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alt title(s): Bowdlerize; Bowdlerized; Bowdlerization; Bowdlerised; Bowdlerisation 
Don't move or else I'll kill get him with my... spring-loaded showerhead? "With ABC deleting dynamite gags from cartoons, do you find that your children are using explosives less frequently?"
— Mark LoPresti
To alter existing programs, plays, etc. so they are less rude and/or offensive. Used in a very negative sense, by those who think the alterations are often done with a ridiculously high fear of lawsuits and/or need for political correctness.
North American releases of anime are frequently targeted with this accusation. Differing cultural norms create separate notions of what is okay to show on television, but some companies in their attempts to stomp out any preliminary complaints from Media Watchdogs and Moral Guardians are quite famous for going undeniably overboard. This may be because of the American perception that cartoons are for kids, so that shows meant for slightly higher age groups that aren't specifically marketed to them are edited down. In fact, one of the most notable Bowdlerizers is actually named 4Kids Entertainment.
This can also be done to movies that were originally made for television in an era where standards were looser. TV movies once lauded for their daring when first aired are now edited as much as any R-rated theatrical film when rebroadcast.
Named after Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), who first did it on The Bible and Shakespeare's plays; for instance, changing Ophelia's drowning from suicide to accident. It's worth noting that Bowdler himself created his "Family Shakespeare" versions as a way to introduce Shakespeare's plays to audiences who would otherwise be barred from experiencing them at all, and actively encouraged people to seek out the originals. Sadly, this cannot be said of most modern Bowdlerisers.
Americanitis can often contain elements of Bowdlerization. See T Word Euphemism for a mild form of bowdlerization. See also Cut And Paste Translation (which specifically refers to Bowlderization in translated works and refers more to the final product than the process) and Disneyfication (which generally goes further, in not only removing content, but adding new, "kid-friendly" content). See Bluenose Bowdlerizer for when it happens here on the wiki. Sometimes the Bowdlerizing becomes Narm. The opposite is essentially what happens when American Kirby Is Hardcore.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- As mentioned, pretty much all of the anime properties dubbed by 4Kids Entertainment (such as Yu-Gi-Oh, One Piece, and Pokémon) have fallen victim to bowdlerization. One Piece may be the most infamous example.
- Some examples from One Piece:
- Sanji no longer smokes, but he has a lollipop, which may be really undermining his level of Badass.
- You obviously have never seen Kojak
- Zoro's swords no longer cut people open, and so there's a memorable scene where his blade cut through a giant stone mallet and then "knocked out" the guy beyond it; in the original, the only people he ever knocked out with his swords in the middle of serious combat were a nun and a little kid.
- When Mihawk sliced Zoro open across his whole chest, they removed all the blood from the image.
- Speaking of Mihawk, he originally had a first name, being it "Dracule", which was struck off by 4Kids. Now don't ask me where they got that French accent from...
- Probably derived from the fact he's got a little mustache, and we all know only french people have those.
- All references to ale become "juice" or, if you were cheating in the drinking contest, "ginger tea".
- Character and mutilation is removed, which explains some of the above examples. Belle-Mère's death is removed. Nami is afraid that Arlong will hurt people, and she hates him because he fills people with fear, not because he shot her mother right in front of her when she was ten.
- Though an odd exception to this was the dismemberment of both Shanks's arm and Chef Zeff's leg, which while they became a case of Bloodless Carnage, both happened without any attempt to hide it. Probably because editing anything that major would just be completely impossible.
- Though so, Chef Zeff's leg was bowdlerized in the Japanese anime. In the manga, the chef eats his own leg to not starve to death while giving Sanji all the food they had, while in the anime he just loses it because it became stuck in a rope while his ship wrecked.
- In a case of So Bad It's Good, Captain
Smoker Chaser (even "Smoker" was too edgy) no longer smokes several cigars at once, but he has "smoke breath" from his Moku-Moku Fruit, a Devil Cursed Curséd Fruit that enables its user to turn into smoke.
- Even in the cage that eliminated fruit powers, he still had the clouds of smoke.
- They replaced all guns in One Piece with water pistols, despite this being a perfect opportunity to replace them with lasers. One gun was replaced with a mallet on a spring! (See above.)
- Another case has them replace a gun being pointed at Shank's head with a pop-gun. When that man is shot point blank by one of Shank's men (to show how ruthless and powerful they are) Shanks informs the bandit that the gun was full of blanks and the man simply fainted.
- The Korean broadcast version of One Piece painted over Zoro's swords to make them look like billy clubs.
- Yet another manga-to-anime case is how Chef Zeff from One Piece lost his leg. In the anime it was ripped off by an anchor when he was saving Sanji from drowning, which is a step down from the manga where he ate his own leg and gave Sanji all his food.
- Most incidents of characters getting maimed by other characters are edited in the anime, even the Japanese version.
- In the transition from manga to anime, and the Japanese manga to English one, Mr. 2 is no longer an "okama," (or Japanese transvestite), resulting in his image song being changed to "Oh Come My Way," (and the English manga suggests that he doesn't want a female partner, rather than being both male and female). One can only wonder how the part of the Impel Down arc in the not too distant future for the anime will be treated, when Mr. 2 finds a secret room full of transvestites, the leader of whom has a hormone-based Devil Fruit power and can change people's genders.
- Toei has apparently reversed its policy on "okama" with the most recent episodes. All of the okama jokes and references are retained.
- Another case is that in Zoro's backstory in the manga he sees Kuina's body after she died from falling down the stairs himself (and on-panel) while in the anime he's first informed by word of her fellow students of the dojo.
- One infamous case of Bowdlerization in Yu-Gi-Oh GX centers around Professor Cobra's final fate. In the original, Yubel gives him a false vision of his son still being alive, using it to lead him off the edge of the elevated duel arena he was dueling Judai on to his death, before transporting everyone else to another dimension. Since 4Kids can Never Say Die, Cobra's death walk was hastily cut out, abruptly jumping from the very start of the false vision straight to the dimension-hopping.
- Bizarrely, they left in Professor Stein falling to his death in an extremely similar fashion, an event which happened around six episodes previously.
- In fact, the bowdlerization served to make Yubel an even nastier antagonist by emphasizing her sadism and cruelty. Sure, she was a Complete Monster already, but that just makes her come off as even worse of a Karma Houdini later!
- The original Yu-Gi-Oh anime was notorious for this as well, particularly with the use of the Shadow Realm. While Shadow Games were part of the original story, they were far less common than they were in the 4Kids dub and often had different consequences. In the original version of the story, the Shadow Realm did not exist. Shadow Games could be played in another dimension (which was the basis of the American Shadow Realm), and the penalty for losing said game could involve being sent to a prison dimension like what happened to Mai Valentine after losing to Marik. But in the dub, the "Shadow Realm" was, with a few exceptions, simply a replacement for death. In one notable example, the battle against Arkana/Pandora involved the contestants being locked in place with a "spinning shadow disk" edging close as life points were lost. If the disk touched the player (because their life points reached zero), then they'd be "sent to the shadow realm". In the original version of this story, the disks were simply buzzsaws that would dismember the loser.
- Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series had a field day with that.
- That's not all. In one episode of the VR arc, Seto and Mokuba are tied to crosses in the original. The crosses were edited to become vaguely shaped hunks of rock when the show came to the US. Face it, if Americans of certain mindsets saw Seto Kaiba crucified, he'd get more Misaimed Fandom than he already does.
- In any given episode where guns are used, the gun will be edited out, leaving characters (including intimidating guards) pointing their fingers at each other — though that doesn't stop anyone from acting like they're holding instruments of
death harm.
- In one episode what followed demonstrated that, while guns are verboten in 4Kids dubs, suicidal leaps aren't.
- "Don't move a muscle! Or we'll shoot you with our invisible guns!"
- For instance after Bandit Keith loses to Joey he pulls a gun out of his pocket and points it at Pegasus' head, but in the edited 4Kids version he points his finger at his head. And he still talks like he's going to shoot him.
- And let's not forget what happens afterwards...
"AAAAAAAAAHGH...Ouch!"
- ...In America.
- If the dubbers knew Keith would be coming back next season, they wouldn't have put that "I'm Okay" ouch at the end.
- My favorite was when Kaiba simply had to win a duel, and threatened to
jump off a cliff get blown off a cliff by an explosion from a virtual reality machine if Yugi played the winning move.
- Apparently, religious references are also off-limits — in the arc Digital Nightmare of the original series, all Bible references, including allusions to The Apocalypse, The Flood, and The Creation, were edited out. In fact, the main antagonist's deck was called the "Seven Days of Creation" in the original, which went missing, yet again, from the dub.
- They cut a reference to Mai having been a casino dealer on a cruise ship previous to playing in the tournament. Let that sink in. They cut a reference to gambling in a show centered on a card game.
- They toned down the torture Malik received during his childhood and changed his motivation from avenging his father (he doesn't know he's the one responsible) and freeing his family's destiny from being tied to the Pharaoh to becoming the new Pharaoh of the entire world, making him less sympathetic in the process.
- Many of the cards were modified overseas that portrays religious symbols, nudity, violent weapons, such as the pentagram on Exodia, Destiny board message from "death" to "final", and revealing clothes on Harpie Lady.
- Fanboy: But I can't even see what this card is!
- Weevil: That's because I gave you the uncensored version of Enchanting Mermaid. Heheh. You can totally see her boobs!
- It's currently unknown what 4Kids will do to censor Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds, but most viewers agree they're going to have to do something with all of the intense and objectionable material in it.
- An egregious example was the transformation of an early adult-oriented anime Science Ninja Team Gatchaman into Battle of the Planets in the post-Star Wars space-show frenzy. Hermaphrodite villain Berg Katse became Zoltar and his "twin sister". The youngest hero Jinpei was changed from a kid to a genetically engineered being with weird speech patterns. All of the copious blood was removed, and a "narrator" would pop up to explain how the bad guys had been "temporarily stunned" by our heroes' weapons. Finally, a robot on an orbiting space station (animated in a completely different style) was inserted to pad the running length because so much had been cut. He would usually provide an Aesop at the end of the show.
- Zark was not on a space station, but apparently (to judge by the art) in the upper dome of Center Neptune. He served as narrator, including reassuring the kiddies that nobody was really hurt, when he wasn't taking credit for numerous good ideas and machines, or having really disturbing conversations with the early warning system on Pluto.
- Apparently even this wasn't tame enough, since they introduced a robot dog to further up the cute factor. My favorite part, though, was when some of the team would show up to talk to Zark, lunging into the room like a Gilliam animation then standing utterly stock-still during the conversation.
- For some time, there was an urban legend that Jinpei/Keyop's speech patterns had been edited to remove swearing. The release of unedited Gatchaman by ADV in the mid-2000s demonstrates that this wasn't true.
- The same Bowdlerising above was somehow committed by World Events Productions when they changed Beast King Golion to Lion Voltron, and then Space Musketeer Bismarck to Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs. Like Battle of The Planets, both dubs also use footage and characters animated similar to BOTP's robot scenes
- Golion was itself pretty violent anime by non-Japanese standards. In the Voltron dub, all the violent and repulsive scenes were cut, as with the character deaths (examples being certain aliens and mutants changed into robots, as well as Takashe and Ryou Shirogane being one character rather than two). in addition, some episodes were given footage from Dairugger XV to pad their running length. All of the Non Japanese Anime footage was used as the infamous season two.
- As you might notice, Saber Rider might be a Gag Dub, as Bismarck is not really a space western. In fact the character WEP called "Saber Rider" is Not Even Second In Command in the team. For some reason the Bismarck space cruiser was given a voice in the dub, which was ironic because the voice was never used when the ship was in complete robot transformation (but knowing the ship didn't speak in in the original anime, some would disapprove of the ship voice). Although the enemy forces are from the same dimension as the good guys, the dub states that the enemies come from another dimension, and if they get shot or stabbed or such the enemies are said to be "forced back to their own universe for a short amount of time". a good example being the slain alien spy from the first episode appearing as a major character in some non-Japanese episodes, which were used to make up for the Bismarck episodes WEP did not want to pick up. Also, there was a handsome Anti Villain whom the dub stated was human... but was originally not.
- The FUNimation dub of Kodomo No Omocha blandly sanitizes many of Sana's more outrageous statements, starting with the title of the first episode — "I'm A Grade School Student With A Pimp" became "I'm A Grade School Student With An Agent". This practice stopped after the first disc.
- Fortunately, the subtitles (or at least one of the subtitle options) retain the unsanitized lines.
- While Sailor Moon's rather infamous Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune were changed from being Schoolgirl Lesbians to being "cousins," the edits didn't extend to any of the original visual innuendo — making them incestuous lesbians, which is hardly new to anime but probably wasn't their intention.
- And Zoisite who was suddenly a ''woman''.
- And Raye's grandfather was originally very lecherous. New dialogue helped here, but in one episode, we see a newspaper article. The dub claims it's an ad for his dojo, but it originally was a warning for girls to look out for a dirty old man in the neighborhood.
- Little things like that were always being changed in the DiC dub; in one episode, when chasing the aforementioned Zoisite into a narrow alley, Sailors Moon, Mercury, and Jupiter cram themselves in and are unable to move. Sailor Mercury attempts her bubble attack, which requires a certain awkward pose, and trips, leaving her bent forward with her backside in the air, unable to actually fall forward. Jupiter, behind her and much taller, has a close-up view of her posterior — and she blushes and stares, wide-eyed, as Mercury struggles to stand up. In some airings, Mercury fell half-way down but not completely; the blushing was not shown.
- The Abridged Series had a field day with this, as Sailor Moon recounts what they had done that day. "We [..] saw Amy's vajayjay."
- One awesome episode that aired in the U.S. features Usagi going to a fancy party and proceeding to get "sick" because she drank too much "juice".
- An interesting French example is Fist of the North Star (Hokuto No Ken). After the anime was "accidentally" "bought" for a children's anime show, the French dubbing team was brought in to Bowdlerize it. Which they did by completely discarding the original translated script and improvising a new one from the images (see Gag Dub).
- Naruto's infamous German dub removed all blood, dead bodies, and bladed weapons, something that's more than slightly intrusive on a ninja-themed show.
- Also nobody is allowed to say "dead" or "death" which screws with Sasuke's whole motivation, as the viewer never learns that his whole clan was killed.
- The transfer to anime from manga toned down some of the more gruesome injures. When Haku fake-killed Zabuza the needles went into his neck instead of through
 his neck. Haku was stabbed but not impaled (the same goes for Naruto when he fought Sasuke). Gato was pushed off a bridge instead of beheaded. Zaku's arms had holes blown in them and his match ended then instead of one being blown off and the other being sliced open with Shino punching him in the face afterward. In a non-violent example, the joke where Konohamaru shows off his new sexy technique removes the one with Sasuke and Sai as Yaoi Guys, but not the one with the two women and Shikamaru temporarily taking up smoking while avenging Asuma is removed.
- In the English manga, they turn into silhouettes, but they're still there.
- Although it's pretty good about it, the Cartoon Network broadcast version cuts several things as well — such as the Naruto/Sasuke kiss (even though they keep it in during the flashback when Naruto believes Sasuke is dead) or the part when Naruto stabs himself with a kunai (though a line of dialogue makes what happened obvious).
- The uncut version of the dub restores the alcohol references, and also keeps the blood and sometimes adds (restores? depends on which they recorded first) profanity (like Shikamaru saying "we'll nail these bastards" in Episode 110).
- The Jetix version. Nuff said.
- The manga, though not as heavy-handed, took a few edits as well in the U.S. Such as the whole potion/special elixir (which was actually alcohol) deal during Rock Lee's battle in the Sasuke Retrieval arc, and editing the Shikamaru puffing a cigarette after Asuma's death and his defeating Hidan with it as well and a couple other scenes where he appears to now be clasping air. 'Course, the original anime also changed this as well.
- Early on in the series, when some of Gato's thugs kidnap Tsunami and are about to kill her son Inari, she threatens to bite her tongue and kill herself if they do, which would leave Gato unable to use any hostages against her father Tazuna. In the dub, she says she'll do anything the kidnappers want, with a fairly threatening look on her face and tone in her voice. This is one of the few edits that wasn't changed back in the uncut version (possibly just as an oversight).
- The broadcast version can also be noticeably random with was it does and doesn't edit. For instance Sasuke is allowed to wander through a street littered with blood-covered dead bodies but moments later a wipe that was clearly meant to look like blood was made bright green (a similar edit happened a lot earlier, but wasn't followed by actual violence). Gaara always kills people in silhouette but another character is allowed to stuff them in a box and stab it until blood pours onto the ground.
- Another jarring cut is during the final Zabuza/Kakashi fight, when Kakashi stabs two kunai into each of Zabuza's arms to render them useless. The actual stabbing scenes are cut and the kunai are rotoscoped out, so it's extremely unclear what happens. Kakashi just spins some kunai and then suddenly Zabuza stops using his arms.
- A pair of Japanese TV networks refused to air the controversial anime Kodomo No Jikan. Those that did present the show only did so with massive amounts of censorship, to the point of it being nearly unwatchable.
- A rare double Bowdlerization occurs in Rurouni Kenshin: in the anime adaptation, Saitoh defeats Usui by pinning him to a wall using the Gatotsu Zeroshiki. When the dub was shown on American television, they removed the sword. And in the original manga, the Gatotsu Zeroshiki rips Usui's body in half! It's by far the most violent scene in the manga because you can see Usui's intestines.
- More in the manga-to-anime shift: Get Backers? More boobs and more blood. Notably, Kazuki comes across as much more dangerous: rather than just tying people up and maybe a few bloodless slashes, he can be seen severing limbs and sewing people's eyes, mouths, and ears shut, and then tying them up. And leaving them there. For about a week. Yeah.
- Card Captors, the Americanized version of Card Captor Sakura, eliminated all of the series' same-sex crushes, despite all of the romance in the original series being portrayed in a strictly non-sexual fashion. They also changed nearly all of the characters' names.
- In the case of Syaoran and Yukito (Lee and Julian), they completely and utterly failed to remove the crush. If you squint, they also didn't do a good job covering up Tomoyo's crush on Sakura, although they did cover up the fact that they were cousins. Why they'd cover up Tomoyo and Sakura being second cousins, we have no idea.
- Especially since they turned Yamazaki and Chiharu from childhood friends/sweethearts into cousins. Go figure.
- A very minor (mostly cosmetic) change made in Pioneer's translation of the Pretty Sammy series was to replace all instances of "Sexy/Sexual" with "Lovely" in Pixy Misa's incantations. This wouldn't really be noteworthy... except for the fact that in the subtitled versions, you can still clearly hear her saying "Pixy Sexual Fire," while the subtitles claim it is "Pixy Lovely Fire".
- The infamous 1980s-1990s French dubs for children of anime such as Dragonball Z sometimes censored Kame Sennin's sexual harassment of Bulma without censoring the images. In one of the first episodes of Dragonball Z, Bulma brings Kame a gift, and he starts fondling her breasts while saying she should let him pet her instead. In the French dub, he does exactly the same thing, but exclaims "I bet these are chocolates!" (speaking of the gift, but it sounds like he means... So Yeah).
- Infamously, the original English dub of Dragon Ball Z (handled in a joint effort by Funimation and Saban with voice actors from The Ocean Group) bowdlerized the many character deaths by referring to the afterlife as "the other dimension" and dead characters as having been "sent to the other dimension". In one episode, Goku visits Hell (here, simply a place in the afterlife) and meets two oni wearing shirts that read "HELL" in block letters; Saban/Funimation edited the shirts to read "HFIL" and referred to the location as the "Home For Infinite Losers".
- Transformers (Unicron Trilogy) and its "sparkling grape juice." Kind of like the "synthetic orange juice" served at the mess hall on Vehicle Voltron.
- Also, Mirage's (same gender) crush on Galvatron. Like the Sailor Moon example above, they edited the dialogue, but not the animation itself, which leaves the giant heart that Mirage manifests at one point more than a little suspicious.
- Considering how hyperactive anime double-takes are, they probably felt that part could be handwaved as easily as Louis Armstrong's zany beefcake heartings.
- The dub version of Power Puff Girls Z has plenty of examples, the most notable being the episode where the Rowdyruff Boys make their debut:
- While in the original the Boys climb on a roof and take a piss on people's heads, in the dub they are completely re-drawn, showing them holding a garden hose and wetting people with it.
- When the Boys start attacking the Powerpuff Girls, they flip their skirts. This was cut in the dub.
- They then proceed to humiliate them further by taking off their pants and mooning them. Guess what happened to the scene in the dub.
- One dub change that didn't involve the Rowdyruff Boys: Turning Snake of the Gangreen Gang into a woman named Ivy (Because Rape (or something resembling it) Is Okay When It's Female On Female). Note that even anyone familiar with the American original Powerpuff Girls series would know that that's supposed to be a guy. Massive fail.
- The villain Great Michel is an extremely effeminate campy hairdresser guy in the original. In the dub he's turned into a woman.
- Sakurako transforms into Sedusa because she wants to be 'sexy like Miss Bellum' and make her love interest notice her. In the dub of course this motive is removed. Later, she finds her boyfriend chatting with his college teacher. She turns into Sedusa because she thinks he's cheating on her with said teacher. In the dub, she simply thinks that he found a new friend and that he no longer wants to be her friend.
- Inverted in Zoids, which has at the T. rex-ish Berserk Führer changed into the more ferocious sounding Berserk Fury in the English dub.
- Funnily enough, there's also a much rarer but still used inversion of this sort of editing called "Fifteening" — upping the language content of a dub to make it seem edgier. Manga Entertainment used to be the biggest offender, but there's still others.
- The anime version of Bobobobo Bobobo tones down a few things. For example, Softon's head becomes pink, to avoid Toilet Humor around him (even though that's his entire point in the manga), giving Serviceman an older appearance after thinking he looked too "innocent", and one minor villain who wears panties with a duck popping out of the front now wears them... on his head. And yes, I said his.
- Sonic X was frequently Bowdlerised. "Real" firearms became lasers (quite tricky when you consider there was a large backstory involving a military organisation), several shots of human-shaped characters being hurt were removed, all upper-front shots of the character Rouge were eliminated and some scenes made no sense whatsoever. Some say the Bowdlerising of the final episode was so blatant it actually knocked several scenes out of sequence.
- Mega Man NT Warrior also suffered from frequent Bowderdization. Shots containing projectile weapons pointed towards the camera were edited out. Swords were airbrused with a glow to look like lightsabers, though they usually ended up looking more like glowing popsicles. And for some reason, the dub seemed to make an attempt to hide the blatantly obvious fact that Commander Beef was Masa in a Paper Thin Disguise.
- An interesting example from the Arabic dub of Digimon Adventure: to get past some extremely strict media regulations, the concept of Digivolving does not exist for this dub. Instead, the higher forms of the basic Digimon are their older siblings.
- Bleach's anime significantly reduces or obscures the violence in many scenes in the manga, like when Yammy splits open an Arrancar nurse's head (he punches her into the wall), when Grimmjow kills Luppi by blowing his torso away with a Cero (the flash from the cero obscures the gore), and when Szayel uses Gabriel on Nemu (instead of impregnating her and forcing her to give birth to him, he turns into a pink mist and comes out her mouth, with enlarged cells dividing to recreate his body). One recent and somewhat clumsily executed example is the treatment of the scene where Harribel's Fraccion cut off and fuse their left arms to create Aion; they don't quite cut off their arms, but turn them into red energy, and instead of a bloody stump, there's a glowing red sphere where their left arms end.
- More manga-to-anime censorship: one infamous example is where Ichigo cuts a guy's arm off; in the anime, Ichigo jumps, and his opponent's arm just falls off — you never see the actual cut. (In the same episode, litres of spit fly from the characters' mouths instead of the blood shown in the manga. What the...?) Also, the Mad Scientist Szayel Aporro turns his minion into a purple blob before eating it, instead of devouring him whole.
- Another arm-chopping incident: early in the manga, Gin cuts off a giant guard's arm with his shikai. In the anime, Gin only leaves him with a not particularly deep wound on his arm, which still takes some hard work by Orihime to heal.
- Another one: Most of the characters who wear hakama have their skin covered by white cloth. Most noticeably is Soifon, who has everything except her shoulders covered in the anime, even though in the dialogue she specifically mentions that the clothes have no back. This is also noticeable on many of the Arrancar, most noticeable Halibel, and even some of the male Arrancar.
- When Ichigo goes through the fight to defeat his Inner Hollow, at one point he fights Kensei in the real world as a Hollow. In the manga, Kensei cuts off Ichigo's left arm, and it grows back as a Hollowfied arm. In the anime, Kensei only slashes the left shoulder, and the wound is then instantly healed by his Hollow side.
- And apparently when your inner organs are crushed, you vomit up water and not blood.
- Yu Yu Hakusho's dub broadcast edits out smoking, which removes Yusuke's strategy for victory in one fight. This also counts for the transition from manga to anime — in the manga, he uses one of his own cigarettes, while in the anime, he uses one that Genkai (who smokes in that scene and never smokes again), threw at him. In the Three Kings saga, the demon who Kurama hired to attack Yomi, resulting in him being blinded, appears mostly intact, but emaciated in the anime, while in the manga, much of his body, including a good part of his chest, and one of his arms, has rotted away.
- MAR has a character named Halloween who wore a giant cross chained to his back, as well as an ärm that attacks with the same. The American release of the manga edited the cross out by removing the horizontal portion, making it into a giant rectangular slab that looks more like a coffin or a generic headstone than a cross. The editing is at least well-done; if you didn't see the original release, you'd never know it was supposed to be a cross.
- Oddly enough the anime adaptation itself was plagued with this in the Japanese version no less. Changes that are usually made in edited English dubs were made, such as referring to alcohol as juice.
- Not to mention all the blood and violence that was either toned down from the manga, or just removed completely.
- Similarly, Fullmetal Alchemist has a scene in the manga where Greed is pinned to a giant cross-shaped slab of rock. The American release edited the slab by filling in portions so it looks like a generic oval-shaped slab of stone.
- The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya had this with "Remote Island Syndrome", which is changed from the book through the addition of Kyon's little sister, who in the novel attempted to come along, but was discovered and left at home. Once on the island, the SOS Brigade members avail themselves of as much alcohol as their host can muster, which can't be shown on Japanese TV, since the characters are still in high school. The TV show has them doing things appropriate for the presence of a grade-schooler instead. Minus the murder-mystery part, anyway...
- The Hebrew dub for Card Captor Sakura removed Yukito's love for Touya. So after Sakura confesses her love to Yukito, the Israeli viewer learns that he doesn't feel the same way because he already has Touya as a very close friend. Also, for the rest of the episode, the words "a very close friend" are repeated again and again. Because Touya is Yukito's very close friend.
- This is Monster's original poster◊. This is Monster's American poster◊. Gee, the gun disappeared.
- This is made stranger by the fact that that's the only gun edited out in the American release.
- The Warrior Cats manga, which, despite following mostly non-violent (except for Rise of Scourge) backstories, still manages heavy Bowdlerisation in the form of Bloodless Carnage (example here). The fact that these mangas still manage to get a 10+ rating makes this one wonder what they would do with an uncensored adaptation of the original novels.
- For some reason though, they're still allowed to say "die", and one significant character in the Tigerstar and Sasha manga does die a somewhat unpleasant death.
- Somewhat averted by Shattered Peace. Although the art style still makes things seem Lighter And Softer, the artist clearly wasn't trying to hide any blood in the chicken coop scene.
- Do NOT mention the "Knights of the Zodiac" Cartoon Network broadcast dub of Saint Seiya to any of the English-speaking fans. It got Bowdlerised so bad that it basically ruined the classic series' chances of succeeding on the English market. Even ADV's uncut and much more loyal to the source material DVD release couldn't save it, and after the 60-episode license ran out, that was it. No More Export For You The most glaring examples:
- Dying blood various colors and calling it "spiritual energy."
- Eliminating all religious references (This being a series about warrior-saints fighting holy wars in the name of their goddess Athena)
- Never Say Die
- Upping the characters' ages so they're talking about 17-year-olds going into battle rather than 14-year-olds. (Granted, the art makes that part easy...)
- And, of course, the Flanderization of almost all characters, especially Shun, who was chickified as much as a male character can be; and Hyoga, the Siberian with a surfer's accent.
- On another note regarding Pokémon, the title is sometimes accused of being the product of bowdlerization due to the original Japanese title translating to Pocket Monsters. In reality, the localized title was a portmanteau to dodge legal issues with an existing toy line called Monster In My Pocket.
- In Kiki's Delivery Service, when Osono offers Kiki a drink during their first meeting, in the original the drink was coffee. You can't give coffee to American kids! So the English dub changed it to "hot chocolate".
Comic Books
- The Belvision version of Tintin attempted to Bowdlerise Captain Haddock's drinking problem to sleeping drops in his coffee, and Alan's Opium running to diamond smuggling.
- The grand irony is by and large diamonds a helluva lot bloodier...but of course nobody cares about 'those kinds of people' who died harvesting those.
- The lead character of the French comic book Sillage is Navis, a teenage girl who as the only survivor of a wrecked starship has grown up alone except for an animal companion on a jungle planet. Volume 1 of the original comic depicts her naked except for a pair of briefs, with white bars tattooed on her arms, legs, face and breasts. The US edition is retitled Wake, renames the character Navee for the sake of pronunciation, and censors her nudity by painting her chest tattoo solid black.
- Another French comic about a girl raised in the wild, Pyrénée, might never see publication in English because the kid is starkers.
- Also when he did a story about a police officer shooting a criminal in the leg he was told he couldn't use guns, so instead he shoots him with his donut which makes it funnier.
- Mocked in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vol. 2's supplementary material, where the last page contains a note from the "H.M. Office of Bowdlerisation" ordering readers to "detach and destroy all scenes of an unsavoury nature".
Film
- ...Way to kill the joke entirely, guys.
Literature
- During Prohibition, there was a move to edit The Bible to remove all references to alcohol. Except, of course, the ones that discouraged overindulgence.
- Yes, they literally wanted Jesus to turn water into grape juice.
- The strangest part of this is that the bowdlerizers reasoned that the translation must be wrong, since Jesus would never drink alcohol. This even though most of them were old enough to remember a time when it was necessary to drink fermented beverages because they wouldn't be infected by dangerous bacteria like plain water was. (And without modern sanitation and refrigeration, you simply can't keep freshly pressed grape juice from fermenting. Grape skins are coated in yeast.)
- There are individuals who to this day maintain that when Jesus refuses οἶνος mixed with myrrh, or when Paul commands that a deacon be not given to οἶνος, the word οἶνος means "wine"; but when Jesus changes water into οἶνος, or when Paul (only two chapters after the previous reference) tells his friend Titus to avoid drinking water but use a little οἶνος for his stomach's sake, the word οἶνος means "unfermented grape juice".
- Wanna make this Older Than Print? In the King James Version, the first of which being in the sixteenth century, the translators deliberately replaced the tetragrammaton, four Hebrew letters frequently translated to either YHWH (Yahweh) or JHVH (Jehovah), with the all capital, LORD. In the foreword for some translations the reason is given that, after the second century, the spoken name of God was bad luck. Which gives us the reason why no one can agree on the true translation.
- Funnily enough, "Yahweh" is supposedly a Bowdlerization (from the big man himself no less) because God's real name would make your head asplode to hear it (or drive you insane, whichever one). Yahweh in Hebrew translates to "I am," signifying that the Hebrews, Jews, and later Christians, only need to know he exists and do not need a proper name. Also, supposedly Jehovah is the name of a Sumerian demon. Gives one a new perspective on Christianity.
- And there was an interesting variation on removing certain parts of the Bible: the Wicked Bible. Said word was "not", which gave us the awesome seventh commandment: "Thou shalt commit adultery." Sure, they claimed it was an accident, but given the subject matter...
- Terry Pratchett canceled plans for a movie of Mort when the producers told him they loved the story (about Death taking an apprentice) but wanted to lose the "Death" angle.
- That makes me die a little inside.
- Another Terry Pratchett example in Feet of Clay actually uses the word; a common dwarfish saying in regards to height is "All trees are felled at ground level.", it is mentioned that this is merely an extremely bowdlerised version of the actual saying, which is "When his hands are higher than your head, his groin is level with your teeth"
- In one of the few shining, brilliant examples of this, in the US release of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "Most Gratuitous Use of the Word "Fuck" in a Serious Screenplay" is changed to "Most Gratuitous Use of the Word "Belgium" in a Serious Screenplay" and then Lampshaded by Arthur Dent.
- There exists a condensed, 'kid-friendly' pop-up book version of Gulliver In Lilliput.
- Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories includes "How the Leopard Got His Spots", in which an Ethiopian and his Talking Animal Leopard friend, who both start out light-coloured, decide to change their colours for the sake of camouflage. The Ethiopian paints the Leopard with spots, of course, but chooses plain black for himself. In the original version he tells the Leopard "Plain black's best for a nigger". In more recent editions this is often changed to "Plain black's best for me".
- Considering the etymology of "nigger", the original version is actually kind of Fridge Logic-y...
- Sometimes changing cultural standards can leapfrog over attempted Bowdlerization. Many early English translators of The Count of Monte Cristo tried to disguise the lesbian subtext of one of the sub-plots; however modern readers should have little difficulty putting two and two together with the information left in the story (tomboyish woman abandons her fiancee at the altar, flees Paris with her close female friend, they're discovered sharing a room and a bed at a country inn).
- The Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were originally a tribe of pygmies from "the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before." And they get recruited by a rich American/British guy to work for food in his overseas private factory. Since the seventies, the book and movie versions that most people know have changed them into being native to the fictional Loompaland, and having "rosy-white" (or orange, in the movie) skin. The book illustrations followed suit. The 2006 movie still set Loompa-Land in Darkest Africa, but had the Oompa-Loompas played by Deep Roy, an Indian.
- Parodied in J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard, where in his commentaries on the tales, Albus Dumbledore reveals that a witch some centuries ago tried to bowdlerise the titular tales to rid them of realistic dread and pro-muggle messages. The result is, for Dumbledore and many child readers, nausea-inducing.
- In Marie de France's poem Lanval, the original story has the faerie queen ride in to town, and save Lanval from execution. He leaps upon the back of her horse as she rides away, providing a reversal of the traditional knight in shining armor archetype. In some translations/adaptations/what have you, people have had Lanval take the front of the horse, returning the archetype to it's "proper" form. This has the unfortunate side-effect of removing a huge chunk of what makes the faerie queen so mysterious and alluring (her beauty is so great that she holds sway over everyone around her, and one of Arthur's knights gladly takes the traditionally "feminine" place).
Live Action TV
- BBC Kids (at least in Canada) has shown episodes of Red Dwarf with heavy edits. One particular episode, "Holoship," had virtually the entire middle of the episode removed, as the episode dealt largely with a main character's romancing a fellow hologram, making the resulting plot unintelligible. (They pretty much had to cut the bits where the female hologram showed off her superhuman sexual abilities. Not to mention the fact the crew boasted of having sex as part of their daily routine.)
- Note that BBC Kids, like BBC America, is only part-owned by The BBC. Their relationship to the BBC proper is similar to that of the various UKTV channels in the United Kingdom. They should under no circumstances be mistaken for real BBC channels.
- Those heavily censored episodes also aired on the Ontarian based kids channel YTV. Because they were also available on PBS public television at the same time in fully uncensored version, lack of viewers forced YTV to pull the plug on the show. Honestly? Very much a mercy killing.
- Also, the episode "Balance of Power." The remastered version of that episode took out the hilarious moment where Kochanski (really Rimmer using her holo-data) looks down her shirt and says, "I've seen something you haven't, squire."
- Kryten as well, for lawyer-friendly purposes presumably, for the remastered and Dave edits. Rimmer describes a group of skeletons as having 'less meat on them than a Chicken Mc Nugget'. The other versions remove the 'Mc' part from the speech but don't cover Barrie's lips.
- While Fox Kids was airing the Transformers series Beast Machines on Saturday mornings, they ran reruns of its predecessor, Beast Wars, on weekday afternoons. It featured a number of cuts from the syndicated version that had aired until about a month beforehand, mostly to remove violence and a few "questionable" lines of dialogue. Gratuitous censorship, with no change in target audience.
- In Argentina, Cartoon Network broadcast Beast Wars and War of the Planets uncensored.
- When broadcast in Canada, Beast Wars was changed to Beasties as YTV found the word "war" offending. YTV forgot that Canadian kids see more American commercials (such as for Beast Wars) than they do Canadian TV shows.
- That's not YTV's fault. Under Canadian broadcast regulations, a Canadian network can't broadcast a cartoon with "War" in the title. It's the same reason that War Planets was called Shadow Raiders in Canada.
- Amusingly both Beast Wars and War Planets are made by the same Canadian animation studio.
- In the UK there are "daytime edits" of sitcoms such as Friends and Scrubs, in which invective and references to sex beyond Double Entendre levels is removed, either by excising the line, or by blanking out specific words.
- A particularly grating example is the Friends episode "The One With The Ballroom Dancing", in which Phoebe loses her job. The conversation in which she explains to the others "They thought I was a whore" and "Now the police think I'm a whore" was retained but without those lines, rendering it almost incomprehensible, while the audience laughter seems to cut in for no reason. And the same thing happens when she attends an interview; we cut from the interviewer asking why she left her last job to the reaction shot.
- Other Friends examples include "The One with the Stripper" (which has the audience seemingly in hysterics over "Rock, paper, scissors" due to the rest of the line being cut out), and "The One Where Chandler Can't Cry", whose plot involves Phoebe being mistaken for a porn star — obviously an episode with a plot like this would have some editing, but maybe removing every single reference to the word "porn" may be a little too far...
- A similar example of editing here occurs in the episode "The One With The Red Sweater", where a recurring joke is that while staying in a hotel, Joey has bought porn and charged it to his friends' bills. The sudden cuts and audience laughter springing as if from nowhere while the other characters work out what's happened makes the scene completely ridiculous and hilarious in a different way.
- The syndicated version of The Sopranos removing every instance of cursing and every scene in the Bada Bing Club. One particularly notorious instance of editing came when the line "sucking on a cub scout's ass" became "chewing on a cub scout's ear". This was parodied in a Mad TV skit, which cut out all lines mentioning violence, profanity and nudity, reducing the whole show to a shade under three minutes.
Therapist: Let's talk about your anger, towards your mother.
Tony: Anger? Anger? Anger what?
Therapist: Well, you're clearly angry at her.
Tony: Yeah, no sh—
—ing genius insight! Who are you, f—
—ing Ray Charles? Lemme tell you something, I didn't have anger AT her, alright, I HATED that f—
—tch! F—
Therapist: Well, why don't we explore this?
Tony: Tell you what, huh? *he stands up, and grabs his crotch* Why don't you explore this—
—ing better things to do with my life than the spend time yakkin' about my motherf—
*halfway out the door* See you next week!"
- The syndicated version of Sex and the City.
- Even worse was the short-lived syndicated version of Dream On.
- Ah, Dead Like Me's short life on the Sci-Fi Channel. It was inevitable the Bowdlerisation would ruin it.
- In Monty Python's Flying Circus, when the Spanish Inquisition arrives late in court, Cardinal Ximénez exclaims "Oh bugger!" This scene was frequently removed, since 'bugger' was considered too profane back then.
- It depended what part of the UK you were watching from. Famously the "Oh, bugger!" line was cut from the Scottish broadcast whilst — correct me if anyone knows different — the rest of the UK got to hear it.
- The most famous Bowdlerization of Python came in the "Summarize Proust" sketch, wherein Graham Chapman's character, asked for his hobbies outside summarizing, lists "strangling animals, golf and masturbating," resulting in a roar of laughter from the audience. The BBC had generally been pretty tolerant of the Pythons, but they drew the line on saying "masturbating," despite the protests of the Pythons. Two edits were produced, one in which "masturbating" is simply muted, creating an odd pause between "golf" and the seemingly disproportionate laugh, and one in which the line is clumsily rearranged into "golf and strangling animals." As Python member Terry Jones would later point out, the fact that "strangling animals" was acceptable in all edits but "masturbating" was unacceptable explained a lot about Britons of the time. Luckily, the unedited master copy was kept and has resurfaced, including on the Internet.
- (Overlap with Music) Kids Incorporated edited almost all of their songs for time and content. Anything overtly sexual was excised, but the judgment was often arbitrary (For example, Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself" loses only the line "Sweat, sweat, sweat, sweat sweat sweat, ow!"). One of the more seemingly random changes: Nelson's "Love And Affection" had its refrain changed from "I can't face another night on my own." to "I can't face another day on my own."
- Towards the end of the first season, Power Rangers got hit fairly hard with Bowdlerization following parental outrage over the fact that it was quite violent for a kids show. Episodes began devoting a lot more to the 'plot' part, and what fighting there was usually consisted of the Rangers fighting an endless stream of mooks while the Monster Of The Week hung hurled "witty" lines at them. Once enough mooks had been beaten, the Monster would grow giant, brainlessly charge the Zord, and get fried.
- This was mostly in the second season, and had more to do with the fact that they were still using the Ranger suits from Zyuranger but the monsters from Dairanger, and thus there was no Japanese footage of the Rangers fighting the monster. For some monsters, they were able to get the suit sent over to record their own fight scenes, but a lot of the time, this wasn't possible.
- Spoofed on an episode of The Brady Bunch, of all things. Mike and Carol are trying to convince Bobby that Jesse James was a criminal and not a hero, so they let him watch a movie about Jesse James that's airing on television, hoping that the movie's violence will scare Bobby into seeing Jesse James for the ruthless criminal he actually was. However, said movie is bowdlerised to the point that it cuts out the violence completely, making Jesse James seem more like a roguish hero of sorts. As a result, Bobby becomes even more enamored with the outlaw, and Mike and Carol are not happy.
- In the Top Gear Bolivia Special, James May referenced this when after swearing he turned to the camera saying that BBC 2 would need a beep.
- An early episode of Saturday Night Live featured cast members singing the song "Let's Kill Gary Gilmore for Christmas." When the episode's rerun aired after Gilmore's execution, this segment was replaced by a different skit.
- In an episode of House, Dr. House prescribes cigarettes to a patient suffering from an inflammatory bowel. In France, the cigarettes were changed by two bowls of rice.
Music
- This editor heard no less than three versions of Blessid Union of Souls' "I Believe" on the radio during the same drive from Pittsburgh to Boston. One version used the original line "She's in love with a nigger from the street", one changed the N-word to "brother", and one blanked the word out altogether.
- The Cole Porter song "I Get a Kick Out of You" is commonly performed in one of two Bowdlerised versions, which remove the reference to cocaine and replace it with "perfume from Spain" or "a bop-type refrain."
- Interestingly enough, this editor participated in a high-school production of Anything Goes (the musical for which "I Get a Kick Out of You" was written) which was left entirely uncensored.
- This is one of the jokes that isn't taken out of TV broadcasts of Blazing Saddles. Considering that half the time the entire campfire scene is taken out or overdubbed with cattle mooing, that's saying something.
- "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" is often sung using the standard edition with all the Double Entendres removed when not performed as part of Pal Joey. One would need to Bowdlerise far, far more than this song to make a clean version of Pal Joey, a feat which was accomplished in the film version with significant Adaptation Decay.
- The Rolling Stones had to record a special version of "Let's Spend The Night Together" to play it on BBC radio because it implied sex. The bowdlerised version was called "Let's Spend Some Time Together".
- They were also forced to play this version when they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in the United States, but Mick expressed his displeasure with this by rolling his eyes and giving the camera exaggerated looks of disgust while singing.
- D12's Purple Pills, a song about drug use, was rewritten to Purple Hills, a song about travelling while engaging in drug use. ("Blue and yellow purple hills?" Yeah, they're high.)
- Rapper Styles P's song Good Times Pt. 2 (I Get High) has two versions, a milder version with slightly different lyrics that goes with the music video and the more explicit version on the CD (the drug use remains constant throughout both versions). The mild version is arguably of higher quality, as the hardcore version uses profanity and references to violence to sound 'gangster' but the music video version flows better with more assonance and consonance. (For example, "I get high 'cuz I ride, what's better to do/ and I'ma always stay live, 'cuz I'm better than you" rhymes better than replacing the second line with the explicit version's "and I never give a fuck, 'cuz I'm better than you".)
- The Clear Channel version of What It's Like, by Everlast, replaces all "objectionable" words — including, oddly, "Chrome '45" — with humorous sounds (well, the music execs probably find them humorous, at any rate).
- Who else found the way they'd changed "Like cutting off his balls" to "Like cutting off his -" followed by the sound of a very loud pruning shears to be a lot more painful than the uncensored line?
- Dr Demento has been known to use duck calls and other funny noises to drown out obscene words in some songs, such as over the repeated refrain of "what the fuck?" in The Fools' "Psycho Chicken".
- He has also been known to cut-n-paste parts of songs to remove "offensive" material. The version of Dr. Hook's "Freaking at the Freaker's Ball" broadcast on the program, for instance, had the line "All the fags and the dykes are boogyin' together" electronically replaced with a copy of "White ones, black ones, yellow ones, red ones" from later in the song.
- He also took out a brief snippet from "Ti Kwan Leep/Boot to the Head" where Ed Gruberman complains, "All this faggy stuff is starting to piss me off!"
- The song "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails is a complete subversion. Aside from removing the word "fuck" 4 times, the song is left completely unedited when played on the radio. This may be due to the fact that most Moral Guardians are scared shitless of Trent Reznor. There is an occasionally aired version that also cuts out "penetrate" (as in "you let me penetrate you"), though evidently "violate you" and "desecrate you" are still okay.
- After the 9/11 terror attacks, several songs that mentioned bombs and war were censored — among them was Electric Six's "Gay Bar", which included the lyrics, "Let's start a war, start a nuclear war!" In the United Kingdom, the offending words were replaced by the sound of whips cracking. In the American radio edit for alternative and college radio, however, the lyrics were replaced entirely with "Let's do an edit, do a radio edit!"
- And of course, there are the Black-Eyed Peas changing "Let's Get Retarded" to "Let's Get it Started" for radio play.
- Nokia's even using the bowdlerised title to promote one of its music phones.
- The popular song "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" by Charlie Daniels has the final line where Johnny says "I told you once, you son-of-a-bitch, I'm the best there ever been." On the radio it usually plays as "son-of-a-gun." Not too noticeable considering the song is otherwise clean.
- Even better, when this song was put in Guitar Hero III, it was censored... even though the official soundtrack CD has the line as "son of a bitch".
- This particular edit seems to completely change the tone of the song. "Son of a Bitch" in the correct tone shows complete contempt, but no matter how you say "Son of a Gun", there's a feeling of affectation in it.
- Then there's Charlie's song "Long Haired Country Boy" where the line "but I will take another toke" is replaced by "but I will tell another joke".
- Charlie Daniels bowdlerized many of his own songs after becoming a born-again Christian.
- Spoofed in "Oh Susie" by German singer/comedian Frank Zander, in which all the (still quite obvious) "dirty" words are replaced with random noises ostensibly due to Executive Meddling.
- Some radio stations completely replace the second verse of the Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" because of the repeated use of the word "faggot."
- No one mentioned "I Bet You They Won't Play This Song On The Radio"? It's a Monty Python song entirely about this where there are very odd and obvious bleep sounds every few words about profanity censorship. And yes, it has been played on the radio.
- Apparently, the B-side had the "un-censored" version.
- The song "Seasons in the Sun" is a highly bowdlerised version of a French song "Le Moribund" ("The Dying Man") by Jacques Brel. Both are about a dying man saying goodbye to his friends and family, but in the original, it becomes pretty clear that all the people that the narrator is saying goodbye to were people his wife was having an affair with.
- When Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl" was originally released in 1967, a lot of radio stations objected to the line "Making love in the green grass" because of the sexual connotations, so the record company issued a version that poorly edited in the line "Laughin' and a-runnin', hey hey" (from earlier in the song) over the other line. That version was quickly forgotten and the uncensored version became the standard one over the years. Then, for reasons unknown, the censored version was included on the popular 1990 Best of Van Morrison comp.
- Incidentally, both versions are available on iTunes, and not marked as "clean" or "uncensored". So, best of luck...
- The song "Almost" by Bowling for Soup, a title quite appropriate in that after the edits it's almost a different song. For example:
I almost got drunk at school at fourteen
Where I almost made out with the homecoming queen
Who almost went on to be Miss Texas
But lost to a slut with much bigger breasts
- became
I almost got punked at school at fourteen
Where I almost got a hug from the homecoming queen
Who almost went on to be Miss Texas
But lost to a girl who sewed her own dresses
- When the Eels album Daisies Of The Galaxy was released, Dream Works Records requested they record bowdlerized lyrics to "It's a Motherfucker" for an edited version of the album to be sold at Wal-Mart. E complied, in a tongue in cheek Writer Revolt sort of way, by changing it to "It's a Monster Trucker", complete with unintelligible CB radio speak during instrumental breaks.
- Songs with potentially offensive references to Jesus in their title frequently have it omitted. For example, "Trip with Jesus" by The Union Underground is frequently just referred to as "Trip...". Not so bad? British metal band Orange Goblin has a song called "Jesus Beater" (it isn't actually as offensive as the name would make you think). It got bowdlerised, though... into "Wife Beater".
- Tool's "Stinkfist" has no offensive lyrics, but it is frequently referred to as "Track #1".
- The words "knuckle" and "elbow" are also censored on the radio. Apparently people have issues with anal fisting...
- The official edited version of the Beastie Boys album Ill Communication has some rather perplexing Bowdlerizations. (Many would also find the very concept of an "edited version" perplexing, but that's beside the point.) Aside from being poorly done in general — portions of the entire finished mixdown are reversed instead of just altering the vocal track — there are edits to completely innocuous words such as "shifting" and "funky". But the most humorously misguided edit on the album would have to be in "Get It Together", when the word "crack" is edited out of the line "Never ever ever smoking crack." So instead of getting a nice anti-drug message, the hypothetical listener of this family-friendly album now has to wonder exactly what it is that the Beasties will never ever ever smoke. (The same song has the word "shit" unedited in one lone instance.) A later song also has the word "Cheeba" edited out of the line "I stopped smoking Cheeba, that was part of the key."
- The later To The Five Boroughs also has an edited version, but it's much less of a hack job, as almost all of the songs actually have alternate vocals recorded to mask the offending words. Hearing the edited version of "Ch-Check It Out" on the radio, for example, you would never guess just how profane the song really is. "Wait a minute, all you Klingons in the fucking house? Turn this motherfucking party out? Where'd all this come from?"
- "Tubthumping" by Chumbawamba goes from "pissing the night away" to "KISSING the night away."
- In Karaoke Revolution 2, the Boys II Men song "I'll Make Love To You" is edited to say, "Throw your rose on the floor / I'm gonna take my rose off too," which makes absolutely no sense in a song that's literally about sex.
- Another Cole Porter example: it's unlikely you'll hear singers nowadays launch into the first chorus of "Let's Do It" as it was originally written: "Chinks do it, Japs do it / Up in Lapland little Lapps do it..." (The replacement lyrics about birds, bees and educated fleas were taken from one of Porter's later choruses, but they spoil the nationality theme of the first refrain.)
- Likewise, the line "Roosters with a doodle and a cock do it" was changed to "Even little cuckoos in their clocks do it".
- The Drifters' "Under The Boardwalk" originally had the line "we'll be making love under the boardwalk" in the chorus, but radio stations objected, so it was changed to "we'll be falling in love." The Bowdlerized version has become the standard, although some oldies stations have started playing the original.
- Mocked in Desorden Público's song "El día que prohibieron la violencia y el sexo en la tele" ("The day where sex and violence were banned from TV"), which is about what the title says. The result: all the programming is screwed, since everything Newscasts to Soap Operas is damaged when not outright off air, people stops watching TV at all since there is nothing to watch; and to appeal to those yearning for the lost things producers use those media not affected by the ban, so now people "can hear gunshots and moans on the radio".
- The single version of "My Name Is" by Eminem featured substantially rewritten lyrics. They're generally either just slightly toned down or so intentionally ridiculous that you can easily figure out the original content anyway ("I just drank a fifth of kool-aid, dare me to drive?"), but a couple of lyrical substitutions are different enough for the real words to be a little surprising when you're used to the radio version. Even knowing his reputation, it can be kind of jarring to find out "If you see my dad, ask him if he's bought a porno mag and seen my ad" is actually "If you see my dad, tell him I slit his throat in this dream I had".
- Other Eminem songs, such as "Stan", were censored simply by muting half the song's lyrics. In one version, the word "trunk" was removed from the line "Some dude was drunk and drove his car over a bridge/With his girlfriend in the trunk, and she was pregnant with his kid", as if such an action would have been perfectly acceptable if she had been sitting in the front seat.
- The version of Alice In Chains' "Man in the Box" played on MTV contains the altered line "buried in my spit" (and later "shove my nose in spit"). Radio stations, which had actually been playing it uncensored previously, also switching to this version post-nipplegate. Thankfully, they've now started just cutting the word short rather than using the rather silly alternative.
- Presumably for the sake of the singers among us, Rock Band 2 uses the version that replaces the instances of "shit" rather than removing them.
- And let's not forget the edit of "Heaven Beside You", which included the line "that's fracked up".
- The MTV version of Tom Petty's "You Don't Know How It Feels" censored the line "Let's roll another joint" in an odd way, by just playing the offending word backwards (it sounded something like "let's roll another t'nohj"). Amusingly, when Tom Petty accepted an MTV video music award for the video, he couldn't help noting that whenever he saw his video on TV, there was one word of the song he could never make out.
- When the original Jesus Christ Superstar Rock Opera was released in 1970, Judas's first song, "Heaven On Their Minds," was released as a single. On the album, the song is Judas's critique of Jesus's growing role as messiah. In the single, seemingly half of the words are changed ("If you strip away the myth from the man" becomes "If you strip away the sleep from your eyes," for example). It also adds background singers for some reason. May or may not be deliberate Bowdlerization, when you take into account the pattern of Rewritten Pop Versions of songs from other shows by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.
- Also, I believe that there is a censored version of Coheed And Cambria's "Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness" where several words are cut out. Including the word "crush". Which leads (I think; I have yet to see the censored version) to "You're a selfish little (Whore, which goes here, may have been cut, also), I'm the selfish little (Whore), if I had my way I'd (Empty space/bleep) your face in the door...So Yeah, wonder what that line could be...
- A version of The Beatles' "The Ballad of John and Yoko" distributed to American radio stations in 1969 blipped the word "Christ" from the line, "Christ, you know it ain't easy."
- Subverted in M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes". What initially seems to be Sound Effect Bleep is, in fact, the official, er, lyrics, to the song.
- Those noises (a gun shooting then cocking and a cash register noise) have themselves been censored into less offensive noises, like a dull popping sound.
- BBC Radio 1 played a censored version of the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York" during Christmas 2007, blanking the words "slut" and "faggot". They received complaints from angry listeners, from the Pogues, and from the late Kirsty MacColl's mother, and generally attracted much more attention than if they'd just played the song uncensored in the first place. (They quickly apologised and played it unaltered later the same day.)
- Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life" has two edited versions. The radio edit omits the sexual content, while the music video muffles out a reference to crystal meth. As Lampshade Hanging, Stephan Jenkins passes his hand over his mouth as he sings the line in the video.
- Pink Floyd's Money. Heard on the radio in New York, "do goody good bullshit". Heard on the radio in North Carolina, "do goody, good, bull".
- The Stories' "Brother Louie", a song about the joy and pain of an interracial love affair turned marriage proposal, lost its unique punch when a brief spoken word interlude representing the fathers of the fated couple was cut out from the original Hot Chocolate version that it was a cover of. White voice: "No spook in the family." Black voice: "No honk in the family."
- Wheatus' song "Teenage Dirtbag" was censored on UK radio by blanking words out of one verse:
Her boyfriend's a dick
He brings a gun to school
And he'd simply kick
My ass if he knew the truth
- Interestingly enough, this song was part of the UK soundtrack album for the anime series [[Beyblade V-Force]]. Even more interesting that only the second line of the aforementioned chorus has a censor blank on it.
- Alanis Morissette's You Outta Know is a classic case of Bowdlerization not working. The song was very popular among teens, but of course, there's an F-bomb in it. At school dances and similar functions, the radio edit version would play where the offending word was simply muted. So what would happen when that spot in the song came up? Everyone in the room would shout out the offending word at the muted point.
- To be fair, most radio stations played it such that it went, "When you ffffff- her." Which actually sounded good too.
- A similar phenomenon happens with Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl" when "Oooh, this my shit" becomes "Oooh, this my shhh".
- Guitar Hero 3 comically censors the word "niggers" in the song "Holiday on Cambodia":
Braggin that you know, how the brothers feel cold, and the slums got so much soul
- Dir en grey's song "embryo" had its lyrics changed entirely for radio play. The edited lyrics speak of wishing to join the narrator's mother in the afterlife. In the original, the lyrics (sung from a daughter's perspective) reveal that the narrator's mother has hung herself to save herself from an abusive relationship with her husband, who has now turned to raping his daughter. She ends up eventually killing her father during another rape, and yet decides to not abort the baby she is now carrying.
- In the Nickelback song "Rockstar", the radio version bleeps out the word "drugs"
- Surprisingly missing in most classic rock songs.
- The Who's Who Are You is almost never unedited — "Tell me, who the fuck are you?" — twice in the song.
- Similarly, the (admittedly barely comprehensible) "oh, fuckin' hell" from The Beatles' Hey Jude is always left intact, if only because the censors don't realize the line exists.
- About half the time, Steve Miller's Jet Airliner escapes unscathed. The other half, they're getting "caught up in any of that / funky kicks going down in the city."
- The Outhere Brothers — "Boom Boom Boom" has two different sets of lyrics; the original which contain lots of sexual innuendo, and the bowdlerised radio version. I've occasionally heard the dirty version on after-hours radio shows.
- Compare it to "FYITA". Given that bowdlerization would cut about 90% of the song...
- Some radio versions of The Bloodhound Gang's "The Bad Touch" have the words "sex", "pants", and "nuts" cut from the first verse, as well as removing "gettin' horny now" from the chorus.
- And in "Fire, Water, Burn", the word "fucker" is replaced with a "clink-clank" sound.
- Or the braying of a donkey.
- Fergie — Glamorous : Usually, it either has "take your broke ass home" changed to "take your broke broke home", or has the intro lyrics completely removed.
- The end of Marillion's Garden Party originally included the line "I'm fucking", changed to "miming" for the single release. When the single was performed "live" on Top of the Pops Fish shut his mouth for the pertinent word, letting the track continue playing.
- In the broadcast version of Shiny Toy Guns' Le Disko, in addition to the obligatory removal of the F-bomb, the line "with loaded guns" is also cut.
- The "clean" version of "Baby Got Back" has the intro removed, and "walking like hoes" changed to "walking like flo-jo".
- NWA — Boyz In The Hood: "Jockin' the bitches, slappin' the hoes" => "Jockin' the freaks, clockin' the dough", among other obligatory changes.
- There is nothing quite so funny as living in a Mormon community where popular modern music of all stripes gets played on the radio... including incredibly popular foreign acts. The "rage" inherent in Rammstein's songs, and the romantic overtones of any suave latino dancer, reduced much non-English songs on the radio to karaoke versions, as the local censors only spoke English and a handful of French. Angry German guy? Must be lots of cursing. Iglesias serenading a hot girl? Must be lots of fucking euphemisms and entendres. Never mind that this is still going on even today, even with the internet and song lyrics available with a couple of clicks, it just sounds like the music'd-over words could be curse words.
- The BBC edit of "Respectable Street" by XTC censored out all off-color references, without which the song doesn't make much sense. In the line about "which sex positions pleases her old man", "sex position" is replaced by "preposition", while "Saturday I saw him retching over our fence" becomes "...stretching over our fence". Don't even get me started on the video.
- The version of Faithless's "Insomnia" played on the radio was almost always the "monster" alternate lyrics version, as the original lyrics had the line "I only smoke weed when I need to... where's my cess?". Both versions, however, had the innuendo "makin' mad love on the heath, tearing off tights with my teeth".
- Supposedly, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" had "my libido" changed to "jalapeno" for the radio. This may be a case of Mondegreens.
- The band James subverted this with the video for their biggest hit, "Laid". The third line of the song, for both the radio and album version of the song, is "She only comes when she's on top." In the video, the line is changed to "She only sings when she's on top" — except the singer is quite obviously singing the original lyric, and the word "hums" appears on screen. Also, it's not quite clear why mention of a female orgasm had to be edited on MTV in the first place — particularly when it passed just fine on the radio.
- A censored version of Lil' John and the Eastside Boy's "Get Low" would seem impossible, but they pulled it off. They substituted seamlessly a long "MODAFOCKEEEEEERS!" with "To all skit skit skit skit skit skit". Seamless.
- The original version of Kanye West's "Gold Digger" has the line "But she ain't messin' wit' no broke niggaz." The radio edit changes it to "But she ain't messin' wit' no broke broke."
- "I'll be burnin' rubber you'll be [[KidzBop watchin' me pass." The weird thing is, although it sounds stupid, it actually makes more sense this way.
Myth And Legend
- Pretty much every piece of media that features the ancient Greek pantheon of gods will gloss over the fact that they're all siblings as not to Squick viewers out. Even the extremely gory God of War games glossed it over.
- Likewise, the gods' blatant adulteries are toned down. Zeus and Hera love their son Hercules, according to the Disney version. Now go and look up the original!
- They also tend to ignore Athena's backstory. Particularly the part where her dad ate her mom while she was still pregnant with Athena, who was then born out of her dad's forehead.
- Most modern retellings of Theseus and the
Minotaur fail to mention the fact that the Minotaur was the result of Mino's wife having sex with a bull.
- Many modern variants say that Aphrodite was born from seafoam. They omit the fact that the foam was actually from the sperm and blood spilled when Cronus castrated his father. And that's not to mention Hercules The Legendary Journeys, where Hercules calls her "sister".
This is, of course, impossible...
- The Bowdlerisation of the gods' adulteries became a gag in the lost Gilbert And Sullivan play Thespis, in which Daphne, playing Calliope, the Muse of Fame, uses a Bowdlerised classical dictionary to prove that Apollo is her husband:
Thespis: "Apollo was several times married, among others to Issa, Bolina, Coronis, Chymene, Cyrene, Chione, Acacallis, and Calliope."
Daphne: And Calliope.
Thespis (musing): Ha! I didn't know he was married to them.
Daphne (severely): Sir! This is the Family Edition!
- In Egyptian mythology, Atum supposedly created Shu and Tefnut by ejaculating into his own mouth. Cleaner versions have had him simply spit on the ground and they were created from his saliva.
- That's nothing. People are fairly familiar with the story of how Set murdered Osiris to get his throne only to be thwarted by Osiris' son Horus, but most people don't know how it was done. Set attempted to prove his worthiness before the other gods by anally raping Horus, but Horus reached between his legs and caught Set's semen, throwing it into the Nile. Horus proceeded to masturbate into a salad, which Set ate without knowing about the special sauce. When it came time for Set to prove his dominance over Horus, the gods commanded Set's semen to speak. When the voice came from the Nile, the gods then commanded Horus' semen to speak, and imagine Set's state of mind when his stomach started talking to him. That is how Horus avenged his father upon Set. The Egyptians were totally perverted.
- Plato was the Ur-Bowdleriser; in The Republic he explains how, in an ideal city, myths and epics would be edited to remove all mentions of gods and heroes doing bad or treacherous things, or even insulting each other, because gods are supposed to be unambiguously good (a very Platonic notion Homer would have had a hard time to comprehend) and that would be a bad example for the citizens. Knowing the nature of most Greek gods and heroes, he would have had a lot of work to say the least...
- The Grimms introduced the Wicked Stepmother into Snow White and Hansel and Gretel in order to Bowdlerise them; the original edition featured cruel mothers.
- Also, what gives Rapunzel away is changed from pregnancy to a Freudian Slip due to objections to her premarital sex with the prince; a pointless gesture, really, since she still bears his children before they meet again, let alone marry.
- In the original version of Sleeping Beauty, the prince had to do a lot more than just give her a kiss, If You Know What I Mean.
- And even then she kept on sleeping, either because the curse was that powerful, or because the prince was, well, unimpressive.
- In Arthurian stories geared toward children, several major elements of the legend tend to be left out, most notably Arthur sleeping with his half-sister Morgause (and producing Mordred!) and Uther's by-trickery seduction of Igraine. This editor has read of at least one story where Lancelot and Guinevere's affair was left out entirely.
Newspaper Comics
- Boy, have Pearls Before Swine and Dilbert gone through this.
- What's weird is that in one instance ("I yust got out"} it improved the clarity. That's two for a thousand so far (see above Pink / Kidz Bop thing).
- When Scott Adams was told he could not have Satan as a character in one of his Dilbert strips, he introduced "Phil the Prince of Insufficient Light" who wielded a large spoon and would temporarily "darn" people to "heck" over relatively minor offenses. Adams does admit that this character ended up being funnier than what he had planned for Satan.
Theatre
- The very first words (sung by the black chorus) of the musical Show Boat have been Bowdlerized in various ways over the years. The most faithful of the three film versions (1936, Universal) began "darkies all work on de Mississippi." The major Broadway revival in 1946 (for which Oscar Hammerstein made a few other revisions) changed the line to "colored folks work on de Mississippi," which has become the most commonly seen variant. At least this keeps the sense of the following line ("...while de white folks play") intact, unlike another once common variant: "here we all work on de Mississippi." The 1966 Lincoln Center production, like MGM's 1951 film, dodged the subject by abridging the opening chorus (and the second verse to "Ol' Man River," which reprises the excised section); in these versions, to quote theatre historian Miles Kreuger, nobody worked on the Mississippi. Kreuger and a few other musical theatre buffs, citing the fairly serious treatment of race relations in Show Boat, have expressed their preference for the original opening lines as they were sung in 1927:
"Niggers all work on de Mississippi,
Niggers all work while de white folks play..."
- In The Fifties, Ira Gershwin replaced all uses of "nigger" in Porgy and Bess: about twenty, by his count. It's fortunate that the earlier stage version of Porgy has succumbed to Adaptation Displacement, as it used the word considerably more often.
- Passages of three Gilbert And Sullivan patter songs from The Mikado and Princess Ida were rewritten in the forties to get rid of that same word. As Psyche says to the girl students in Princess Ida, "you will get them Bowdlerised" in this manner:
"And the niggers they'll be bleaching" => "And they'll practise what they're preaching" (Princess Ida, "They Intend to Send a Wire to the Moon")
"There's the nigger serenader, and the others of his race" => "There's the banjo serenader, and the others of his race" (The Mikado, "I've Got a Little List")
"Is blacked like a nigger with permanent walnut juice" => "Is painted with vigour and permanent walnut juice" (The Mikado, "My Object All Sublime")
- The forties? Gilbert himself rewrote parts of The Mikado to that end at least, after American audiences pointed out that, while the word may have been innocent in Victorian Britain, across the pond it was rather closer to the modern implications.
- Also in Princess Ida, the Lady Psyche suggests that her students should get the works of Juvenal bowdlerised. Given the content of Juvenal's writing and the Dworkin-esque nature of the school's morality I can't imagine there'd be much left to read...
- There was some Bowdlerization on original cast albums of the 1960s and earlier, though it ought to be noted that even the original lyrics used Gosh Dang It To Heck to an inconsistent extent.
- One of the most consistently censored expressions was "son of a bitch," three instances of which were removed from The Most Happy Fella.
- In "Get Me to the Church On Time" from My Fair Lady, "For God's sake, get me to the church on time" became "Be sure and get me to the church on time."
- In the original Broadway version of Sweeney Todd, there was the song Johanna sung by Judge Turpin, where he said how suddenly grown up Johanna seemed, and how beautiful she was, while he's watching her through a hole on the wall of her room that Turpin did himself. He starts flagellating himself as the song goes on, and climaxes (the stage direction says so) while screaming "God!!!" The Vocal Score says it was cut for reasons of time, but it was squicky enough to just let it out. True, Turpin's crush on Johanna is showed in the play and is a plot point, but that song was more disturbing than just him saying that he wanted to marry her.
- When musical Spring Awakening performed a medley at the Tony Awards, several lyrics to "The Bitch of Living" were changed to please CBS. Including, among others, "nothing but your hand" to "getting what you can" and "breasts" to "chest". The company then lampshades the censorship in the "Totally Fucked" portion by censoring themselves on the words "ass" and "fucked".
- However, when the show performed another medley on Good Morning America, part of "Totally Fucked" was also performed, but this time with the phrase "totally fucked" changed to "totally stuck" and "kiss your sorry ass goodbye" as "kiss your sorry life goodbye".
- The original published version of the song "You Can Drive A Person Crazy" from Company altered the last word of "if a person was a fag" to "drag"; some singers use this. For the 1996 revival of the show, Stephen Sondheim rewrote the line and its complementary rhyme:
I could understand a person
If he said to go away
I could understand a person
If he happened to be gay
- A modern example of Bowdlerisation is when The Tamingofthe Shrew is changed to make it more "feminist" especially the ending. The most ridiculous examples have Petrucchio and Katharine end up with a happy marriage where all their verbal abuse has ended, even though this was what neither character wanted from the other in the first place.
Video Games
- Whenever a game is denied sale in Australia due to lacking a rating (due to it being "too much for MA" and the people in charge of giving higher ratings to videogames being more than a little clueless), this will inevitably occur. The most famous is Fallout 3, where morphine became "Med-X", because we really have to protect Australian kids from getting mixed up in a hospital grade tranquilizer that is nowhere near as readily available as its illegal counterparts.
- And now we have a new winner: Left 4 Dead 2. Infected couldn't be set on fire, thus making incendiary rounds useless, a lot of the gore was removed, the appearances of Riot uncommon infected were almost non-existent, and nearly all zombies disappeared before they even hit the ground. Yes, even stuff that was in the previous game was censored. Australian review show 'Good Game' took the mickey out of it in one of their finest moments
- The same applies for Germany. It's not unusual that games are Bowdlerised as a preventative measure, as it's legally tricky to do it after the original release got "indexed". (Although it has been pulled off at least once, but required a name change in addition to the actual Bowdlerization.)
- And proving that stupid censorship goes both ways, the Japanese release of Fallout 3 made it impossible to nuke Megaton.
- Just curious but was that mandated by the Japanese, or by oversensitive westerners? From what I've seen while travelling there, not many left living who would even play it give a rat's arse about the bombings anymore.
- South Park pinball (yes, it's not a video game but close...) had a "safe" version. Featuring the Super Fart Bumpers becoming the Super Pop Bumpers, "They killed Kenny — rats!" and others.
- World of Warcraft's Chinese version. To the point where Chinese censorship often delays new content far longer than it should, much to the irritation of fans everywhere.
- Especially with content involving death. Quite problematic, considering the latest expansion's premise was basically a Zombie Apocalypse. The playable undead (someone please confirm or disprove this for non-playable undead?) have all the exposed bones covered by badly colored flesh — you can see exactly where the original model had holes in the flesh. The skeletons left behind when a dead character resurrects are replaced by neat, tidy graves in the Chinese version.
- The Final Fantasy games that appeared on Nintendo's consoles. Hell, early NOA was pretty vicious overall about this stuff, up until about the N64 era.
- "You Spoony Bard!"
- Strangely enough, it's a perfectly legitimate line spoken in appropriate context, if you're familiar with 19th century English. Not sure how it compares to the original Japanese, though.
- In the original Japanese, Tellah just swears at Edward while he's pummeling him.
- Judeo-Christian references were forbidden in the US localization of Final Fantasy IV for SNES. The White Magic spell "Holy" was renamed to "White", the Tower of Prayers in Mysidia was renamed to Tower of Wishes, and Rosa's "Pray" ability was removed entirely.
- References to death were inconsistently censored. Early in the game, Rosa, sick with sand fever, was "kept from falling down" at the desert village.
- This may just be a bad translation. The Japanese verb 倒れる (taoreru) literally means "to fall down" and can refer to all sorts of things like people, buildings, or governments, however it's frequently used to refer to the act of dying as well, as in "he was felled by illness".
- Later Final Fantasies continued to face a few editorial axes to stay within the T rating. Notably, FFVII was localized with Cid and Barret's Cluster F Bombs bleeped over, and the Devour command in FFVIII was replaced with a Relax O Vision screen.
- The Devour command's "calming visuals" were the same in Japanese to begin with.
- Final Fantasy VI Advance, however, was noticeable for apparently not being bowdlerised at all. They were allowed to show people being drunk, and even a dog fight with Dobermans in the streets of one occupied town.
- However, in the GBA version, they did take out a scene where Celes gets punched by a guard. Which is a bit weird because of all the things they could have taken out, they took out something that you see pretty much every time you get into a Random Encounter.
- There's even a scene where Celes tries to kill herself because Cid, her surrogate grandfather, has died and she believes she is the last human alive on Earth.
- In the SNES version, that scene itself was subjected to censorship. Celes's small monologue and remembering what Cid told us tries very hard to avoid mentioning suicide at all. Cid said something along the lines of that those who were with them on the island would throw themselves off the cliff for a nice pick-me-up. The Japanese version, with its Fan Translation, was significantly darker in context.
- There was a reason for this. At the time of its Japanese release, a series of well-publicized torture/rape/murders was occurring in Japan. The culprit would chain his victims up, and beat them to death...among other things. To leave a scene that so closely mirrored a crime like that would simply have been in bad taste. The US just found it easier to translate the slightly edited Japanese version, than to start from scratch. Then again, a certain amount of this is simply Woolseyism.
- In the SNES and Playstation versions, Locke threatens to rip the lungs off a man who calls him a thief. In the GBA version, he simply tells the guy to shut up, because the "rip your lungs out" was never in the original Japanese version.
- Which finds its way into Kingdom Hearts as the American name for King Mickey's signature spell. With the much lessened level of censorship these days, especially on the Sony side of things, it's more likely a reference to Final Fantasy VI than a strict case of bowdlerization.
- This actually works out for the better in the English translation of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Mewt, Ritz, and Doned are less repellent, Montblanc is no longer a Jerk Ass, Cid's alcohol problem has been replaced with a rather poignant depression and self-loathing, and . . . Ivalice is no longer a violence-wracked, Darker And Edgier fantasy world that's much less a paradise for the common citizens than it is for its selfish makers? Okay, it sort of works out for the better.
- How exactly are Mewt, Ritz and Doned "less repellent?" From what I understand from this translation, their motives and most of their dialogue are largely the same.
- Neither Montblanc. His dialogue are almost exactly the same in the translation link above.
- One of the jobs for the One Gender Race in Final Fantasy Tactics A 2 was called Bastard in Japan. This job was localized as Ravager; probably because it's not worth the risk arguing with the Media Watchdog or Moral Guardians.
- A particularly noticable Bowdlerisation comes from Germany in the form of Carmageddon, a GTA-esque car game. Originally the protagonist could run people over, but the game makers replaced the people with zombies. According to the execs this was still not enough, so they replaced the zombies with robots. (This is one of the few examples of Bowdlerization making something cooler, in an insane way.)
- Shouldn't GTA be a Carmageddon-esque game? Just wondering.
- No, I was describing Carmageddon. GTA and Carmageddon are both similar games, so I can compare one to the other even if Carmageddon's older. It's like saying Return to the Forbidden Planet is like Star Trek, even though Star Trek came later.
- (GTA 3 is Older Than They Think, but if anything it's is a Driver-esque game... sandbox wandering, carjacking, shooting were not part of Carmageddon. The player couldn't even leave the car in Carmageddon. GTA 1 and 2 however, were original games, nothing like Carmageddon or Driver-clones.)
- For Carmageddon TDR 2000, all pedestrians were made into zombies to simplify regional violence issues.
- No, there are definitely original copies of Carmageddon TDR 2000 with pedestrians and red blood. The copy I bought is full of pedestrian splattering fun.
- A similar Bowdlerization occurred in the PAL version of God of War: in the other versions of the game, Kratos must at one point, drag a helpless man in a cage up a slope and use him as a human sacrifice to open a door, with him screaming in protest all the way through. In the PAL version, he's replaced by an ordinary zombie enemy.
- Guitar Hero and Rock Band are not above editing songs to remove the cussing, but the fact that they don't put anything back in to replace it...
- Um...yeah they do. Look at Welcome Home, Man in the Box, and others; they replace words with other words all the time.
- Korea discourages positive portrayals of Samurai (on account of the various invasions and all). This affected the release of some versions of Soul Calibur, which replaced Mitsurugi with a katana-wielding knight named Arthur (with no relation whatsoever to King Arthur). He later returned as an unlockable bonus character in Soul Calibur III, using a katana style distinct from Mitsurugi's.
- Kingdom Hearts II has several localization censorings — for example, recreating the scene from Pirates of the Caribbean where Will threatens to kill himself. In the film (and the game's Japanese version) he holds his pistol to his head, while in the American version, he doesn't even raise it from his side. And the Hydra from Hercules? Its already relatively family-friendly green blood was changed to black/purple vapor (A change that was later kept for the Japan-exclusive Final Mix version). Proof that not even Disney's own source material is safe from Disney.
- The violence present in Twisted Metal Black's storyline — eye gouging, throat-slitting, brain splattering and the like — was so extreme, that for the PAL version, the entire story for every single character was removed. Yep, every last word.
- In a rare occurrence of material being censored in its native country, the original Japanese version of Resident Evil 4 removed all decapitation deaths, instead changing them to have the faces mutilated much like the aftermath of a Novistador's acid attack.
- Which, ironically enough, is far more grisly in appearance.
- Similarly, in the Gamecube remake of the first game, the Hunter's One Hit Kill Deadly Lunge no longer decapitates the protagonist.
- Censorship of decapitation is somewhat common in Japanese releases. Among others, decapitations aren't possible in the Japanese versions of Ninja Gaiden for the XBOX.
- Likely because it was still a widely used execution method into the 20th century? *shrug*
- The PC adventure-slash-RPG game Superhero League of Hoboken has an interesting example of Bowdlerization being used in-game as a puzzle solution. One mission part-way through the game involves finding out why a neighboring superhero league has suddenly gone "missing"; it turns out that this particular league — comprised entirely of men — has become so enthralled by a crate full of pornographic magazines that they refuse to do their jobs. The solution? Zap the magazines with a Bowdlerizing ray gun that instantly changes the magazines into much less offensive (or interesting) material. In an extension of the gag, none of your male party members are willing to pull the trigger — the only person who'll actually do it is your team's sole (at the time) female member.
- Arguably Dynasty Warriors... then again, with the what-the-hell,-heroes moments in the original material, it may be a good thing.
- Liu Bei still retains some moments...you can't have Yi Ling at all or the subsequent failure without painting him as a stubborn hotheaded bull.
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was named as such in English because of Nintendo of America's aversion to even the most tenuous of religious themes; what the translated title should have been was Triforce of the Gods.
- One game later, in Link's Awakening, they changed cross-shaped grave markers into "RIP" rounded-block gravestones.
- The original release of Ocarina of Time had Ganondorf cough up blood after you beat him and mortally wound him. The blood was turned green in later-produced cartridges. The vocal track in the Fire Temple was excised as it was a Muslim chant, and the Gerudo symbol of the star-and-crescent was replaced with... who-knows-what-to-call-it, again for its association with Islam. This had the tragic effect of making the Mirror Shield now butt-ugly. (Notably The Wind Waker includes the WTF-symbol◊ as a Continuity Nod, rather than the crescent.)
- Let me get this straight- the blood coming out of the bad guy's head was too graphic, but the blatant Nightmare Fuel ReDead monsters that had a paralyzing scream, horrible moans, and SUCKED THE LIFE OUT OF YOU weren't?! What is WRONG with these people?!
- The much-hyped, gorgeous-looking PS3 game Little BIG Planet had one Toumani Diabaté song, "Tapha Niang," excised completely by Sony, replacing with something more generic, a mere four days before its launch date, pushing back the release two weeks so that whole new, bowdlerised discs could be distributed all over again, so that those without online access to patches might not be offended. The issue was two passages from the Koran having been set to music in the song, which is a major controversy in Islam.
- The Area 1 boss of Super Aleste greets you with "Welcome to Hell!" In Space Megaforce, the North American version of the game, this got changed to "Welcome to the underworld!"
- Another example of removal of religious references: The American version of Duck Tales had the crosses on the gravestones in Transylvania replaced with "RIP".
- The English localisation of La Pucelle removed every single crucifix/cross from the game. Considering that the plot was based around an church of demon-hunting battle nuns, that's a hell of a lot of crucifixes. The company in charge of the localisation released a statement explaining their reasoning: namely, that they were a very new and very small publisher that simply could not afford their game to be crucified by the Moral Guardians, so they pre-emptively gave every concession they could to 'good taste'.
- There were also other edits, such as removing the cigarette from Croix (but keeping his victory animation where he takes a smoke from his invisible cigarette).
- The American version's box was also subject to censorship. Instead of the original artwork of Prier standing front and center, the American cover appears to be some kind of fanart piece she's kind of off in the corner while the other characters take prominence. This is a pretty blatant attempt to distract attention away from the fact that she has rather large breasts and thighs.
- Let's not forget about the legendary worst ending of Disgaea 2 and how the audio for the US version is butchered.
- Shadow Warrior's UK release had the shrunken weapon replaced with darts. 3D Realms made a patch available online that would patch the game back to the original form. Regardless of which version of the game you have, the graphics for the dart weapon are actually present, even if they're not used because the game isn't the modified version.
- While all other media from Left 4 Dead (including the game cover) features a hand with its thumb ripped off, said thumb is present, folded, on the French poster ads.
- Similar censorship occurred in Germany, although there the game had two covers, an outer one with the "folded" finger and the actual inner cover with the ripped-off finger.
- There was a long-standing rumor that Barinten was a bit more explicit about having raped Rafa in the Japanese version of Final Fantasy Tactics, but it was Bowdlerized for the US release. Technically, this is true; he was a bit more explicit — in the Japanese script, during the scene on the Rooftop of Riovanes Castle, he refers to her as "Dear, sweet Rafa", which, given what he's saying, has rather obvious connotations... but the rumors that either she or he said it in so many words are false.
- The PSP translation inverts this, and rewrites Barrington's speech on the rooftop of Riovanes to make him sound even more creepy and blatantly sexual.
- For a good idea of what basically every US game on the NES or SNES had to go through to get published, see The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion
- Ironically, while the NES version removed nude statues and references to sex, it retained the ability for the player character to blow up a live hamster in a microwave.
- MMORPG example: When Global Maple Story got Showa, all the guns were replaced with robot-like attacks or energy blasts, and the swords were replaced with toy hammers. All the enemies were also shown transforming into monsters upon death. Fairly large changes, considering that only two maps contained monsters not unique to Showa.
- In Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, the Joker's fatality move is (to widespread dismay from American players) less violent in the US than elsewhere. In a pre-release version of the game shown to game journalists, Joker's Fatality went as such: he pulls out a gun and fires it, only for that gun to be a fake gun with a "BANG!" flag; after laughing like a madman and the opponent relaxes like they've been let off the hook, Joker pulls out another gun and shoots his opponent in the head. The Fatality itself was left intact in the American release version of the game, except for one small detail: when Joker does the killshot, the camera zooms in to only show him, not showing the opponent getting a lead lobotomy. A similar Fatality done by Deathstroke is also censored in the same manner in the American version of the game. The European version of the game features both Fatalities in their uncut form.
- In fact, it could be argued that the game itself is a Bowdlerisation of the Mortal Kombat franchise: in order to secure DC's approval in regards to the usage of the license, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe had to be rated "Teen" and none of the DC characters known for refusing to kill could have Fatalities. This led Midway to give the heroic DC characters "Heroic Brutalities," which only incapacitates the person on the receiving end of said move. Additionally, while the Mortal Kombat characters and the DC villains in the game could pull off Fatalities, the Fatalities were nowhere near as violent, gory, or — worst of all — creative as past MK games.
- Castlevania Bloodlines was renamed to Castlevania: The New Generation in Europe to remove a reference to blood. It's also notably less gory and violent than any other version — including changing a dripping blood hazard into dripping water that still somehow hurts you — it didn't make a lot of sense for blood, but it makes even less sense for water.
- The SNES port of Flashback renamed Death Tower to Cyber Tower.
- In the Japanese version of Persona2, the Zombie Junkie is the reanimated corpse of a druggie who died of drug overdose. In the official translation of Eternal Punishment, he is a "junk food junkie turned zombie."
- Kato & Ken: a toilet humor-filled Turbo Grafx 16 game featuring two Japanese comedians, featuring fart attacks, crapping birds, urinating on walls, taking a dump in the bushes, etc., was Macekred into JJ and Jeff for the US. The other character no longer pisses on walls or craps in bushes, the fart attack was replaced with spray paint/pepper spray, although there were still the dog/bird turds and a few other things.
- Half-Life was extensively censored for release in Germany, with all human opponents (Marines, etc.) being turned into robots and NPC "die" animation being changed to them simply sitting down and holding their head in their hands.
- The SNES version of Final Fight was particularly wrecked for its international version. Two enemies, Damnd and Sodom were renamed "Thrasher" and "Katana", the line, "Oh my god!" is changed to "Oh my car!", references to alcohol were removed (the "bar" from Round 3 became a "club", while "Beers" and "Whiskeys" became "Root Beers" and "Vitamin Es"), and the two shemale enemies Poison and Roxy were replaced by Billy and Sid. When Street Fighter Alpha 2 was released on the SNES, Sodom remained "Katana" to maintain continuity. The GBA version of Final Fight, though mostly uncut, still has Billy and Sid.
- The Japanese arcade version of Final Fight also featured a scene in the intro showing Jessica in her underwear on Haggar's TV monitor, which was removed from the international releases. The SNES port (both, Japanese and international releases) redrew the scene so that it shows Jessica wearing her red dress instead. The Sega CD version alternates between the two, showing Jessica in her underwear in the Japanese version and in her red dress in the international versions.
- Hilariously inverted with Garou: Mark of the Wolves, in which the character known as Marco Rodriguez in the Japanese version got renamed to Khushnood Butt for the U.S. release.
- In the US version of Raycrisis, the Flaming Sword-wielding Humongous Mecha boss's name was changed from Sem-Slut to Sem-Strut. Obviously, to get an E rating.
- The N64 port of Duke Nukem 3D was done when Nintendo was just emerging from the Video Game Censorship Ghetto, so much of its "adult content" was axed, for example, the porn shop was turned into a gun shop, the strip club was replaced with a Duke Burger joint, the captured babes were no longer topless (and had to be saved instead of being killed), and the prison chapel was removed. It still had the somewhat stripperific females and gratuitous violence, garnering it an M rating.
- The TurboGrafx-16 port of the arcade game Splatterhouse (which was also released on the Wii's Virtual Console) was Bowdlerised, but not as badly as people might think. While a fair amount of the violent content remained intact (some of it was toned down, which can partially be blamed on hardware limitations), there was some censorship, most notably in Level 4. The boss of the level in the arcade version is a possessed upside-down cross, surrounded by severed heads, and following its defeat, Rick moves further into the chapel where it resides and kneels before an altar with a crucifix in hand, while a hymnal theme plays and light shines into the chapel; in the console version, the cross is changed to a demonic-looking skull, and the altar is removed from the post-fight scene (though the hymnal and lighting effects inexplicably remain).
- The SNES release of Chrono Trigger removed ALL references to alcohol — including alcohol drunk by legal adults. In the DS release, they were back.
- The hilarious thing being, both platforms are from the family-friendly company Nintendo.
- There was a line that went along the lines of "But Toma, you have drunk too much
beer soda today! You must have too much alcohol sugar in your body!"
- The PSP port of To Heart 2 is proof that not even facial expressions are safe from Bowdlerisation. And other, more sensical stuff ripe for this trope.
- In Test Drive 5, the song "Anarchy" by KMFDM had the line "fuck me like a whore" changed to a repeat of "knock me to the floor".
- The early console installments of the Contra series in Europe and Australia were released under the title of Probotector, replacing the original human characters with robotic counterparts: thus the original heroes of Bill Rizer and Lance Bean became the robots RC011 and RD008, while the cast of Contra: Hard Corps were replaced by other robots with the generic names of CX1-4 (except for Browny, who was already a robot in the original version, but was still renamed). This was mainly due to a censorship law in Germany that forbade the depiction of human characters killing each other with guns, which affected the rest of the PAL region.
- Inverted with Super Double Dragon: a sign in Mission 6 which says "Beer" in the international version was changed tp "Books" in the Japanese version. This may be an unintentional example, since Super Double Dragon was released incomplete and the Japanese version, Return of Double Dragon, uses a more completed (but still unfinished) master build.
- Very sadly, the Dept Heaven series has fallen prey to this in Atlus' translation. In Riviera The Promised Land, main character Ein's Crowning Moment Of Awesome speech decrying the villain was heavily toned down (the original Japanese version carried strong atheist — or as some would say, "anti-organized religion" — undertones) and is considered by many to make the scene very weak and Narm-filled. In Yggdra Union, one of the main antagonists is Flanderized heavily to make him appear less sympathetic to the player, and there were a few lines changed or added for no apparent reason. Knights In The Nightmare is more of a Cut And Paste Translation than anything else, as the translated text is often inconsistent with prior translations or abandons stylistic speech patterns, depriving characters of their individuality. We're not even going into the arbitrary name changes, as that's highly touchy territory.
- One must wonder, though, how much of this is to blame on Atlus giving the series to their B-team. It's usually pretty apparent when the company puts real effort into their localizations.
- Even more pathetically, Riviera actually Bowdlerised itself once — in order to keep the game's rating at CERO-A, Sting was forced to remove the bath scenes from the PSP remake. The "special edition" rerelease of the remake put them back in, but clad all the girls in bathing suits — they were going swimming, not getting naked! The fandom (and even the Fan Dumb) found this hilarious, as CGs are still included of the girls panicking when Ein arrives, leading to the meme "OH NOES! EIN SAW MY CLEAVAGE!" It's actually even more funny when you think that it is a remake from a Nintendo platform to a Sony platform.
- Made even sadder by the fact that the game was uncensored for America, famous for its frothing Moral Guardians, with a raised rating — while Japan, Europe, and Australia received the Digital Bikini version. (Perhaps not a surprise in Australia, but...)
- Breath of Fire IV was hit with this particularly severely (even compared to the rest of the Breath of Fire games, almost all of which have either suffered some bowdlerising, dodgy translation, or both). The PS 1 international versions had a bit of fanservice (in essence, an onsen scene involving Nina and Ursula) and a scene involving Ursula proving her womanhood via exposure (which were not so important to the plot) cut entirely—as well as a third, ''very'' plot-important scene where Fou-lu decapitates Emperor Soniel; the US version just fades to black and people are left wondering just what the hell happened. The redaction of the latter scene is particularly puzzling as the scene where Fou-lu actually offs Soniel is literally a black-on-red sillohuette in the game and cannot be termed explicit in the least and which would be considered quite safe for inclusion in Playstation games of the period.
- And even more confusingly, in the Windows port—which was never released in the US, the one country where there would be a valid concern re censorship—the same scenes were bowdlerised. Yes, even in the version sold in Japan. (Yes, you are reading this right. This was a bowdlerisation of a scene that was bowdlerised in the original game.)
- Family Project had an English translation done by JAST. A number of scenes involving Matsuri were censored, with underwear digitally added in any scene that involved her being remotely nude at all. It didn't help that the customers who pre-ordered this were never warned of the censorship; in fact, JAST marketed the game as FULLY UNCENSORED. The worse part? Some idiots actually think what JAST did was a GOOD thing!!
- Let's not forget the first Resident Evil. The intro FMV in the Japanese version had all the gore. The Western releases were recut and used alternate footage. The PC version and some PAL releases of Director's Cut contain the original FMV.
- Also, Chris Redfield lights up a cigarette in his intro.
- Earthbound suffered from edits.
- In Mother 2 (the Japanese version), Porky was spanked by his parents for running off at night.
- Alcohol, religion, and death references were removed.
- Ness was naked with a hat in Magicant. In the US version, he wore pajamas and no hat.
- The NES version of The Immortal had the gratuitous death animations toned down.
- The House of the Dead is banned outright in Germany. This affected Sega Superstars Tennis which features an HOTD-themed court and minigames — because it would have been too expensive to release a Germany-only version without this content, the HOTD elements are renamed "Curien Mansion" in all territories.
- In the Super NES version of Art of Fighting, the Super Death Blow (which is actually a literal translation of the term "Chou Hissatsu Waza", the common Japanese term for super moves) became the "Super Fire Blow". The ability to expose King's bra was removed as well.
- Oddly enough, the Super Famicom version of Ryuko no Ken 2 (Art of Fighting 2) also removed the ability to undress King and Yuri, even though that version only came out in Japan.
- Speaking of Neo-Geo SNES ports, World Heroes turning the "Death Match" to the "Fatal Match."
- All Xenosaga games suffered various levels of censorship to assure the game a T-Rating in the US. The most extreme case was in Xenosaga Episode III: Also sprach zarathustra, in which all blood was digitally erased for the American release (odd, since the other games got away with some blood). This led to a specially nonsensical scene — a certain character is "trying to put the blood back" in another character's body... but her hands are completely clean.
- Akatsuki Blitzkampf was altered for the arcade version: the blood from being slashed by Fritz or shot by Anonym was replaced with yellow... stuff... and the "Sieg Heil" that pops up in the background during Elektrosoldat's level 3 super was replaced with "Blitzbombe".
Webcomics
Western Animation
- Virtually all Looney Tunes shorts have been heavily Bowdlerised in their current forms. The first joke to get cut was the fairly common Seen It All Suicide, where a character would see something outrageous, comment "Well, now I've seen everything", produce a pistol, and shoot themselves. Over the years, the censors have slowly crept onward, deleting jokes with racial overtones, the appearance of the occasional Confederate flag, and recently, any and all appearances of firearms, sexist attitudes and even smoking. A vast number of WB shorts that used to play regularly now never see the light of day, or make no sense with the large cuts and omissions.
- Cartoon Network ran many of these cartoons during a late night block called "The Tex Avery Show", with appropriate disclaimers. Several shows were even dedicated to the more racist, sexist, and lewd shorts, also "The Bob Clampett Show" aired all of his cartoons with the suicide gags and racial stereotypes intact.
- In Argentina, the Looney Tunes short are shown uncensored in Cartoon Network and Boomerang.
- And let us not get started on the Speedy Gonzales Affair. Even though the Hispanic viewers that were asked said they liked the character.
- Narrowly Averted with Cartoon Network's June Bugs Bugs Bunny marathon. They wanted to show all of Bugs' appearances in chronological order, but they had to deal with the 12 outrageously offensive Wartime Cartoons. Eventually, they showed everything but those cartoons in chronological order. The Wartime shorts were moved to 3 AM, with disclaimers before and after them that basically said, "Yes, we know it's offensive but we're not going to censor it."
- In Don Bluth's Disney Swan song "The Small One", the "Jewish" merchants (which in reality look more like Medieval Arabs instead of first century Jews) have a line in their song, "we simply cheat a little if we must" changed to "we work a little harder if we must" even though it doesn't match with their actions. A lesser edit is at the end when the star that appears over the manger was given more lines to look less like a cross, although the lines that form the cross remain and are the most prominant.
- GI Joe: The Movie...Duke goes from dead to being in a "coma," and then recovering (off-screen). Thanks, Optimus!
- The alternate take of Rock & Rule is an interesting case...most of the adult language and themes are intact, but the opening narration is altered and downplays the idea of this world being Post Apocalyptic. And Zip survives his self-sacrifice in the end instead of staying dead.
- The Simpsons has also suffered from this. One instance was particularly pointless because the unedited version was used in a trailer that immediately preceded the episode. Specifically: Homer wanted to run for Sanitation Commissioner of Springfield, and spent a long time queuing to register, only to find out he was in the line to register as a sex-offender. Then Moe walked into the room and announced despairingly "Why is there always a line?". The edited version removed all indication of what the line was for.
- I'm not sure about everywhere else, but in Australia they're also starting to remove gags that involve physical violence too.
- In the UK during the same episode as mentioned above when Homer asks his family if they want to guess how he got the money all the replies (drug dealing) are cut, however the outburst from Lisa of "I wish it had been drugs!" is left in.
- Recent UK reruns of the episode where Homer buys a gun edit the scene where Marge "disposes of it". The scene is edited so that the bin opens and shuts and cuts to Marge walking away, removing the bit where Marge looks at her reflection in the bin with the gun and decides to pocket it. Curiously the BBC never had problem with the scene and Channel 4 has only gained a problem with it recently.
- At first, the episode was never shown in the UK altogether: the reason Homer buys the gun in the first place is because of a case of hooliganism during a soccer game, something for which the UK has been infamous.
- The practice of cutting the setups, but not punchlines, and therefore making the situations worse seems to be popular, at least in Australia. Another example is a scene with Homer attempting to disguise his purchase of illegal fireworks with condoms and pornography being cut, but Marge removing those same items from the shopping bag and saying "I don't know what you're planning for tonight, but count me out" is not. Whether this is due to bowdlerisers being Literal Genies or just stupid is open to debate.
- The word "wanker" is used in a number of Simpsons episodes, including the episode mentioned above. Rather than bleeping the word, UK versions cut the entire line out.
- Also in that episode, Ray Patterson ends a speech with "You're screwed, thank you, bye." On Channel 4, the "you're screwed" was cut, but kept the very next line of Mayor Quimby saying "We are far from screwed!"
- For about two years after the death of Princess Diana, UK airings of the "Bobo the Bear" episode censored the final word of "Damn you, paparazzo!"
- Similarly, in the episode where Homer escapes the plant to visit the Duff brewery, there's a bit where Barney is waiting outside in the car and says, "Hey, that looks like Princess Di!", drives over to look and disappointedly observes, "Aww, it's just a pile of rags." Those lines were cut in the UK broadcasts following Di's death, and so Barney now just drives the car away for no reason.
- The Arabic dub has Homer drink soda instead of beer and eat Egyptian beef sausages rather than hot dogs.
- Great Britain has shown a sensitivity to the depiction of ninja, stating that assassins shouldn't be glamourized. For example; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. Likewise, Michelangelo's nunchucks were changed to grappling hooks, although Leonardo was allowed to keep his swords.
- The reason for this bit of farce was due to the fact that at the time, nunchucks were even more illegal than a gun in England. Eventually he was given nunchucks, but they were never used for fighting, and just hung off his belt.
- The English dub of Lion Voltron rewrote most of the dialogue about humans being killed. The deaths were written as capture/injury if the victim was one of the heroes (as it was for original Blue Lion pilot Sven, who later "came back" — actually a character who fortunately looked like him). And as the destruction of 'robots' if villains.
- The Sven instance actually made the English dub work more smoothly in one way. The character that "fortunately looked like him" was, in the Japanese version, a relative of Sven, who was put into the show as a direct Expy of Sven because the fans liked him a lot and wanted him to return. So in the English version, instead of having a suspiciously similar replacement, you have the return of the actual character instead.
- The most narmful result of villainous robots, or 'robeasts,' would have to be the episode where Pidge convinces a maternal medusa-like reptile woman to defect to the side of good, causing Haggar to attack her in a rage throughout the episode. When she is finally mortally wounded towards the end of the episode, very obviously I might add (hey, if its a robot, then that must just be oil, right?), she is panting very hard with Pidge on her back trying to get him back to his lion before the voltron force is destroyed by her replacement, her legs give out and she hits the ground with a pretty unhealthy sounding 'splak' plus a puddle of 'oil'. She tells Pidge she is running low on energy and preparing to shut down and Pidge pats her reassuringly and tells her "he'll bring help...Oh and an extra energy pack!" All while crying as if he were losing his own mother of course. It truly is one of the most ridiculous "living being to robot" moments ever edited. Note: Have heard of some edits removing the 'oil' and making the eyes 'dim' robot style after figuring out it was too obvious, but the Phillipines copy I purchased had the 'oil' and wounds with fakey mechanical bits in the holes still. Quite a shame, such a strong episode dubbed or undubbed, turned incredibly Funny Aneurysm. You know you shouldn't find it funny buuuut...
- Mexican viewers who had the chance of having a satellite TV subscription before 2005 can tell three different South Park dubs. The first was the Venezuelan dub, not bad but with some South American slang that some of the audience didn't get. The second and best was the uncensored Mexican dub, largely devoid of local slang while still keeping the cuss words, with the neutral and pretty much accentless voices that are the trademark of good Mexican dubs. The third, aired shortly after South Park was moved to MTV, had all the profanity removed and replaced with "friendlier words". Needless to say, that was quite jarring for an audience that heard Kyle saying "Damn you!" when they expected him to say "Motherf***ers!", the local translation of his catchphrase "You bastards!". Eventually, the fan outcry was so loud MTV had no choice but to return to the uncensored dub.
- ¡Oh Dios mío, mataron a Kenny! ¡HIJOS DE PUTA!
- Indeed, in Argentina the only version that is shown is the Venezuelan version. First on Locomotion, now on MTV.
- In a completely opposite way, the German dub of Seasons 1-7 is filled with profanity that wasn't originally there. The worst offender probably being "Red Sleigh Down" where Jimmy stuttering "The Twelve Days Of Christmas" was replaced with Jimmy singing "Silent Night" with the verses being replaced with random insults. Most people who also watched the English version say that it looks like the dub was made for children who go to bed later when their parents are gone so they can watch TV shows with "many bad words" in mind.
- Try watching the Irish dub's version of "Pinkeye". The censorship to the gore within the episode is insane, and "laid" is bleeped out during Chef's zombie musical number. Some character names have also been changed to more Gaelic-sounding names (one example being "Wendy" to "Aoife").
- The French dub, although quite good, is a lot more profane than the original American one. Mostly because French censors are a lot more lax with language on TV?
- French censors? We have French censors? Due to recent historic trauma, censorship is not something taken lightly in France, even if since a few years, this unfortunatly seems to change...
- The Cartoon Network airing of Superman: Doomsday didn't cut out any death, but it downplayed some of the language and skipped past the more violent parts, which is very noticeable. For example right as Lex Luthor is about to beat the ever-loving crap out of his Superman clone, it cuts to him already on the ground (creating some massive Dub Text). Oddly, it shows Toyman falling to his death, cuts out the actual impact, but leaves in his body sitting on top of the car in the next shot.
- It appears that the second airing was unedited.
- Oddly averted during Cartoon Network's presentation of the two Hellboy animated movies, in which the characters swear infrequently (not surprising, given Hellboy's catchphrase is "Oh, crap."). Instead of redubbing the movies, they simply put a parental advisory warning up every time they returned from a commercial break.
- This is fairly clearly a result of being forced to either show Miyazaki's work uncensored or not show it at all. Ever since they did the "Month of Miyazaki" Cartoon Network seems to have developed a fairly reasonable attitude toward showing work without heavy censorship by just moving the time back an hour and putting up brightly colored warnings about violence and language.
- Duck Tales also suffered from this once; in the scene where Scrooge hires Fenton Crackshell as his accountant the scene where, driven to holy Scottish fury by Fenton's persistance after he frequently tell him to leave, Fenton yells as he is dragged out of the room; "Please give me a shot!" and Scrooge responds by shooting a warning shot and Fenton counts the bullets impressing Scrooge enough to give him the job is cut. This leads to the next scene making little sense as it shows Fenton celebrating Scrooge employing him after he was presumabley thrown out of his office. Thankfully it's restored on the DVD.
- The direct-to-video movie Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker was quite Bowdlerized for its television premiere; in particular, the entire flashback sequence in the middle which explained the Joker's final fate was heavily, heavily edited to remove some of the more gruesome bits. For the usual reasons, it was this edited version that was initially released to DVD; fortunately, fan outrage eventually led to a second release for the original, uncut version.
- Note that the first TV release was basically 2 weeks after the Columbine school shootings.
- Minor note on a good bowderlization (heavens to betsy!), Harley was originally supposed to die as well, then someone had the awesome idea for 'Nana Harley.
- What about dubbing over "offensive" accents or banning racial stereotypes?
- See: Stiletto from Danger Mouse. Most American viewers didn't know about his original stereotypical Italian accent and speak until the DVDs were released. (the Nickelodeon run gave him a nondescript Cockney accent by the same actor).
- see also: Charley on the TV Mister Magoo cartoons. Originally a "So sorry, Mistah Magloo" Asian stereotype, he was given an American accented voice dubbed over the original dialogue.
- Sticking with UPA, when the Warren Beatty Dick Tracy movie was released in 1990, some stations reran the old UPA shorts. Yes, including Joe Jitsu (guess...) and Go-Go Gomez (Mexican stereotype, complete with Mel Blanc voice, I theeeeeeenk...). This was the case for awhile, and then the cartoons were pulled. Only to return, but now mysteriously only having Heap O'Callory and Hemlock Holmes shorts. (Hooray for Acceptable Targets...)
- Splash Mountain features a fairly faithful recreation of Song Of The South's animated segments, although a few things are changed. The Tar Baby story is slightly altered for one; Brer Rabbit is caught inside a Beehive instead.
- The "death" of Keif in an episode of Invader Zim titled "Bestest Friend" was changed twice before the higher ups would allow it to air. First, it was simple Keif chasing the squirrel out into the street and getting hit by a car. Next, he fell off the roof onto a telephone wire and got electrocuted. In the end, he simply fell off the roof and exploded. Much more kid friendly with an explosion. (Although, credit should be given in that they still let Zim pulls his eyes out and replace them.)
- Also Iggins was supposed to die when Gaz cut the cord on the elevator that caused him to fall many stories below so they had him emerge from the rubble glowing bright green implying that he got super powers somehow.
- Here's an unusual case: when Toon Disney (now called Disney XD) started airing episodes of the animated Superman and Batman series, they left in quite a lot of objectionable content (like blood and mention of death), but edited out quite a lot more (like actual on-screen shots of death or religious overtones). For example, during the final fight with Darkseid in the Grand Finale of Superman The Animated Series, we clearly see the blood running from Superman's mouth, yet after the fight, they cut out the scene where Darkseid — being carried away by his horribly subjugated minions — gives his infamous "I am many things, but here, I am God" speech.
- Even Winx Club got its own fair share of bowdlerization. (Especially they made the girls so much more preppy to appeal to younger girls.) Hell, there is even an entire website dedicated to it.
- Beavis and Butthead, post "fire incident." Nuff said.
- Lampshaded in a later episode, wherein Beavis began chanting "Water! Water!" in a similar manner to his previous "Fire! Fire!" upon viewing a video with a swimming pool in it.
- Another time, Butthead suggests they take the batteries out of the smoke detector (because it was always going off whenever they were cooking burritos), to which Beavis says "But what if there was a...um, never mind."
- And the time they were watching Rollins' Band's "Liar" and Beavis declares: "Liar, Liar, pants on...oh, whoa!"
[shot of corn dogs being placed in deep fryer]
Beavis: Hey, Butthead! Check this out!..."Fryer,Fryer, Fr..."
Butthead: BEAVIS!
Beavis: Oh! Sorry.
- In Rocko's Modern Life three gags were cut from the original versions of their airings first in "The Good the Bad and the Wallaby" a scene where Heffer sleeps alone in the barn and a farm hand milks him with a milking machine was removed, in "Road Rash" a scene where Rocko and Heffer stop at the No-Tell Motel a sleazy motel where men take hookers to have sex in was removed, and in "Hut Sut Raw" a scene where Rocko is picking berries and accidentally grabs a bear's testicles was cut, in all other airings aside from the U.S. has these scenes intact.
- Hell, they removed an entire episode from syndication because it featured Mrs. Bighead attempting to seduce Rocko.
- And the "Best of" DVDs that are out now also contain heavy censorship, which has prompted Joe Murray (the show's creator) to attempt to negotiate for the rights to rerelease the show himself.
- In Batman The Animated Series the Joker wasn't allowed to kill people on screen so every time he killed some one it was mentioned in the news or by the police, also his Joker Venom couldn't kill people out right so an antidote is created in the series while in the comics it's untreatable.
- The UK release of Lilo and Stitch was edited to have Lilo climb out under a table covered by a pizza box rather than out of a tumbler.
- In the original Den storyline in the magazine, Heavy Metal, all the major human characters are completely buck naked and completely comfortable with that. However, the film version of Heavy Metal has them usually wearing loincloths with Den himself going "There's no way I'm going around here with my dork hanging out."
- Star Trek The Animated Series got this treatment by the German TV station ZDF since they figured something animated just had to be for kids. The ZDF dub goes straight into Gag Dub territory in the eyes of any reasonable Trekkie — with the characters delivering horrible puns of the SoBadItsHorrible kind, random cuts and edits of scenes to get the episodes from a length of 22 minutes to 15 minutes as well as making everyone's personality easygoing and joyful — especially Spock's. Also, every episode ended with a crew member doing a supposedly clever recap in rhymes. Thankfully, there was second dub in 1994 that made it onto the DVD release later with all episodes being uncut, as well as all characters being voiced by their actual voice actors from the live action series.
Other
- The Pirates of the Caribbean ride suffered this over the years. The Pirate that originally was looking for a young girl whose underthings he snatched was commenting how spry she was — with her head poking out from the barrel behind him. His lines were toned down, underwear taken away. Then it got changed to the pirate looking for Jack Sparrow.
- The portly woman chasing after hot pirate tail was changed to her chasing with a rolling pin after pirates who stole her pies.
- The whole scene was changed — all the pirates are being chased by women for stealing their food (the rooster chasing the hen appears to be fine).
- Parodied in Arfenhouse Teh Movie Too, which has this actual subtitle:
Woogy: "FUCK!!! Ow."
- Even Mega Man didn't escape. Fox Family/ABC cut out quite a bit of violence, including any directed at Roll from a male robot, and several lines (though those were apparently just for time).
Real Life
- Before Thomas Bowdler got a reputation one would have refered to this trope as the castration of stories.
- When Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson was dying at the Battle of Trafalgar, he said "Kiss me, Hardy", Hardy being the captain of the ship he was on board, and the de facto fleet commander with Nelson in his condition. Apparently this was far too homoerotic for school children, so certain sources relate his words as "Kismet, Hardy". Which completely ignores the fact that Hardy did kiss Nelson (on the cheek) and Nelson's response to the kiss (and his final words to the man) were "God bless you, Hardy".
- Important officials have often had quotes bowdlerized by those reporting on them (for face-saving purposes, most of the time).
- John Nance Garner IV, a Vice President of the United States under Franklin Roosevelt, once described the office (as reported) as "not worth a bucket of warm spit." The word he really used was "piss", and (according to TOW) he "once described a writer who quoted it this way as a 'pantywaist'."
- Ronald Reagan, after finally pushing legislation through Congress permitting the sale of AWACS to Saudi Arabia (the Congress and the general public were strongly against it), said, "Thank God!" according to his Deputy Chief of Staff. What he actually said, according to someone in the room, seems more in line with his personality: "I feel like I've just crapped a pineapple."
- While it's a general rule that race horse names can't be changed once a horse has started, exceptions have been made when the name was found to be unsuitable after the fact. Heesaputz raced for several years before the Jockey Club discovered that "putz" means "penis" in Yiddish, so they asked the owner to change the name. Heesaputz became Samuel Alan. Similarly, Heart On became Heart One due to a double entendre, and Columbine Is Sad became Dake after the Columbine shootings. The funniest example was Liquor In Excess. That name was vetoed by the Jockey Club due to a double entendre, so it was changed to Censored.
- A rather funny one from the UK, a concil in Yorkshire attempted to rename a local land mark from Tickle Cock to the rather less funny Tittle Cott and were forced to change it back by the Elderly residents committee (usually the demographic that forces these changes). Read the story here.
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