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The Censor Box is used to cover up an offending sight with something that obviously doesn't belong, less physically part of the scene than any sort of fig leaf. Most typically, this is a heavy black bar or box, but sometimes bizarre stickers are used.
It's more glaringly obvious than Censor Steam or Pixellation, and such a brutal way of keeping something hidden from audiences that it's often used for parodies of censorship. There are plenty of subversions where the characters grab it or move it around or throw it away or what, using it as an actual effect.
A variation is for the bar to appear over a person's eyes, rather than their naughty bits. Rather than censoring nudity, it's used to censor identity. This may be used when the subject in question is fully clothed, and is often used to Draw Around Trademarks in order to show a famous person to whom the author doesn't have the rights while stil maintaining Plausible Deniability. This was also commonly done while showing naughty bits in vintage porn magazines and older medical books.
Examples:
Advertising
- The late-night Girls Gone Wild commercials will usually cover up the naughty bits of the aforementioned girls with either their logo or, ironically, a big bar labelled, "UNCENSORED!"
- An Australian animated ad for Red Bull was set in a nudist camp. There were black censor bars over everyone's naughty bits. One fellow had an exceptionally large censor box that rose as he drank his Red Bull.
Anime and Manga
- Hayate The Combat Butler makes a running gag out of them, since it's a reference-heavy show in a early time slot. A genie holding up 'can't show this' and 'don't do this' signs is used to cover up everything from mild injuries to humans being sexually assaulted by a tiger.
- This example
 ◊ is from Magical Pokaan. While the slats are somewhat believable, there is absolutely no reason for the bats.
- The TV adaptation of Kodomo No Jikan is victim to a ridiculous amount of censorship in the form of swirling banners, often leading to total confusion about what is going on—unless you read the manga first.
- Note that the uncensored DVD version reveals that most scenes blocked by these were far more innocent then the presence of a censor box implies. see the previous picture for the trope◊ for an example
- Naughty bits in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei often are obscured by a photograph of the bald head of Maeda-kun, the original manga author's assistant who is also responsible for the blackboard gags. His expression and line of sight change depending on what he is covering up. His head also often pops up at intermissions and in the school's clock. It's very disturbing.
- Macademi Wasshoi has claymation versions of Tanarot appear to cover up the animated her whenever she does anything that might be considered too fanservicey. It ends up looking really weird.
- Nazo Koumori in Rosario To Vampire is a bat of many talents. Combat Commentator, Morph Weapon and Panty Shot censor when he needs to be. This leads to odd scenes where he's in two places at once as Kokoa's familiar and part of the censorship. Spoofed when Kokoa sits down on him only to find he's become part of her panties somehow.
- Inukami applies most of its Censor Boxes to the males (usually Keita) in the form of blue elephants on parade. Said elephants are usually right around the crotch. There's a lot of manservice in Inukami.
- Parodied in Mobile Police Patlabor during the obligatory Hot Springs Episode. We see all the main male characters go into a communal shower, with black dots covering their modesty. then, after they go behind a opaque wooden screen, they throw the dots over the top of the screen like towels!
- After some unintentional Clothing Damage in Black Cat (or rather, immediately as it happens), two cats appear holding signs that prevent the reader from seeing anything.
- In Eyeshield 21, Hiruma's spirited exchange with the coach of the American NASA Aliens football team is all in English and almost completely covered with the Shounen Jump logo, as is the "translation" on the next page.
- Shown above is Black Lagoon's somewhat ironic use of this trope during the anime's OP. The show itself has no such censoring at all, and depicts acts much more brutal than simply firing a gun at something offscreen.
Comic Books
- Used in the U.S. version of the French comic book Sillage (Wake in English). In the first issue the heroine Navis/Navee is living as a kind of Jungle Princess, wearing only a pair of briefs. Conveniently for the censors she has a set of white bars tattoed on various parts of her body, one of which just happens to be across her breast. So for the US edition all they had to do was paint her breast tattoo black, and presto!
- Censoring Sillage? Come on, it's a book for 12-year-olds, that shows nothing more than all other French comics... What is the next step: censor Tarzan's chest?
- That sounds like Mike Lu and Og, where island native Lu has a white paint stripe across her breast in the pilot episode (she gets a proper tube top in the series).
Film
- The eye-covering black box was parodied in Spy Kids: The character actually grabbed the black bar, moved it around and finally put it down on a desk or table.
Live Action TV
- There was a Bobcat Goldthwait special called Is He Like That All the Time? where he did stand-up comedy in a large communal shower explaining that his jokes are funnier in the shower just like people's singing is better in the shower. Everyone in the shot has the black rectangle. Bobcat's starts spinning like a propeller near the end and he flies off the screen.
- Parodied in the Saturday Night Live sketch "Boys Gone Wild." Men, mostly overweight, flash their chests for the camera and their nipples are black-boxed.
- Actually, MADtv (SNL's rival show on FOX which, as of 2009, has been canceled) was the one that did "Boys Gone Wild!", though SNL did do a Girls Gone Wild parody focused on college coeds in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina happened and Doug Stanhope (played by Jason Sudeikis) offers them fresh water in exchange for the coeds flashing their breasts and going wild.
- The Middleman uses them to cover people's mouths while they're swearing.
- Subverted in a You Cant Do Thaton Television sketch where two boys are behind black boxes. Says one to the other, "I don't know why they don't want to see... our boxers!"
- Wasn't this one parodied in I Bet You Will (or one of the various shows with the same premise), with two people running a race clad in nothing but a censor bar made of cardboard? As I recall, for one of them it fell off.
- The Daily Show once referred to some sort of gory/sexual footage which couldn't be shown because "they don't make black bars that big".
- One episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 used a superimposed MST3K logo to cover up nudity, Or So I Heard.
- That would be the episode Devilfish, where the audience is given an unwanted look up a male character's shorts.
- And in an earlier episode (City Limits), Joel opens an umbrella in the theater for seemingly no apparent reason...
- X-Play has often censored violence, gore, and nudity in games they review with little kitten heads. Adorable mewing kitten heads. It is this troper's favorite part of the show.
- In a Welcome Freshmen (Hi There is no such thing as notability!) sketch, two boys got the censor box and discuss how creepy it is, then ran off stage, carefully covered themselves, leaving the censor boxes just hanging there. Then as if realizing what just happened, the boxes zoomed off after them.
Magazines
- An issue of the National Geographic magazine in this troper's home country arrived in the mail with the pictures of topless native women scribbled over with permanent marker. Apparently by the censorship board, no less.
- Wow... I guess this is the kind of thing that make you feeling bad for living in your country. :(
Music Videos
- Parodied in the music video for REM's "Pop Song 89," which features topless women and men dancers. Both have black boxes over their nipples.
- Used creatively in the video for Brighton Port Authority's "Toe Jam."
- In that they carefully arrange naked people to draw pictures with their censor boxes.
- Used in the video for Lemon Demon's song Geeks In Love (animated by Andrew Kepple), a censor box appears to be covering the girl geek fellating the boy geek; the box goes away and we see they are just playing foosball.
New Media
- Zero Punctuation features censor bars in order to depict nudity due to the minimalist art style.
- The censored boxes are also often covered in witty text. When Yahtzee describes something as "being stretched wider than a catamite's rectum," the censor box reads "IMAGE VERY CENSORED". Similarly, the aftermath of trying juggle babies and chainsaws at the same time is covered up with, "THE BABY IS FINE THE BABY IS OKAY".
- A piece of video art by performance artist Pina Bausch featured a shot of a topless woman sitting in a room with a censor box over her eyes. Opinions in this troper's class on the meaning behind the image were varied, but it made me feel dirty.
- Head Injury Theatre movie review site often shows scenes too graphic for the German Web site's editor-imposed UK-15 rating... censored with little white circles stating NO.
- In The Spoony Experiment, there was this scene on the movie called "Clones of Bruce Lee" in which several women were seen baring their breasts on a beach. There was a huge censor box advertisement covering them from the shoulders down that read, 'Buy Revolutions of the Mask'.
- Used in The Nostalgia Critic's review of Red Sonja, when the naked dancing woman appears.
- In this video, a naked blonde resizes the censor boxes in front of her.
- The /tg/ Image Board tends to use censor bars with "HERESY!" written on them, when they bother to.
Video Games
- In Space Quest III, if Roger fails to get off the Conveyor Belt O Doom and falls into the meat grinder, a box labeled "NOT A PRETTY SIGHT" pops up as he is "shredded like an Iran-Contra document".
- Many players find this moment very funny and will repeatedly kill Roger just to watch it again and again.
Webcomics
Western Animation
- In the Blernsball episode of Futurama there is a machine that censor-boxes reality in a men's changing room. It gets accidentally knocked off and all the bars disappear, which means the men have to cover themselves up manually.
- All except the one guy who proudly proclaims, "I win."
- Rocko's Modern Life uses stereotypical black censor boxes to cover Rocko's nudity on several occasions, including one where a censor actually appears on screen and places the box himself. This, despite Rocko not wearing any pants most of the time.
- Rocko's even been asked to autograph some censor bars fans mailed him. It's a long story.
- The Venture Bros. tends to use black bars instead of pixellation for censorship. Used rather cleverly when a man's penis morphs into Henry Killinger, the censor bar seamlessly transforming into his black coat.
- Played with in the Bugs Bunny cartoon "Falling Hare," in which the front gate sign of an unnamed Air Force base is censored for reasons of wartime security - or not. "Number of planes: Censored. Number of men: Censored. Men's opinion of Top Sergeant: CENSORED!!!"
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