Turner to censor old cartoons for broadcast...could DVDs be next? (1 Viewer)

[sarah99]

Just got my China set, It's deffo a bootleg.

"Puss 'n' Toots" is uncut as you said EDIT ..... no it isn't, this is the version with Mammy removed!
"Saturday Evening Puss" is the later redraw (skinny white teenage girl)
"His Mouse Friday" is muted as stated

I just did a complete censorship comparison here.

Tom & Jerry Censorship

 

[Ricardo C]

This may be a strange complaing in a thread denouncing excessive politcal correctness, but... "Negros"?

 

[sarah99]

NOw changed to "slave stereotypes", I hope you find that a more suitable wording.
It was a little more than a "blackface" gag and I was unsure how else to describe a word that was "considered the correct and proper English word for slaves and freed slaves of sub-Saharan African origin" according to Wikpedia.

 

[Ricardo C]

Judging by that melodramatic responses, I guess oversensitivity is a two-way street.

 

[Phil_O]

hate to resurrect old threads....

Aladdin alters the song near the beginning about "they cut off your ears if they don't like your face" in recent releases of the movie - something to that effect.

I had the movie on VHS and soundtrack as a kid and they have that in there "uncut".

Gimme a break.

 

[Arild]

Not just recent. That was changed quite a while ago. The VHS I bought sometime in the mid-nineties also had the altered line.

 

[Cees Alons]

Well, anyone removing that line could honestly and correctly state that the movie was un-cut.


Cees

 

[Ethan Riley]

Why, Cees--between your puns and my "sarcastic jokes," what is this forum coming to?

Anyway, the "ears" line never existed on vhs; it was deemed outrageous by various Muslim and Middle Eastern groups and changed very quickly. It only existed in the initial release of the film and the oldest soundtrack cd. This is an example of the kind of inarguable censorship that creeps up now and then; in which a particular ethnic or social group will protest a particular film depiction of themselves. Another example would include Thai people all but condemning Jodie Foster's 1999 "Anna and the King" remake. In these cases, where the word "offensive" is used, you just kind of have to take their word for it. You have to just say, "well, I've never stood in your shoes, so if you say it's offensive, I guess its offensive." Mammie Two Shoes suffered the same fate. If people of African descent have a problem with her, I'm not the one to sit there and tell them they're wrong. This kind of censorship I can live with. I don't like it, because it's not personally offensive to me; but it is to a good many other people.

But for the smoking thing, that's just a sort of alarmist reaction. I mean, those scenes have been in the movie for 50 years and nobody really cared or thought about it until this "anti-smoking" thing kicked in about 5 years ago. Tell me, why weren't these scenes offensive when I watched Tom & Jerry back in the 70s? Was there no lung cancer then? Or is it just now? I don't get it. I suppose the reason why "Pinocchio" hasn't been on dvd for a long time is because Pinocchio has a scene where he smokes a cigar. Hmm...do wooden people get lung cancer or root rot? Perhaps Disney will insert a scene where Pinocchio goes to a doctor who tells him, "I'm sorry to tell you this, sir, but it is a knothole and I'm afraid we can't operate."

Next year, there will probably be an "anti-nudity" wave sweeping the world, and that one dork in England will write in to protest Tom & Jerry's apparent nudity. So now Ted Turner's going to have to draw pants on T&J for all those 140 episodes, give Uncle $crooge a pair of jockey shorts and force Mickey Mouse to put on a shirt. The year after that, there'll be an "anti-obescity" wave and they'll have to delete all depictions of food from cartoons. It will never end.

The irony of all this is that's today's cartoons are far more outrageous than anything from the 40s or 50s. The most popular cartoons seem to be the naughty fart-joke stuff that appears on Comedy Central. And nobody has attempted to re-edit those cartoons, I suppose, mostly because the cartoon makers there are still alive. Most of the Tom & Jerry participants are long gone, so society takes it upon itself to censor them. That's the real issue--that the cartoons are old, their authors are dead and therefore everyone thinks they own them, and that they have a say in their messages.