Thanks to the American fear of offending … um … ourselves, comes an uncanny need to sanitize movies for mass consumption. It pains me to say this about five of my favorite films, but after righteous rusty knives cut away what is deemed offensive (such as the scenes below), they downright suck when aired on television. Yeah there are others, but these are usually the most butchered.
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Blazing Saddles (1974)
Imagine this — the Citizen Kane of politically incorrect comedies — airing on ABC Family Channel. Seriously. I swear the movie was gutted from a feature down to a short. Not only was the movie all but stripped of the classic racial satire, but every suggestive joke was slashed. They actually ran this scene with no sound!
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Bad News Bears (1976)
This one set the stage for all other gutter-mouth youths to come. For us kids at the time, the appeal was hearing other kids swearing like longshoremen. You know, the way we all did. Take away that main gag and all you have left is some sappy old-guy-learns-to-love-kids tale.
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Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
No offense to Burt Reynolds, but Jackie Gleason is why this movie is a classic. As the foul-mouthed redneck Sheriff Buford T. Justice, he is hellbent on catching The Bandit. What made this one so shocking (and so funny) are Gleason’s streams of colorful vulgarity throughout the film. When TV attempts to clean his performance up with horrid vocal replacements, The Great One must turn in his grave.
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Porky’s (1982)
One of the kings of teen sexploitation, coming-of-age films. We all remember the peephole shower scene. Understandably, many of the sight gags were cut because Americans fear nudity just as much as cursing. How it hurts to lose all the tit/dick jokes and replace the swears with beeps or (worse) clean words. You tell me if there’s any way this scene could be funny censored.
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The Big Lebowski (1998)
OK, now why would you even try to air this on broadcast television? Where Blazing Saddles was gutted, The Big Lebowski was trampled. So famous for its colorful use of the English language that the TV-friendly version makes me cry. The scenes are kept more or less in tact but with poorly matched voices replacing the profanities. Here’s just a taste of what is lost.
