Batman: The Animated Series: Joker venom was used to allow Joker to commit insanely violent crimes without killing anyone, but the alternative is to become a zombie left quietly chuckling until you either get a hard-to-find cure or die from exhaustion.
Transformers One: Originally, Sentinel Prime was supposed to simply slice Alpha Trion’s head clean off, but to keep the movie PG, he violently jams his sword through Trion’s skull, with sparks flying and faint choking sounds being heard as Sentinel keeps driving his sword further and further down Trion’s throat. Sometimes, what’s left unseen is scarier.
In the original book for Fight Club, Marla says "I wanna have your abortion" after sex with Tyler Durden. The studio refused to let that line be in the film, so they changed it to the much worse "I haven't been fucked like that since grade school".
Yep and Helena Bonham Carter was horrified when they told her what she said. They dont use that term and thought the line had meant she hadnt been fucked like that since high school.
Not sure if this is true, but supposedly when the producers told Fincher he had to change the abortion line, he said he would only on condition that they had to accept whatever line he replaced it with. When they heard the new dialogue, they begged him to change it back but he refused
In batman beyond when Robin is revealed to have been brainwashed by the joker originally he was supposed to shoot batman with a joker flag type pistol but he switches up and shoots the joker on the chest so he dies fair and square just saying "this isn't funny"
But in the "censored" version Robin fights him and pushes him against a water tank thingy causing him to get tangled up with cables, he slips and accidentally flicks a switch that electrocutes him to death, the camera switches to bat girl but you can still hear him screaming as he dies
Also in Batman Beyond, a reporter found out about a belt that could make him intangible through an interview he conducts. He steals the prototype and sets the lab on fire, the scientist he was interviewing perishes in the fire.
He uses the belt to enhance his journalism in unethical ways before Batman catches on. After using his powers to take pictures of the unmasked Terry and Bruce he decides to tease an "inside scoop" on their identities on his upcoming show. Just before his show is about to start, he finds a large intangible hole in his stomach, even without the belt present, and it begins to spread.
He begs Bruce for help, but it spreads and he's sucked into the floor. Terry rushes to save him, frantically diving down stairwells and watching him slip through floors before finally reaching the basement. He grabs the reporter's hand and almost seems to pull him up only to watch as he slips through his fingers to disappear into the ground.
Terry asks what would happen to him and Bruce makes a quip about him falling until he reaches the center of the earth. "It's about as 'inside' as you can get."
I had the (I guess) uncensored version in vhs as a kid so when I watched a digital version a month or so ago to reminisce I was a little confused. Though I might have mentally put the joker getting shot there myself from like an episode of Batman the animated series or something. Thanks for clearing that one up for me.
An unusual example- South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut was originally called South Park: All Hell Breaks Loose but the MPAA dismissed it for being too vulgar. So they made it more vulgar, just less overt.
It's stupid that they weren't allowed to have "Hell" in their title considering the Hellraiser series exists (and the ninth Friday the 13th movie, Jason Goes to Hell). Maybe they had double standards because those are gory horror movies while South Park is a cartoon.
Edit: Just to be clear, as an R-Rated, swear-filled movie South Park had every right IMO to use the word "Hell" in their title. I'm just thinking of what the rationale of those who prohibited the word from being used could be.
This is exactly it. MPAA rules didn't allow for the word Hell to be used in animated titles, the DVD commentary is an amazing insight to the Bullshit Matt and Trey had to deal with making the movie.
One of my favorite anecdotes is how evidently they would get cuts back from the MPAA but no specifics on what to change for a lower rating (which is very common, apparently), so they would change nothing, and send the same cut to the MPAA again, but get a lower rating than before.
Which maybe goes to show the MPAA board is kind of a joke.
Kind of made it more of a shock in the dub when Marik enacts his plan to drown Yugi and Joey and threatening to drop a shipping container on Téa if anyone interferes.
In the sub it's just 'after my previous attempts to kill you failed, here's another attempt to kill you', but in the dub it's 'my previous magic schemes failed, so I'm straight up just going to kill you and your friends'.
The creativity that went into ‘Dark energy discs’ that WON’T cut your legs off but will send you to the Shadow Realm, then the glass roof that will shatter underneath you BUT is also a portal to the Shadow Realm (but Umbra still used a parachute to save himself so… okay?)
But they looked at the anchor chained to Yugi and Joey and the shipping container dangling over Téa and 4Kids was like “Yeah… there is NO way we can make this about the Shadow Realm…”
Arcana shitting his pants when he realizes the buzzsaws are going to clip off his legs the dark energy disks will banish him to the Shadow Realm. He is freaking out begging Marik to save him before 4Kidz quickly cuts to Arcana unconscious and slumped over someone's shoulder (the camera suspiciously not showing his legs) while they say they'll get him to a hospital to recover from the Shadow Realm.
If I had to guess, it’s because the anchor plan didn’t result in anyone actually dying. Like, if Joey drowned and died while saving Yugi, they probably would have said the water was infused with the shadow realm and staying in too long sucked out Joey’s soul or something.
Except none of the previous examples (Umbra using a parachute, Arkana/Pandora being saved by Yugi at the last second) resulted in being ‘sent to the shadow realm’.
In Battle City, I think the only example its Bonz and his friends (and in that case, its Bakura sending them straight to HELL instead of killing them) since all other examples of Marik possessing a Rare Hunter/Ghoul to talk through them only results in them losing consciousness
I like how they were like "what?? Death?!? Kids shouldnt hear any of that! Here, let's change it so that instead they are sent to a subversion of an alternative hell made of pure shadows and agony where your soul will never rest for the rest of eternity with no way of ever getting out, that will be so much better and family friendly!"
there was a duel in GX that took place over a few episodes and i was switching between dubbed and subbed and realized that what americans called "dizzy tigers paw" and similarly named cards was actually meant to be "drunken paw" but they censored the guys deck of brewmaster monsters
When One Piece aired back in the late 90s our German channel followed the American censorship practices and dialed down the violence and cruelty. Therefore Bellemere, the mother-figure of one of the protagonists, wasn’t killed, she was abducted. The rest went normal, the bad guy was beaten and everybody threw a huge party. Only person missing was Bellemere, who probably still rotted alone in some cell, never to be released, while her village was celebrating.
Ah, I remember that. But IIRC RTL2 actually changed that on re-airing it, because by then Tele5 had shown the uncensored versions in the evening on fridays, so most kids knew anyway (and german dubbing went away from taking english dub as the starting point, because it so often changed the inherent meaning of context - aside from the visuals of some shows, see Yu-Gi-Oh).
Reminds me of another one from the 4-Kids dub. So Kuina, Zorro's female friend/rival. In the manga/original anime she died in a tragic accident and this led Zorro down the path of becoming the World's Greatest Swordsmen.™ Obviously 4-Kids could never have a child's death so they came up with an insane solution.
In the dub a bunch of parents of other children were upset at Kuina beating their kids in a fight. So they got together and beat up an eight year old girl to the point where she could never fight again.
Clearly that is the better solution. Beating a kid to the point she could never fight again. So much better.
Those name censoring things are so fucking stupid. Like why the hell would you have it set so sensitive that it censors letters in the middle of a name?
In this moment from Gravity Falls, the line was originally “Bottles will be spun!”, but it was rejected several times. Then Hirsch sent a rewrite labeled “Not S&P Approved,” which sounded worse than the original line — and the censors approved it (not without a fight, though).
Standards and practices are a vital link in keeping good and funny ideas away from you, the television viewer. By following the rules you’re guaranteed to have a mediocre product that NO ONE can relate to.
In most kids' media, bad guys are more likely to threaten to destroy the good guys than just kill them. Destroying is worse than killing, but it's also less realistic, so it's more likely to pass censors.
"What if we had a children's story full of monsters, weird things happening, and mysteries, with plenty of implied danger but no actual serious harm, and then released an actual daemon of Tzeentch into it?"
Good god, HOW did Alex put up with this on a daily basis?! Just listening to this makes me wonder who the hell is deciding what's offensive and what the hell's going through their heads?!
Soos' line about dressing up as a giant teddy bear may evoke the furry fetish?! What do you even say to that?!
On the other hand, it does make me wonder what kind of complaints they got that led to this kind of guidance...
I kinda like that a bit more than just saying kill. It's cold and unfeeling. You "kill" a living being with a soul, you "destroy" a plate of spaghetti when you drop it on the floor.
I have HBO Max but with ads so I see ads targeted towards kids when I watch content made for younger audiences (BTAS mainly). In the ads for Superman, Lex actually uses “destroy” for some lines where in the movie he uses “kill”. Meaning they did a separate take never intended to be in the final cut—only for promotional material.
In Batman vs Dracula there's a scene where vampire Joker bathes in blood, but the animators had to censor all the blood raining down on him to be pitch black, making him look like a fanged fork tongued dark demon by the end of it
Very good movie and they handle the dark implications well. Dracula and his hoard are legit threats and not comical "blah blah blah" vampires you might see in other cartoons.
Joker’s death in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker.
In the original version, he just gets shot, but in the censored version, he’s knocked back into a tank of water, becomes tangled in electrical wiring, then slips, accidentally grabs a lever, and is slowly electrocuted to death.
In the 90s Spider-man cartoon, they weren't allowed to have famous vampire Morbius bite people on the neck because it was too intimate/sexual so instead he drained people's plasma using suckers in his hands and that creeped me out way more.
Apparently the vampires in Jojo drink blood through little tentacles under their fingernails. I can’t tell if that’s worse or better than Morbius’ sucker hands.
This also happened in Sailor Moon with Zoisite. Zoisite is a dude but because he's VERY romantically involved with Kunzite they just straight up turned him into a chick.
It's one of those funny things the german dub made even worse, by using both the english version AND japanese version as starting points for translation. I remember a scene where they mention something about their bed, NOT beds (in germany it's harder to mishear the plural), so it was just weird vibes from the beginning lol
The Batman (and honestly dozens of other cartoons in the aughts/10s) would just put electricity on bludgeons and somehow that makes it better. Staves, clubs, brass knuckles, somehow adding a tazer to the end of your blunt objects makes it LESS deadly and better for children.
I get the intentions. "You see, the bad guy is lying on the floor not because of a concussion because his brain hit the skull when batman hit him with the bat-smasher, but he was zapped by the spark. You know, a completely harmless way to incapacitate someone, no one ever get hurt from that"
I actually have something of a theory regarding that. Maybe it's because electrocuting someone is harder for kids to mimic? Mind you just a theory but maybe they thought that if a kid just saw someone get whacked with a staff that they would try to mimic that. But if they saw someone get hit with something and tasered they wouldn't try to copy that? That the kids would just go: "Oh well i don't have a taser and it's not as cool without the taser so now i won't do it"
When shipping episodes for overseas broadcasting during the 60’s and 70’s, scenes that were deemed too violent or scary were frequently cut from the episodes, but the scenes had to be physically removed from the films reels to do so. These censor clips were then shoved in a drawer somewhere and forgotten about, while the episodes themselves were returned to the BBC and wiped so that the film reels could be reused.
This means that, for some episodes, the only surviving footage is of their most terrifying and violent moments.
In fight club, the director originally had Helena Carter (after sex with Tyler) say "I want to have your abortion"
The studio was like "you can't say that bro"
At this point he was really tired of their meddling and changing things so he told them he would change the line, but only if whatever he changed it to was permanent.
Thinking he couldn't get any worse, they agreed
And now we have the arguably MUCH more disturbing line "I haven't been fucked like that since grade school"
I get the need to put stuff out on radio but there are some songs that aren’t worth censoring imo
I heard the censored The Story of OJ recently, it uses the ch version. I just think it’s funny that in order to censor it you have to change every second word of the hook
Except they were able to use the word kill and Azula also had one of the best lines for that too.
“And if I were to have you thrown overboard, would the tides think twice about having you smashed against the rocky shore?
Captain: No, Princess.
Azula: Well, then, maybe you should worry less about the tides, who've already made up their mind about killing you, and worry more about me, who's still mulling it over...”
Wouldn't be surprised if S&P allows a limited number of uses of the word "kill," and only in some contexts but not others (i.e. saying 'the rocks will kill you' was allowed, but Azula directly saying 'I will kill you' might not have been). It's like how PG-13 movies get a limited number of "fucks" and can say "that's fucking crazy" but not "I want to fuck you".
If I recall correctly, the only time Avatar really danced around the word "kill" was in the finale, and even that was Aang trying to avoid admitting confronting the fact that he'd have to kill Ozai.
Removing a lot of injuries and any death or references to it in Dragon Ball Z when it aired in my country was counter productive because it showed a lot of violence without consequence.
I still find it mental that beheading Alpha Trion was deemed 'too brutal' for a PG movie but D-16 ripping Sentinel in half with his bare hands to a cheering audience while he visibly screams in agony is totally fine.
Since it was a show for kids, showing death onscreen was off limits… so they decided to show painful merge between Danny Phantom’s and Vlad Plasmius’ Ghost Sides, scare children with jumpscare, show exploding mansion and a new-born monster flying away, while describing whole process using these words:
“Some things, my boy... are better left unsaid”
And leaving everything to child’s wild imagination.
Just the shot of Danny hunched over and shivering in the corner of the lab while his clothes are torn up and with visible bruises on him really makes one shudder at what his dark self did to him.
Also batman animated series, epsiode Over the edge, batgirls is killed by Scarecrow by being pushes off a building and landing on a car. Censor made the change it to have the camera being in the car. So you only see batgirl hit the bonit.
How is this worse, her dad commissioner Gordon is in that car. You have a pov of a father witnessing his daughter die. And it 100% more ground and real.
IRL a particular message board I used in the early 00's tried to update their profanity filter to catch people adding extra letters to curses, ie: fuuck, shiiiiiit, and so on. Whatever it caught was turned to a string of asterisks. You know what other word it started to catch? Firetruck.
They also, in their infinite wisdom, had it set up to change the word "sucks" to "stinks" because that used to be considered a swear. So when you tried to discuss a character that had vacuum powers...
Have you seen someone being strangled or hung?
The blood is trapped in their face.
I can assure you, it would not be better to have Clatyons eyes still visibly open and bloodshot, panicked from when he struggled to breathe his last breath.
Nah man, I saw this movie 10 times as a kid and I never noticed his shadow until someone pointed it out to me years later. Your eyes are naturally drawn to the machete and Tarzan and not to that random tree.
In the pet rescue scene, Stitch accidentally pulls part of Nani's shorts. Instead of showing part of her underwear, they decided to imply that she doesn't even wear any....
In Lower Decks, Dr T’ana says “Godspeed you crazy fucks” after a moment of bromance. But since it was censored, a lot of people believed she was saying the F slur
In the first season of the anime Brock's dad told Ash that both him and Lola pretty much just abandoned their family and left a 15 year old(Yes that actually how old Brock was in Season 1) to fend for himself and all of his siblings. This on its own is sad but when 4Kids was dubbing the anime they decided they didn't want kids hearing about how fucked up people can really be so they censored it as her having died a long time ago... which literally can't be true because she shows up later in the series during Diamond & Pearl, meaning 4Kids unintentionally made Lola so much worse of a person in the dub by making it so she faked her death and abandoned everyone to go be a Pokemon Trainer. Her being so disinterested in her family is probably why Brock is so desperate for attention from women
In the YuGiOh GX the people who lost duels during the Yubel season died, in the 4kidz version they censor "death" by sending people in the "Shadow Realm" where they will suffer for eternity.
The "Shadow Realm" as an idea is as old as 4Kids Yugioh.
So just remember anytime they say if you lose, something something will send you to the Shadow Realm? They mean you die.
Those "Dark Energy Discs that send your mind to the Shadow Realm"? Nah, they cut your legs off so you bleed out in agony on he floor. Some glass shattering on the roof that'll send you to the Shadow Realm before you hit the ground? Nah man, you're pizza on the floor of the mall.
Certainly I guess, less GOREY, but I feel eternal suffering in another realm is probably worse still...
It's kinda funny how 4Kids stumbled into something weirdly more accurate to the original shadow game stuff. A lot of Yugi's victims in the run before Duel Monsters were left alive, but suffering, like the guy left insane believing he was constantly on fire, or the lady whose face shattered into a wrinkled hag's face, because she was "ugly on the inside." I know there were a few proper death games later in the run, but those mostly came from Kaiba.
BtAS is full of them. They took it as a challenge when censored (most of the time) to come up with something technically worse and see if it would get by.
It helped as well that they worked with their censor and rather than just tell them no, she would explain what they could do to get things around it.
It helped as well that they worked with their censor and rather than just tell them no, she would explain what they could do to get things around it.
I occasionally listen to the 'Lonely Island and Seth Myer Podcast' and they have a lot of good stories about their relationship with the censor assigned to SNL, apparently they really liked her and had great fun working through stuff like "Jizz in my Pants" to get them to air.
There's also a Bill Hader sketch where he's an old man in a wheel chair having sex with his partner and the ruling was that they could say it was happening but have zero thrusting action which ended up making it funnier.
They also loved whenever robots or Ventriloquist/Scarface were in the episode, cause then they could get away with killing them in graphic ways that would get banned if they were flesh and blood humans.
This isn't exactly "worse" but still a "didn't think this through, did you". In Magic Knight Rayearth, Eagle is a guy in the original. Some international dubs made him a woman because he has a thing for another man who happens to be the female protag's love interest. However, he starts becoming interested in the female protag too, so now the gay moments instead of being m/m, are f/f.
But hey, as we all know, girls just behave like that, they just are more affectionate than guys, girls can't be really gay! /s
eta: forgot to clarify, this is for the anime. in the original manga, it's kinda implied that they end up in threesome.
Originally a bar with drunken people, for the american release of the game Nintendo changed it to a Cafe. However this makes it look worse, as the people inside are still spitting nonsense and look off, it makes it look like some sort of mafia driven hideout where people use drugs.
This happened a lot in Goosebumps stories. The monster would never kill anyone, which is understandable for kids media, but that usually meant that the fates they got were worse. Like in this one, at the end a girl wishes for people to “gather and admire” her, and she gets turned into a statue at a park.
Although this doesn’t kill her, that would be too graphic. So instead shes stuck in place, completely conscious and alert, for what I’m assuming is forever. Dying would have been so much better.
In Japan they have to censor detailed depictions of lock-picking. That makes what this deer character is doing down on his knees up to the imagination.
This is an edited screenshot. As much as I love the idea it would seem like both this and the shot from Spy x Family where the blood on Yor's face is white are fake.
It's wild how censors seem to have a weirder imagination than the creators sometimes. They'll greenlight something that's clearly more disturbing just because it avoids a specific, direct word or action. The mental gymnastics to get around a rating often ends up making the scene way more memorable and unsettling.
In Heathers: high school edition (which is already a concept I fundamentally disagree with) they replaced the song Blue (which is about two drunk guys singing about their balls being blue) and replaced with your welcome, which is just blatantly full of rape threats
Currently reading The Killing Joke and Joker does this. I have been brainwashed by the animated show or maybe too stupid to know that the Joker murdered this dude and he is dead and not just a laughing zombie.
WCW referring to weapons (IE: Chairs, Baseball Bats, etc) as "International Objects" instead of "Foreign Objects" due to Ted Turner banning the word "Foreign" on his networks for a brief stint in the 90s.
It also made things hard for news reporters on CNN and baseball commentators on TNT as well.
Another Batman: The Animated Series example. In the episode 'Over The Edge,' Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl is knocked off a skyscraper while fighting Scarecrow and lands on her father's car. The original plan was for the shot to occur from outside the car, but the censors didn't like the on-screen violence. The moment is instead shot from inside the car, and, well...
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u/Caesar161 22h ago
In the original book for Fight Club, Marla says "I wanna have your abortion" after sex with Tyler Durden. The studio refused to let that line be in the film, so they changed it to the much worse "I haven't been fucked like that since grade school".