Stange Changes in Movies and TV

[Jixby Phillips]

The Kickball scene wasn't in theaters. On TV they will often add scenes that were initially cut from the film to pad it out, because they need to fill time for all the other things they had to cut to make it suitable for broadcast. Plus it gives it the extra edge over simply going out and renting the movie, even though you get to hear all the cuss words that they bleeped out on TV, you DON'T get that extra little Kickball scene. See also the TV versions of Airplane! & the Naked Gun.

Also, sometimes they'll shoot two different versions of a scene, just for the TV release or the airline release or in case they need to use it in favor of getting a PG rating. The scene where he says "You gotta get your ass out there and find that fuckin' dog!" is now "You gotta get your ass out there and find that stupid dog!" From what I could tell it's a completely new scene, they must have shot it unsure if they'd lose the PG-13 rating for saying "fuck." A lot of sexploitation movies will shoot cleaner versions of their dirty scenes for basic cable broadcast. HBO's "Dream On" would shoot clean versions of their sex scenes just for Comedy Central when they got to air it.

The changing of "dirty" jew on South Park is one I remember, and I disagree with it. This just changes what the joke is... The original joke is that Cartman's mom comes up to Cartman and says to him "Turn off this show, I heard from Kyle's mother that it makes you a potty mouth" and he says "That's stupid, Kyle's mom is a dirty jew" to which the mom replies "oh! okay hon!" the joke is that Cartman is a bigotted asshole and that's much worse that swearing. But bleeping out dirty is supposed to imply that Cartman said "fucking jew," which turns the joke into a stupid joke about how stupid Cartman's mom is. Not as funny.