by JustinHoskie » Sun Dec 29, 2013 3:20 pm
Here's an essay I wrote in my senior year of high-school in preparation for a speech.
Everyone is aware of censors and censorship, and everyone has experienced it. The most obvious case is when a word is bleeped or an action is blurred on a television show. The reason used most often by supporters as to why this happens is that it is to protect children and the easily offended. As long as the uncensored version is available in some form, there is not a real problem. However, there is a form of censorship that is not as common; the modification and banning of movies.
This form of censorship does not happen very often anymore. It is when a film is edited or banned from re-release or a foreign release after its initial premiere due to offensive material. This happened mostly during the “Code” years in Hollywood, between roughly 1925-1970, in when older films were edited to fit within the Hayes Code, and destroyed when they could not. The most recent film that has been subject to this form of censorship, in both forms, was the 2009 comedy film Brüno, starring Sacha Baron Cohen. A small scene involving La Toya Jackson was hastily, and permanently, edited out of the film hours before it’s Los Angeles premiere (due to Michael Jackson’s death earlier in the day), and it was banned outright in Ukraine. While the Lat Toya Jackson scene was included as a bonus feature on the film’s DVD release, other films have not been so lucky. And this is a detriment to film history and preservation.
Disney has been known to censor and ban films, both feature and shorts. A prime example of it is the 1940 animated masterpiece, Fantasia. Released first as a road-show picture, then edited for a general release, Disney has begun restoring missing pieces of footage with every new re-release. However, according to Steve Daily, writer for Entertainment Weekly, characters were removed from all subsequent releases since 1969. During the segment set to Beethoven’s The Pastoral Symphony, three stereotypical black centaurs, including one named “Sunflower”, were featured as servants to the white centaurs. Set during Ancient Rome, and made during a time when racial stereotypes were common in cartoons (for instance, the recurring Mammy Two-Shoes character in the Tom & Jerry shorts), the removal of Sunflower and her fellow centaurs has been meet with criticism from animation fans and enthusiasts, who believe that, although the characters do cross the line for today’s standards, tampering and permanently deleting something from an established masterpiece is unthinkable. This would not be Disney’s last encounter with racial problems.
Based on the stories of Uncle Remus, and featuring the original song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”, Disney’s Quasimodo, Song of the South, was originally released on November 12, 1946. Unknown to newer generations, Disney has not released the film on any home video format since it’s last re-release in 1986, due to racial issues, according to Christian Willis, webmaster of SongOfTheSouth.Net. While Walt and his story-team tried their hardest to make the film as racially sensitive as possible, the film has been deemed racist by the Disney corporation, and, despite various rumors online every couple of years, Disney CEO Robert Iger has recently stated that there are no current plans to release the film on DVD.
There have also been two, more recent films that Disney has censored. One of them, Aladdin, first released in 1992, has undergone two subsequent changes. According to the 14 July 1993 issue of The New York Times, the first involves the first verse of the opening song “Arabian Nights”. The line, “They’ll cut off your ear, if they don’t like your face. It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home” was, understandably, found offensive by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, or ADC. The line was (noticeably) changed for the film’s VHS release and all subsequent home video and soundtrack releases to “Where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense. It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home.”
A smaller controversy arose after the film’s home video release. According to the article “How A Rumor Spread About Subliminal Sex In Disney’s Aladdin” by Lisa Bannon, home viewers reportedly heard Aladdin say something along the line of “Good teenagers, take off your clothes,” off screen during the scene where he is being attacked by Jasmine’s pet tiger, Rajah. The actual line, “Come on… good kitty, take off and go…” was hushed, and the word “kitty” is obscured by Rajah’s snarl. The line was changed to “Down, kitty” on the film’s DVD release in 2004. A similar controversy arose after The Lion King’s first home video release; during a scene when Simba lays down on the edge of a cliff, viewers reported seeing the letters “S-E-X” in the sky, formed by blowing dust. The animators, however, say that the dust forms a common abbreviation for special effects; “S-F-X.” They were removed from the 2002 IMAX release and the 2003 DVD release.
Some things from Hollywood history just simply cannot be edited back in. Before roughly the seventies, things like costumes, sets, and extra footage were all considered industrial waste; when a film was released, things were reused, stored, given away, or destroyed. Because of that, there is no longer a copy of the cut “Jitterbug” or “Over the Rainbow (Reprise)” sequences from MGM’s 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, for various scenes and lines of dialog in 1932 Marx Brothers film, Horse Feathers, or for the scrapped “Spider Pitt” scene from the classic 1933 RKO film, King Kong. The original and unedited versions of those films are lost forever.
Fortunately, Disney saves a considerable amount of “industrial waste” from their pictures, making the restoration of these films entirely possible. That may not be possible forever, though. A simple solution to this would be to release these films online, via digital download, for just animation enthusiasts, films historians, students, and fans of the films. Or, better yet, as a series of limited edition, “Straight from the Vault” Blu-Rays releases, featuring the original, unedited, theatrical release prints of the films.
Tick tock, Disney. Tick tock.