So I’ve been thinking even more about the eternal “When should I let my kids watch Conan?” question and I remembered something:
The first time I watched Conan, I didn’t tape it off of HBO. I taped it off of WTBS. Now, I want to say, pretty much all of the dialog was left intact but about half of the violence was left out, and all of the scenes with boobs were replaced with nigh-identical scenes except the women were fully clothed. They had, of course, reshot all of the “this will give it an R” scenes to allow the movie to be shown on public broadcast. The scene where Conan, ahem, “met” the witch had her wearing *THIS* outfit in the version on TBS but, in the HBO movie, she was wearing *THAT* outfit.
It seems to me that these more, ahem, “accessible” versions of the movies would be available for purchase somewhere, no?
I mean, I’d never dream (in a million years) of giving one of the nephews Conan the Barbarian before he turned 17. That said, I could easily see giving a Bowdlerized version to one of them when they hit 12 or 13 so we could yell the movie quotes at each other (and, hey, if it’s boobless and has far fewer decapitations, surely even the parents in the stricter homes might shrug at the gift).
Now, of course, there are a number of movies that would not benefit from this treatment particularly… I remember, say, The Breakfast Club’s TV version (“Eat my socks”, “Hot wild affection” “EAT SLOP!”) as doing more to detract from what I was watching than adding to it (and I can’t even imagine Bowdlerized versions of, say, Pulp Fiction) but it does seem to me that, much like Bowdler’s original intention, we can introduce some really awesome stuff to kids (stuff that they’re actually ready for) without introducing really awesome (extraneous) stuff to them that they aren’t quite ready for.
Like Conan at 12.
Or am I thinking about things the entirely wrong way and, dangit, people who want to read The Scottish Play should have to read “damned” instead of “crimson” when Lady The Scottish Play is giving her own Cheer commercial?
Didn’t we talk about this in the past somewhere on these fora?
http://www.clean-edited-movies.com/
I want to say that we discussed the Colorado case on Hit and Run (and, if I recall correctly, the commentariat was full of scorn) but I don’t remember arguing it here.
I did a search on “Matsch” (the Judge’s name) and found this but didn’t see anything like that anywhere among the Ordinaries.
Ah thanks, that might have been it (though I wasn’t reading H&R back in
06, so they may have rehashed it more recently).
But for the record, I wouldn’t mind being against Kate Winslet’s breasts.
Searching again, I’ve found that our very own Trumwill wrote a couple of posts about this back in April! Like, 2012 April!!!
(How in the heck did I miss *THAT*???)
You can find plenty of Bowdlered movies, but most are older. Back in the day just cussing could get the rating and those are easy to clean up. The Dirty Harry’s being a great example of that (well and the removal of the one exposed scene). I am sure there are other more recent, but I cannot think of any right now. Most likely that is because I do not watch network movies these days and have not seen what they have done this to.
As for the age and Conan, you can just start with the Destroyer. That was PG.
Well, reshooting scenes for television broadcast was once something that movie production entailed as a matter of course. They knew that the choice was between having the scene cut and having the scene reshot and there were some crazy artist types out there who said stuff like “this voiceover is important! Reshoot the scene with a fur bikini top on the model!” because they new that the CBS Sunday Night Movie was likely to be a synergistic secondary income stream… people would watch the movie on CBS, then they’d go and rent it from their local video store. Maybe even buy it!
I have a hard time seeing them do that anymore.
They do it backwards now. The PG or PG-13 version is seen in theaters, then you can get the “UNRATED DIRECTOR’S CUT WITH FOOTAGE THEY COULDN’T SHOW YOU IN THE THEATER!!!”
When the time comes to show the movie on Fox, they just show the theatrical version rather than the DVD version.
Good point.
And that unrated version is just PG-13.5