Distanced from Current Events

This scene wasn't edited out for nothing.

“The Aurora shooting was an unspeakable tragedy, and out of respect for the families of the victims, we felt it necessary to reshoot that sequence, and I’m proud of the fact that we did, I think that we didn’t compromise the film or our intent, and I think the [newly shot] Chinatown sequence is really well done, and that we should all respect the tragedy and not draw associations to our film."

— Ruben Fleischer on re-shooting a scene in Gangster Squad following the mass shooting in a movie theater in Colorado during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, in an interview with IndieWire.

A kind of self-censorship born out of sensitivity to current issues. One frequent situation is when a new episode (or possibly an old one) is edited, has its release date changed, or not broadcast because it coincides with some recent tragic event. Can be taken to ridiculous extremes, especially if Executive Meddling is involved; for example, after President Ronald Reagan's assassination attempt in 1981, The Greatest American Hero had the surname of its main character changed for the final 2 episodes of the first season to Hanley, due to having the same name as Reagan's would-be assassin, but would later revert to his original surname starting with the second season. Sometimes it goes so far that any fictional depiction of someone or something upon which tragedy has been visited cannot be shown at all for fear of "trivialization" - even if the depiction is respectful.

A prominent example for Americans was that, for several years, any show featuring the former twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City tended to be tweaked a bit. Some older shows and even movies had broadcasts digitally edited to remove it from the skyline or trim down its height. This sometimes happened even when the show or movie was set before 2001.^note  This can have Unfortunate Implications, in that it allows the terrorists to destroy the World Trade Center retroactively. Much of the awareness of the issue is due to the rather long shadow the World Trade Center attacks cast over the subsequent decade.

In other cases, the result ends up being a Missing Episode (if it's scheduled to air around the time of the tragedy, but has to be replaced with a rerun or another episode) or a Banned Episode (if it aired previously and now has to be shelved until the tragedy dies down, though, in some cases, like the South Park two-part episode "200" and "201," an episode will be considered gone for good if it really caused trouble).

Ironically, sometimes it is the very act of censoring a scene that highlights its similarities to current events. A seemingly innocuous scene has been edited out of a repeat; the only explanation is that it referred to the same kind of situation as in Current Issue X. What was a vague connection has now been made explicit.

Has elements in common with Harsher in Hindsight. If a work had its airing or release delayed due to a tragic event, but the work's content wasn't related, that would be considered a Release Date Change. Can overlap with Renamed to Avoid Association, where characters or elements in a work are renamed because another work has already become more popular using the same name. When the creators are forced to delay or change their work due to the event preventing them from working as they originally planned, instead of them voluntarily doing it out of respect, it's a Troubled Production.

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Example subpages:

By medium

• Anime & Manga
• Films
• Live-Action TV
• Music
• Video Games
• Western Animation
  • The Simpsons

By specific event

• September 11th

Other examples:

Advertising

• A TV ad for the 1986 Ford Aerostar minivan, which compared the van's profile to that of the Space Shuttle, was pulled after the Challenger disaster.
• Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a popular weight-loss-by-meal-replacement programme in Great Britain was frequently advertised on the TV as AYDS Helps You Lose a Lot of Weight - Fast! Following a certain new disease which came to the public eye in the 1980s, however, AYDS, its advertising and the product itself vanished completely.
• In 2017, the automaker Dodge sponsored a drag racing event in Michigan called Roadkill Nights, with their new Challenger SRT Demon muscle car featured there. The event was held on August 12... which was, unfortunately, also the day when a neo-Nazi at a "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia drove a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and injuring nineteen others. Dodge very quickly removed the banner and tweets on its Twitter page promoting Roadkill Nights (the former complete with a picture of the Demon), though not before they got hit with no shortage of jokes and remarks about the unfortunate timing.
• The Energizer "Bombshell Bunny" commercial only aired a few times before being pulled after the Oklahoma City bombing.
• HP and Hardee's ads were pulled in light of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
  • The HP advert was harsher than the others because it bragged about bringing astronauts to safety.
• KFC once ran an ad featuring their Tiananmen Square location until it was pulled in the wake of the 1989 massacre.
  • In 2020, KFC announced they would drop their slogan, "It's finger-licking good," in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and people becoming more cautious about spreading germs.
• Kraft Heinz suspended Planters' Super Bowl LIV ad campaign, which centered around the Heroic Sacrifice of their longtime mascot Mr. Peanut, in the wake of Kobe Bryant's tragic death. Both the incident and the first ad in question involved vehicles crashing, with the Planters ad involving a car crash and Kobe dying in a helicopter crash, and the campaign would've continued in the week of Kobe's death with new material leading up to Mr. Peanut's funeral, which was to air during the game itself. Despite the cancellation, the ad slated for the game, which ended with Mr. Peanut being reborn as Baby Nut, aired as scheduled.
• After a 14-year-old boy died after participating in the Paqui One Chip Challenge, Paqui pulled all promotional materials for the challenge, which encouraged people to eat an extremely spicy chip for as long as possible without eating or drinking anything else. The product itself was pulled from shelves a day later.
• Weber Grills wound up apologizing after sending out its recipe-of-the-week email on BBQ Meat Loaf the same day news broke that Meat Loaf had passed away.
• When WE tv began airing McLeod's Daughters, they ran a humorous promo where a mother Bound and Gagged her family with duct tape so they wouldn't interrupt her while she was watching the show. The ad was pulled in response to a news story about a child who had died after having their mouth taped.
• Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, did a Weight Watchers commercial in which she said she got most of her exercise running from the paparazzi. It was released the same week as the death of Princess Diana of Wales and was immediately pulled.
• A commercial for Vigilante 8 featuring a heavily damaged school bus was supposedly pulled after the Columbine massacre.
• Walmart pulled a commercial featuring a Black father saying "I can't breathe!" after the grand jury failed to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the choking death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man. In particular, the issue was that "I can't breathe" were the last words Garner said while dying on-camera, and subsequently became the rallying cry of those seeking to end race-based police brutality. (It is still available on t-shirts, jackets, hats, etc., and his daughter famously wore one in a promo for the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign.)
• In November 2023, British department store Marks and Spencer released their Christmas ad, encouraging people to let go of Christmas traditions they disliked and "only do what you love". One promotional image featured red, green, and silver paper hats burning in a black fireplace... resulting in a remarkable resemblance to a burning Palestinian flag. With Israel having declared war on Hamas the previous month, and thousands of Palestinians having been killed since then, the (entirely coincidental) resemblance drew significant controversy, and M&S quickly withdrew that particular image and apologised.

Comic Books

• Formula One racer Ayrton Senna inspired in his native Brazil the comic book Senninha. Four issues in, Senna tragically dies during a race, so Senninha had to go through some changes - none more significant than ditching the blue overalls◊ the pilot wore during the fatal crash in a Williams, to start wearing the red ones◊ of his Golden Years, where Senna won three championships with McLaren.
• On her Tumblr blog, Gail Simone mentioned that she had to rewrite an issue of Batgirl (which featured a Latino youth being brutalized by bigoted security officers) due to some similarities it bore to the death of Trayvon Martin.
• Issue #3 of Batman Incorporated was pushed back a month due to the tragic shooting spree that occurred at a Colorado screening of The Dark Knight Rises. The issue, which saw a female Leviathan agent chloroforming and replacing a teacher and then pointing a gun at her students, was deemed insensitive in light of the shootings.
• For a brief period in The '70s, Black Panther was renamed "Black Leopard" in order to avoid being associated with the Black Panther revolutionary organization.
• One issue of the Vertigo Comics title Hellblazer, containing a story entitled Shoot (written by Warren Ellis) was never released due to its resemblance to the Columbine shootings - it would have come out only weeks after the shootings occurred. As with the above example, the issue had been in the works for several months, the timing was merely coincidental. The issue was eventually released as a standalone story in 2010.
• The Man of Steel, the 1986 updated retelling of Superman's origins, was going to have him make his first public appearance saving a space shuttle from crashing. The Challenger disaster occurred while the miniseries was in production, and the vessel Superman saves was changed to an "experimental space-plane".
• The cover of Preacher #52 was originally supposed to depict an 8-year-old Tulip O'Hare getting a handgun as a Christmas present. After Columbine, it was changed to a standard facial shot of an adult Tulip.
• Trinity was originally scheduled to have a three-issue arc called "Divided We Fall," which would have dealt with Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman defending a racist hate speaker from angry rioters. The issues were cancelled by DC due to the increasingly volatile political situation in the United States following the election of Donald Trump, including at least one incident that bore superficial similarities to the riot in the story.
• Venom (Donny Cates) was meant to introduce a new symbiote character during its Free Comic Book Day special in 2020 named Virus. A lot of people really liked the design and noted the simple-yet-cool name that was surprisingly overlooked, given the stranger names other symbiote characters have had... then Coronavirus became a much bigger issue (and it was already an issue when the character was revealed, though obviously not nearly as much of one during the creation itself), which also resulted in the delay of said FCBD issue due to the cancellation of FCBD 2020.

Comic Strips

• The artist for the satirical Swedish comic Arne Anka had just finished a strip that ended with Arne and his friend Krille going on a shooting spree against snooty waiters at Discoteque "Sturecompagniet" in Stockholm, when news broke on the radio that there had been a Real Life shooting at "Sturecompagniet". He quickly scrapped the strip and drew one where Arne and Krille discuss violence in society in general.
• In FoxTrot, the strip published July 22, 2012, was supposed to be showing Paige in the crosshairs of Jason's squirt gun, but as it was just days after the Aurora, CO movie theatre massacre, Bill Amend pulled the strip and replaced it with a rerun of a 2009 strip.

Fan Works

• Japanese author/artist Gensoukoumuten is internationally renowned in the Touhou Project fandom for their Touhou Days Woven With Illusion series, highly emotional, character-driven stories, set in a modernized version of Gensokyo. On the 8th of March, 2011, preview images of the next installment of their doujin series Days Woven With Illusion^note Gensou to Yamugu Hibi were posted to their pixiv account, the full item to be released the following week. The images (worksafe, although banner ads will probably be otherwise) showed a small fairy struggling to rescue a puppy as the city is flooded by a typhoon. The Tohoku earthquake struck three days later. Shortly, the artist announced that due to the imagery employed, the book's release was delayed.
• Due to an ongoing decline in mental health leading up to very personal deaths happening in his family, in addition to the stresses of having to cope with COVID-19 Pandemic, that MF217 decided to discontinue updating Digimon Re: Tamers in its original form, and has announced a soft reboot titled Digimon Re: Tamers 7D6. Another reason was that MF217's writing skills had changed significantly between the last time the original fic was updated and by the time the first page of the reboot will be posted, and he wanted to demonstrate that by a Continuity Reboot to allow him the freedom to do so much more than he originally did.

Literature

• This was also the reason why Animal Farm was made into an allegory involving animals. George Orwell originally intended for it to directly expose some of the horrific crimes committed by the Soviet Union since Stalin came to power, but because the Soviets under Stalin were part of the Allied Forces during World War II, the book publishers could not release the book without risking Stalin either abandoning their alliance, or worse, attacking them.
• Dean Koontz set up his Frankenstein trilogy to involve artificially created monsters rampaging through New Orleans during a hurricane. Due to the destruction caused in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, the third book was delayed, finally being released in July 2009.
• Phenomena book 7 was this according to Word of God, because of the 2011 Norway attacks that took place about 5 months before release, but it was published anyway.

Magazines

• MAD, being a topical satire magazine, has had this happen a few times:
  • Issue #122 featured mascot Alfred E. Neuman holding a pin before several balloons with caricatures of contemporary politicians on them. The original art featured a caricature of Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated just before the issue was set to print. As a result, his likeness was hastily replaced with one of Alfred.
  • Issue #300's original cover had a caricature of George H. W. Bush burning an American flag with Alfred's image on it. Due to the then-ongoing Gulf War making this cover seem tasteless (and likely would have been especially controversial for a Milestone Celebration issue), it was replaced with a stock image of Alfred captioned "The Sexiest Schmuck Alive!" as a spoof of a popular People magazine event.
  • Issue #411's original cover art featured Alfred mistaking crime scene tape for the finish line of a foot race. This cover art was deemed in poor taste after 9/11, so art director Sam Viviano hastily prepared a new cover: a stock image of Alfred with an American flag in place of his missing tooth.
  • Cartoonist Al Jaffee had originally created a Fold-In themed around the 2012 theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, but the editors decided that it was in poor taste and destroyed several copies of an issue. It was finally deemed acceptable for print in June 2019.

Pinball

• James Bond 007 (Stern) was originally intended to be fully revealed on September 13th, 2022. However, after Queen Elizabeth II passed away a few days prior and the United Kingdom entered a lengthy period of mourning, Stern pushed it to the 20th (and subsequently the 22nd).

Professional Wrestling

• In the build to AEW's Full Gear 2021, Jon Moxley took a hiatus from wrestling in order to attend a treatment program for alcoholism. Prior to this, "Hangman" Adam Page (AEW's top star who was due to win the World Championship at Full Gear) was a Functional Addict as a major part of his gimmick, as he would often be seen drinking beer whenever not in the ring. Out of respect to Moxley, Page's love of drinking was dropped almost right away, and he explicitly rejected a beer as part of his World Championship win celebrations to embrace his friends.
• In June 2021, All Elite Wrestling announced a Coffin Match between Darby Allin and Ethan Page to take place at the special Road Rager show in Miami on the 7th July, but this was quietly pushed back to Fyter Fest in Cedar Park, Texas the week after. The Kayfabe reason for the change was Darby attacking Ethan during a promo, and Ethan stipulating in response that he wouldn't do the match unless Darby left him alone for the full week prior to it. The real reason for the rescheduling isn't officially known, but is almost certainly a response to a fatal Miami condominium collapse that occurred in the week after the match's announcement; having a Coffin Match with the aim of burying your opponent in the city when the event was still recent would've been in very poor taste.
• In 2021, Impact Wrestling signed their newest Knockout, the Russian-born Masha Slamovich, after her impressive victory against then-reigning Knockouts World Champion Deonna Purrazzo in Knockouts Knockdown, and her country was mentioned by both the announcer and commentary team. However, in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Impact officially retired any mention of Masha's country of origin, even on their official website.
• In 2014, Rusev and his manager Lana (actually American born Catherine Perry) began a Foreign Heel gimmick where they were Russian sympathizers degrading America at every opportunity, all to draw heat. The "Russian who hates America" gimmick dated to the height of the Cold War, but the WWE, Rusev and Lana took this a step farther when, at the 2014 Battleground pay-per-view event, Lana delivered a heel promo prior to Rusev's "United States vs. Russia" match with Jack Swagger blaming the United States for "recent current" world events and praising Russian president Vladimir Putin. Some in the media viewed the promo as a veiled reference to the crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 three days earlier.^note A reported 283 people died in the airliner shootdown, near Hrabove, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine.The WWE was forced into damage control, making a statement to TMZ.com and various professional wrestling websites that Lana's scripted promo "was in no way referring to the Malaysia Airlines tragedy," but both the mainstream media and professional wrestling journalists strongly disagreed, with at least one writer saying that a reasonably intelligent viewer could conclude that Lana's promo was making reference to the plane crash.
• Late in its run, the braintrust at WCW decided to repackage goofy German dancer Alex Wright into the Goth-like Foreign Wrestling Heel Berlyn. Trouble was, Berlyn debuted shortly around the time of Columbine, and his attire (specifically his ring jacket) apparently drew too many comparisons to the killers. WCW was then forced to drop the character after a handful of appearances, and Wright went back to being himself and partnered with Disco Inferno as the Boogie Knights.
• WWE stumbled into such a moment during the airing of a live broadcast. On the day it was discovered that Chris Benoit and his family were dead, WWE replaced a scheduled three-hour RAW episode with a tribute to Benoit's career. During the airing of the tribute, it became clear that the deaths were a murder-suicide, as the show was airing. WWE just has rotten luck when it comes to tragedies — so much so that they instantly turned a 180 — not only did Vince McMahon apologize for the tribute show, but ever since, Benoit has never been mentioned by name on any new WWE programming that has aired since his death, his name is almost completely wiped from their website (save for some minor mentions in title histories and whatnot), and footage prominently featuring Benoit has not been seen on WWE programming. Hooray for Hand Waving. Classic Benoit footage is available on the WWE Network (with a "does not reflect the views of the WWE or the personal lives of the wrestlers" content warning), several passing mentions of Benoit have come up on recent DVD releases, and — starting with Shawn Michaels a few months after Benoit's death — several WWE wrestlers have used the Benoit's signature submission hold, the Crippler Crossface (including the man who tapped to it at WrestleMania 20 — Triple H — and, on the same night, Trips busted it out for the first time, so did The Great Khali.) What makes this even worse? The Raw that was replaced was intended to be one of the major turning points in the "Who killed Mr. McMahon?" angle. A few weeks prior to Benoit's death, Vince had been (kayfabe) blown up after stepping into a limo, and the three-hour Raw was intended to reveal who the perpetrator was. Following the Benoit murder-suicide, the angle was dropped completely, with Vince reappearing on Raw a month later to explain that he'd faked the explosion in an attempt to see what people really thought of him.
• On an episode of RAW in 2012, wrestling manager A.W. said "Titus O'Neil is like Kobe Bryant in a hotel room: unstoppable!" That was a reference to Bryant's rape charges, which had happened a few years earlier. With WWE trying to paint themselves as a family-friendly program, and with Linda McMahon running for Senate, WWE fired A.W. for the reference.

Radio

• A 1955 Goon Show episode, "The Pevensey Bay Disaster" which featured a train crash was postponed and replaced by a repeat of an earlier episode because of a real-life crash at Didcot in which 10 people died and 116 were injured. Annoyed by the show's cancellation, Spike Milligan re-submitted the script under a new title, "The Hastings Flyer — Robbed", and this version was duly recorded and broadcast five weeks later. "The Pevensey Bay Disaster" was finally broadcast at the end of the series, five months after it was originally scheduled, and confusing listeners who had already heard the same story under a different title.

Tabletop Games

• In early 2020 Epic Games intended to release three new digital board games on their platform and make them available for free during the week leading up to the official launch. However one of these games, Pandemic was too close to home for comfort considering the real-life coronavirus pandemic of 2020 once media outlets started reporting and commenting on the poor timing, Epic Games pulled the plug on Pandemic and as of this writing is still not available on the platform. The other two games (Carcassonne and Ticket to Ride) launched with no issue.
• The Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths set Magic: The Gathering features a few Godzilla-themed reskins of some of the cards in it. Among them, the reskin for Void Beckoner was Spacegodzilla, "Death Corona", named after Spacegodzilla's Breath Weapon, the Corona Beam. While it was too late to remove it from the set's initial printing, future printings do not include the variant due to the coronavirus pandemic.
• With the physical version of Pandemic, the announcement of the Pandemic: Hot Zone spin-off was intended to be made at the February 2020 New York Toy Fair, but it was pushed back out of respect for current events. It was a late enough change of plans that the event's printed brochures still mentioned the game, and the game would eventually receive a proper low-key announcement on Z-Man Games' website in May.
• Pokémon's third Sword and Shield expansion, Darkness Ablaze, was originally called World Down in Japanese. However, due to its apocalyptic connotations with the COVID-19 Pandemic raging at the same time, it was renamed to Infinity Zone.

Theatre

• Anything Goes originally had a subplot in the first act that involved a fake bomb scare. This was written out after the SS Morro Castle caught fire, though this was not the only part of the book Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse had to rewrite. ^note Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse were unavailable for rewrites, the former hospitalized in England and the latter living in France.
• Some of Gary Coleman's lines in Avenue Q, specifically one about how he's already achieved his purpose and how everything since is just a "slow, tiresome walk to the grave", were cut following the real Coleman's death.
• After the death of Thomas Monson, post-January 2018 showings of The Book of Mormon replace the line "I believe that the current President of the Church Thomas Monson speaks directly to God" in the song "I Believe" with either "I believe that the former President of the Church Thomas Monson spoke directly to God" (in the touring version) or "I believe that the current President of the Church Russell Nelson speaks directly to God". (in the Broadway version)
• From October 2017 until the show closed in January 2018, the Broadway production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory replaced the line "Daddy, buy me North Korea" in "When Veruca Says" with "Daddy, buy me Warner Brothers," likely in response to the 2017-18 North Korea crisis. The original line was reinstated in subsequent productions.
• After a performer in Cirque du Soleil's Las Vegas production KÀ died from a fall during the late show on June 29, 2013, the show went on hiatus until July 16 as the company and authorities began investigating the disaster. Beyond the logistical reasons for the hiatus, much of the show's Spectacle involves characters falling, sometimes to their doom, so going on with it in the immediate wake of the company's first onstage death would come off as poor taste. When the show reopened, the Battlefield sequence that the death occurred in was gone — even though it was the climax. Luckily the scene preceding it was The Centerpiece Spectacular and worked as a substitute; the original climax was finally reinstated in late 2014. Also, this disaster happened to take place the same night as the world premiere of another Vegas Cirque production, Michael Jackson: ONE. So as not to conflict with company-wide mourning for the performer's death, Cirque's official website, YouTube channel, Facebook pages, etc. did not feature any coverage of the ONE premiere and afterparty.
• For a few weeks after the Parkland shooting, Jared's line in Dear Evan Hansen that describes a classmate's haircut was changed from “school shooter chic” to “troubled teen chic”.
• For the 2016 Tony Awards, Hamilton performed the song "Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)," which takes place during the final battle of the Revolutionary War. In response to the Pulse nightclub shooting that had occurred less than 24 hours earlier, however, musket props were removed from the performance.
• The 2018-20 U.S. touring production of Hello, Dolly! changed a lyric in "I Put My Hand In" from "My aplomb at cosmetic art / Turned a frump to a trump lady fair" to "My aplomb at cosmetic art / Turned a frump to a great lady fair" to avoid association with the controversial then-president Donald Trump.
• The 2023 Hetalia musical, Hetalia: The Fantastic World, apparently didn't use Russia due to the then-ongoing War in Ukraine. The musical before that had some lyrics changed in its DVD release as well to avoid association with the same war.
• Due to the controversy surrounding Donald Trump's presidential administration, many productions of In the Heights replaced his name in the lyrics of "96,000" ("Donald Trump and I on the links and he's my caddy!") with other figures, most commonly Tiger Woods. Lin-Manuel Miranda carried this change over to the 2021 film adaptation.
• Matilda: In the 2022 London run, the references to the Russian mafia were changed to the Bulgarian mafia due to tensions surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
• The tour of Mean Girls replaced a joke about Russians influencing the Spring Fling elections with a joke about Steve Kornacki following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
• The 2019 Chicago pre-Broadway tryout of the Michael Jackson Jukebox Musical Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough was supposedly scrapped due to an Actors' Equity strike, but given the announcement of the cancellation came in the wake of the Sundance premiere of the documentary Leaving Neverland — which went into gruesome detail about alleged child sexual abuse committed by the singer — many people suspected it was really this trope in action. The show instead went straight to Broadway as MJ — The Musical after further delays caused by the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Theme Parks

• At the Disney Theme Parks:
  • The original plan for the former Superstar Limo attraction at Disney's California Adventure had it being a thrill ride that involved the guests trying to escape from paparazzi in high-speed pursuit. The idea was scrapped completely in light of Princess Diana's death in a car crash — while she was trying to get away from paparazzi. The results were disastrous.
  • After a toddler was dragged into the Seven Seas Lagoon and killed by an alligator at Disney's Grand Floridian Hotel at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida on June 14, 2016, many changes were made:
    • Disney asked its cast members not to say the iconic one-liner "Watch your children, or the crocodiles will!" (or any jokes about the gators and crocodiles) in the Jungle Cruise attraction anymore.
    • The incident also caused Louis to be written out of the Mickey's Royal Friendship Faire show, which debuted just three days later.
    • Additionally, the Tick-Tock float in the Festival of Fantasy parade and the crocodile animatronics in Living with the Land were both temporarily removed in direct response to the incident.
    • Press junkets for the re-opening of Epcot's popular attraction Soarin' as well as the park's new Frozen Ever After ride were cancelled due to both this and the Orlando nightclub shooting that had occurred just days before the alligator attack leaving no one in a particularly celebratory mood. None of this stopped the latter ride from being a huge hit from the get-go, largely due to Frozen’s overwhelming popularity.
    • As mentioned above under Live-Action TV, most of the media coverage Disney planned for the opening of Shanghai Disneyland Resort in China ended up postponed thanks to these incidents, although the grand opening ceremony special aired on The Disney Channel, Disney XD, and Disney Junior as scheduled.
    • In the Disney Junior Live On Stage! show's Jake And The Neverland Pirates segment, the audience had to make alligator noises to scare Captain Hook. After the incident, the audience now claps to scare him.
  • The day after an Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular! stunt performer died due to injuries sustained during rehearsal, performances of the stunt show were cancelled due to respect.
• Europa-Park cut off its association with Russian majority state-owned gas and oil company Gazprom and its sister firm Nord Stream 2 due to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022. They sponsored several rides, most notably "Blue Fire", which prominently advertised the company and featured wall and video presentations of its activities in the queue area.
• The Wheel at ICON Park Orlando had announced a laser gun game called Bullseye Blast in July of 2022 where riders would shoot at targets from the Ferris wheel. However, the announcement was met with mixed reception as some felt like it was the wrong time to introduce this game, considering that there had been several high profile mass shooting incidents that year. There was also a concern that people outside the wheel would be alarmed to see people inside pointing guns below. ICON Park quickly announced that the ride would be redesigned to address these concerns.
• At Universal Studios:
  • Men in Black: Alien Attack was originally going to feature the "Tiffany" schoolgirl cutout from the first movie in the attraction's opening training scene for riders to shoot at; but after the Columbine massacre had occurred, it was decided that this would be in extremely poor taste.
  • When Universal Studios Florida was in its early planning stages back in 1982, concepts were drawn up for an elaborate nighttime lagoon show that would've featured an explosive finale where a plane would crash right into the water. This idea wound up being abandoned following the devastating helicopter incident that occurred during production of Twilight Zone: The Movie.
  • When Fast & Furious: Supercharged opened at Universal Studios Hollywood, Agent Novak's dialogue towards Roman Pierce was more aggressive, with Novak telling Roman to "get down on the ground" while holding him at gunpoint. Novak's dialogue was later softened to have him just say "Don't move" to Roman, in response to the many police brutality controversies occurring around the nation at the time.
  • In response to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, Universal postponed its initial grand opening date and press junket for the Skull Island: Reign of Kong attraction until July 13th.
  • The nightclub shooting also led to Universal delaying the release of any new announcements they had concerning Halloween Horror Nights until the next month, as well as cancelling plans for a scarezone based on The Purge: Election Year.
  • Twister...Ride it Out was slated to open in March 1998, but ended up being pushed back several months out of respect when in February an outbreak of tornadoes in Central Florida claimed 42 lives and injured 260 others, the deadliest outbreak in Florida history.
  • During construction of Universal Studios Japan, Universal opted to duplicate the Backdraft attraction instead of Earthquake: The Big One, as they feared that Japanese audiences would be uncomfortable with the attraction, considering how Japan has been home to many devastating earthquakes.
  • For the versions of Terminator 2 3-D: Battle Across Time that were at the Florida and Hollywood parks, Sarah Connor would show the audience various clips from the Terminator 2 movie in the pre-show, one of those clips being Sarah's nightmare of the nuclear destruction of Los Angeles. When the show was brought over to Universal Studios Japan, the Los Angeles clips were omitted, so as to not remind Japanese guests of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
  • The 2002 theme of Halloween Horror Nights was initially going to revolve around an evil undead girl known as "Cindy", but it was scrapped due to there being a string of child murders in the area at the time. The event's theme for that year was changed to revolve around "The Caretaker", who was Cindy's father in the original backstory.
  • After a scareactor was crushed by a tram on the first Halloween event (then called Fright Nights) at Universal Hollywood in 1986, Universal put Halloween celebrations on hold until 1992.

Visual Novels

• Following a case of a 17-year old girl killing and dismembering an 8-year old girl in South Korea, who later was revealed to have been a regular participant of roleplaying communities, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony ended up being banned in said country, after she was thought to have copied the game, despite not specifically participating in Danganronpa roleplaying.
• Two instances in Choices: Stories You Play:
  • This happened to Open Heart in Spring 2020. Because the story is a Medical Drama with mature themes that would be considered insensitive with the real life events that were taking place around the same time (the Coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement), Pixelberry decided to put the book on hiatus until September and rewrite some of the material so that the story wouldn't feel so untimely. The events of the first two chapters released after the hiatus, which include people being quarantined after contracting an illness with seemingly no cure and a person of colour nearly dying after an attack instigated by a white man proved that Pixelberry made the right choice by putting the book on hiatus.
  • Originally released in December 2019 to a limited number of players as part of Choices' newly launched VIP program, With Every Heartbeat was originally scheduled to be released to the general public in April 2020. However, this release was pushed back to January 2021 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Webcomics

• The creator of Megatokyo had been working on a separate, unreleased comic called "Warmth" for several years. But then the 2011 earthquake/tsunami in Japan destroyed much of Sendai, the comic's intended setting. At this point, it's indefinitely in Development Hell, and may never be released in its original form, or at all.
• In the print edition of the first run of The Order of the Stick, there's a previously-omitted comic during the battle with Xykon in which Vaarsuvius, paralyzed by a ghasts' touch, sits helplessly while a trio of demon roaches sits on his/her head and crack wise. Why was it omitted from the online comic? Because the morning that it was scheduled to be posted, Christopher Reeve died. The author (wisely) pulled it, only letting it see the light of day as a "bonus strip" over a year later.
• The Platypus Comix story "Vess MacMeal Starring in: The More You Know!", which has a Ludd Was Right ending, experienced a two-week delay. Otherwise, it would have appeared a few days after Steve Jobs' death.

Web Original

• Since 2017, Atop the Fourth Wall had been doing yearly reviews of Batman Odyssey. However, after artist/writer Neal Adams had passed away in 2022, Linkara opted to move the review for issue #5 to 2023 in respect for the creator.
• A Twitter account dedicated to cataloguing Beanie Babies decided to no longer post Beanies themed around American patriotism following the murder of George Floyd and increased tension surrounding the American justice system.
• Bob Chipman, who has (among other projects) a series called Really That Good about dissecting great movies to see why they work, was planning on doing a special Really That Bad episode on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but put it on hold after the suicide of Zack Snyder's daughter and his resulting departure from the reshoots on Justice League (2017). While he did ultimately release the episode after a delay, as he especially hated that film and saw it as a portent of all the problems he had with the DC Extended Universe and with modern Hollywood moviemaking in general, he felt that the analytical approach to directors and writers that he does in Really That Good, which he'd have to apply to Snyder here, would've just felt like kicking the man while he was down had he released it as planned.
• Cracked.com's list of "The 5 Major Cities Most Likely to Be Spectacularly Destroyed", putting a few possible natural disasters (volcanoes in Italy, mudslides in Seattle, earthquakes in San Francisco and basically everything in Wellington) came out the same day of a tragedy. They took it down in respect temporarily (and banned all the users who complained). It was put back up the following day with the title of the article changed to "5 Major Cities Most Likely to Be Wiped Away by Natural Disasters".
• After Craig "Mini Ladd" Thompson, a former and frequent collaborators of Vanoss and his crew, admitted of sending inappropriate messages to underage fans in June 2020, various members of the group began distancing themselves from him. Furthermore, his editor Ty Widdas removed his mention of Mini Ladd from his Twitter bio, and had confirmed that he no longer works for him, his first single on his music channel was shelved, his subreddit and Discord server were permanently locked, he has lost all, present and future, deals and sponsorships, his Twitch account was indefinitely banned in February 2021, and he went through a large loss of subscribers on his developing YouTube channels. When he made his return to YouTube in June of that year on his second channel, Craig Thompson, he proceeded to abandon and tear down all of the videos from the main channel altogether, most notably all of the videos made after the allegations, besides "clearing the air" and his apology, not to mention all of the tweets have been deleted. Another member of the crew, Lui Calibre, also went through this.
• In March 2023, James A. Janisse, host of Dead Meat and The Kill Count, announced that he'd be going on hiatus until June and passing hosting duties to his editor Zoran Gvojic during that time. His reason was personal: namely, his father had just passed away from cancer, and he felt uncomfortable hosting a show about counting and cataloguing the deaths in horror movies so soon after he'd gone through that experience.
• Epic Rap Battles of History: Due to the unstable political climate in the United States, Nice Peter and EpicLLOYD decided to omit the "Hitler vs. Vader Trilogy" from their touring repertoire since 2017.
• In light of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 Film Brain delayed his 2012 Bad Movie Beatdown review from its intended March release, removed a couple of lines which he felt were callous and put up a disclaimer at the front of the review when it was released in May.
• Following the 2021 Capitol attack, AndrewJohn100 removed anything from the channel that contained political talk in them.
  • The original opening scene to FNaF Shorts' "The Frost Bear!" was deleted due to the scene containing the characters discussing the United States Capitol attack, which occurred a few days before the short was uploaded. According to AndrewJohn100, he said he removed it for "unintentionally offending Trump supporters".
  • Similarly, AndrewJohn100 removed the "The Best of AndrewJohn100 2017" video as it contained him mentioning the 2016 election.
• Several Game Grumps videos featuring racist humor and slurs were removed in the summer of 2020 following the George Floyd protests, with Arin issuing an apology for making such jokes in the past. There was also no Game Grumps video uploaded on June 2, 2020 in order to observe "Blackout Tuesday," a day where artists would cease posting content and instead use their platform to boost the Black Lives Matter Movement.
• Half as Interesting released a video on the Nebula subscription service entitled "How Tokyo Made Itself Earthquake-Proof" on January 3rd, 2024. These videos are then usually uploaded a day later to YouTube, but another video, "South Korea Built a Mediocre New Capital in the Middle of Nowhere", was uploaded there instead, likely because the first video was released just days after a major earthquake hit Japan.
• JaidenAnimations removed the Minecraft video she did with Call Me Carson after the latter was accused of inappropriate behavior with underage fans.
• The lonelygirl15 episode "Bree's Mom" was originally supposed to be entitled "Girl, Abducted", but was hastily retitled to avoid offending the fan community, after the vanishing and death of Nadia Kajouji, a friend of a prominent fan of the show.
• Following the George Floyd murder, Musical Hell removed her reviews of The Wiz and The King and I. She explained that black viewers had informed her on how important ''The Wiz'' was for its representation and Christi believed she was not qualified to talk about the movie as a white woman, and she removed The King and I review due to jokes mangling Prince Chulalongkorn's name, which she believed was hurtful to Thai people. She later reinstated "The Wiz" review, deciding that her review was only her opinion and was not meant to dissuade people from liking the film.
• The Nostalgia Critic:
  • This affected the Nostalgia Critic's 200th review for Ponyo, in which he tries really hard to avoid making jokes about Japan being hit by tsunamis less than a year after it happened in real life and even expresses annoyance at one point when he realizes that he had been provoked into almost cracking such a joke.
    One Ponyo character: Hey, that is quite a boat you've got there.
    Another Ponyo character: I've seen you before. You're Lisa's little boy, aren't you?
    Nostalgia Critic: Boy, they sure are chipper for everything they've ever known suddenly being lost. In fact, a lot of people in this movie treat it like an inconvenience, like the power went out and it will just be on in a second. They don't act like they just lost their house and home. But hey, I'm sure that's a reaction a lot of people would have when they went through... dammit, you almost made me make a joke about it!
  • He also delayed his review of The Good Son after Macaulay Culkin's sister died.
  • After Michael Jackson's death, Doug and Rob released a commentary for their review of Moonwalker, explaining they'd had a brief discussion about whether or not to remove it from the site after his death. They decided to keep it up, feeling they never went too far with the jokes.
• Rapeman, a translator known for his very off-color scanlation bonus pages, released a chapter of Himenospia with a Remix Comic showing a character telling the audience to subscribe to PewDiePie. He got a warning from Mangadex about it (the phrase was used during the Christchurch mosque shootings), but it was let through since the chapter was released the same day and so may have been poorly timed. Two days later, another remix comic had a much more explicit reference (getting into a taxi with an assault rifle, asking the driver to take her to the nearest mosque, playing the same music in the video), and after asking him to remove only the remix from the release several times, the chapter was taken down.
• A line was changed in RWBY Chibi where Sun Wukong, playing as a "Junior Detective" along with Neptune, yells out as Jaune is attempting to get his library card. In the original Tugg viewing, he shouted "HE'S REACHING!", but the public version has him shouting "WATCH OUT!", most likely due to a string of police-related shootings, especially one in Dallas.
• The Scott The Woz 200th episode special "Borderline Forever" featured a cavalcade of guest appearances of gaming content creators. Among them is YouTuber Alex Carducci (RelaxAlax), reprising his role as the Supreme Leader from the 2018 season finale "It's Awesome Baby!"; this provoked a backlash from some fans, especially in light of sexual abuse allegations against him that surfaced in 2019. The backlash caused Scott to quietly remove Alex's cameo from "Borderline Forever" on July 1, 2021, and unfollow him on Twitter and Instagram around the same time. Alex's appearance in "It's Awesome Baby" remains as his part in that is too large and important to easily remove.
• Smosh: Part one of "A SMOSHY CHRISTMAS!" was pulled shortly after its release on December 14, 2012 due to the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting occurring that same day. In a video informing viewers about the video's removal, Ian and Anthony singled out the scene where Ian shoots a man dead with a shotgun and states that "that's what guns are for," feeling that it was too uncomfortable to keep up in the wake of the massacre. The video would be reuploaded unedited three days later.
• Originally, the SML Movie "Bowser Junior's 10th Birthday!" had a scene where the titular character receives Nickelodeon Kart Racers from his friend Cody and refuses to accept the present, aiming a blowtorch at the face of SpongeBob SquarePants. But because of the passing of Stephen Hillenburg from heart failure caused by ALS before the video was uploaded, the scene was removed from the final video.
• TomSka:
  • Tom had intended his sketch "Shoot all your problems away" to be a simple Crosses the Line Twice sketch with no deeper meaning. Unfortunately, every time he planned on releasing it, "America happened", and he had to delay it. Ultimately, he decided to edit it slightly to include a Take That! against American gun safety (or lack thereof) and upload it anyway.
  • Baby With A Gun 2 features a tower building exploding at the end, but it's represented with a very simplistic, superimposed, obviously fake stock explosion. Tom initially went for a much more realistic explosion and destruction sequence, but the video released very close (as in, less than three days close) to the very real Manchester Arena bombing, so it was heavily toned down at the last minute into a deliberate Special Effects Failure.
• On What the Fuck Is Wrong with You?, Nash covered a news story involving extraordinary Jerkassery, it was accompanied by a Douchequake. This was temporarily retired after the 2011 earthquake/tsunami in Japan.
• Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation review of Yakuza 4 also coincided with the aforementioned earthquake and tsunami, prompting this to appear onscreen.
  The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan was an unqualified tragedy, and Yahtzee offers his deepest sympathies to a country that has long held his admiration and respect. This statement was given to karmically balance out the following one.
  Yahtzee: Boy, the Japanese are into some weird shit, aren't they?
  • On January 18, 2023, a week after the review of High on Life was posted on the Escapist website, the YouTube video for said review opens up with the following statement:
    The author wishes it to be known that this video was originally made and released *before* news broke that Justin Roiland had been charged with felony domestic violence. We are very much aware that the timing is awkward. And no amount of comments to that effect will make us more aware of that.

Other

• The British Sunday papers were caught badly on the wrong foot about reporting the death of Princess Diana, because it occurred very late on a Saturday night. The most the tabloids could do was to replace their original front pages hastily with respectful coverage of what was known about the tragedy. The inside pages, including opinion pieces written earlier in the week, reflected the previous orthodoxy about Diana: that she was a dumb blonde who intended to bring down the Royal Family with the maximum embarrassment and was most likely going to present them with a half-Arab sibling for William and Harry. The complaints caused much embarrassment among hacks, but the Stalinist revision made by the papers after her death was probably the most noteworthy thing.
• The Twitter account for the Duke Center for Firearms Law tweets out a historical gun law every day, scheduled months in advance. For Christmas Day in 2020, the Center's chosen law for the day was an exemption on firing guns and fireworks on Christmas in Nashville, Tennessee. However, just hours before the tweet was published, a bomb went off in Downtown Nashville, and many saw the tweet in poor taste. Soon afterwards, The Center deleted the tweet.
• After the mass shooting in Buffalo, NY on May 14, 2022, the History Regents exams scheduled to be held on June 1, 2022 were cancelled for that year, as it was feared that the exams could have caused trauma in some of the children who took the exams as a result of recent events.
• LEGO:
  • A LEGO Architecture set depicting Las Vegas went unreleased as it featured the Mandalay Bay hotel, due to the 2017 Vegas shooting as the shooter fired from inside the hotel, and was replaced by a similar set that swapped Mandalay Bay for the Bellagio.
  • LEGO asked stores to remove any marketing for products that feature police, as well as a donut shop and the White House, after the George Floyd protests in 2020.
• The initial release of MacPaint for the original Macintosh had to change the Aids menu seen in prerelease builds to Goodies as a result of the then ongoing HIV epidemic.
• One of Mardi Gras events of Alabama, Order of Isis was retitled for 2015, obviously due to the rise in prominence of the terrorist group of the same name.
• British retailer Marks & Spencer renamed their Isis perfume into Aqua to avoid association with the Islamic State.
• Cisco Systems changed the official abbreviation of their Intermediate System to Intermediate System protocol from "ISIS" to "IS-IS" to also keep it distant from the aforementioned terror group.
• On February 14, 2018, around the same time as the mass shooting at a school in Parkland, FL was taking place, the NRA posted a tweet for Valentine's Day saying "Buy your loved one a gun". The tweet was soon deleted in response to the tragedy.
• The Onion:
  • "Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying" was published in every market except Denver.
  • On November 10, 2018, The Onion ran a (presumably) scheduled tweet reposting its 2013 "Fallen Firefighter Remembered As Idiot Who Sucked At His Job" article before pulling it minutes later due to the massive wildfires around California at that time, which had already claimed lives.
• Vaughn Meader's blockbuster comedy album The First Family and its sequel were yanked from shelves after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The producers even destroyed all the unsold copies, as they didn't want to be seen as "cashing in" on such a horrific tragedy. Because of this, original copies of the sequel are now highly valued collector's items.
• After the Virginia Tech shooting, many colleges cracked down on the game Humans vs. Zombies for this reason, either banning it outright or banning the use of Nerf guns. Even today, several years later, some schools are still squeamish about the game.
• Topps got a lot of flack in 2021 for their Garbage Pail Kids set Shammy Awards, where the theme was making fun of musicians, featuring a card named BTS Bruisers/Bopping K-Pop that depicted the members of BTS getting beaten with a Grammy a la a game of whack-a-mole at a time where anti-Asian hate crimes were surging. The backlash persuaded Topps to withdraw the card.
• The unveiling of the 2022 FIFA World Cup mascot La'eeb in 2022 offered a Continuity Cavalcade showcasing past mascots... except direct predecessor Zabivaka, because 2018 hosts Russia invading Ukraine was not something to take lightly (FIFA even banned Russia from the remaining qualifiers). Albeit during the tournament's opening ceremony 8 months later, even if the invasion hadn't yet ended, Zabivaka was present.
• UK channel BBC One's Christmas branding package for Christmas 2022 was based on the Charlie Mackesy book "The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse". Three idents were made, but one of them showed the characters walking along a river on a snowy evening. The ident in question, used before news bulletins and other serious programmes, was withdrawn from use on 12th December, after an incident in Solihull, West Midlands in which four boys fell into an icy lake and died from drowning. The offending ident was reinstated a week later, but was used less often.
• Samsung's Z series of foldable Galaxy smartphones was rebranded in certain territories (especially in Baltic states) as the letter reminded people too much of the "Z" symbol Russia used as pro-war propaganda during the invasion of Ukraine.
• During a time of violent conflict in the Middle East in 2023, the Australian branch of Kmart pulled from market a festive bag intended to store a Christmas ham in the fridge, labeled "Merry Ham-Mas!," due to the unfortunate similarity to the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

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