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Getting Crap Past The Radar
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alt title(s): Getting Crap Past The Censors 
By the way... He's fifteen, folks.
"I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it."
— Mae West
The practice — usually found on but not limited to comedies — of attempting to sneak some manner of profanity or other forbidden material past the network censors. The trope name is a somewhat milder version of comedian Robin Williams' term for his attempts along these lines while he was on the air in Mork And Mindy; Williams has probably made the greatest (known) effort along these lines in television history, allegedly researching and exhausting several different languages in an attempt to find genuinely dirty words the censors would not recognize, and coming up with sequences that would seem utterly innocent on paper, but which would carry vast quantities of implied prurience — often hilarious — when executed.
He was hardly the first, however. Films have flirted with the line for decades, often through the use of Double Entendre (as demonstrated, for example, by Lauren Bacall's famous line from To Have and Have Not: "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow."). And, of course, the above-quoted Mae West pretty much made her career out of finding ways to get her bawdy comedy under the censors of Hollywood back in the 1930s and 1940s.)
A specific type is Hide Your Lesbians. See also Frothy Mugs Of Water, Something Else Also Rises and Head Tiltingly Kinky; the original item is often quite obvious.
Bolder and less camouflaged efforts frequently take Refuge In Audacity. A combination of these two is when creators deliberately fill their work with an over-the-top amount of something that they freely expect the censor to take objection to and demand that they cut... in order to distract them from a lesser item that the creators want to keep in, but without the distraction the censors would immediately demand be excised.
It should be noted this is where Western Animation shines — one folder wasn't enough to hold it all.
See Censor Decoy for one specific method.
Not to be confused with Bowel Breaking Bricks which is another way of getting "crap" past the radar.
The polar opposite of Innocent Innuendo.
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Examples
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Anime and Manga
- The English dub of Sailor Moon accidentally Bowdlerised itself into this in one episode. The girls are arguing about who should be cast as Snow White in a play. Each girl gives various reasons why she should be the lead. In the original Japanese, Makoto (Sailor Jupiter) says that she should be Snow White because she has the biggest breasts. In the English version, she says she should get the part because she has "the most acting experience and talent." The English line ends at the same point the original Japanese line ends, with a sting at the visual, suggesting to the audience just what the word "talent" refers to. When you remember "talent" is a common euphemism for large breasts, it's even funnier.
- The hidden lesbians that got turned into cousins. Very, very close cousins.
- Some fans have hypothesized that the whole "cousins" thing was a deliberate attempt to get crap past the radar because the adaptation's hiatus had provided ample time for any casual fan to catch up to the original material (presuming they could find it). Characters being cousins to create an ambiguous relationship is common in shoujo.
- And then there's her obligatory transformation scene which I always refer to as "The Sailor Moon Nude Review and Spontaneous Orgasm".
- .hack//SIGN somehow managed to have a lesbian couple.
- The English translation of Samurai Pizza Cats has Guido and Polly looking for a lost Speedy on Prisoner Island in one episode. They discover the far half has been turned into a beach resort. Polly says, "Gosh, I'm amazed." Guido sees all the cute girls and says, "Gosh, I'm aroused!"
- The narrator also got away with saying, "orgy of destruction" in one episode.
- In the midst of all its Bowdlerisation, the Yu-Gi-Oh GX dub still had its moments:
Alexis: Well, you haven't grown up too much. Pierre: My! You have.
- Team Rocket are the go-to source for this trope in Pokémon, especially in later seasons. Examples (out of context):
"It pays to have protection!"
"The Boss loves something, as long as that thing is the biggest and the best."
"It just didn't seem right to take it from behind!"
"Grovyle's shooting bla-aanks~!"
"I haven't seen this many strange letters since I took out a personal ad."
"I am not a piece of fruit, no matter what anyone says."
- James was once inspired to dress as a superhero version of a Pokémon:
James: ... I am a flaming Moltres!
Meowth: That outfit... where'd he get it?
Jesse: I think it came out of his closet.
- The Pokémon dub has an episode titled "I Feel Skitty!" That was an accident on their part. They were attempting one of their usual puns (off "I Feel Pretty", a showtune — they use a lot of puns on showtunes), and came up with...well, something that would be misinterpreted.
- One Sinnoh episode title was "Getting [Turt?]Twiggy With It!"
- The second movie has a background character telling someone "and I said, 'no, but I do have Krab-BIES..."
- The same movie has several references to a plethora of "touchy" things, including one Team Rocket dialogue:
Jesse: Listen to me kid, when you get involved with the opposite sex, you're only asking for trouble!
James: Yes, and that's the kind of trouble I stay out of.
Meowth: Yous two don't need the opposite sex cause' yous got each other!
Jesse: What's that supposed to mean!?
James: Not funny!
- It should be noted that 4kids put these things in as bonus points for older viewers. Um, wow?
- Given the sheer number of references to Ash and Misty's relationship and Melody's interference, it's a wonder that 4Kids didn't go the whole nine yards and outright make the whole thing about budding sexuality. Oh, and by the way, the movie was tamer in Japanese...
- Despite cutting out all of the overt Fanservice from Pokémon Special, this
 ◊ managed to get into the English manga. Guess the translators didn't know what that meant...
- Brock, about Officer Jenny:
"She can violate my rights any time!"
- The song "What Kind of Pokémon Are You?", a song about Elemental Rock Paper Scissors, briefly managed to get away with these lines until American parents complained and the song was taken out of rotation:
Good luck with Muk and Poison Gas
Make one wrong move and it'll kick your GRASS
- Similarly, the (official, mind you) Pokemon Snap Strategy Guide has, as a tip title for Scyther, "A Pain in the Grass".
- One of Team Rocket's rhymes ended with:
"to protect us from all that chafing and itching!" "It might finally stop all of Jesse's... complaining!"
- At one point, James gets his head stuck in a Victreebel and mumbles. If you play the clip backwards, he says "Leo Burnett and 4-Kids are the devil."
- And then there's this episode which made it past the radar in Japan (do they have the radar there?), but not in America. In this episode, James has large inflatable breasts and is trying out for a beauty competition.
- May's Pink Surprise, anyone?
- There was one episode called "Take This House and Shuppet". No, really.
- A more recent, Sinnoh-era episode managed to get away with Ash saying "suck" in the oath-based context. This is really less a case of getting crap past the radar and more a case of the radar being asleep at the switch.
- There's also Harley. Basically every thing about him is Ambiguously Gay. He even calls May "girlfriend" a few times. It's so blatant you'd have no idea how it didn't get any angry letters from soccer moms.
- The first American broadcast of Digimon Tamers is best summed up with this trope. It got a lot of stuff that shouldn't have passed onto Fox Kids. It was "the season the censors were asleep". Tamers (and Shinzo, which had a lot of violence in it, too...) were the last two shows by Saban before Disney took it over; hence, a GaoGaiGar-like final blaze of glory was probably Saban's intent.
- In episode 8, there is a scene with a man and a woman. The dialogue goes like this:
Man: Um, I've been doing a lot of thinking... (places his hand on her lap)
Woman: Ohh.
Man: Oh, not that. Not about that!
- In Digimon Frontier, Bokomon spends a good chunk of the series caring for an egg that eventually hatches into Patamon, acting every bit the proud mama. Then (in the English dub), during a talk about brotherhood:
Patamon: I'd love to have a little brother or sister.
Neemon: (to Bokomon) Better get busy!
Bokomon: What exactly are you saying?!
- Also in Frontier, some of the Fanservicey gags involving Zoe push it a bit. For instance, once JP offers Zoe a "ladies first" up a ladder because the ladder's ridiculously tall. She's immediately offended, pointing out she's wearing a skirt — "As if you didn't know, sicko!"
- Whenever the kids get caught up in the Transformation Sequence (it happens in both Frontier and Tamers), they always go nude. They have Anime Anatomy — but Zoe does get a Panty Shot when she becomes Kazemon.
- In the original version of Digimon Adventure 02, Daisuke and V-Mon once angered a Monster Of The Week by walking in on it taking a leak (Or So I Heard). This bit was edited out of the English dub, but they made up for it somewhere else: when the gang is trying to decide on a game to play in the Christmas episode, Davis suggests Strip Poker.
- For the Finnish dub, some Moral Guardians managed to confuse the "monster takes a leak" scene for jerking off.
- In both the original and the dub of G Gundam, just watch Rain suiting up to use the Shining Gundam when she's in a pinch and Domon's not around. Her squeals are supposed to be of pain, since it's the first time she uses the Trace System (involving a particularly... tight version of the Latex Space Suit); but both Jennifer Holder (English VA) and Yuri Amano (Japanese seiyuu) make Rain sound like she's having an orgasm.
- In Axis Powers Hetalia, China meets a Hello Kitty rip-off named Shinatty-chan. "Shina" is a Japanese word for "Chinese" that is roughly comparable to the word "Negro" in the US; a formerly neutral word made charged by its derogatory use in history.
- In the Sonic The Hedgehog anime, Sonic gives
Dark Eggman Metal Robotnik the finger. Later on, we learn that since Metal Sonic and Sonic share the same data; each can see what the other sees. Then Sonic is shown cringing and twitching around. Cut to Metal Sonic in a position that would allow him to look up Sarah's dress.
- Then, after a crash, this memorable exchange is made:
Knuckles: Tails! Get off! Tails: I so sawwy! I'm so sorry! Knuckles: I never thought you'd stoop so low!
Tails: That wolf is nasty, huh, Bunnie? Bunnie: Nasty as a one-eyed snake, sugar.
- Togashi has a habit of sneaking in subtle and unsubtle references to fetishism and other deviant behaviors in his works, as well as extremely symbolic imagery; but this page◊ from Yu Yu Hakusho takes the cake (might be NOT worksafe despite getting published.) The editors must have all been drunk that day.
- Burst Angel: In the Beach Episode, there is a scapegoated environmental group called the "Organization for the Nature Preservation of Tokyo". This gets the acronym "ONPOT".
- And then there's Sei's swimsuit, which would likely require glue and "careful positioning" to wear without violating decency laws.
- Jo leaps onto a giant tentacle near the end of an episode.
- In the 4Kids dub of Kirby Right Back Atcha, a fairly light-hearted anime about a pink puffball who fights an evil penguin named King Dedede, Dedede sets up a fake monster that destroys a model of Cappy Town on TV and tricks everyone into thinking it's real. When Kirby gets onto the set, he appears huge; one of the viewers remarks, "Looks like someone's been feeding Kirby steroids!"
- Also in Kirby, we get Bouncy Tiff◊, which made it into the 4Kids dub with less editing than you'd expect.
- Another "steroid" incident took place in the 4Kids One Piece dub when "Zolo" said, during his fight with Mr. 1, "Is he made of steel or steroids?" To think, they edited so many drug references... however, by then, the show was airing on Toonami, so....
- Speaking of 4Kids, they kept the Transformation Sequence in their dub of Tokyo Mew Mew. Same with YTV and their recent Pretty Cure dub. Take that as you will.
- The Tokyo Mew Mew ones were changed.
- Excel Saga: After seeing an example of Excel's ability to distinguish the value of objects stuck in small holes using just her fingers, she brings up Excel's "daily finger training", which Excel says "isn't training".
- In The Prince Of Tennis, Momoshirou is spying on his best friend Ryoma and Ryuzaki-sensei's granddaughter Sakuno, thinking they have a date. He notices Nanjirou peeping on them too.
Momo: He must be following her!
Comics
- In The Books of Magic from DC Comics, writer Neil Gaiman infamously has John Constantine swear "Bugger! Damn! Blast! Felching heck!" DC higher-ups apparently assumed that "felching" was a made-up word.
- In Runaways, Gert is talking about criminals filling the power vacuum left in L.A. when their supervillain parents died; her boyfriend Chase suggests that "power vacuum" should be Gert's codename. Eleven-year old Molly gets it; apparently, the censors didn't.
- In Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog comic, Julie-Su gets into a personal confrontation with Rouge the Bat, leading to this exchange:
Julie-Su: Let go of me, you b—
Rouge: Bat, dear. Remember it.
- Earlier example: in the Spin Off Knuckles the Echidna, one arc is centered around one of Charmy Bee's friends dying of Lemon Sundrop Dandelion poisoning. Take the first letter from each word and what do you get? Subtle, huh?
- And then there's this, which appears to date from the age of the Comics Code...
- Wait, does that mean you can figure that one out? Then please, tell the rest of us. We're so confused! (Maybe "A stud with a big weiner"?) (It's "horse wiener".)
- "I could eat a hotdog the size of a horse"? Others include "I want a wiener so big I could ride it" and "I wanna ride a giant wiener."
- "I want a wiener like a horse"?
- It's actually: "I'm so hungry I could eat a wiener the size of a horse!", carefully misheard. Still doesn't make it better.
- In a 1959 Archie Comics Christmas story, Archie tells Veronica that he's going to give her dad "the bird" as a Christmas gift. Veronica is understandably offended until Archie shows her the canary he plans to give to Mr. Lodge.
- There's another famous example from Archie where one of the main characters runs through a magical hole in the wall that looks exactly like a vagina. It could have been coincidence, but....
- There is a memorable cover in which Archie mentions that he had to "beat off three other guys" to rescue a drowning Betty. Take that how you will.
- In an issue of Doom Patrol by Grant Morrison, the team fights an otherworldly assassin who talks in anagrams of what he means to say. When Rebis is about to destroy him, he says "This!" Think about it.
- Though it's very clear what word the anagram is of,, this troper argues that it does not count as getting past the rader in that case, because Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol has used and written out the word "shit" on multiple occasions; mostly spoken by Robotman.
- In Impulse, thought balloons frequently had pictures representing the character's thoughts. At one point, Max Mercury responded to an unpleasant surprise with a picture of a dam.
- Impulse took this habit with him into Young Justice. Once, when Wonder Girl was nagging him, his thought balloon contained a picture of her as a dog.
- From an issue of Titans in which Dick "Nightwing" Grayson insists the original members have to maintain their secret identities in front of the new kids, which means full costumes and codenames to hang out and watch TV:
Arsenal: Nightwing, you can be such a...
Flash: No real names, remember?
- Don Rosa started practising this after he gained Protection From Editors. Example 1.◊ Example 2.◊
- This◊ Get Fuzzy strip from April 2005.
- Another series in Get Fuzzy featured two ghost hunters showing up at the main characters' apartment; they represent Atlantic Research of Supernatural Entities. If this wasn't clear enough, their initials appear on their shirts and, later, their laptop (in a larger font than any of the dialog lettering).
- The Nov. 7, 2008 edition of 9 Chickweed Lane, on several levels: Newcomers will only have a vague idea of what's going on. Regular readers will know it's Edda and Amos curing Amos' hiccups. Sharp-eyed readers will take special note of the hands' positions...
- Rather tame, but from a surprising source: a 1974 Peanuts strip had Marcie measuring Peppermint Patty for a dress, but she becomes embarrassed and tongue-tied as she reads the measurements, leading a frustrated Peppermint Patty to shout "Bust, Marcie! It's a perfectly legitimate sewing term!"
- A Dilbert strip featured Dogbert coming up with a new name for the company by using a computer program that "randomly combines
Astronomy and TechnologyTechnology and Astronomy terms". The first result was "Uranus Hertz", and the Pointy Haired Boss opines "I like it." According to the commented compilation where the strip appears, "this strip was banned from at least one newspaper."
- Another Dilbert strip features Dilbert comparing his cubicle to a womb. Then his boss pokes his head...
- A strip used as an example of how to get crap past the radar in Dilbert's Joy Of Work has Alice wondering how many digits her bonus would come into. When asked about it later she replies "One on each hand."
- One of the later Fox Trot daily strips featured Jason telling his mom that Peter loves folk music, since the lyrics consists nothing but "folk this" and "folk that". Maybe there's a reason why this strip ran so close to the day the final daily appeared.
- The original Golden Age Wonder Woman comics had Bondage & Domination subtext so blatant and frequent that it would qualify as Refuge In Audacity in modern times. Diana was as big a Heroic Sociopath as her male counterparts of the time, but her psychosis lent itself to tying people up and being tied up in return, bouncing people around until they submitted, and singing the praises of occasional slavery. It was pure Author Appeal, to be sure, but still...
- The writer was right. Deliciously right.
- In American Flagg the subversive organization American Survivalist Labor Commitee. Say the acronym fast.
- Tame by the standards of its animated counterpart, The Boondocks nonetheless has some naughty moments. One scrip has Huey and Cesar talking about Puff Daddy changing his name to "P Diddy," and they talk of how it's a stupid name because few words can be made to rhyme with it. When asking for suggestions, Cesar offers, "How about sh—" before being cut off by Huey. Also, the "N word" is alluded to countless times throughout the strip; often the necessary censorship is utilized for extra humor. However, it is debatable whether The Boondocks can be counted under this category, as it has frequently been censored, pulled, and even canceled by many papers.
- In the recent Muppet comics, it was revealed just how adult Floyd and Janice were. In one comic that explored the question "Just what is Gonzo?" Floyd answered with "Man, he can swing any way he wants. That's cool." In the comic spoofing Robin Hood, Janice plays a character named Willa Scarlet who is an expert on herbs.
- Jonah Hex, who somehow managed to be a violent anti-hero in the days of the Comics Code. The very first issue ends with him dropping an unarmed villain off a cliff.
- Though most often booed for their horrible puns, the host-characters of horror comics like Tales From The Crypt or House Of Mystery often threw in a Double Entendre during various stories' introductions and denouments. Having previously been driven underground by the Comics Code, graphic writers of horror tend to see Getting Crap Past The Radar as a badge of honor, if not a moral duty. The Cryptkeeper from the televised Tales From The Crypt continued this envelope-pushing tradition, with punning references to bondage, masturbation, S&M and the like, taking full advantage of the looser standards applied to pay cable programming.
Films
- The Austin Powers movies turned this into an art. Sure, they featured blatant references to sex and the occasional bout of swearing, but some of the scenes were exercises in how far they could push it without raising the rating. The opening to the second movie, where a naked Austin covers his genitals with nothing but objects resembling genitalia in one way or another, serves as a good example. So do both scenes, from the same movie, where Dr. Evil's rocket is seen from Earth. "It looks like a giant—" "Woody! Woody Harrelson! Would you sign this for me?" "Sure, I... Wow. That looks like a huge—"
- Scarface was toned down twice, and negotiations had to be made before its rating got lowered from X to R. However, director Brian DePalma thought the differences between the final cut and the original were insignificant and had the original submitted to theatres.
- And no one noticed until the VHS release.
- Josie And The Pussy Cats The Movie, of all things, had a little ditty called "Backdoor Lover" by the Boy Band Dujour. Three guesses what it's about.
- Those outfits. Flaming gay, anyone?
- Seriously — those guys were one huge gay joke.
- Let's not forget Lord Farquaad (try saying his name fast), the Big Bad from Shrek. Especially since he's a caricature of then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner...
- And the song when they get into town: "Please keep off on the grass, shine your shoes, wipe your — face." Accompanied by the singing puppets turning around and bending over.
- In the forest on the way back to Farquaad with Fiona they get accosted by Robin Hood:
Merry Men: What he basically said is he likes to get—
Robin Hood: Paid!
- And this exchange:
Fiona: Where are you going!?
Shrek: I have to save my ass. (meaning Donkey)
- Similarly, Donkey during an unusual display of affection from Shrek: "All right, knock it off, nobody likes a kiss-ass."
- And this quote when Shrek and Donkey see Lord Farquaad's large castle:
Shrek: Do you think he's compensating for something?
(Donkey looks at him in a puzzled way, and then Shrek basically says to forget it)
- And the follow-up later in the movie when Fiona sees the same large castle:
Donkey: (finally getting Shrek's innuendo) Shrek says [Lord Farquaad]'s compensating for something in there, which I think means he has a VERY—
Shrek and Fiona: DONKEY!
- One memorable Farquaad moment is when he's watching his bride-to-be in the magic mirror while he's in bed (making the mirror rewind, no less), and he peeks under the blanket at his lap, and gets this pleased "Oh my" sort of expression. The same scene shows a rather... familiar-looking bear rug on his bedroom floor. One with a bowtie that we spotted on Mama Bear earlier in the movie.
- Then there's the bit in Shrek 2 where Shrek has turned into a handsome human and is being fawned over by three maidens. Two of them try to ease the confused Shrek's tension by rubbing his shoulders. The third complains, "I don't have anything to rub...."
- Same three maidens, upon hearing that the spell needs "true love's kiss" to make it permanent. "I'll be your true love!" "Ooh, pick me!" "I'll be true! *beat* Mostly!"
- When Universal Studios was producing its series of Sherlock Holmes movies in the 1940s, it was explicitly decided that any references to drug use, including Holmes' canonical use of cocaine, would be censored. However, the writers did manage to slip one reference in: in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, Holmes, captured by Moriarty and stalling for time, suggests to Moriarty that instead of Just Shooting Him, he should try something "more creative" — like inserting a needle into his vein and slowly drawing out all of his blood. Upon hearing this suggestion, Moriarty snidely quips:
"The needle to the last, eh, Holmes?"
- Airplane!: Fellatio on a blow-up doll, a woman in bed with a horse after sex, a pedophile pilot, a young girl who takes her coffee black (like her men), one woman briefly appearing entirely topless, and repeated drug use, and it gets a PG rating. The MPAA rating board must have been helpless with laughter. If it had come out a few years later, surely it would have received a PG-13 rating, if not an R.
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit has some infamous Parental Bonus that shouldn't have let it keep its PG Rating. Most of it involves the ridiculously attractive Jessica Rabbit — for instance, the scene in which a Weasel reaches into her cleavage and promptly gets his hand caught in a "Booby Trap," as Eddie quipped.
- Additionally, a subtle joke in the opening sequence seems to reference Getting Crap Past The Radar: the brand name on the oven is "Hotternell" — while the film's PG rating would certainly allow for language as mild as "hell", the Hays Code that was in effect during the film's period setting would not.
- This is actually a combination of this trope, and a Shout Out. Tex Avery, in that same period, managed to get away with including a freezer labelled as Coldernell in one of his show, and the Rogor short in production is very much in Avery's style.
- And also when Eddie is singing to distract the weasels, he says "Without that gun, I'd have some fun / I'd kick you in the..." He gets cut off when an object hits him on the head; Roger says "nose!" to finish the line. Smartass, the lead weasel, says, "Nose? That don't rhyme with walls!" and Eddie replies "No, but this does!" and kicks him in the groin.
- Baby Herman's line, "I got a fifty-year-old lust, and a three-year-old dinky."
- Patty Cake. This Troper had to have her sister explain to her why Roger was so upset over a game of Patty Cake. It was then that she learned what an affair was.
- Bacall's famous "You know how to whistle" line quoted in the intro was brilliantly and outrageously parodied in Steve Martin's Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid:
"If you want me, just dial. You know how to dial, don't you? You just put your finger in the hole and make tiny little circles..."
- Not dirty so much as violent, but careful editing cuts down a lot of things in The Dark Knight that would otherwise have cranked up the rating to the levels of Gorn horror films.
- In Sunset Boulevard, it's implied that Norma Desmond has been using her now-dead pet monkey as a surrogate lover (major squick in itself). She eulogizes him thus:
Norma: He always liked fires... and poking at them with sticks.
- In High School Musical 3, there's an endless list of "how did they get that in a G-rated movie?" Two examples are Troy suggestively kissing the ball on his team's new trophy and later singing, "put the balls in my hands."
- The Bob Fosse-styled choreography in "I Want It All", the catgirls, and Sharpay's suggestive outfit.
- The new kid, Jimmie, also known as Rocket-Boy... innuendo in itself? has a huge crush on Troy. He's male. It's played for comic value, but still! (Ryan's just as flaming in this movie, too, not to disappoint. Of course, Disney does attempt to pair them with girls.)
- Ryan and the new kid are how Disney introduces teenage homosexuals in a G-rated movie. Because something has to reflect real-world high schools.
- The "Give me back my clothes!" scene with the volleyball girls and the gay guys. Oh, and Rocket-Boy's towel is placed veeery low on his hips and shows off as much as Disney could possibly allow.
- When Troy is taught how to Waltz by Gabriella, she sings the line "Keep your eyes locked on mine" which, in context of their pre-song discussion, relates to him needing to learn the steps. Unfortunately, due to the way the camera was positioned, it is obvious that what he's doing is checking out Vanessa Hudgen's chest. Of course since it's been three movies and all he's had is one rather chaste kiss, it's hard to blame the boy.
- And speaking of her chest, there's the part in the second movie when they're singing "Gotta Go My Own Way" and he's hugging her from behind... his hands are placed awfully high...
- In the most recent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, an innocent comment is played for obvious double meaning: "My small rectory abuts her estate." The speaker emphasizes "rect-" and "abuts" to obvious humor.
- Don't forget the "through intercourse... excuse me, the intercourse" line. The Director's Commentary says they intended these lines to show the character was repressed.
- In The Princess Diaries movie, Joseph goes to purchase some "respectable" clothes for Mia, his purchases include a set of high heels. When he gives them to her, he relates an anecdote of their purchase:
- I still think there wasn't enough nudity in that movie...
- Hoo boy, Enchanted...
- The live-action Casper film included this line: "There's a girl... on my bed. Yes!" Said in an innocuous context, but still...
- In the Disney/Pixar movie Cars, Lightning McQueen gets towed several times by Mater. Each time the tow hook is swung under his bumper, he gets a comical expression of surprise and a squeak of pain.
- There was also a scene where a couple of giggling teen girl cars flash their headlights at Lightning. A deleted scene has these two as waitresses at a seedy truck stop Mack stops at on the drive to California. It was marked as a "top-down" truck-stop, with all-convertible waitresses.
- Don't forget: "He did what in his cup?"
- And that was in the trailer.
- There are several of these near the beginning of the movie, when Lightening makes an appearance for his sponsors. When we first see inside the Rust-eze tent, a pair of Laurel & Hardy-esque comedians are performing a comedy set; their routine contains (among other things) a rather obvious Double Entendre:
Van: Winter is a grand old time! Car: Of this there are no ifs or buts! Van: But remember, all that salt and grime... Car: Can rust your bolts and freeze your— (Lightening appears.) Van: Hey, look! There he is!
- Immediately after Lightening is introduced by the Rust-eze guys, one of the fans in the crowd says, "That race was a pisser!" No kidding — it's in the actual script. (How on earth did they to sneak that in? Did the censors have wax in their ears?!)
- Shortly after this, Lightening explains that he doesn't need working headlights, because racetracks are always lit; one of the comedians replies, "Yeah, well, so's my brother, but he still needs headlights!"
- This troper always thought 'lit' referred to cigarettes rather than alcohol...
- According to the Urban Dictionary, it can refer to being either completely drunk or completely stoned. (Either way, it's not exactly something you would expect to hear in a children's movie.)
- In Bańeros 3: Todopoderosos, one of the things the "new generation" lifeguards do after receiving superpowers is telekinetically undressing girls, a la Scott Baio in Zapped!. Also, at the lifeguard tryouts, they are the only male lifeguards applying for the job, and apparently Emilio Disi picks the candidate based on how hot her ass is.
- Ignoring The Incredibles' surprisingly large amounts of violence and death, it also has a moment where Syndrome exclaims that Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl got "biz-zay!" when he notices their children.
Kari: What's the big S in your shirt for?
Syndrome: What? Oh, you mean this. It stands for "Sitter". At first I was thinking of putting in "BS", you know, for "Baby Sitter", but then I realized I couldn't go around with a big BS on my shirt, so....
- Antz probably just barely squeaked into its PG rating rather than going into PG-13 territory. The ants go to war against acid-spewing termites, and are massacred, with only Z surviving. We're shown this battle, with ants melting in acid, and in one scene, Z is seen holding the torn-off, but still talking, head of a soldier ant. Also the exchange: "This tastes like crap." "Lemme try... It is crap. S'good."
- In the 1947 film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Mrs. Muir types Captain Gregg's autobiography for him. An argument over what euphemism to use for something he wants written ("What sort of word would you use if you wanted express such a concept?" "I wouldn't!") ends with her irritatedly typing out the original word. Judging by how her fingers move when typing, the word is "shit".
- In the film Beyond The Forest, when Bette Davis complains about her indolent maid not cleaning the dining room table she says, "I can write your name in the dust". She quite clearly spells out "S L U T".
- In Ratatouille, when Linguini is trying to tell Collette about Remy, he stutters "I have a tiny... little...!" Her eyes noticeably flick briefly down towards his groin.
- And a bit earlier, when Linguini comes up with the excuse that he's just familiarizing himself with the vegetables as to why he's in the food locker, his boss yells at him "It's possible for one to become too familiar with vegetables!" Worried for his carrots and cucumbers, perhaps?
- That scene in Beauty and the Beast where Lumiere is chasing a maid/feather duster around behind the curtains: "Oh no!" "Oh yes!" Especially when we saw the maid again after the spell was broken.
- "But I've been burned by you before!" In normal circumstances, a way of saying one is an unreliable partner. When a candelebra is holding a (wooden-handled) featherduster?
- Any attempts to figure out what on Earth she could be talking about tend to tie the brain into knots.
- If you're not sure what she could mean, consider that the most flammable part of her is her feathers — that is, her skirt, and his hands and head are flame.
- The Warner Bros. film Quest for Camelot has a hilarious example that doubles as a Parental Bonus, since it'll fly right over the heads of most people under 12. Our Heroes encounter a talking two-headed dragon (or two dragons joined at the neck?).
Garet: What are you?
Devon: Frankly, we're the reason cousins shouldn't marry.
- And the song "Looking Through Your Eyes". Just... really listen to the lyrics. How did they sneak a borderline Intercourse With You song into a kid's movie?
- In the The Great Mouse Detective, who could forget the anthropomorphic lady-mouse performing a Victorian Era strip show to the song "Let Me Be Good To You"?
- Search on Youtube for "Disney Movie Subliminal Messages". You'll either be shocked by what's put into the movies, or shocked by what people with nothing better to do find in the movies. You can give one of these people any frame from any movie and they'll find the word "sex" in it.
- It almost did say "sex" in The Lion King. It was a hidden message from the special effects team. Which is why it actually says SFX in the cloud — not too hard to understand why people confused the two.
- Looking back, the Disney Tarzan got away with some... interesting stuff when it came to Tarzan and Jane, for a movie that's supposed to mostly appeal to children — such as a quick scene where Tarzan curiously tries to look up her skirt and presses his face against her chest to listen to her heartbeat. Considering how this was the first time he met a human woman during his adulthood and therefore being rather "innocent", and how the scene as a whole is actually very sweet and romantic, it's possibly one of the least crass examples on this page.
- The kicker? The skirt scene was actually in the advertisements for the movie.
- The Lion King II: After the Star Crossed Lovers are reunited, Kovu eagerly suggests to Kiara, "Let's get out of here. We'll run away together! And start a pride all our own...", with a motion and a look on his face that suggests he's ready to get started right then and there, If You Know What I Mean.
- Up has one of these in the soundtrack: Giving Muntz The Bird.
- The Disney dub of Kikis Delivery Service has Jiji suggesting that Kiki should be painted naked (she reacts with disgust). Also, when Kiki goes to stay with Ursula, they get picked up by one of Ursula's friends, who says that he thought she was a boy for a moment. She then mutters, "What kind of a boy has legs like these?"
- The movie starts out with one of these moments. Kiki is reminding her friends that it is traditional for a young witch to leave home for a year. One of her friends immediately replies, "Tell the boys that!" and all the girls giggle. Kiki also gets in a Panty Shot as she's taking off, though you have to be looking for it.
- Speaking of Ursula, her scenes in The Little Mermaid are much more adult than most children realize. The animators apparently spent a long time making sure that everything that should jiggle actually did.
- In Spain, during Franco's oppresive fascist regime, one trick that filmmakers used to get crap past the radar is they would write the script they wanted to make, then submit a different script for approval, knowing it would get marked for change. When they submitted the original script, the censors would see that everything marked for change had been and approve the script, letting the filmmakers do almost whatever they wanted.
- In Bringing Up Baby, while David is taking a shower, Susan secretly takes away his clothes to get him to stay. He is forced instead to wear her frilly bathrobe and answers the door in this bathrobe. The following scene is arguably the first time the word "gay" was used in a film to mean "homosexual", and the meaning would have been lost on most audiences back when the film was made.
Mrs. Random: Well, who are you?
David: I don't know. I'm not quite myself today.
Mrs. Random: Well, you look perfectly idiotic in those clothes.
David: These aren't my clothes.
Mrs. Random: Well, where are your clothes?
David: I've lost my clothes.
Mrs. Random: But why are you wearing these clothes?
David: Because I just went gay all of a sudden!
Mrs. Random: Now, see here young man, stop this nonsense. What are you doing?
David: I'm sitting in the middle of 42nd street waiting for a bus.
- In his book Gay New York, George Chauncey mentions that the comment about 42nd Street confirms the double entendre was intentional. Before WWII, 42nd Street was one of the main spots in New York for gay men to look for "trade".
- Bollywood has been known to do this on occasion due to the country's censorship policy regarding sexuality.
- The ban on kissing in films was actually implemented by the British, and was lifted a while back. In recent years this trope has been subverted and kissing had been openly shown in many instances. (Though it's not as common as in Western films.)
- George Of The Jungle. Innocent Fanservice Guy George espouses the strangeness of the ablution practice of using "strange slippery rock"... while nude, in front of two girls. IN A DISNEY MOVIE!
- "Bad waterfall; first it's too warm, and then George slip on strange yellow rock" is the actual line, and he's referring to soap.
- In Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka exclaims,
Wonka: Don't touch that squirrel's nuts! It'll make him go crazy!
- The movie Spaceballs was made after the introduction of the PG-13 rating, but manages to keep itself at a PG rating despite a great deal of swearing. Most notably, it contains the word, "fuck", which can legally be said a minimum of once in a PG-13 movie, so long as it is non-sexual. The movie Little Nicky similarly stretched the boundaries of the PG-13 rating with lots of swearing, and while it uses the F word only once in the context of dialogue, (Popeye's chicken is fucking awesome!) it had a song play during its ending credits that contained numerous chantings of the word after many stanzas.
- On a related note, Last Action Hero, also PG-13, toed the line with the word "fuck" in a manner that made failure at Getting Crap Past The Radar a plot point. Attempting to prove to Jack Slater that his world is a movie, his kid fan writes something (not shown) and asks Jack to say it aloud, then cites Jack's intense resistance as proof that they're in a PG-13 movie. What he'd written is never stated, but it hardly needs to be, does it?
- How the hell has Watership Down not been mentioned yet?!? It is most likely the only U-rated (i.e. for kids; universal) film IN EXISTENCE that has the words "Piss OFF!!!" right there and extremely obvious. The cuprit is of course Kehaar, the funniest seagull you will ever meet with the most bizarre accent and dialect... oh, and of course the entire film itself, which is the bloodiest and most gory animated children's film ever. AnimationAgeGhetto indeed.
- The Goonies spoke of a pirate named "One-Eyed Willy". There were plenty of snickers when it came out... And by "snickers" I don't mean the candy bar... And by "it came out" I don't — oh, forget it.
- The W.C. Fields film The Bank Dick features its title character ("dick" was the popular street term for "detective" at the time) frequenting a bar called The Black Pussy, complete with a few shots of him entering it.
- In the animated Surfs Up, Cody calls fellow surfing penguin Tank Evans a "pecker-face." When Tank sensually shows the film crew his "ladies" (actually his surfing awards), his mother asks him accusingly if he's "polishing his trophies again." Chicken Joe, searching for Cody in the jungle says "I know he's out here. I can feel it in my nuggets." Zee tells Tank that he's gotten sand in his eggsack.
- In Night At The Museum, the Teddy Roosevelt character has from his hips to the bottom of his chest flattened by a mail coach. Sacagawea uses a lit candle to soften and pour the wax to re-mold the damage to his midsection. The "oh boy" moan could have been bracing himself for the pain, but this is Robin Get-crap-past-the-radar Williams.
- The CGI kids movie Madagascar has this in the form of getting swearing and death past. Examples would be of Marty saying only the first letters of a swear (Sugar Honey Iced Tea) and Skipper and Gloria self-censoring. (Gloria basicly said "hell" but added an "o" at the end to make it OK. Skipper both censures the word "damn" by naming a famous dam to make it child-friendly, and gets to imply he and his fellow penguins killed the human crew of the cargo ship and ate their livers by saying he was only joking.)
- The creators also get to show a shark die horribly in a volcano by downplaying it as a good thing. (It saved one of the lemurs.)
- Also, in Madagascar 2, the monkeys (who are working for the penguins at this time) ask for a "maternity leave" one of the penguins look under the table and note, "You're all males."
- It would probably be easier to list the scenes in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit that don't involve Getting Crap Past The Radar.
- It's subtle, but near the beginning of "The Corpse Bride," the rather rotound Mrs. Van Dort attempts to climb into a carriage and gets stuck; Mr. Van Dort and the driver begin pushing on her, trying to get her loose. Cut to Mr. and Mrs. Everglot watching the scene through a pair of binoculars — except from their perspective (the opposite side of the carriage), all that can be seen is the cab rocking wildly. The soon-to-be inlaws roll their eyes in disgust.
- A fairly minor example by today's standards, but at the beginning of Mr Deeds Goes to Town, the manager of the newspaper angrily dismisses his employees, who leave mumbling. The boss quickly asks "What'd you just say?" and the employee responds "I said you've got some...dirty plaster".
Literature
- Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift was written mainly with the goal of making up outrageous fantasy countries to satirize existing ones without getting reprimanded by the censors, the way he would if he criticized them directly. He tested exactly how much crap could get past by naming a country "Laputa". Basically, Spanish for "The Whore".
- Miyazaki's Castle In The Sky just got a whole lot weirder for this troper.
- Hell, Miyazaki once noted that if he'd known what it meant, he would have used a different name.
- Mystery author Dashiell Hammett used to enjoy putting things in his books that sounded like they might be dirty, just to annoy his editor who would cut them out before the books were published. But his editor did not notice the word "gunsel" in The Maltese Falcon, so it was included in the published version. The editor thought the word meant a "gunman", and many American writers imitating Hammett use the word "gunsel" to mean "gunman". In fact, the word meant "homosexual lover".
- "Gunsel" managed to survive in the 1941 film as well. Although Peter Lorre's character makes up for it with the perfumed white gloves.
- Well, that and the strong implication in both novel and 1941 film that Peter Lorre's character Joel Cairo and the "gunsel," Wilmer, are having a homosexual affair. Also this line from the novel, about the gunsel: "The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second 'you.'"
- Not literature, but relevant: Deadpool refers to himself as a "gunsel" multiple times in Joe Kelly's run—probably intentionally, and quite likely referencing this incident.
- Terry Pratchett engages in this frequently but normally it's not so jarring as they are adult books. But there was a notable occurrence in The Wee Free Men, which is definitely a kids' book.
The Toad: Oh, croap!
Tiffany: Pardon?
The Toad: Er, that was, er, swearing in Toad.
- Also later in the book the Toad says "shoap". And the Nac Mac Feegle's favourite: "Crivens!" As well as their "Pisht", which one of Tiffany's more "proper" witch teachers is assured means "tired".
- That's possibly a play on "tired and emotional", libel-dodging journalese for someone, usually a politician or celebrity, being drunk in public. This happens to Hacker in one episode of Yes Minister.
- Let's face it, Fenrir Greyback was a pedophile.
- Perhaps, but is 'cannibal willing to eat people alive' really any less disturbing? This isn't really 'getting crap past the radar', because if Fenrir was a paedophile then all JK did was take out that crap and replace it with different but equally un-kid-friendly crap.
- Albus Dumbledore's Dead Little Sister Ariana was horrendously traumatized by what could be interpreted as child rape. On a lighter side is his brother's relationship (especially the illicit charms on one) with Goats, implying that Aberforth has sex with them.
- This troper had interpreted the implied trauma to Ariana as the boys trying to stone her to death, although rape could be an interpretation.
- The quote is "When she wouldn't show them the trick [of how she did some magic], they got a bit carried away trying to stop the little freak doing it." That sounds more like a beating than anything else, at least to me.
- A more lighthearted Harry Potter example would be Hagrid's Blast-Ended Skrewts. The males have a "stinger", while the females are described as having a "sort of sucker thing on their bellies", presumably to "suck blood". Furthermore, the Skrewt's preferred method of transportation appears to be explosive flatulence.
- And let's not forget the "wand polishing", including the sparks.
- "Can I have a look at Uranus too, Lavender?" J.K. Rowling was surprised when her editor didn't object to that joke.
- No, the All Time Champion example of this trope from Harry Potter is from Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, when Vernon Dursley complains that Dobby's antics upstairs "interrupted my Japanese Golfer joke". Let's just say that the joke's punchline is, "What you mean.... 'wrong hole'?"
- I never realized it before, but when you consider that Harry enters the Chamber of Secrets to find Ginny, his future wife, "Chamber of Secrets" is itself an instance of this... or of Double Entendre.
- The Tales of Beedle the Bard is filled with cuddly Radio 4 innuendo in the sections where Dumbledore discusses the content of the fairy tales — particularly when he mentions a female relative refusing to marry a man after seeing him "fondle a Horklump" (a pink mushroom-like creature covered in bristles).
- Also, In the seventh book, Ron gets Harry a book whose title was something like 100 Great Ways to Charm Witches. Apparently, it's not all about "wand-work". Hmm...
- And then there's what little we hear of the lyrics to "A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love"...
- One of the characters in Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1934 classic A Martian Odyssey is named "Putz". He also ejaculates in one scene.
- In Daniel Pinkwater's Young Adult Novel, the Wild Dada Ducks write and perform a play called "Chickens from Uranus". (As it's a Dada play, the title bears no relation to the plot, which is nonexistent.)
- PG Wodehouse has something like this with the character Galahad in his Lord Emsworth stories. It's very clear that Galahad had an adventurous youth but it isn't said explicitly that he was a Loveable Sex Maniac. However, this is strongly implied by comments that his name is ironic (Galahad is known for being a chaste knight — see Monty Python And The Holy Grail), and by the way young female characters react to him.
- "But I want to face the peril!"
- During the Forties, writers for science fiction magazine Astounding made a game of getting dirty references past bluenose assistant editor Kay Tarrant. George O. Smith succeeded with a reference to a tomcat as "the original ball-bearing mousetrap".
- Robert A Heinlein's The Star Beast, written for what would now be called the young adult market, stars John Thomas Stuart XI, latest in a series of custodians of the titular alien pet. In the end, it is revealed that the pet is a) female, b) royalty, and c) considers the Stuart line to be her pets. Heinlein managed to get away with writing of Lummox's "hobby of raising John Thomases".
- That is definitely Parental Bonus. I saw the same thing in Transformers Animated, and Lord knows that Cartoon Network censors are even harder (ahem) than Heinlein censors.
- Considering that Heinlein had a bluenose, Freud-obsessed editor at the times who saw innuendo in virtually everything else he wrote, he had to have especially enjoyed getting that bit past.
- Damon Knight's short story Cabin Boy has the titular character "circumnavigating the skipper", referencing the bawdy shanty "The Good Ship Venus". At least one collection included the text of the shanty, assuming readers may not have heard it.
- Machado de Assis and José de Alencar, the two Brazilian writers from the XIXth century of most renown, are masters of this trope. They had to keep the obvious subtle to appease the prudish society of their century.
- A Series Of Unfortunate Events: You have to be really sharp to catch this one, but in Book the Fifth, the three siblings are forced to work as a secretary (Sunny) and study an impossibly vast amount of material for a test (Violet and Klaus). At one point while Sunny is frustrated with her work (making staples by hand), she says "Merd" as an exclamation of frustration. It's awfully close to "merde", which is French for excrement.
- Sunny probably has quite a few of them. As Sunny is quite intelligent for a young child, it is often wondered if what she is saying is simply nonsense to her or if she is saying these things on purpose.
- These may be accidents, but Warrior Cats has some... questionable... moments:
- Crowfeather deserves an award for achievement in implied sex. First, when he disappeared overnight with Feathertail, and they returned with their eyes "glimmering with satisfaction", and later when "There seemed to be some unspoken connection between them, and Stormfur had wondered what had happened while he had been held prisoner in the cave". And finally, with Leafpool: "They had been travelling all day even though neither of them had gotten any sleep the previous night". This becomes even more... questionable... since we now know that he got Leafpool pregnant during that period of time.
- Remarks made in Eclipse about Birchfall and Whitewing becoming closer leading to the nursery getting crowded, as well as pointing out that problems may arise from Honeyfern sharing a den with Berrynose. Questionable indeed.
- The dream that Leafpool has about Crowfeather in Twilight. Questionable doesn't even begin to describe it.
- The few times that male characters have said to have their tails "shoot straight up" when faced with the object of their affection.
- Generally any potentially suggestive content operates on Parental Bonus: Most people under 13 would see some of the intimate scenes as kitties snuggling, whereas some older readers would be thinking something else.
- Alice's Adventure in Wonderland:
'Seven years and six months!' Humpty Dumpty repeated thoughtfully. 'An uncomfortable sort of age. Now if you'd asked my advice, I'd have said "Leave off at seven" — but it's too late now'.
'I never ask advice about growing,' Alice said indignantly.
'Too proud?' the other inquired.
Alice felt even more indignant at this suggestion. 'I mean,' she said, 'that one can't help growing older.'
' One can't, perhaps,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'but two can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven.'
Live Action TV
- Mork And Mindy, as noted above.
- My personal favorite was an episode (perhaps the Necroton one) where Mork is hiding inside the couch and when Mindy sits down on it he explodes out of it with the line, "I can sit on my face but I don't think you can!"
- Monty Pythons Flying Circus has topless women appear, uncensored many, many times. Add to that all the dirty jokes. But in one of Terry Gilliam's animations, the word "cancer" was considered too offensive and was, rather obviously (the narrator's voice changes dramatically) changed to "gangrene".
- Interestingly, they did not remove Smoke-Too-Much's racial epithets (the "tiny emaciated epithet" and the "epithet waiter named Manuel").
- This editor can't remember if this appeared in the TV version, or only in the live show, but they also did this in the Travel Agency sketch. Mr. Smoke-Too-Much is pathologically unable to say the letter "C", replacing it with "B". When the travel agent points out that he could just substitute "K" for the "C" in those words, Smoke-Too-Much muses to himself "What a silly bunt." I'll leave that to you to work out yourselves.
- It was in the initial television broadcast... and there were complaints afterward. The BBC responded by editing the punchline out of the master recordings, so it's nowhere to be found on the DVD release.
- They definitely worked it back into the live show, as heard in Live at the Hollywood Bowl. At that point, of course, there were no censors to worry about.
- Arguably, Firefly's Chinese obscenities.
- And occasionally subverted, in that some of them aren't actually obscenities, but are said so that the audience assumes they are.
- In a flashback on The Odd Couple, Felix tells Oscar he has to marry Gloria. "You have to marry her? A man who covers up every piece of furniture with plastic, and you have to marry her!?"
- Similarly, on Star Trek Deep Space Nine, the Ferengi have these giant ears that act as erogenous zones. They love to have women rub them while they're holding conversations, and at times they even rub them themselves. While they're not quite sex organs as such, the effect is much the same. And let's not forget the times women have grabbed Quark by the ear to use the intense pain as a motivation for cooperation. And all the times they refer to someone who's weak, stupid, or otherwise deficient as "not having the lobes for [task]".
- They call the ear massage "Oo-mox". Apparently it can't be translated into English.
- There's also an offhand reference to the "old wives' tale" that performing Oo-mox on yourself too much might make you go deaf.
- Also, the head Ferengi is the guy with the biggest ears, and his valet even spends time combing the ear hair.
- This is probably a reference to (if the internet is to be trusted) human ears being made of erectile tissue, the same tissue as human... well what do you think?
- The internet is NOT to be trusted on this.
- Farscape does the same thing with Rygel's eyebrows.
- Speaking of Farscape, the show had more alien swear words than anything else. Off the top of my head: frell (fuck), dren (shit), schlock (shit), mivonks (balls), hezmanna (hell), trelk (slut/whore), and many, many more.
- Back in The Sixties, U.S. TV networks wouldn't allow women to show their belly buttons, most famously affecting Jeannie on I Dream Of Jeannie. In the original Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror", Uhura's mirror outfit included a bare midriff and her navel is visible in several shots. The producers achieved this simply by having someone take the Standards guy out to lunch and lowering the bottom half of her costume while he was gone. The shots with her bare navel were edited into the episodes and evidently no one caught it.
- Babylon 5 featured an episode where Londo Mollari was shown cheating at cards by using a tentacle to surreptitiously check the cards of the other players. Turns out that the Centauri do not have tentacles but Centauri males do have 6 prehensile penises. That are each 2-4. Feet. Long.
- More amusing was Vir's bumbling attempt to describe to Ivanova the varying... levels of intimacy a Centauri couple could encounter while necking (a misleading word in this context if ever there was one), complete with sound effects and gestures indicating the difference between "one" and "six":
Vir: There were other women, but I never got past one.
Ivanova: You mean first base.
Vir: No, no, I mean one. You see, we have six a... we have six, you see, and each one is a different level of intimacy and pleasure. So, you know, first you have one, and that's naa-naa. Then there's two... and by the time you get to five it's a heehaa-heehaa.
- Furthermore, Vir's description of the Centauri's "bases" state that they start at what Earthlings consider "Home Plate" and go up from there, forever cementing the Centauri's reputation as the most cheerfully decadent quasi-alien species ever depicted on network television.
- Also, Word of God has stated that Centauri females also have six, er, receptacles — three on each side of their spine.
- Londo was furious that the action figure version of himself sold in the station gift shop lacked the relevant characteristics. Ivanova, who has an unfortunate knack for finding herself involved in discussions of Centauri anatomy, says "So you feel you're being symbolically cast... in a bad light?"
- In the pilot episode, G'kar tries to hire the human telepath Lyta Alexander to bear his child, because the Narn have no telepaths. "Now, would you prefer to be conscious or unconscious during the fertilization? I would prefer conscious but [grins] I don't know what your pleasure threshold is." Indicating that the two species' reproductive organs are similar enough for copulation. Which makes rather perplexing a later episode where G'kar is shown having an affair with one of Londo's wives. I mean, given what we know of Centauri "attributes", that's not like a human having sex with a sheep, it's like a human having sex with a spider.
- Several years later (and after the full awakening of her Touched By Vorlons powers) Lyta agrees to provide G'kar with her genetic material, commenting in passing "Oh, and you once mentioned wondering what my pleasure threshold is. I just recently found out... I don't have one. Have a very, very nice day, ..."
- G'Kar is also described as having a fetish for human women, and his promiscuity is referred to in several places prior to his first imprisonment. For example, in Na'Toth's first episode, when G'Kar asks her to investigate how a black tulip turned up in his bed, she comments "Far be it from me to speculate how anything finds its way into your bed," within only a few days of her arrival on the station, suggesting his reputation is well known on Narn as well. There are also a few references to him sleeping with the Drazi ambassador's wife.
- Given what's later revealed about Drazi reproductive biology, Squick seems too mild a word...
- Given that human beings have figured out many fun things beyond standard Tab A into standard Slot B, G'Kar doesn't necessarily need physical compatibility for any of his extra-species dalliances, just creativity and dexterity.
- Londo in particular, but also G'Kar and others, make insulting comments about other male characters lack of sexual prowess.
- Indeed, Londo and G'Kar get into an argument about G'Kar's late arrival that quickly diverges into a conversation about premature ejaculation. Much to G'Kar's increasing horror.
- They also managed to sneak in an implied and later explicitly confirmed relationship between Ivanova and Talia, and a (pretended) marriage between two men was seen as completely normal by every character in the show.
- Let's not forget Londo talking over a comm-link to someone severely annoying him, who then ended transmission with "I'll be in touch." Londo's response? A self-grope with both hands, meaning he grabbed his own chest, as he said, "touch this!" Viewers who missed the previous...explanations for Centauri genitalia were probably confused, and any of those viewers who might've added it up were probably quite horrified without the benefit of the previous explanation to ease them into the information.
- Veronica Mars became almost infamous for the number of double-entendres and even single-entendres that the censors somehow missed. Even on UPN.
Veronica: They give trophies for stealing hubcaps now?
Weevil: What is this, the seventies? Rims, baby.
Veronica: So you got a trophy for a rim job?
(later, in the same scene)
Veronica: Finally, a deep throat to call my own!
- Battlestar Galactica in all its iterations, is frakking famous for doing this. Robot Chicken parodied this here, with the majority of the cast to boot.
- An episode of EastEnders had Dirty Den addressing a pair of police officers as "cuntstables" with just enough emphasis on the first syllable to get it on the air while still being obvious. However, although it got past the Censors, it didn't get past the British viewing public, who complained vociferously.
- The gang on That 70s Show seems to be smoking an illegal drug on a regular basis. The writers keep it ambiguous by never referring to it directly. The most common reference is scenes called "the circle" in which characters sit in a circle in a smoke filled room while acting unusually peppy and stupid. There are also "the circle" scenes without smoke suggesting that they don't always get high in "the circle".
- That or they're getting high by other means...
- Like that batch of "special brownies" Red once ate by accident...
- In Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the 2-finger gesture Spike makes in the fourth-season episode "Hush" and the entire fifth season opening credits is understood to be quite rude in the UK — it's the old-school version of flipping someone off — but slipped under the US network radar.
- There's also Spike's repeated use of "bollocks".
- "You make me come...plete."
- How about: "Lost in ecstasy/Spread beneath my Willow tree..."? Yeah, that episode, and that song in particular, was Joss Whedon saying, "Au revoir, Madame Metaphor!"
- "Warm in the night, when I'm right in her tight...embrace, tight embrace!"
- "With your lips as red as rubies and your firm yet supple...tight embrace!"
- "It was like a meat party in my mouth!" — Lamp Shaded by Dawn right after she says it: "Okay, I'm only fourteen, and even I know that sounds wrong."
- Giles calls Wesley a berk, which comes from the rhyming slang phrase Berkshire Hunt. It doesn't have the same connotations in Britain as the word it replaces has.
- Probably because nobody knows that etymology. It's not obvious, either: the berk in Berkshire rhymes with "dark".
- Also from the episode "Hush" — Buffy is attending one of Giles' briefings. Everyone has been made mute by some demonic spell, so most communication is done through gestures. Buffy tries to say "Can I kill these guys with a stake?" She makes an up-and-down 'stab stab stab' gesture. Everyone stares, since without a stake in her hand, that hand-gesture appears to indicate a whole other... activity.
- The most blatant example also comes from "Hush". After Xander beats up Spike for mistakenly believing he had attacked Anya, Anya walks over to him, smiles coyly, makes a circle with her thumb and forefinger and sticks her other forefinger in it repeatedly. And they exit quickly, stage right. To this day, Joss Whedon is unsure how that got past the censors.
- "I can lay my body down but I can't find my sweet release..."
- I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Xander's line "I think about two girls doing spells together, and I make a spell by myself."
- Let's not forget Buffy's spinoff, Angel, which sure as heck got more than its share of crap past the radar — and Joss (and other writers) comments on it in several episode comementaries. Examples include:
- The scene in "Waiting in the Wings" where Angel and Cordy get trapped in a room that has a... somewhat erotic effect due to ghostly presences. When they leave, Cordy makes a comment to the effect of "Thank god the effect only lasts in that room..." whereupon Angel glances down, agrees with her, and hastily whips off his tux jacket and drapes it to cover... certain areas.
- From the same episode, Fred happily telling Cordy that her first sexual dream was about the Mouse King.
- A lot of the stuff with Lilah and Wesley — they practically beat out S6 Buffy and Spike for most mutually destructive, self-loathing couple, but that's a whole 'nother trope. As far as this one goes, there's Lilah dressing up in the schoolgirl outfit and her and Wesley having phone sex!
- Everything involving c'amshacking with the Groosolaug.
- Even Power Rangers has slipped one past the radar once or twice. In a Lost Galaxy episode, Leo tried to score a date with a girl but had to deal with her motorcycle-riding brother. At one point, the brother offers "Want to take her for a test drive?" The question hangs in the air for a bit before he clarifies "The bike!"
- Way back in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, in "Green with Evil, Part IV", when Those Two Guys Bulk and Skull are caught in yet another monster attack:
Bulk: I want my mommy!
Skull: (without thinking) Yeah — I want your mommy!
(Bulk shoots him a look)
- Mystic Force had this in the finale:
Xander: Leelee's mom is hot!
Vida: (wide eyes, big grin, enthusiastic nodding) Uh-huh!
- (Adding to the subtext, up to that point Leelee's mom was the vampire queen Necrolai. Who had briefly turned Vida into a vampire earlier in the season.)
Ziggy: I would have layed odds that you were a dude.
Dr K: ... Sorry to disapoint you.
- Ninja Storm had an episode open with Shane and Dustin ogling a computer with lines like "what a babe" and "check out the lines on her". Cam catches them and remarks "I hope you guys aren't doing anything illegal". Embarrassed, the two try to hide the computer, only for Cam to grab it and find they were looking at...readouts of the new motorcycles they received last episode.
- Kenny Everett was forbidden to call his giant-busted, air-headed, sexually exploited starlet character by the spooneristic name "Mary Hinge" on the grounds that it was too rude, but then got away with calling her "Cupid Stunt".
- Beakmans World comes close a couple of times, many of those occurring in the final episode, where they tackle flatulence. Another memorable moment is when Lester confuses "desert" with "dessert". His response? "Well, I've certainly made an 's' of myself."
- Rowan And Martins Laugh-In managed it sometimes by burying it in a hail of less offensive humor, and to a lesser degree by developing their own code words.
- An episode of 30 Rock saw Liz Lemon's father, named Richard, announcing that "It's not a Lemon party without old Dick!"
- In the series iCarly, during the episode "I Spy a Mean Teacher", there are many suggestive scenes. For example, two teens get trapped in a "closet" together, which makes for some interesting dialogue. Plus, there's a giant talking Randy Jackson cardboard cutout which the teacher they were spying on flirts with. Oh, and then she puts her glutes onto the cutout's crotch.
- House, in the episode "Ugly" of season four, House and Wilson snuck into a locked room. The conversation is as follows:
Wilson: Where did you get those keys?
House: Blue the janitor.
Wilson: What?
House: That's his name.
Wilson: His name is Lou.
House: I owe him an apology.
- S Club had a few examples of this. There was, I think, four jokes made about the size of Rachel's breasts. "Backs straight, chests out... not so much the last one, Rachel.", and when complaining about having to wear a stupid costume involving bikini tops the line "If Rachel dances in that, it'll sound like a stampede." was used. In another episode, Jo and Bradley get into a fight, leaving her with a black eye and him severely injured in order to point out how hitting a woman is seen as worse than hospitalising a man. Then there was a scene in which what was believed to be a suicide attempt was used for laughs. In the movie however, there was a very unexpected scene in which a woman is taking things out of her bag and giving it to them "Passport, wallet, vibrato—" at which she looks awkward and puts it back in the bag. And a twelve-years-old child trying unsuccessfully to chat up one of the female members, who naturally isn't interested... until he reminds her that he is rich. And then who later gropes Linda Blair, with the line "You're only as old as the woman you feel."
- This video on You Tube contains a montage of moments on I Love Lucy that could be interpreted as this.
- In one episode of Robot Wars, Craig Charles referred to Robochicken as a "clucking good robot!"
- The Demon team wore hats with devil horns, leading JP to quip that they're feeling "horny, horny, horny"
- A robot called Pussycat. Need I say more?
- In one episode of Supernatural, Dean's confronted by two fantasy hookers who are offering him a massage and says this immortal line — "You know, I'm a sucker for a happy ending. Really. But I'm going to have to [pauses, disappointed] pass."
- In Phil Of The Future, Keely has a Did I Just Say That Out Loud moment:
Keely: What in the world are two teenagers going to do in a dark room alone with no adults? (cue shocked look.)
- Most of the humour in Are You Being Served is a stream of one blatantly sexual Double Entendre after the other.
- An episode of Thats So Raven ostensibly addressed the horrors of junk-food. However, it included a scene of Raven spending at least a minute of screen-time trying to get her mouth around a huge hot-dog. Her friend Eddie may well have been talking about the effects of the cafeteria menu on his girth, but that's not what it sounded like when he watched her performance and said "I think my pants are getting tighter!"
- It's amazing how Scrubs got away with this particular prank The Janitor plays on J.D.:
The Janitor: (trying to solve a crossword puzzle) Five letters, showing vulnerability... a "blank" in one's armor...
J.D.: Chink.
The Janitor: What? (hides crossword puzzle)
J.D.: CHINK!
(the Janitor steps aside to reveal the VERY ASIAN gold boxFranklyn standing behind him)
J.D.: No! No, Franklyn, we were doing, um, a crossword puzzle and...
Franklyn: I always suspected...
The Janitor: We all did.
{Franklyn walks away hurt)
J.D.: Franklyn, NO!
The Janitor: Wow! Tough break.
- Then again, a good portion of the episode involved Asians being mean to him, so the writers would have had to rewrite a good portion of it if it had been censored. The Janitor is a jerk.
- In Arrested Development, George Sr. thinks he has devised a way to get past the sensors (that are keeping him under house arrest). Buster replies "When mother sees this, she will blow a cow." The creators have claimed this was unintentional.
- And of course that's just one of a billion instances. "Get rid of the Seaward" also comes to mind. Especially later when Gob got a new yacht, the C-Word.
- Drew Carey had one memorable line in the American version of Whose Line Is It Anyway?:
"I'd like to thank Laura Hall, our pianist, for having a profession I can say on the air and the censors can do nothing about. Pianist. Pianist, pianist, pianist. I've never seen such a beautiful pianist."
- (And the joke worked, because Laura Hall is very attractive.) Whose Line did a lot of that sort of thing. One great example is this sketch from the Richard Simmons episode.
- There was also a game that had everyone replace the letter "b" with "f". Most of it consisted of discussion of Wayne's "fig futt" and hunting "male deer".
- Firefly has one with the expletive "rutting" frequently said by Jayne. As "rutting" is an archaism for sexual intercourse, this basically allowed the characters to say "fucking" as often as they pleased.
- While the frequent use of "fecking" in Father Ted may come across as this (used in exactly the same was as the word fuck) the word is hardly even considered an expletive in Ireland and is used freely by teachers, priests and on TV.
- Pushing Daisies is displaying a warped genius for this. So far we've had "Jock-off 2000", "Well, I'll be dental-dammed...", "Simone had come... and gone", and so forth.
- It would be a crime not to mention the Norwegians' Mobile Investigative Lab Facility, which they refer to as "mother" throughout the entire episode.
- The Daily Show likes to play games with the censors. Recently, California banned gay marriage. Interestingly, they also created new legislation ensuring that chickens in slaughterhouses were not being mistreated.
Jon Stewart: (picture of rooster appears on screen) So clearly, California voters are still amenable to some [bleep].
- In Thats So Raven, Tanya tells Cory that she has a surprise for him. He begins guessing and his last guess is "an inflatable—". Tanya cuts him off with a loud "NO!"
- MST3K, episode 519, "Outlaw" contained the song "Tubular Boobluar Joy." Which contained this doozy of a verse:
Mike & The Bots: (singing) It's area-logical, auto-erotical, toobular, boob-ular joy! An expose-ular regional, batch-ular pouch-ular fun for girl and boy! A latisima-dorsical, hung-like-a-horse-ical, calipa-ligical ball!
- Games Master took this so far it's practically Beyond The Impossible; it even parodied its constant use of innuendo in a couple of episodes.
- On an episode of I Love Lucy, Lucy informs an old woman that she is conducting a poll to which the lady replies (shockingly for a show on which the word "pregnant" was verboten), "Your name ain't Kinsey is it?"
- A recent episode of Bones does this very well. A father and son are ice fishing, and as the son is now eighteen, the father is letting the son drill the hole for the first time. As he hands the son the drill, he says something to the effect of "Make sure you use proper protection when drilling holes... and this doesn't just apply to ice augers." Then, as the son is drilling the hole, he hits the episode's case/victim, causing blood to spurt up, and shouting "It's bleeding!" Oh, and did I mention that they spend the whole discussion refering to the auger as "she"?
- Sesame Street: In an "Elmo's World" segment all about socks, when Elmo watches The Sock Channel, the announcer says: "Next up, Socks and the City." Hmmm...
- Late in the miniseries The 10th Kingdom, Virginia and Wolf come back from a frolic in the grass that started as a search for firewood. Returning, they pass Virginia's father Tony, who asks where the wood is. Virginia claims they couldn't find any. A moment later, he demands of Wolf, "I suppose you don't have any wood either?" to which Wolf replies with a goofy smile, "Not any more."
- Saturday Night Live once featured a sketch with Joe Pesci playing his "Goodfellas" character buying a pinkie ring. He goes to the mirror to try it on and begins miming a conversation which ends as an angry argument full of F words. Today, censors would pixillate his mouth and no one would get the joke.
- And who can forget the Schvety's Christmas Balls sketch which pretty much lampshades the trope?
- There was also the SNL skit "Jingleheimer Junction", a parody of children's shows with characters personifying Friendship, Unity, Caring and Kindness. With their initials written on their shirts. They never get into that order... but come surprisingly close. The best part is the "togetherness song" that's sung toward the end: "You can do it anywhere, in the park or on a chair... in and out, in and out..."
- The Brady Bunch sorta-kinda got away with "hell" on the air. In one episode, Mike walks into the room and says "Alice, I need your hel—" and cuts off when he sees Carol standing there. When Carol asks why he was asking for help, he responds "No, I said 'hel', as is 'helmet'."
- Drake And Josh gets away with multiple references to Drake's girlfriends being capable of giving Drake a whole lotta pleasure, and I don't mean through kissing, including putting their entire fists in their mouth, tying a cherry stem in a knot with their tongue... Drake can also do the latter.
- In Friends, after getting a strong handshake from Monica, Phoebe remarks that she's glad she's not Chandler (Monica's boyfriend). Awkward looks follow.
- Hannah Montana has a strange example: One episode features Miley Stewart's brother being mistaken for her alter ego's boyfriend and they keep up that charade for a while, mostly because the brother didn't want to end the "relationship," (because of all of the, ahem, perks). At one point, Miley says, in disgust, something to the effect of, "You're enjoying this way too much."
- In Blossom when Six LeMeure was asked abour her unusual name, she replies that, according to her father, "that's how many beers it took".
- Life with Derek has a few of these; in one episode, a kid hastily shouts in response to whether he was listening or not, "I was looking at your eyes, not your chest! Derek also says in response to boys being different from girls, "Yeah, I learned that the fun way on the old couch."
- The All That 10th Anniversary episode had this particular line...
Coach Kreeton: And even though I'm a seventy-five, and you're NINETEEN! AHAAAAAAAAHAHA!
- (And to drive the whole point home, he even starts rubbing Abby Rhode's legs while he's laughing.)
- Either they were Accidental Innuendo or Freud Was Right, but you have to really have to wonder how they managed to get some of Pierre Escargot's lines in the show. Some notable lines include "Keep your hands off my chicken nuggets!" and "May I jump up and down your sausages?"
- Recently on MSNBC, there has been mocking coverage of the "Tea Parties" advertised by conservative groups. Cue a volley of Double Entrendre about teabagging with comments about swallowing, etc.
- This troper recalls an episode of a science TV show for children (it was either Feed Your Mind or Popular Mechanics For Kids) where they were visiting a recycling center. They are standing next to a conveyor belt with paper trash getting ready to be processed until suddenly a kid picks up from said conveyor belt an issue of Playboy. The adult standing next to him immediately goes "Hey! Put that down! This is a family show!"
- In an episode of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody,London mistakes Maddie's command to strip the bed as a request to strip.
- How I Met Your Mother had the following exchange in "The Goat":
Ted: Hey Barney, do you want my X-Box?
Barney:(terrified) TED, SHE HAS A NAME!
- The Benny Hill Show period, when it wasn't Refuge In Audacity
- How has no one mentioned Red Dwarf? Alone, we have Smeg, a substitute word for so many swears so the BBC couldn't censor them. "You Smeghead!"
- The truly disgusting part being that "smegma" is a real word (although supposedly the people who made the show weren't aware), with a rather Squicky definition.
- Smeg is also an expensive brand of whitegoods. Go figure.
- Said brand is Italian, and used to invest in quite a lot of advertising at Italian football stadia. Then came the time Channel 4 started showing weekly live coverage...
- In the second season of Knightmare the dungeoneer (a girl in her early teens) slides down to the second level, knocking over Bumptious the Dwarf and accidentally causing an explosion. Gretel the maid then says "See what you get for playing with his plunger?" It gets worse/better. Gretel is sent off for bandages and returns shortly screaming "I'm coming Bumptious! I'm coming!"
- And it keeps on in later seasons with a number of female characters getting chained up, tied up and put in stocks (although to be fair the last one happened to Merlin as well), not to mention the "magic pills" marked "Uppers" and "Downers"
Music
- The song "Real Mother For Ya" by Johnny "Guitar" Watson uses repetition. Over the course of the song, it's pronounced "Real Motha Fo' Ya", and at the end of the song, is repeated several times, But at the end he actually says "Real Motherfucker" Most radio stations cut out that last part in its entirety, although it sometimes slips by.
- The Who's "Who Are You?" is almost never censored on radio stations, despite Townshend ad-libbing "aw, who the fuck are you?" in the chorus towards the end of the song.
- Another Who song, Squeeze Box is about a wife tiring her husband out and keeping the neighbours up all night with her rampant accordion playing. What else could it mean?
She goes in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out,
And she's playing all night, and the music's all right,
Momma's got a squeeze box, Daddy never sleeps at night.
- The T. Rex song "Twentieth Century Boy" has the refrain "twentieth century toy, I want to be your boy." A casual listener probably wouldn't notice that in the last two iterations, this becomes "twentieth century toy, I want to be your toy," the song ending with "twentieth century boy, I want to be your toy."
- "Dirty Water", the Standard Snippet of anything Boston-related, runs the gamut from oldies stations to network sports with the phrase "lovers, fuggers, and thieves" uncensored. What do you call a city that yells "fuckers" every time it wins at baseball?
- "Oliver's Army" by Elvis Costello features the phrase "white nigger" which is never censored on the radio...
- "Fairy Tale of New York" by The Pogues has the line "ya cheap lousy faggot" which always gets past Radio and MTV censors.
- If you're going to quote it, quote it all: "You're a bum, you're a punk / You're an old slut on junk, lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed / You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot, happy Christmas your arse, I thank God it's our last!" Surely the greatest Christmas song of all time, it never fails to fill me with a warm glow. Not so much "getting crap past the radar" as "flying crap straight over the radar at top speed and launching heatseekers after anyone who wants to argue about it".
- Over Christmas 2007 BBC Radio 1 censored it. For about a day. They were ridiculed in the press over it and went back to the unedited version.
- Cultural note: In Ireland, the word 'faggot' isn't obscene, and means a lazy, shiftless individual, not a homosexual.
- In the UK, 'faggot' can also refer to a type of meatball made from cut-offs and offal.
- Approximately 2.56 into "Hey Jude" by The Beatles, John Lennon's swearing, "Oh!... Fucking hell" was not removed from the released version of the song When the band's music is remastered and put made available for digital download (surely can't be long now...) I can't help but wonder if it'll be edited out...
- And IIRC, "Please Please Me" is actually a song about oral sex...
- Who would have guessed that the upbeat, catchy song "Semi-Charmed Life" was a song about sexual addictions and crystal meth usage? Don't believe me? Google the lyrics.
- Not as much gotten past the radar, but let right through with the Red Carpet treatment, Queen Latifah's "U.N.I.T.Y." often ran on radio stations with the lines "Bitch" and "Ho" uncensored. Most likely because the lyrics made it impossible to take the use of the words as offensive.
- Method Man's "All I Need" often got away with the oft-repeated line "I swear to God I hope we fuckin' die together" by stashing it in the instrument line and covering it with the more recognizable chorus.
- "Yummy Yummy Yummy" written by Arthur Resnick and recorded by the Ohio Express. What sort of "love" can one have in one's "tummy," I wonder?
- This troper was eating at Subway when "Crazy Bitch" by Buckcherry came on. I love the song, but even with the swear words blanked out (and "bitch" wasn't), isn't it a bit much for mainstream play?
- This troper heard "Hollaback Girl," in its un-bleeped glory, being played over a mall PA system. Heaven only knows how that got past the muzak provider's Standards and Practices people.
- Someone please explain to This Troper — how can anyone censor the words "dickhead" (okay I'll accept that one) and "suck" (does anybody really use that word in that context with that meaning anymore? Pink sure as hell wasn't), and yet still let a song explain to the implied audience that "it's just U and ur hand tonight"?
- There is a techno track by DJ Aligator called The Whistle Song or Blow My Whistle Baby. It is a thinly veiled depiction of fellatio. Oddly, enough, there was absolutely no warnings on it. Blow My Whistle Baby
- The "unclean version" has the lyrics "blow my whistle bitch" but is otherwise unchanged.
- And of course, with title edited to match the lyrics, it was in the E-rated DDR Max 2
- That's hardly the only case! Do it all night, do it with me / I'll take you to Heaven if you make me feel free, babe... Complete with moans and all.
- "Making love in the afternoon with Cecilia, up in my bedroom / I got up to wash my face, when I came back to bed someone had taken my place" Now, what kind of lovin' would cause a guy to go wash his face after making it with a girl, hmmm?
- Swedish drag act After Dark's entry in Melodifestivalen 2007 (the annual national song competition), (ĺh) När Ni Tar Saken I Egna Händer, which is three minutes' worth of thinly-veiled references to masturbation. Read the Wiki entry for details.
- Naturally, the Japanese took it one step further with their Mondegreen-ed lyrics, at which point the subtext just simply disappears. NSFW on account of crude language, cross-dressing and loss of dignity.
- "La Macarena"... just "La Macarena"...
- Every time this troper has heard Beastie Boys' "So Whatcha Want" on his local Modern Rock station, they've always left Mike D's lyric "I'm the illest motherfucker from here to Gardena" intact.
- Probably because the vocals are distorted. I've had friends who either didn't realize he said it, or thought he said something like "illest mofo".
- Warrant's "Cherry Pie' is all this trope, from the very title to the immortal lyrics "Swingin' in there/Cause she wanted me to feed her/So I mixed up the batter/And she licked the beater"
- An old Dixie Chicks song called "Goodbye Earl" had a sly line at the end stating that the female protagonists of the song sell "Tennessee Ham and strawberry jam". If anybody's ever seen the video, at the Tennessee Ham part all three girls do a sort of hip thrust toward the camera and slap themselves on the ass, which is followed by a shot of one of the girls doing a rather suggestive taste test on the aforementioned strawberry jam. Turns out that selling Tennessee ham is a euphemism used in connection with prostitution...
- Wait, so prostitution might be arguably better than staying with a violently abusive spouse, but— but— the other one was... eek!
- "Son of A Preacher Man" anyone? About a girl being deflowered by the local preacher's son? With the line "Looking to see how much we've grown?"
- "Afternoon Delight". "This is a song about afternoon lovemaking."
- Rihanna's "Shut Up and Drive" is just a big Double Entendre.
- "Knockin' at Your Back Door" by Deep Purple. Think about the possible meanings of the title... yeah, it's about anal.
- The song "Kitchen Man" by Bessie Smith was loaded with sexual double entendre, and it was recorded in 1929. Sample lyrics: "When I eat his doughnut / All I leave is the hole / Any time he wants to / Why, he can use my sugar bowl"
- On Britney Spears' new album, she has a song called "If U Seek Amy" where the chorus makes little sense as read. However, when heard, it's clear that the intended meaning is F-U-C-K me.
- Metallica released a DVD entitled Cunning Stunts.
- It seems like whenever Pink Floyd's "Money" is played on air, they never censor the line "Money, it's a hit/Don't give me that do-goody-good bullshit."
- Early R n' B is full of this trope: examples include Billy Ward & The Dominoes' 1951 hit Sixty Minute Man: 'There'll be fifteen minutes of kissing, then you'll holler 'please don't stop', fifteen minutes of teasing, fifteen minutes of squeezing, and fifteen minutes blowing my top'.
- Not to mention Dinah Washington's 'Big Long Slidin' Thing' from 1954 (it's a trombone). 'He said 'I blow through here, then I work my fingers and thumb''.
- And (bisexual) Ma Rainey releasing "Prove it on me blues" — "I went out last night with a crowd of my friends, it must've been women, 'cause I dont like no men".
- U2. Mysterious Ways. If you wanna kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel — ON YOUR KNEES, BOY! This Troper was a teenager when she translated it into her mother language for the first time, and when she reached that particular line, she went all "OMG, does that phrase mean what I think it means?!"
- Given the religious overtones of the song, he's probably talking about praying; still, that's not exactly the first thing that comes to mind....
- Not just that song, but several of U2's songs: of the members, I believe only Larry Mullens is not a devout Christian. Not to say that they're above putting sexual content into their music, but it IS likely that the line in question was not intended as this trope.
- "On your knees, boy"? I think they may have been somewhat aware of the Double Entendre...
- Puddle of Mudd, "She Hates Me". This troper was extremely surprised when this song managed to make it on the ridculously censor-happy radio station he normally listened to, uncensored. It's not even like it's necessary cursing—it's just a Cluster F Bomb.
- The amount of f-bombs in the chorus (in the middle of the title) is probably the reason it became a Top 40 hit in America.
- Steely Dan has a lot of songs that push various amounts of crap past the radar, but two jump out:
- "The Fez" is not about a hat. Even the usually evasive Word Of God says it's a condom.
- "Show Biz Kids" retained its Precision F Strike as a single.
- Not to mention the fact that the band's name come from the name of a gigantic metallic dildo used to sodomise young teenage men engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation in William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch.
- AC/DC has made this an artform in and of itself. At least half their songs are sexual innuendo, more or less thinly veiled (more often less then more). "Girls Got Rhythm", "Giving the Dog a Bone", "Big Balls" (which is about high-end social events. Really.), "You Shook Me All Night Long", "Hard as a Rock"... The list goes on and on and on and...
- Death in Vegas's song "Dirt" uses a number of samples from Woodstock, including Joe Mac Donald's FISH cheer: "What's that spell?" to which thousands of hippies cry, "Fuck!" over and over again. Since the, "Gimme an F... Gimme a U..." part was left out, it's a bit hard to figure out just what the crowd is screaming unless you know the reference.
- The Violent Femmes did this a lot. From "36-24-36", which spoke of a woman being the perfect measurements and them wanting to bang her, to "Gimme The Car", which was about getting a girl drunk, high and then banging her, to the "Country Death Song", which involved the voice of it pushing his youngest daughter into a bottomless pit and then hanging himself in shame, to "Blister In The Sun" (very commonly played on the radio around here), which had the line "let me go on big hands I know your the one...", that made this troper think "Why are they playing a song with a male voice behind it about having sex with a big guy and having the male lead turn gay?" I don't know how they weren't banned from radio.
- Da Yoopers has a song called "My First Time Ever", which sounds like it's about a sexual affair, talking about how she "spread her legs" and finally how the "white stuff came". It turns out that the song is really about his first time milking a cow.
- Sugarland's song "It Happens" sticks a "ssssh" before the title.
- The early Pink Floyd single "Candy And A Currant Bun" was originally written as "Let's Roll Another One"; The BBC objected to the obvious drug reference of the title (as well as lyrics like "I'm high, don't try to spoil my fun"). The recorded version changed these lyrics, but somehow also slipped in "Ooh don't talk with me / please just fuck with me".
Print Media
- The September 2008 issue of Nintendo Power (The One With Sonic the Hedgehog on the front) is chock-full of this. First, their review of Fatal Fury 2 refers to "bouncy ninja girl" Mai Shiranui. They also had the guts to show a picture of Walter Peck with the caption, "Yes, it's true. This man has no Wii." Guess they didn't know what that meant.
- And the picture they used to show the Judge from the Ace Attorney games in one issue, they showed him imagining a pair of panties. (It was in the January 2008 Ninja Gaiden DS issue though)
- But the crowning moment of getting crap past the radar was this, in their Sonic and the Black Knight coverage (9/08 issue, of course).
Steve Thomason: [With Sonic's new sword skills], he'd probably make a good guest fighter in the next Soulcalibur game. Hey, it'd be less absurd than Ivy's... um... "enhancements".
- Oh, stop trying to sugar coat it as "Getting Crap Past The Radar" — Nintendo Power has been actively ramping up the Fanservice for over a year now. You were expecting maybe the "family-friendly" company that lost the previous two rounds of the Console Wars to Sony? Nuh-uh. They've learned how to cater to a more mature audience (while still putting out plenty of stuff for everyone else to enjoy).
- One Year? Hrmmm, that would be right around the time Nintendo of America stopped publishing Nintendo Power. It's now published by Future Publishing. Coincidence?
- A issue of Mad for Kids, which is a toned down, Nick Mag like verison of Mad for duh kids, had a parody article on Jonas Brothers that didnt make the cut, one had braces and was named Rusty and he is holding a Trombone, Put it tougher please!
Radio
Tabletop Games
- In the 2nd-edition days of Dungeons & Dragons, a large number of Forgotten Realms guidebooks (particularly the "Volo's Guides" series of in-universe travelogues) made reference to "festhalls" scattered across the Realms in just about every city and town. And by "festhalls" I mean "brothels".
Theatre
- Shakespeare is the absolute master of this. For all the high-brow main story, he was always certain to put in plenty of lower-class pleasing vulgarities throughout all of this plays. This is therefore Older Than Steam.
- Hamlet contains the following exchange during Act III Scene II:
Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
- The lines immediately following that show off a very popular euphemism at the time.
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.
- The title of Much Ado About Nothing takes on a very different meaning once you realize that "nothing" was slang for female genitalia in Shakespeare's time.
- How about a child Juliet falling and bumping her head, whereas if she were an adult, she would have known to fall on her back?
- The first two minutes of Romeo And Juliet are a series of double entendres, designed to catch the attention of the peasants watching. In case you'd forgotten, check it out.
- In Shakespeare's time, "to die" was an accepted entendre for "to have an orgasm" (based off of the French term la petite mort). Now go back and re-read Juliet's impassioned speech to her mother where she states that her dearest desire is to "behold Romeo dead" and realize what she's really hoping for.
- The Taming of the Shrew: "What, with my tongue in your tail?"
- His "Get Thee To A Nunnery" line is a trope unto itself.
- Antony and Cleopatra is a nonstop string of raunch.
Cleopatra: Stands he, or sits he, or does he ride upon his horse? O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!
- The Comedy of Errors is another smut-packed classic. Take careful note of the scene where Dromio of Syracuse discusses the kitchen servant Luce.
- In Othello: "an old black ram is tupping your white ewe," and the now-classic "your daughter and the Moor are making the beast with two backs."
- Of course, Shakespeare didn't really have a radar to get crap past. Many shows were openly bawdy.
- Plays did have to be approved and licensed by the Master of Revels, but Elizabethan censors were far more concerned with politics than with sex.
- And with religion: "the bawdy hand of the dial is upon the prick of noon" was perfectly fine, but "gadzooks" (God's hooks, or the nails that held Jesus to the cross) was pushing it.
- Not to mention Mercutio's little story in Romeo and Juliet.
- And then there's Malvolio in Twelfth Night when he looks over the Countess's letter and exults her handwriting, how "she makes her Cs, her Us, and her Ts, and thus makes her Ps."
- When performed at my high school, our director famously told our Malvolio for about half of his lines, "Insert appropriate inappropriate gesture here."
- It looks like this is the logical conclusion.
Toys
- There was a toy in the late 1980s that consisted of plastic rings with fighter jets on them. It, as well as the cartoon series it spawned, was entitled Ring Raiders. I can just imagine the dialogue that occurred at Matchbox R&D:
Executive: So, um, we need a new toy line or something.
Developer: How about a series of disembodied pair of legs that have a parrot perched on the pelvis and an eyepatch on the left arse cheek? We could call them Butt Pirates.
Executive: Maybe. Any other ideas?
Developer: How about Anal Invaders? I can't think of what they'd be, but the name's pretty good, right?
Executive: (nods approvingly)
Developer: OH! How about a set of plastic rings with fighter jets on them? We could call them Ring Raiders.
Executive: Perfect! And we can make it into a cartoon series somehow!
Developer: For fuck's sake, Gary, stop agreeing with me. I'm trying to lose my job before Mattel buys us out.
Executive: So am I.
- Mr Bucket. As well as the obvious balls-related innuendo, I'm sure that kid at the start of the advert says "Fuck it!".
- How has the Oozinator not made this list? Seems like just about everyone but the censors noticed it!
Video Games
- This troper is amazed that no one saw this in The World Ends With You.
Shiki: Oh, the Hachi Fest is amazing! You have to touch Hachiko and you get good luck!... If you touch him in just the right place, in the right way, your dreams come true!
- There's an even more obvious radar-dodge in the game's description of the Jelly Neocoustic monster — "Let this jelly violate your space, and that obscene tentacle may start violating your HP!"
- Not to mention that after you meet at Ramen Don during Another Day, and go to the Shibuya River, there's a scene where Beat and Shiki think Joshua, err, likes Neku, and Joshua, of course, plays along.
- Oh so "Playing Along" is what they're calling it nowdays hmm? Let's not forget that infamous scene in the manga where Josh take a photo of Neku's ass with his cellphone.
- In Banjo-Tooie, there is a chamber where cheat codes are entered. The top line reads "ESRA", the British spelling of "ass" spelled backwards (and possibly a thinly-veiled poke at the ESRB). Knowing the sense of humour favoured by the game's creators, the British company Rareware, this was probably intentional.
- K-A rated Mega Man 7 managed to get one usage of "damn" into a cutscene at the end of Shade Man's stage. It was amusingly Bowdlerized into "darn" in the Anniversary Collection rerelease, which was released on consoles where there was less to worry about in the censorship department.
- Related, and German: The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess (!) featured Midna (!) saying something along the lines of "wir endlich bekam dass verdammten Schlüssel" (I can't recall, actually — someone on a Midna fan forum once pointed this out, and I don't have the European version of TP) upon locating the Bedroom Key in the Snowpeak Temple, which translates to "we finally got that damn key". In a first-party Nintendo game.
- Also, in Ocarina of Time, the Poe Dealer says to Link, "If I had looks like yours, I'd be in a different kind of business."
- Possibly topped by Nabooru's offer to "give you something special" if you get the Silver Gauntlets for her in the Spirit Temple as a child. When you come back as an adult, she says that "if [she]'d known [you] would have grown up to look this good, [she] would have kept her promise."
- Super Mario Land 2 for the Game Boy features a world which takes place in a giant robot Mario, with the individual levels in Mario's shoe, head, etc. The theme of the level in Mario's crotch? Balls. Big, rubbery balls.
- In the Space Zone, Super Mario Land 2 also has a platform shaped roughly like a fist with an extended middle finger.
- Similarly, Super Mario Strikers somehow snuck in the very famous goal animation of Waluigi and his teammates performing a D-Generation X-style crotch chop. Waluigi could be written off as taken Refuge In Audacity, as he's meant to be a crude cuss (and because he sometimes aborts the celebratory action, as if to please the censors), while the rest of the team can get away with it, because they just look so silly doing it.
- This is pretty similar as well. In Super Mario Galaxy, there is a level where you have to crawl all over a gigantic Queen Bee in order to find the source of 'an itchiness' (star pieces). She writhes and has little ecstatic moans and giggles and says things like 'yes, that's the ticket!'. Can be seen here, starting at the 2:12 mark.
- While its dialog is mostly in modern English, Final Fantasy XII sometimes lapses into anachronisms like "nightsoil" to literally get "crap" past the radar.
- In Earthworm Jim 2, there is a bonus stage that in-game is referred to as "Secret Room Number 37", but is called something different in the manual: "Totally Forked".
- While Earthbound certainly got hit with the censor stick, they still, literally, got the word "crap" past the radar multiple times. A big deal for a 90s game from the Mario house.
- ...and let's not even begin to talk about Giygas.
- At the beginning of the game in the Onett treehouse, one of the kids says, "You're starting to become a man. I... I think I like you. ...Well, you know what I mean." And then there's Tony and his relationship with Jeff....
- The Smash Bros. series has been notorious for Panty Shots. Peach's trophy in Melee clearly shows pink lace undies. Zelda and Peach have had more carefully censored trophies in Brawl, but the character models in the games still appear to have them (extremely noticeable when Peach attacks by kicking her legs straight up.)
- Amy Rose's Brawl trophy isn't censored. That is, if you're into that sort of thing.
- Apparently, snapshots of Peach's panty shots were so prevalent that Masahiro Sakurai actually addressed the issue on the Dojo, saying that he would never publically post them on the site... ironically enough, the Japanese version of the update shows such a snapshot doing exactly that◊.
- In a gender-reversed example, the sheer amount of loving close-ups of Solid Snake's rear is either an example of this or even more evidence that Even The Guys Want Him.
- Not to argue, but that trend was prevalent throughout MGS 2 years before he appeared in Brawl.
- Talking of Snake, look at his Codec taunts. Instead of saying 'damn', 'hell' and 'ass', the characters say 'darn', 'heck' and 'butt' — but plenty of the conversations allude to horribly traumatic events or heavy sexual innuendo. Snake's dialogue for Zero Suit Samus basically ends with him complaining that he can't strip naked and grope her, calling it 'her loss' — and it got on the aggressively child-friendly official website as a promo. At one point, Mei Ling suggestively offers to teach Snake 'all the Chinese proverbs he can handle'. A few message boards around the time were also impressed that Nintendo of America was allowed to keep Snake vaguely scorning religion in a few of his conversations. And he considers killing and eating Yoshi.
- Donkey Kong Country 2 literally got "crap" past the radar (though, technically, it's K. Rapp), an alternate name for K. Rool during the Quiz Mini Game.
- Sometimes, all one needs is a well-placed black bar or two to get something past the radar but sometimes that bar doesn't stay placed all that well as was the case with the Naked Ninjas in the Sega Saturn game Three Dirty Dwarves. The Ninjas were quick while their censor bars were slow, making them the ultimate in Highly Visible Ninjas that make Mai Shiranui look downright prudish by comparisson.
- In the add-on to Medieval Total War, the ESRB apparently cringed at generals being described as "craven whoresons". However, their radar didn't twig on the Cunnywarren, last stage of the tavern line of buildings, until after the game was released. They've been quite angry at the Creative Assembly from then on...
- In Bionic Commando, not only is the villain at the end obviously Adolf Hitler (who calls you a "damn fool"), but when you kill him you get a close-up portrait of his head graphically exploding. Amazingly considering this is a Nintendo game from the heavily censored 1980's.
- Well, the original Japanese name was "Top Secret: The Return of Hitler." The US NES manual called the enemy faction the Nazzes, although it was changed to the Badds in-game. Besides it was Nintendo hard so it's not like many people actually got to the end.
- An old NES game called Kid Niki: Radical Ninja features, at one point, a mountain that resembles a fist with its middle finger raised. It was released in America, right in the middle of Nintendo's "everything has to be kid-friendly" mindset.
- One song in Elite Beat Agents is "La La", a pretty blatant Intercourse With You song. But on top of that, that level's mission is to help a Night Nurse white blood cell fight off infection — just what kind of disease is she fighting, anyway?
- Also in Elite Beat Agents, they got away with Gainaxing, female Clothing Damage, and references to pregnancy. The thing is, EBA is a Nintendo game.
- Osu Tatakae Ouendan gets some crap past the radar too, including the fact that you can see the cheerleaders' underwear, and also the "Bambina" stage. Here's an excerpt from the lyrics:
Don't let me down
My sweet baby Bambina
That night that I held you was a secret
When you get nude, your angel wings
Are exposed, Bambina
- The best part? The song plays during the level where you help a kid stop wetting the bed.
- Yoshis Island has the level "Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy". It's filled to the brink with fuzzy white seedlike creatures which cause Yoshi to have psychedelic hallucinations when touched, and induce a Meta Effect which makes Yoshi stumble around uncontrollably with a glassy-eyed stare and causes the screen to wave around so that the player can't judge distance correctly. The German version of the level is named Lustiges Sporen Drama.
- Despite the more childish art style used in the game, Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow had one notable item that went past the radar, and usually not spotted by fans: The demon Malacoda has an erect phallus that can only be seen when it's facing a certain way.
- I think that's just his tail.
- Nope, similiar-looking demons in Aria Of Sorrow also had their dongs hanging out in plain view if you were the kind of person to stare intently at 16-bit sprites to find something dirty about them. I doubt Malacoda's was erect though. But this is seeping into Fetish Fuel terriory so better take it there.
- In Symphony of the Night, the two statues surrounding the teleport portals had very visible (flacid) penises. One wonders how they missed that one.
- Regardless, once you reach the Final Boss, which is fought in hell against a truely squicky Body Horror, on top of a pile of naked screaming corpses (with a background), you have to wonder how they got the T ratng.
- The intro to one of the levels in Katamari Damacy has the King Of All Cosmos say "Russia is very large, but Our royal thing is much larger." This from the character who appears to be wearing a rather prominent codpiece.
- Also, in the descriptions of the items you pick up, the game notes that handcuffs are used when you've been very bad... or very good.
- Despite her young appearance, Lilith from Darkstalkers 3 has some surprisingly suggestive win quotes.
- In Samurai Shodown 2, when Cham Cham is confronted by final boss Mizuki, she says "Shit! You really make me mad!", which not only contains a cuss word, but is also surprisingly coherent given Samurai Shodown 2's general Engrish.
- In Sonic Heroes, Amy will sometimes say "Oh my God!" when she's falling in one level. In a game about colourful hedgehogs, foxes and echidnas fighting against an egg-shaped scientist. When the game is rated E.
- Notice that the game received flak for being too kiddy. Make of that what you will.
- Speaking of "too kiddy", an ongoing dispute since Sonic Adventure was released in 1999 rages: just what exactly did the singer say at 1 minute in to My Sweet Passion (Theme of Amy Rose)? Just listen to the lyrics all the way through. Consensus: "The Sphinx looked so cute, I had to shave it." In a sultry voice. And the song was long enough to be played during Amy's end credits sans lyric-masking dialogue.
- And in Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, one of the Dark Chao's special attacks is titled "Hell Bomber". In the Game Cube remake of Sonic Adventure, a mission description refers to Red Mountain Zone as "Hell". Also, Shadow The Hedgehog, a spin-off game from the series, is littered with overused swearing, contains blood and death, and features guns and vehicles as its main mechanic. It received an E-10. Meanwhile, a game about Mario, Link, Pikachu and Captain Falcon, among others duking it out, and a Donkey Kong game got a T.
- Well, to be fair, the E10 rating didn't exist around the time of Super Smash Bros Melee. No excuse for Brawl though.
- Also, to put Shadow into perspective, Maria's death was there ever since he was introduced in Adventure 2. It just played out like the Dead Little Sister trope. Also, the blood is purple, and from the Black Arms, an alien race.
- It was actually self-Bowdlerised because the developers didn't want the ESRB slapping a Teen rating on it.
- Red Mountain features imprisoned ghosts in the PC version. Sonic drowns them in lava.
- Sonic Chronicles managed to pack a bit in. Hoo boy, Rouge. And Amy: "You'll get Rouge germs all over you!" You'd think she'd be too old to believe Girls Have Cooties...
- Sonic Adventure 2 was rated E in America and 3+ in Britain, perhaps surprising when you consider that the lyrics of the Wild Canyon stage contain blatant references to Rouge being "sexy" and how Knuckles and wants to "get her with his tools" and is "feeling her in mysterious ways". Not to mention how they got away with those jiggle physics.
- And the final boss. It's a moaning, writhing beast which shoots lasers from its underside. Unintentional? Perhaps. But where's the Eclipse Cannon pointing?
- Space Station Silicon Valley contains the word "damn" during the briefing for the level, The Battery Farm, even though it is rated E/K-A. You know, for kids!
- Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2 mangaged to get suggestions of suicide past the radar. As well as overloads of Nightmare Fuel.
- Lego Batman(!) included a few such things. Most subtly (and most literally), there are little brown cylinder Lego pieces floating in the water of the Absurdly Spacious Sewer level. Then there's an image of the Riddler on the toilet as part of a "How Did That Get In There?" gag. And most shockingly, when the Joker gets thrown in jail he puts a gun to his head — before showing that it's one of those prop guns with the "BANG!" flag. But still, the Joker puts a gun to his head. In a kid's game.
- This pageless troper accidentally hit the "Skip" button at that precise moment.
- I don't know how many knew this one, but in Lego Star Wars whilst playing Slave Leia, holding the "action" button without interacting with an object (does not happen in the DS versions) will cause her to dance in a way that possibly should include a pole.
- Back to Lego Batman, the civilians who you rescue throughout the levels. Notably the women. If you look at them and the criminals before rescuing them, one of the criminals will be making out with the woman. The first time I came across this, I thought it was just some couple making out put in as a joke, but after I beat the men up I got the credit for one of the 25 rescues throughout the game, plus afterwards the woman just stands there looking extremely distraught and shivering. It's like G Rated Rape. In a kids game.
- Super Mario RPG: Legend of The Seven Stars has a variant of the classic Mario villains, "Shyguys." These versions are known "Shysters." Not very obvious to people who speak only English, but the name is phonetically identical to "scheisster"—German for "shitter." See the entry on Gulliver's Travels above for a more classical variation of this gag.
- Shyster is a perfectly legitimate English word describing an unscrupulous person (particularly lawyers) and is derived from the aforementioned German word.
- In the first Paper Mario game, one quest involves returning a "special tape" from Goompa in Goomba Village to Koopa Koot in Koopa Village. The contents of the tape are never mentioned, save that Goompa keeps it... well hidden.
- Happens in The Thousand Year Door too, only this time with a mysterious 'package', from one Goomba to another. Add to this the fact that this delivery is made in the back streets of Rougeport, and the Goomba who're you're delivering it for tells you not to be seen, well, it just speaks for itself really.
- Hell, this happens in the third game as well. Are the censors locked in a minivan somewhere?
- In Metroid Prime 3, one of the other bounty hunters — a shapely Shape Shifter — seems to be rather... interested in Samus. Her shaking hips and seductive voice seem to suggest that she's actually trying to seduce poor Samus, who doesn't seem to know how to react.
- In Ratchet And Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, Qwark's color commentary during Ratchet's arena battles provides some eyebrow raising moments. When Ratchet is fighting two huge enemies at once, Qwark mentions that he "Hasn't seen two on one action like that since the new Courtney Gears video hit the web" and also talks about himself starring in something called "Hero Sandwich".
- Even more blatant in the third game of the original series. The game was rated 3+ in the UK, despite getting a Teen (13+) rating Stateside. A contributor to this could have been the removal of the pun title. However, that doesn't change the fact there's an on-screen depiction of a sex toy and a reference to Ratchet being "good with his hands" (which he comically assumes is sexual). Oh, and this gem...
Captain Qwark: I'll bet your prom date came in a box that said "batteries not included"!
- For those who don't know, the pun subtitle for the US release release of the third game was "Up Your Arsenal", the second game had the subtitle "Going Commando".
- Don't forget the pirates in the fifth game, "I'll sing a shanty for girls in loose panties, for six pence I'll luv 'er..." I think this one is pretty self-explanatory.
- Metal Gear: Ghost Babel didn't even contain any swearing, didn't let Snake smoke, and hardly even used words like 'die' and 'death' (in a game about nuclear war) thanks to Nintendo censorship at the time, but manages to get away with an androgynous male villain complimenting Snake's 'beautiful' bone structure; the same androgenous male villain very viscerally describing a brutal murder/rape (without using either of those words and concentrating on descriptions of entrails); and a villain committing suicide by setting fire to himself and screaming in apparent orgasm.
- No swearing? I'm pretty sure the game had a fair share of "damn"s and "hell"s but I can't really say much about the other, more obvious subject matter.
- Score One for Ultra Games when Metal Gear, for the NES, managed to get away with not only letting Solid Snake smoke in-game (and it was good for him), but also with printing a picture of him smoking badassedly◊ in the manual. While that artwork was taken wholesale from the Japanese MSX Metal Gear manual, there was no reason that they couldn't have used the more innocent picture of Snake◊ from it instead, and it's impressive they managed to get it printed.
- In the Snake Vs. Monkey minigame in Metal Gear Solid 3, developed by Kojima as a child-friendly tribute to his young son (whose favourite game was Ape Escape), there's a monkey looking a poster of a bikini model while spanking himself.
- The MMORPG Ragnarok Online seems almost to be made of this at times. A cute, 2D sprites on 3D backgrounds setup, underneath which loiters not just Fan Service, but all-out Fetish Fuel for nearly all genres of Hentai, including Naughty Tentacles, BDSM, Lolicon, Gore, and maybe even implied Rape. One of its signature monsters is a little girl dressed in fox-fur gloves, hat, boots and bra... and nothing else. Nothing between boots and bra. One can only assume its miraculous Teen rating is thanks to the 2D sprites... though many seem to find that format evocative in and of itself.
- The US version of DDR Extreme included the song Highs Off U (Scorccio XY Mix) with the line "fucking you up every time". In an E game. How it did, we're unsure.
- It didn't go completely undetected, though — it was the only US release until DanceDanceRevolution X to get the ESRB "Lyrics" content descriptor as opposed to the "Mild Lyrics" of every other DDR game. Still, not getting at least a T rating is surprising (DDR X has an E10+ rating, for what it's worth).
- This is also the game that has "Little Bitch" in the song list, as well...
- To be fair, this is only in the Japanese editions of the game (yes, that includes the unlicensed-in-the-USA DDR Extreme ubiquitous in arcades). Fun fact: Little Bitch was one of the 11 songs in the very first DDR in Japan.
- Don't forget the "Sexy Planet" songs in some of the US games, which have whole sequences of 14+ orgasmic moans in a row.
- In Lunar at one point you ask for a diamond from a dragon. The Dragon's response?
Dragon: Diamond? What Diamond? Why is it that you humans prize those things? Don't you know they're made from my sh... Oh what's the use? Here. This is the Diamond.
- In the sequal, Lucia walks in on Hiro while he's taking a bath. Stark naked. And completely unashamed of it. Ruby blocks the good stuff.
- The opening mission in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is particularly Japanese-disturbing, as it involves searching for your pubescent assistant's panties (that are actually not "real" panties, but one of the props she uses in her magic shows. Not that the guy who stole them knew this).
- The "trophy girls" in Crash Team Racing. Not only do they have noticeable chests, but they also come with Jiggle Physics...in an E-rated game!
- The original game had Tawna Bandicoot, Crash's love interest, a tall she-bandicoot with blonde hair, a short skirt and large breasts. And that was the bowdlerised version! The original, designed to be "Pamela Anderson with a brain" according to Naughty Dog, had gigantic boobs and a skimpy bikini. This form somehow made it into the scrapbook of Crash Team Racing.
- In another example from Rare, development of Grabbed by the Ghoulies began with only a double entendre name, and the game itself is laden with innuendo. Fiddlesworth the groundskeeper is the source of much of it, with references to his nephew, Little Willy (who happens to own the water squirter weapon Cooper occasionally uses...), and his habit of frequently spouting vegetable-based euphamisms (some of which didn't make the cut, such as "rub my radish!"). Additionally, "Ghoulsville in the Gloom" was refered to as "Neede in the Nuts" before Microsoft deemed it too risqué.
- Unusually,Harvest Moon Cute let some things slide. Such as Kate saying "sucks" while arguing with her depressed father.
- Jak 3, despite the first one being relatively family friendly, and the rest targeted moreso to young teens, had this wonderful little exchange before taking part in a turret gun minigame:
Kleiver: I used to be the tall poppy on that baby. Wanna try to beat me score? Daxter: Oh, don't worry. Jak "beats" things all the time. Eh, Jak? (cue Dope Slap)
- One of the most blatant examples occurs in Michael Jackson's Moonwalker, with grabbing his crotch being one of the titular star's moves. The Angry Video Game Nerd did a mortified Lampshade Hanging in his review.
- In Breath of Fire 2, the Gold Fly says "damn" after you defeat it.
- The main character of Code Name: Viper looks like he's not wearing any pants because they happened to be the same color as his skin. Oddly enough, he is shown in intermissions wearing green pants.
- The intermissions (possibly NSFW) in the NES boxing game Ring King. Just look at it. That can't possibly be anything else other than what it looks like.
- World Of Warcraft has some...very interestingly posed rocks, textures, and models in certain places that look suspiciously like a certain piece of male anatomy. Examples (NSFW)here, here, and here◊. Of course, this could also be an example of people seeing what they want to see.
- Mega Man ZX Advent has a very slick example that you probably won't notice unless you know where to look. When Rospark is unfolded and hanging onto a vine/rope/cable, he has 2 large, pink, rods which are used in his electrical beam attack: one sticking up 45 degrees from his head, and another sticking 45 degrees down from his crotch in a VERY phallic manner, and... well... see for yourself: http://www.gamefaqs.com/portable/ds/image/937937.html?gs=58 (May be slightly NSFW) Apparently, the ESRB didn't notice, because as of May 16, 2009, the game is still rated E10+.
- Although the game is rated T, it's rather surprising to hear Cody and Rolento saying "Shit!" in Street Fighter Alpha 3.
- The Capcom game FLOCK! requires you to move sheep to the "Motherflocker." Yes. Motherflocker.
- The original arcade version of Super Punch-Out!! featured a character named Vodka Drunkenski. The NES version had him [[Bowdlerise renamed]] to Soda Popinski, which apparently was enough to get by Nintendo's strict policies at the time, since his in-between round dialogue snuck in lines like "I can't drive, so I'm gonna walk all over you!"
- Ar Tonelico. Full stop.
- In Skate or Die 2, our skater hero shatters into a dozen pieces if he falls off the ramp, and gets cut in half down the middle if he lands wrong on the middle "spine ramp".
- And speaking of that, how did the title make it past Nintendo's Never Say Die radar?
- Taboo: The Sixth Sense for NES. This game has nudity, and somehow, it actually managed to get licensed by Nintendo.
- Another obscure (but licensed) NES game, Arkista's Ring, features boxart with a somewhat Stripperifically dressed female protagonist.
- Legend Of Legaia got away with references to (heterosexual) anal sex and a character being compared (derogatarily) to a pimp.
- The second stage of Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars (an old Sega Master System game) features naked punk rockers as enemies who attack the player by shooting blue skulls out of their asses.
Web Comics
Western Animation
- The Simpsons had many examples of this, most notably in the episode "E-I-E-I-[Annoyed Grunt]", where the family drives past a sign advertising "Sneed's Feed and Seed — Formerly Chuck's". Or Springfield Heights Institute of Technology?
- Or the rather extreme example in "The Fat and the Furriest", wherein Homer creates a huge ball of cotton candy and caramel. After Bart and Lisa ask if they can have some too, we're treated to the sounds of them enthusiastically sucking and moaning over the candy while Homer says, in a creepy, low voice, "That's it, kids... suckle Daddy's sugar ball." Squick.
- Their very first episode, "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", started with "Santas of Many Lands". Lisa is Tawonga, the "Santa Clause of the South Seas". She bursts onto stage, holding two lit torches, a grass skirt, and a large African mask. She juggles the torches and dances expertly (perhaps seductively), then opens to her mask to reveal that ALL she appears to be wearing is a thin grass skirt, a small pink coconut bra, and a pearl necklace. The producers explained to the censors that she was wearing a flesh-colored body suit.
- Moe, after hearing a recorded request by a supposedly-dead Lisa: "I've never said no to a dead girl before"
- In another episode a pastry(twinky?) called "Mary Magdalene's Chocolate Orgasm" squirts chocolate far when bitten. Invisible to radar but still deafeningly loud...
- Rockos Modern Life, despite being a children's cartoon show in the mid '90s, had a virtual laundry list of innuendo that made it past the censors. Here are a couple of examples:
- In the episode "Canned", one of the jobs Rocko takes on is that of a phone-sex line, portrayed by him saying "Oh baby, oh baby, oh baby" in an unenthusiastic monotone to somebody on the other end. This was made even clearer when they showed both his and Mrs. Bighead's Oh Crap reaction when they recognized each other's voices (and with them both immediately slamming their phone down/clicking the off button) — much like anyone would if such a thing happened.
- In "Gutter Balls", Rocko, Heffer, and Filburt are seen playing a board game called "Spank the Monkey".
- "Closet Clown" was dedicated to Ed Bighead's secretive interest in clowning and discovering like-minded people, all of which is treated like a sexual fetish.
- Also this troper remembers a scene from the camping episode where Rocko is seen picking berries from a bush and then accidentally grabs a bear's genitals!
- It took this troper long enough (perhaps a dozen if not more) years to realize the whole gag of Ed Bighead not wanting Rocko's dog in his garden. It became evident when Ed was planning to kill Rocko & Co, and ended with "No more Spunky in my salmon bushes!" Spunky. Salmon Bushes. Let's hope you get it, too.
- Same troper just remembered this: In the episode where Heffer joined a sausage-obsessed cult (sigh), Heff was once made to do an on-air puppet show for kids using sausages. When Rocko discovered, he exclaimed "What the blazes?! Heff on TV? Playing with sausage?!
- The name of that episode? "Schnit Heads".
- One episode featured a scene in a hospital, where a call for 'Doctor Philiac, Doctor Necro Philiac' is heard.
- A Halloween episode featured Rocko and his friends watching a horror movie entitled "Night of the Shaved Kittens", a barely concealed reference to a particular grooming style of the female genitalia.
- Nickelodeon managed to catch on in a few cases, though: the episode "Leapfrogs", where Mrs. Bighead tries to seduce Rocko, was eventually stricken from the airwaves (though it occasionally returned in reruns on the original Nicktoons Network), and the creators of the show had to change the name of the fictional restaurant chain "Chokey Chicken" to "Chewy Chicken".
- In one episode Heffer is the victim of a milking machine, much to his enjoyment.
- The Credit Card Plot episode "Who Gives A Buck" — of which the title itself obviously refers to profanity — features Heffer watching a television show called 'All Scottish Show'. When the name of the show appears on the screen, the acronym it forms can clearly be seen.
- "How 'bout we trade math equations, baby?!"
- One episode involved Rocko chasing someone onto a nude beach and getting stuck between a woman's breasts.
- An eye doctor cupping Rocko's eyes and telling him to cough.
- "STARE INTO MY NIPPLES OF THE FUTURE!"
- One episode has Rocko getting a new, gigantic vacuum cleaner with multiple functions. One bit has Rocko pointing at a rebus-like design that shows a dog minus two baseballs as he says, "We'll try the neutering function later."
- In another episode Rocko goes to the hospital for a checkup for his cold a doctor called Dr. Bend Ova examines him, he reaches between Rocko's legs causing a pained reaction from him and the sound of a yelping dog is heard, he then tells him to cough and after he's done with that he puts on a rubber glove and tells him to bend over, we then see Rocko stumbling down the hallway holding his rear end in pain, a nurse comes into the room and tells the doctor "I thought we left you strapped to the bed!" and proceeds to tie him into a straightjacket while he laughs like a lunatic, implying that the doctor is actually an escaped mental patient.
- When Rocko has to buy Spunky a new dog bowl in one episode, the sleazy salesman invites he and Heffer to take a ride on a train through the store with the stipulation that they must "sit" "Doggy Style."
- In one called Clean Lovin' where Spunky falls in love with a mop when Rocko searches for him he listens to a noise in the closet which sounds like something being scrubbed on a plastic floor until it squeaks and Spunky grunting, he opens the door to find Spunky lying next the the mop with a relieved look on his face and a white puddle in front of him.
- Invader Zim has a violent image of GIR in duty mode covered in blood concealed as single frames inside several episodes. Supposedly as a retaliation for not letting the image be present in another episode. A search on youtube for "bloody GIR" turns up a variety of these that have been discovered.
- The '80s children's cartoon of The Legend Of Zelda is full of stuff that shouldn't have made it past the radar.
- The first scene in the first episode has Link staring at Zelda's cleavage. It's not just an animator's joke, either; it's addressed in the dialog. No, seriously. In a cartoon based off of a Nintendo game.
- The episode "The White Knight" has Spryte peeking at Link while he's bathing. She even comments that she loves seeing his naked body!
- It may be worth noting that the 80's Legend Of Zelda was shown in afternoon syndication, once a week, on Friday's no less, as part of the Super Mario Brothers Super Show, the one that had Lou Albano as the live-action Mario. Also, the in-show adverts for it never featured ep previews, just the same few clips over and over again. If any show was set up to get past censors, it was this one.
- Storm Hawks has a notable cast of strong female characters who tend to get... close. Most notably is in episode six, when Piper is attacked in a very peculiar manner by Master Cyclonis. She's on her back, with her legs spread, and Cyclonis thrusts forward with her staff. RAAAAEP! Also, in episode seven, Piper uses a low, seductive tone when talking to her (female) hero Starling, saying, "I can do other things too, you know..."
- Rocky And Bullwinkle is remembered fondly largely due to this trope.
Rocky: Bullwinkle, that's a team of girls! What kind of games can you play with girls?
Bullwinkle: Wow, this really is a kid's show. Parcheesi, of course!
- An episode of South Park managed to pull this off. In "Something You Can Do With Your Finger", the four main characters wanted to start a boy band called "Fingerbang" (under the false assumption that fingerbang meant pretending your finger was a gun). While holding auditions, Wendy, Stan's love interest, tries out. She sings a song that skirts curse words just barely, in the vein of a Miss Susie song ("Miss Susie had a tugboat, the tugboat had a bell / Miss Susie went to heaven, and the tugboat went to / Hell-o operator..."). This is quite notable because the creators managed to sneak in "Cunt" in the line "Balzac was a writer, he lived with Allen Funt / Mrs. Roberts didn't like him, but that's 'cause she's a / C[o]nt-aminated water can really make you sick..."
- A further example of how Messrs. Parker and Stone thumb their noses at censors can be found with the South Park movie Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. Every time they were asked to cut something, they would re-submit the film with a replacement "ten times worse and five times as long". The MPAA would then say "OK". (See link.)
- The Title was an example of this as well. The original plan was to call the film South Park Goes To Hell. The MPAA told them this was unacceptable (despite the existence of such movies as Hellraiser, From Hell, etc.). So they chose a new subtitle consisting of adjectives that could be used to describe male genitalia.
- A particularly extreme example is from the (already extreme) Sheisse movie sequence, if you know some basic German (i.e., that essen means eat...).
- The use of "cunt" also slipped under the radar in the episode "Raisins": Stan, after being dumped by Wendy, asks Jimmy to relay to her that she was "a continuing source of inspiration for him." However, Jimmy's stuttering problem caused him to stumble on a... less-than-desirable point in that statement.
Jimmy: Stan told me to tell you he thinks you're a cont...cont...cont..., you're a cont, cont, cont...
- Chinpokomon, resulting in much amusement to one troper's Japanese-fluent cousin.
- The repeated use of the muffled Kenny character in such things as the OPENING no less to sneak past extremely vulgar things. Any number of websites are devoted to it. In the first episode, for example, he describes how a dildo is used to the other boys. (No more than a few minutes in!)
- Not to mention the episode's title is a reworking of a certain well-known racial slur....
- Not really — "chinpo" is penis, and it's a play on that with Pokemon. It sounding like "chink" is probably just a coincidence.
- The anime-inspired (and mocking) fighting sequence from Good Times with Weapons features a Japanese-engrish J-pop song with Japanese lyrics extolling the singer's penis and how silly the song is.
- The episode "Eek! A Penis" had a mouse with a human penis on its back running around the town. No attempt whatsoever is made to censor said organ, even when it actually sings. Evidently if it's not on a human, it's acceptable.
- In the season 2 episode "Summer Sucks," Cartman takes swimming lessons. Because he doesn't know any of the usual swimming strokes, the swimming instructor tells him that he can "Doggie Paddle" across the pool—or, as Cartman puts it, "do it Doggie Style."
- But... this is South Park... when were there ever any censors?
- Even Comedy Central has its standards. The stronger swear words are usually bleeped, and there is (believe it or not) a limit to how far they can go on certain subjects, such as when the censors refused to let them show an image of Muhammad in "Cartoon Wars".
- Despite the fact that they'd already depicted him in the season 5 episode "Super Best Friends" without controversy.
- Super Best Friends was before the whole Denmark cartoonist incident, so there wasn't a problem with it at the time.
- And the episode "It Hits the Fan" blows away any pretensions of censorship while mocking them viciously at the same time.
- But to be honest, saying "shit" 162 times on primetime American television is not getting crap past the radar... it's closer to "beating the radar up and duct taping it's mouth shut so it can't go crying to its Mommy."
- In Canada, the show airs sans-bleeps late at night.
- A side benefit of their obscenely quick production schedule (many episodes are made in the span of 4-5 days) is that the network has to give in quite often, because the show won't be finished on time if they demand too many changes. Although they liase with the network throughout the week, there are occasions where the completed show isn't even delivered to the network until the day it airs.
- On a similar note, in The Boondocks Episode "Stinkmeaner Strikes Back", Roberts date is cut off half way thru the word "country".
- On another similar note, in the Family Guy Episode "And Bango Was His Name-O!", Quagmire goes on a cross-country road trip so he can have sex with a woman in every state. He advertizes this on his winnebago, but Stewie notices that he spelled "country" wrong...
- Either you're actually thinking of Stewie Grifin: The Untold Story, in which it's actually Brian who comments on that, or else the joke happened twice in the series.
- SG:TUS was split into three episodes for TV. The episode where this joke occurred was the "Bango" one.
- Or the episode where a lesbian club in Meg's school have a poster saying "C U Next Tuesday".
- Seth MacFarlane managed to get the term "Cleveland Steamer" into one of the episodes by telling the censors that he just made it up.
- In Tiny Toon Adventures, Buster and Babs go on a Fantastic Voyage into Furball's body to help a family of fleas. Among their adventures, they discover Furball's pleasure center and casually touch it. The result is effectively the cat having an orgasm.
- To say nothing of Fowlmouth's fondness for inserting the phrase "dad gum" into practically every line he had that wasn't completely bleeped out anyway...
- This troper recalls quite clearly an episode where Babs was drawn with obvious cleavage, and Fifi the skunk was literally buxom. If that's not enough... in the How I Spent My Summer Vacation movie, Fifi's boyfriend gets stolen away by what I can only describe as the Kim Kardashian of skunks.
- A Freaky Friday episode of Rescue Rangers swaps Dale and Gadget. Dale proceeds to examine his new butt... with his hands. Gadget-in-Dale notices quickly and orders him to "Keep the hands off the body!" Much to Dale's embarrassment (just in case you thought it was innocent).
- A different episode parodying James Bond films pulled a different whopper: After attempts to make spy gadgets have failed spectacularly, a dejected Dale, wearing only a bowtie is consoled by Gadget in her nightgown by putting her arm around him and saying "How about a little sleep, Dale?"
- That's not crap that got past the radar. Given Gadget's personality, that's a completely innocent scene being interpreted as crap that got past the radar.
- While tame compared to some things on this page, Rescue Rangers had its moments of "ew dirty!" here and there, including the unsavory implications of the obviously pre-teen Tammy the squirrel, a one-shot character, showing the adult Chip way too much affection. But my favorite would be this: Zipper, the team's mascot, of sorts, is a fly. Zipper the fly. Think about it.
- In a similar vein to Rocko's Modern Life, The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy — which has a somewhat mature concept to begin with — has a large number of episodes with innuendo in them. Similar to the above of the restaraunt, the episode "Hill Billy" has Billy visiting Uncle Chokey the chicken-juggler. In "Here Thar Be Dwarves", Billy is cut off reading writing off a wall that says "For a good time call—". In the episode "That's My Mummy" we find out Irwin's mother is a mummy. His Dad says, "You can't help who you fall in love with" and that their love withstand, "Leaving a lot of questions that don't need to be answered".
- In the children's cartoon Captain Pugwash, shown during children's viewing time on BBC TV in the UK, the Captain's crew were actually called: The Mate (usually addressed as "Master Mate"), Pirate Barnabas, Pirate Willy and Tom the Cabin Boy. Okay, "Master Mate" might sound like "Master Bates" if you weren't listening hard, and "Willy" is potentially lewd, but that's all. However, students' rag mags and other such publications soon started spicing up the names, introducing Master Bates, Seaman Staines and Roger the Cabin Boy. Ever since there has been a persistent urban legend that these were the real names. Many people even insist they remember hearing them on children's television. The BBC actually sued a national newspaper for printing this. (Snopes.com has the details.)
- The little whistling voices of The Clangers did occasionally whistle out swear words, including "Oh sod it! The bloody thing's stuck again!" from Major Clanger, this line drew some complaints from executives but was left in. The line was later used as the sound effect for many of the toys.
- Transformers: Beast Wars was particularly good at this. Words such as slag, frag, or scrap were substituted where a human might use harsh profanity.
- In addition, Rattrap had a habit of making comments that we're still not sure how they got past the censors. He invites Tigatron to come to a bar that he described as a "hole in the wall". Later on he invites Silverbolt to a bar where the females don't wear their chestplates and makes a sort of leering wink. After being upgraded to a new form, with the others staring at him, he goes, "Is my gearbox hangin' out or somethin'?" When Silverbolt comes back from an illicit meeting with the Predacon Blackarachnia and claims he was simply scouting the area, Rattrap sardonically replies, "Ooh, scouting the area, were you? Find any new... positions?"
- There is also the remark about a "positron break" when Cheetor developed his crush on Blacharachnia. Then there is the Ho Yay moments with RT... too many to list.
- In the episode "Dark Designs" when Waspinator is hallucinating about being Shrapnel and says the famous line "No, not wacko... Wonko! Wonko the Sane!" Look very, very carefully at where he puts his hand, and try not to fall off your chair laughing, like I did. The very best part is that he gets AWAY with it!
- "That guy must have bearings of chrome steel".
- Transformers Animated has the episode "S.U.V.: Society of Ultimate Villainy", in which Slo-Mo remarks to Nanosec after watching him zip in and out of a building to steal something for their benefactor, "I like a man who works fast," to which he responds "And I like a girl who takes it slow."
- Not to mention Prime's reaction to Sari's answer to his question as to how human reproduction works.
- And of course, Blackarachnia (who, it should be mentioned, has Cree Summer's sultry voice), in "Along Came A Spider", sneers, while fighting Optimus (effectively an ex-boyfriend, or a could-have-been ex-boyfriend), "Much as you'd love to give me a faceful of [fire-retardant] foam..." ('Cause, y'know, he's a fire truck.) And then, shortly afterward, he does. Yeah, it's white. And she does not like getting it in her eyes...
- The PG-rated 1986 Transformers movie is not only chock full of graphic Family Unfriendly Violence and Family Unfriendly Death, but also cursing, eg "Oh shit, what are we going to do now?" and "Open, damn it!" Of course, this was before they introduced the PG-13 rating, I think.
- The Powerpuff Girls: Sarah Bellum's home address is 69 Yodelinda (Yodel in the) Valley Lane.
- Sarah Bellum is practically an example in and of herself. The fact that she is only seen from the chest down has often been suggested as being a joking way of explaining that everybody is staring at her breasts most of the time. Blossom practically confirmed this theory in The Powerpuff Girls' Greatest Rainy Day Adventure Ever, in which she dresses as Miss. Bellum by stuffing a few of her stuffed animals into the breast of her shirt.
- And what about the guy who copies and mass-markets the PPGirls, Dick Hardly? Or the monster in the form of the giant red pointy hot rod, which turns into a robot that battles all the manly superheroes of Earth but proves invincible, declaring "The more manhood you bring against me, the harder I become!" Or the fact that said monster was defeated by the girls when they turned into a giant flaming cat and rubbed against him? I'm still not completely sure what all that was supposed to mean, but I'm damned sure it was something.
- Rowdyruff.net explains it best:
"The giant robot monster emerges and begins to GROW in size, threatening the MANHOOD of all the male superheroes. He challenges the other members to DISPLAY their MANHOOD and COMPARE it against his to see whose is LARGER. The battle only serves to EXCITE the beast. It FEEDS off the EXPULSIONS of their MANLINESS and makes him HARDER. The PPGs intervene by forming a giant flaming PUSSY cat and attack the villain. The PUSSY cat RUBS UP AGAINST the robot's HARD exterior making it HOTTER and HOTTER. Eventually the HEAT from the RUBBING reaches a critical point causing him to SCREAM OUT and SHRINK into a SMALLER version of himself. The male superheroes are so grateful for the PPGs' PERFORMANCE that they wish to SUBMIT to the girls' superiority. The girls PUNISH them for their behavior by making them wear dresses. Not too surprising considering how well their PUSSY WHIPPED that monster."
- And the episode where Professor Utonium goes on a date with Sedusa in disguise. The girls help him dress... and Buttercup tucks something small and square into his upper pocket, telling him he'll need "Some of these!" It's not his hanky, either...
- Also the episode where Sedusa replaces Ms Bellum, which features a series of visual double entendres — for example, "Ms Bellum" helping the Mayor sharpen a pencil while he gets a blissful look, then pulls back the pencil to discover only a nub left... which implies something, since the pencil is playing the part of a metaphor....
- That entire episode was full of this. It is, in fact, the same episode in which Miss Bellum's address is revealed (on her mailbox). This troper would like to point out that, interestingly, the episode was actually a parody of The Big Lebowski, right down to some of the dialogue...
- Him, 'nuff said.
- This troper found the very existence of such a villain in a kid's show to be a bit surprising, but then again, The Powerpuff Girls has never made any pretense of being strictly for kids.
- This troper felt the same way about Sedusa.
- Not to mention the fact that they were originally called "The Whoopass Girls".
- This troper's favorite line is from the Beat Your Greens episode where one of the girls announces "We'll have to swallow our pride and eat these guys to win!"
- Similar to the SpongeBob instance listed below, one episode featuring the Sandman and taking the format of an epic poem featured Blossom telling Bubbles that her "genius [was] showing". Bubbles proceeds to say something along the lines of "Where?"
- One episode involved an alien invasion that forced the girls to co-operate with Mojo Jojo, their nemesis. All of which is quite innocent. The title of the episode, however, was "Forced Kin".
- Season 1, episode "Major Competition". A new supehero arrives at Townsville called Major Man, and completely steals the girls' thunder. Later it is revealed that he started his own accidents and crimes to get the glory. In the end of the episode, the narrator gives us this:
Narrator: Aw girls, I knew he was a fraud all along! Major Man... I bet he wasn't that major... ahem!
- In the season 4 episode "Super Friends", a new neighbor moves in next door to the girls; while introducing her to the Professor, the following exchange occurs:
(the girls introduce their new friend Robin to Professor Utonium)
Buttercup: This is the Professor — he's sort of our dad. He created us in his laboratory.
Professor: Yes, uh — well, it was sort of an accident...
Robin: That's okay, Professor — I was an accident, too!
- When arguing over whether a squirrel they've adopted is a boy or a girl, Bubbles at one point disagreed with "Squirrels eat nuts, stupid!"
- At the end of the episode Cootie Gras, when Mojo was thrown in jail, a large, burly prisoner was looking down on him with a sly smile. The Narrator's quip? "Love is in the air. Can't you just feel it?"
- There was also that episode about Buttercup's poor hygiene: In on of her fights, she crashes against a large truck containing sewer water; said truck had the legend "We're Full of It!".
- In the episode, Jewel of the Aisle, a crook disguises himself as the Girls' gardner because they're having breakfast on their lawn, eating cereal from a box the crook smuggled a stolen diamond in. As the disguised crook rides past them on a tractor mower, he calls back that he'd like to have some of that cereal too. Buttercup replies, "Well throw that bad boy in reverse and come have some!"
- Seasons three and four of ReBoot were practically made of these moments. Such as:
- The characters enter a Dragon Ball/Pokemon-spoofing game called "Pantsu Hebi X". This literally translates to "trouser snake".
- Bob is wondering if he is himself or a copy and Cecil the waiter comforts him.
- Just... this:
Ray: You blokes look uptight. You should try logging off, it relieves tension.
- Speaking of Ray, ask any fan about his infamous box scene.
- In Season 1, Bob is captured by the pirate Captain Capacitor. Some graffiti on his cell wall includes the phrase, "Capacitor is flaccider."
- Another Season 1 example, featuring the first appearance of Mouse:
Mouse: We've got a mission to start. okay, sugah. And move it. Mah meter's runnin'.
Megabyte: Indeed.
- In an early Season 3 episode, Sonic the Hedgehog parody Rocky the Rabid Raccoon is stopped by a Binome in a trenchcoat who flashes him. A second after the coat opens, you hear a loud, meaty sounding thump as something hits the ground, Rocky's eyes bulge out, he screams in terror, and runs away. The Binome looks over his shoulder at the camera and winks.
- Complete with camera-shake!
- In the third season:
Herr Doktor: (regarding a captured Hexadecimal) I think she likes being tied up!
Megabyte: Let us not even think about that.
- In the first episode of the fourth season:
Hexadecimal: She expects too much from people. You need some down time. We... could go down together. Bob: Uh... that's a good idea, but I can't.
- The Mexican dub of Drawn Together has all the profanity beeped out. Sounds like Bowdlerization, right? Well... not really. Here's the catch: the beep is there so the censors can shut their mouths (and mind you, they often belong to the PAN, the ruling party, and they're quite powerful), but it's short enough to still let you recognize the cuss words. It's like writing motherf*cker instead of the full word.
- While producing the Looney Tunes shorts for Warner Brothers between the mid-1930s and 1946, the animators at the "Termite Terrace" studio threw in gags that obviously crossed the line, so the Hays Office would let more of their riskier gags into cartoons without being censored. (Presumably because they'd feel they had to give the studio a break sometime.) Some of the extreme jokes actually made it past the censors by mistake. (This makes this Older Than Television.)
- My all-time favorite example: in A Tale Of Two Kitties, the two cats are trying to catch Tweety Pie. One is standing at the top of a shaky, rickety ladder, while the other is down at the bottom shouting, "Throw the bird down to me! Come on, give me the bird! GIVE ME THE BIRD!" (To which the other mutters, "Ooooh, if the Hays Office would only let me...")
- Batman The Animated Series tended to use Censor Decoys, and quite a bit ended up getting through (makes you wonder about the stuff that got cut):
- Harley Quinn slowly emerging from a gigantic pastry, singing a Marilyn Monroe-esque Happy Anniversary song, and inviting the Joker to "try some of [her] pie". Uh, sure.
- Don't forget her asking Mr. J if he wanted to "rev up his Harley". Though this apparently was the censored version! (As opposed to "Ride On".)
- In the episode "The Man Who Killed Batman", Harley poses as a lawyer for Sid the Squid in order to break him out. When Harvey Bullock says that she looks familiar, she replies with "I think I served you a subpoena once. It was a small subpoena."
- In the episode "Legends of the Dark Knight", a group of kids are relating their stories about Batman, all of which are alternate takes on the Dark Knight. As they walk along a sidewalk,they encounter a long-haired, somewhat, er, effeminate boy in a violet shirt who is wrapping a mannequin's feather boa around himself. He mentions that his favorite things about Batman are his muscles and tight rubber armor, which he declares to be "Fabulous!" He also claims that the Batmobile can drive up walls. His statements are roundly dismissed as silly by the other kids, and they keep walking.
- The kid is named Joel. He's standing in front of a sign that says "Shoemaker". The whole scene is a Take That directed to Joel Schumacher, director of Batman Forever and Batman And Robin, infamous for putting nipples on the bat suit. (Schumacher is also openly gay.) This little scene is so close to character assassination that this troper is amazed it got through, and that it never resulted in a lawsuit or the like. It is, however, mind-blowingly funny.
- Not surprising. Joel's openly gay and obviously has a wicked sense of humor, so the man was almost certainly amused to the point of ROFL when it was pointed out to him. Besides, a man who slips nipples onto the Batsuit two movies after Catwoman was crooning about hard rubber "musculature" while running her fingertips up and down said suit will apreciate "tit for tat" for what it is.
- The episode "The Ultimate Thrill" features the villain Roxy Rocket, a former stuntwoman who commits crimes for the thrill of the chase. During the final scene, she and Batman are playing chicken on a rocket racing for a canyon wall. All the while, she is gushing over how Batman is the perfect man for giving her so much excitement. As the rocket crashes and they both seem to be plunging to their deaths, she screams out "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" in a manner very reminiscent of orgasm.
- She makes similar cries through the chase. It doesn't help that her straddling her rocket while facing Batman adds to the image.
- In one episode, Joker said to Harley and Ivy, "haven't you been busy little beavers"; this actually made it in, but the team chickened out at the last second and changed the word to "bees."
- In The Mask of the Phantasm, Joker greets an old crime accomplice by taking him on a monorail ride. After he puts the mafioso in the cart, he warns: "Now hold on to your hat and watch the valuables, it's going to be a bumpy ride. Mheheee!" As he mentions the word "valuables", he slams the cart's safety bar right down there. Ouch.
- The character of Penguin in The Batman lends himself to these.
- In his first appearance, he explains that he was abroad in the far east. As he finished that statement, a pair of attractive women walk in the room, prompting Penguin to remark with "Speaking of abroad..."
- In The Batman vs Dracula movie, when Dracula takes notice of Vicky Vale, a local news reporter, the Penguin confirms that she is attractive by commenting that she had "Nice Jugulars".
- Batgirl got a pretty good line in the episode "Two of a Kind":
Robin: The neighbors say that [Harley Quinn] went freely with the Joker. Wonder what he could want with her?
Batman: He saw a vulnerable person he could manipulate, someone good for a few laughs until he got bored.
Batgirl: And join us again next week when Batman analyzes the Freudian implications of Penguin's umbrella.
- Harley and the Joker happily poison fluffy little squirrels during their Falling In Love Montage in that episode. I bet writer Paul Dini had wanted to use that gag for a long time.
- Wait...what? Is there a Double Entendre I'm missing in there?
- Batman Beyond, in "Golem":
Nash: I'm sick of the mall. Let's go for a ride. Blade: You like that car more than me. Nash: Who's talking about cars?
- The children's show Histeria! got away with saying "War is Hell" (as a historical reference, it was a skit involving William Tecumseh Sherman). It was immediately (and humorously) followed up by a Moral Guardian network censor character explaining that it was not okay to say "hell" on children's television. It's still quite surprising that it managed to stay in the episode in the first place, though. A similar skit on the show had the same censor complaining about the use of Admiral David Farragut's famous quote "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"
- Also, at one point Mr. Smarty-Pants (a character who wears extremely high pants that go up high enough to cover most of his face) explains he has his name because he's smart, and because he "spends a lot of time" in his pants. You can't say that wasn't deliberate.
- Histeria! ran a segment with Mr. Smartypants titled "Things I Find in My Pants", in which he digs through his pants to find the Tricolor flag. Needless to say, network censor Lydia Karaoke is not pleased with this segment, but reluctantly has to go through with it when she's told that it's bringing in great ratings.
- In one skit, Mr. Smarty-Pants discussed Mr. Thomas *snicker* Crapper, who is credited with inventing the toilet, and the resident censor was not amused — not at Mr. *snicker* Crapper's name, it turns out, but just what was up with this guy and his pants?
- The "World's Oldest Woman" character also had her moments. One skit had her interviewed about one of her "old boyfriends", Sir Francis Drake — whose ship was called the "Golden Hind", to which she replies "Is That What Theyre Calling It Now? When I dated him, he called it the 'Golden Hiney'. He had a thing for tushies." There was also a skit where she played Cleopatra, that mentioned Cleo was bitten by an asp — "Hey, this is a family show!"
- The first "American Revolution" episode featured events from around the world at the time, including "Catherine the Great ruled Russia". The show's horse chimes in with, "I'll say." There has long been a false but very persistent rumor that Catherine had died while being "serviced" by a horse when a rope holding up said horse broke. Either the censor didn't get the joke, or figured anyone who got it was old enough to get it.
- In an episode of The Flintstones, Wilma is pregnant with Pebbles, and is close to giving birth. At one point, she informs Fred and Barney, who rush to get her to the hospital, making various mistakes along the way. Finally, Barney and Fred spirit Wilma into the hospital, but Barney moves so fast through the revolving door of the hospital, that Fred is spun out and across the street, through the revolving door of a hotel, and slams against the front desk. Innocently enough, he states the truth to the clerk, whom he thinks is a hospital admissions clerk, "I'm looking for my wife, she just came in here with my best friend." The Desk Clerk, responds with "Look, we don't want any trouble." Fred, not realizing the double entendre he's just made, says, "What kind of a hospital is this?" To which the desk clerk responds, "This is a hotel, the hospital is across the street."
- Cow And Chicken's The Red Guy (apart from the fact that he was basically, you know, Satan) was always a champion of butt-related puns ("Ben Panced", "Officer Pantsoffski", "Rear Admiral Floyd", among many other pseudonyms), but he may have crossed the line (twice) in one episode where he involved himself with an island tribe called the "Asswipe"- pronounced "az-wee-pay" (but showed up quite clearly on the closed captions).
- From the classic The Tick animated series, when Arthur meets with a woman whose father invented Arthur's signature moth costume. Apparently she's got the only other moth suit in existence, and she makes it clear that having both suits are the key to solving an important case, but she just had to word it thus:
"Arthur, there's something I need from you... in your pants."
- There's an episode of Dexters Laboratory wherein Dexter and Mandark face off at each other in their giant robots, ready to destroy each other. They open fire with missiles from their crotches.
- And there's another where Dexter and a nerdy friend of his, Doug (who, oddly enough, only appeared on the show in two episodes) are listening to a scientific program on tape while on the school bus. DeeDee, who's sitting behind them, unplugs their headphones from the tape player, so that the entire bus can hear the title of the next chapter: "Reproduction". DeeDee gasps in shock, then makes fun of them for listening to it. One kid on the bus even says "Yeah, well, that's the only way they'll ever learn about it." This troper, having not seen this episode since she was a kid, did a Jaw Drop (and had to keep herself from laughing) upon finally realizing what the kids were talking about.
- I'm absolutely shocked that no one has mentioned "Decode of Honor". There are two very hilarious moments that got me laughing in this episode...
- Firstly, DeeDee and Dexter get in a fight over their decoders, inadvertently switching each other's code sheets. DeeDee leaves, delivering the zinger "But Dexter... your club is for big I-D-K-S-Cs." Dexter translates the code, "I...D...K...S...HEY! I'm gonna tell Mom!" For those who only get it for face value, it's an anagram for "dicks".
- The second comes as DeeDee attempts to complete a task on her list; get a tattoo. She sits down in the tattoo parlor beside a wall of potential tattoo designs, one of which is A HAND FLIPPING THE BIRD◊.
- Never mind the half naked lady with enormous breasts.
- Dexter's Laboratory also literally gets the word, "crap," past the radar; in the episode where Dexter gets detention.
- How has no one mentioned the begining of the very same episode with the teacher opening fawning over a child in ELEMENTARY SCHOOL!
- At the beginning the movie Ego Trip, when Mandark sneaks into Dexter's house to steal the Neuratomic Protocore there's a shot of Dexter's parents' legs sticking up in the air, tangled together, with his mother moaning "Honey, I don't think that's gonna fit!" It then zooms out to show them playing Twister.
- Hey Arnold! has a character named Mr. Kokoshka who is a bit of a bum and has an accent (possibly Russian). "Kakashka" is the Russian word for "piece of shit" (also can mean lazy), and "kokoshka" is Bulgarian for "hen". This troper found the name "Mr. Piece-of-Shit" highly amusing.
- Hey Arnold also literally got "crap" past the radar once or twice. Helga said it in at least one episode, and probably more.
- In another episode, Helga recited some of her obsessive love poems in the presence of a parrot, which then flew off and almost repeated it to Arnold. The poem was standard fare for Helga; obsessing over Arnold, flowery language, and such. One line, however, went "you make my girlhood tremble, my senses all go wacky." Whether it's innocent or dirty really depends on who's listening.
- There was also a late-run episode in which Arnold found his father's journal. He begins to read his father's account of his wedding night, as Arnold's mother comes out wearing "nothing but a smile" — Arnold's grandfather quickly snatches up the journal and turns to a new entry after that.
- There was a similar episode where grandpa was telling a story about staying in a barn during the war, when the farmer's sexy daughter came to visit him during the night. Gerald's father cuts him off and tells him he'll have to tell him that story when the boys are in bed.
- There's also a theme park called Wanky Land that's mentioned in at least a couple of episodes.
- In the episode "Fishing Trip", Arnold's grandfather says something that sounds an awful lot like "For the hell of it," but what he actually says is, "Let's go fishing... for the halibut."
- Miriam's "smoothies."
- Mr. Simmons and his sexuality. It's not hidden, even though he's very obviously gay, yet not stereotypically so.
- There was also a special Veterans Day episode where Grandpa tells the boys about his time as a soldier in World War II. Not everything got past the radar; (for example, the swastikas were changed to frowny faces) but Adolf Hitler made a short appearance.
- This Troper had to do a Double Take in one episode ("Thank God for Sky+") where Helga was driving with her Mother and we found out at some point on the trip they went to a restaurant called "Wanky's".
- If this troper is remembering right, this is also the episode that ends with the "Susie had a steamboat" song.
- This troper remembers a Beach Episode in which both Mrs. Kokoshka and Miriam are invited by a typical Paolo to a stimulating dancing class. After hearing the "stimulating" part, they both giggle. And for the final blow, the class is only shown off screen, with the women saying "Ooh, you are so wonderful dancing!" Seriously, the Media Watchdogs weren't asleep — they were dead.
- In the episode, "Oskar can't read," watch the signs carefully as Oskar walks the streets. You can clearly see the word "piss."
- For a show that allegedly was trying not to appeal to older fanboys, Teen Titans was chock full of it. Starfire had one scene early on where in her indignation, her breasts bounce quite visibly, accompanied by a rattling-spring sound effect. And Raven... This contributor is convinced the show's creators realized they had a fanboy's dream girl in her, and just went all out. In addition to all the Fetish Fuel directed her way (as detailed on that page), she's had no shortage of moments that seem designed to remind us how curvaceous she is, including one shot that very clearly defined the bared portions of her half-covered buttocks. Even lighter moments have oddly mature implications, like when Beast Boy yanks her cloak off to do an Obi-Wan impersonation, and she throws her arms over her chest with a horrified look as though she'd just been stripped naked.
- There was also a scene where the Titans have collapsed into a pile. Starfire screams "Someone's claws are on my grebnacks!" followed by a suction cup sound and Beast Boy saying "Sorry, my bad."
- In case you were wondering, the suction cup sound was there because when they collapsed Beast Boy was in the form of an octopus. Oops.
- And the only part of an octopus that could be mistaken for claws are its beak.
- A scene that particularly shocked (and amused) this editor was during the episode "X". The team suspects Robin of being Red X, a new villain. After Starfire pokes him to make sure he isn't a hologram, Beast Boy points out that he could still be a robot, and tells Cyborg to "check him for batteries" which prompts Cyborg to dramatically pull out a white latex glove and hold his hand up in a very "cavity search" manner. A justly shocked Robin desperately asserts that it isn't necessary.
- The creepy subtext of Slade's partnership with Terra culminates in "Aftershock", when Terra disobeys Slade's order to fight and runs for her life from the Titans. Remember that when something is left ambiguous, fans always assume they're hiding the worst case scenario:
Terra: I made it! I'm alive! I can't believe they almost beat me... Slade: (backhands her across the room) That was nothing compared to what I'm going to do to you...
- Of course, that's nothing compared to "Birthmark", when Slade, acting as Trigon's Dragon, rips Raven's cloak and magically shreds most of her clothes. The scene does everything short of displaying a bright flashing neon sign saying Think Rape!
- This example is especially interesting when you recall that Raven herself is essentially the product of a rape.
- In "Can I Keep Him", Johnny Rancid taunts Robin saying, "Look at that, Bird Boy, my dog is kicking your..." Beast Boy turns into a donkey and kicks him, hinting at the greatest euphemism ever in a cartoon for a certain phrase that we all know (because we all know what the old English word for donkey is).
- There's an exchange in The Movie that might be innocent, or might not...
Cyborg: Looks like you're not a wanted man anymore. Robin: (holding hands with Starfire, and looking at her in an interesting way) I wouldn't say that.
- There's also the scene in the first episode where the pole cinderblock's holding goes limp and starfire giggles... ah impotence jokes... do they evber stop being funny?
- Watch "Kole", go to the scene at the end where Robin attacks a super-charged Dr. Light and listen hard. Somewhere in the generic grunting there's a "fuck it."
- Or in one of the "Titans East" episodes, when Speedy detectably refers to his adversaries as "motherfuckers", even though they were robots.
- Heck, the episode "Kole" itself. The plot is Dr. Light kidnapping a little girl. Dr. Light, who in the comic books is best known these days for being a rapist.
- In the episode "Mother Mae-Eye", Starfire is fighting See-More, but her sweater's sleeves are too long for her to use Starbolts, and she yells something along the lines of "You are not the only one with powerful eyes!" and shoots eye beams at him, to which he replies something about having eyes that can see through things. Starfire gasps and tries to cover herself with her hands. Seriously.
- "So payback's the sitch." The immortal lines Kim Possible utters in the final episode. She does a similar play on words talking to Bonnie.
- Superman The Animated Series, of all shows, had some of this. Most blatant was during "The Main Man, part 2", where Lobo says, as Superman leaves him behind, that he's going to kick Superman's "big red S".
- Really? And you don't say a thing about how, when Lois first meets Superman, the first thing she says is "Nice 'S'!"?
- In the same episode, Lobo describes how he and Supes would be tied down and tortured, and throws in an aside how it would be enjoyable under other circumstances.
- In a different episode, Parasite reaches to grope Livewire — ostensibly to absorb her powers. But the whole scene, complete with Livewire shouting, "I said no!" comes off like a creepy rape metaphor, but the Media Watchdogs allowed it anyway.
- Hell, Livewire had a Double Entendre pretty much every third line.
- In the same episode, Superman's solution to combat both Parasite's skin to skin power stealing powers and Livewire's electric powers is a (clear) full body latex body suit. Livewire takes great delight in the fact that Superman is wearing "Protection".
- In another episode, when Luthor is unveiling a new weapons system that unexpectedly fails, Lois heckles him: "What went wrong, Lex? Premature product launch?"
- The second episode: young Clark informs Lana Lang about how he is seeing through things, she askes if he's looked towards the girls locker room.
- In still another, Lois and Jimmy are digging through a pile of plush toy monkeys and squeezing each one in an attempt to find one that will play a particular song to calm down Lois' rampaging giant pet chimp, Titano. Jimmy expresses doubt that they will ever find the correct toy; Lois snaps, "Shut up and keep squeezing the monkeys!"
- this Troper thinks that was more of a Shout Out to Wizard Magazine which at the time had a reocurring character named Keep Squeezin Them Monkeys Lad
- Similarly, creepy villainess Granny Goodness once spouts the line: "You naughty little monkey! Granny will spank you good!"
- To get the full Nightmare Fuel effect, realize that Granny is voiced by Ed Asner...
- In the first story of Gargoyles, Goliath asks to be turned to stone with the same spell that the Magus cast on his surviving clan. Since the escape clause of the spell is the seemingly impossible "Until the castle rises above the clouds", what he is requesting is basically assisted suicide. The fact that the story jumps ahead 1000 years to see David Xanatos fulfill that condition and release them hides that fact.
- Let's not forget that most of the Gargoyles are, well, mostly naked. And at least once (with Angela) there was enough slip with the back-flaps to reveal that they're not wearing some improbable underpants under there. So yes, our heroes are flying about the city with it all hanging in the breeze.
- It's slipping cultural crap past the radar, in fact. Clan Manhattan and Angela were all raised in a medieval Scots manner, the boys actually in medieval Scotland, Angela raised by the Magus, Tom, and Princess Katherine (all from that same era) on timeless Avalon. In short, every single one of those gargs (and, likely, Demona) is playing up the old joke/Urban Legend on what Scotsmen wear under their kilts.
- Ahem... "[...]joke/Urban Legend"? THIS. IS. SCOTTLAND!
- Kappa Mikey's fuzzy sidekick Guano, who can speak English but only ever says "Guano! Guano!" during Show Within A Show LilyMu. Guano is a synonym for crap.
- Johnny Test is more clever; Johnny's dog is called Dukey. Which is a spin on "Duke" as a perfectly normal name for a dog. But the pronunciation is "dookie" which is also a synonym for crap.
- When his dad says "Why can't you be more like your sisters?", Johnny says, "Well, for one, I have a—"
- Courage The Cowardly Dog had "The Mask", where Courage helps a female cat reunite with her friend Bunny, a female rabbit. The subtext of the episode was that the rabbit and the cat were a lot more that "friends" with the rabbit's dog-pack-leader boyfriend wanting to kill her for the "friendship". Very much Parental Bonus.
- Creepy show got more than Hot Skitty On Wailord Action past the radar.
- This troper thought she saw the emergence of Naughty Tentacles during "Last of the Starmakers" when she believes there was Space Squid Sex early in the bit.
- Total Drama Island literally got "crap" past the radar in the talent show episode. The same episode also used the "poor-quality" definition of "suck" just a few minutes later!
- To say nothing of Heather's (pixellated) nudity in a later episode (and the subsequent use of "boobs").
- 6teen snuck "crap" and "suck" in as well. Quite a few times, actually.
- The Spectacular Spider Man had a good one. Yay Double Entendres!
Mary Jane: ... but if I can't dance with Pete, I guess I'll dance with... it's Randy, right?
Rand Robertson: Very.
- In "The Uncertainty Principle", Liz says to Peter (who is "dressed as Spider-Man" for Halloween) that he can web her up anytime.
- In the "Persona" episode, where Black Cat says "You'd better not get your goo in my hair". She was talking about Spidey's webbing of course, but considering how Spidey/Cat is textbook Dating Catwoman...
- The second season episode "Reinforcement" had Spider-man going up against Mysterio in a good ol' Sinister Six Showdown, and Spider-man mentions how ego-the-size-of-Florida!Mysterio is a master of "premature gloatulation". SPIDER-MAN: SUBTLY GIVING YOU INSECURITIES IN BED SINCE 2009.
- Another second season gem, MJ on New Year's Eve. It's the wink after she says this line that does it.
- A particularly sneaky example was pulled off by Stan Lee early in Marvel's history, when the first cartoons based on their comics were being produced. One line of the theme is "exotically neurotic and aquatic superhero", according to the official lyrics sheet. Listen from 0:14 for any trace of an N sound.
- As the theme song itself notes, the Cattanooga Cats were "doin' their thing" back in '69! Check out the lyrics to these songs:
- Animaniacs snuck in quite a few. In general, every time we hear the line "Good night, everybody!" Here's a sample.
- In their version of Jack and the Beanstalk, Wakko plays the girl-harp, electing a sound that could charitably be called laughter, and ending in "That tickles!", but sounds rather like something else, If You Know What I Mean.
- And the number 1 (of 11) moment:
Yakko: Alright everyone, look for prints.
Dot: I found him! (pan over to Dot carrying Prince) I found Prince!
Yakko: No, no, no, fingerprints.
Dot: (stares briefly at Prince, than back at Yakko) I don't think so.
- Underdog's arch-enemy was named Simon Bar Sinister. In heraldry, the "bar sinister" is popularly considered to be the sign of an illegitimate offspring — thus, his name really means "Simon Bastard".
- Ben 10 Alien Force:
Julie: Well, I'd better hit the shower.
Ben: Me too.
- In a recent episode with an alien stuck with Ben as a default form goes on a rant about the horrors of being stuck in a teenage male human body. The rant ends with:
Albedo: ... and scratching myself in places I suspect are inappropriate!
- When they said this series would be Darker And Edgier, who'd have thought they meant Split Personality sexsomnia and Mister Seahorse?!
- Then there's a recent episode where Ben and Gwen's grandmother is introduced and revealed to be an alien. There's a climactic battle where the trio is fighting grandma with this gem of a line:
Kevin: Dude, I don't know if I can pound your grandma!
- In a recent episode, the team is on the moon, using spacesuits originally meant for an Arachnichimp, meaning they have an extra set of arms.
Kevin: What am I supposed to do with the extra arms?
Ben: You never used to have problems using your arms. That's what the girls say!
Kevin: Which girls?
- While on the subject of Ben 10...
Ben: I'd rather clean Vilgax's teeth with my tongue!
More Western Animation
- Justice League and the follow-up Unlimited series include so many of these moments, and some of them so blatant, that one almost has to wonder if the censors were paying attention at all (or maybe they were feeling lenient). For whatever reason, most of these involved the youngest members Hawkgirl and Flash.
- "In Blackest Night" had a rather humorous exchange between the Flash and Hawkgirl once that went over my nephew's head... my sister told me not to explain it:
Flash: ...That's right, fastest man alive!
Hawkgirl: Which probably explains why you can't get a date.
- Basically the same joke in reverse: reporter Linda Park reveals her Flash-fangirl side in "Flash and Substance" when, describing him in glowing terms, compares Flash to "like, the whole track team at once." On the air.
- In "Fury", where a deranged Amazon attempts to commit Gendercide:
Wonder Woman: [Men] can't possibly be that essential to your life.
Hawkgirl: Don't knock it until you try it, Princess.
- A delightful exchange between fire-type villains Firefly and Volcana in "Only a Dream".
Volcana: That's your flame thrower?
Firefly: Wait'll you see how I use it.
(Makes a brief and crappy show of it before getting shot at and running back inside. He stands before Volcana looking ashamed and she pats him comfortingly.)
Volcana: It's okay sweetie.
(She immediately torches up the place while Firefly watches with raised flamethrower.)
Firefly: I think I'm in love. (shoots a burts of fire from his gun on the last word)
- Similar to one of the above Teen Titans examples, in "The Savage Time" when the team is thrown into a pile while riding alternate-Bruce Wayne's rocket train (long story), the following exchange occurs:
Hawkgirl:: ... Whose hand is that?
Flash: (pulling his hand from what almost certainly was her ass) Sorry!
- Speaking of which, one of the New Gods in "Twilight" evidently slaps Wonder Woman's ass just off-screen to provoke her into chasing him.
- Then in "Hearts and Minds", Hawkgirl slaps Green Lantern's ass on-screen, to punctuate her encouragement that he resume his training in his Psychoactive Powers. Considering that earlier, Katma Tui blatantly called his power loss "emerald impotence", (even Flash had to leave the room after hearing that one) GL probably needed the reassurance.
- In the episode "A Better World", a conversation between the Alternate Universe versions of Hawkgirl and Green Lantern ends with Hawkgirl asking if he sleeps better, and Green Lantern replying, "You know I do."
- Let's not forget Huntress confronting Question after a theft, and, wanting some alone time with him, taking the computer disk he has just stolen and tucking it into her non-cleavage Victorias Secret Compartment, complete with closeup as she does!
- Princess Audrey, trying to get Wonder Woman to go clubbing: "I'm a world class party girl. I intend to go out with a bang. Several, if it can be arranged." It's like they're not even trying. (To say nothing of the Les Yay between Audrey and Diana.)
- At the end of "Double Date", after The Question confesses that he helped Huntress because he likes her, Huntress then drags him by his tie off screen to "thank" him. Two guesses what happened. Black Canary knew:
Black Canary: No offense meant, but ew.
- And then there was the time Vixen ambushed Green Lantern by pulling him into a side room with hope for some alone time. (Remember that Vixen is voiced by Gina Torres, who... well, I'll be in my bunk.
- In "Secret Society", as the team starts in-fighting, Hawkgirl nearly calls Wonder Woman a stuck-up bitch but is cut short.
- In "The Balance", Hermes delivers to Wonder Woman a message from Zeus to invade Tartarus.
Wonder Woman: He's telling me to go to— Hermes: Basically.
- Don't forget when Hermes accidentally gives Diana the wrong missive: "For a good time, call Podemanus...?"
- Later in the same episode, the ladies are deep in Tartarus:
Hawkgirl: ... You haven't even broken a sweat.
Wonder Woman: What? I do sweat.
Hawkgirl: Oh please, you practically glow. I wouldn't be surprised if you never have to... (cutoff)
- In "Hunter's Moon", Hawkgirl and Vixen have a conversation about Green Lantern, and both of them mention that they've seen the inside of his underwear drawer.
- There's a scene in "Epilogue" where Waller tries to explain that she obtained Batman's DNA (for one of her late genetics experiments) from blood he left at the scene of a fight:
Waller: It was easy to get a DNA sample from him; he left it all over town.
(cut to Terry giving Waller an awkward stare.)
Waller: Not even remotely what I meant.
- Given that Terry had by that time read up about Bruce's old playboy act, this is getting crap past and yet another way of hooking the Batman Beyond series to the older shows one more time, AS the fat lady (Waller) is singing.
- Hawkgirl on Flash gazing at his new crush Fire (talking to her gal-pal Ice): "Of course, you may be wasting your time. I hear she's, y'know... [long, Flash-panicking pause] Brazilian."
- In "Shadow of the Hawk", while visiting an archaeological dig the day after their first date, Carter Hall tells Hawkgirl that he misses the dress she wore. Hawkgirl replies, "You didn't miss it last night."
- And we can't forget "Grudge Match" when Huntress is on the phone with The Question and she tries to have phone sex:
Huntress: So... What are you wearing?
Question: (sigh) Blue overcoat. Fedora.
Huntress: You really stink at this, you know that?
Question: ... Orange socks?
- Considering that "Grudge Match" was basically one long Cat Fight scene, the censors probably failed on more than one level.
- Believe it. And it shows Question's wit, as he was likely having Huntress on to start with. Orange Socks? There are restrooms all over the world dispensing brightly colored condoms for the use of the lucky and brave. (Dare I even say ballsy?) With Question, the man wants people to be as conspiracy-aware as he is, and having at least two levels of conversation with his girlfriend to drive a point home is utterly in character for this guy.
- The Freaky Friday-suffering Flash is implied to have sex with supervillain Tala while in Lex Luthor's body. Quoth the Flash after Tala pulls him aside (off camera) to "rest": "That's not very restful." She also implies he's better than Lex because he's gentle. (There's also a strong implication that Tala had previously slept with Grodd, who is a sapient gorilla).
- Who can forget the Grand Finale close-up of Luthor's rapturous face as he exclaims "Brainiac, I'm coming!" Hell, the entire Brainiac/Luthor relationship has more Ho Yay than you can shake a stick at.
- And there is also the exchange between Green Lantern and Flash after the latter appears in a commercial for a power bar. The Flash uses the money he receives to buy (of all things) a van:
Lantern: Why do you need a van... wait, I don't wanna know.
- The Atom. In Wonder Woman's cleavage. That is all.
- Also from—
- NO! That is all!
- The episode "Knight of Shadows" included Wonder Woman and Flash rescuing a magazine publisher who was very obviously a No Celebrities Were Harmed Hugh Hefner at his
Playboy mansion. Wondy gets propositioned, and Flash insists he buys the magazines for the articles.
- A more serious example, thanks to careful editing, is the scene where Aquaman cuts off his own arm and they blatantly say that he did it! Also, "A Better World": parallel Superman using heat vision to kill Lex Luthor, when the camera cuts away and only returns to find a horrified Wonder Woman.
- This exchange from "Hereafter":
Wonder Woman: You're no Superman.
Lobo: The ladies say different.
- A Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends episode has Bloo, after an unsuccessful attempt to glue together Madame Foster's stone bust of herself together again when he breaks it using toothpaste, stating "A bust this big needs ample support!"
- In a latter episode, Coco tries to get a single-room after Eduardo already asked for it. When Mr. Harriman claims that Eduardo needed it more, Frankie starts to object and is about to explain, why a girl can't share a room with three boys when the scenario just switches. Once we are back at Harriman's office, he's sweating and utters something along the lines: "I-I-I never knew there were so many... special "needs" for women.... Ms. Coco gets the room." Frankie Foster smiles delightful and a bit mischivious. We are left to guess, what she just told him about girls... Not that we couldn't guess.
- WITCH had a couple of jokes relating to the girls receiving a certain kind of "enhancement" during their transformations; From the one-hour series premiere "It Begins/It Resumes":
Hay Lin: (looking at her new wings) What do we have behind us?
Cornelia: (looking straight down) What do we have in front of us?
- Being made by the same people behind Rockos Modern Life, Camp Lazlo naturally has more than its fair share of radar evasion. A personal favourite comes from an episode where the three main characters make hot dogs for their camp-mates, with Raj in charge of making the hot dog buns.
Raj: Who would have thought that my buns would cause this much excitement?
Lazlo: You have very nice buns, Raj.
- The Codename Kids Next Door episode "Operation: G.R.A.D.U.A.T.E.S." features all of the good guys save Numbuh Two's little brother being transformed into animals by the series arch nemesis, Father. As this happens, two Kids Next Door operatives witness The Libby type character Numbuh 86 get transformed into an Irish Setter. Their only response: "Well that figures."
- In an episode of the original GI Joe cartoon series, Lady Jaye disguises herself as the Baroness to infiltrate Cobra's headquarters. She then gets into a little exchange with Destro in the following conversation.
Destro: See me in my quarters when you are done, Baroness. I have some interesting hand-to-hand combat techniques to show you.
Lady Jaye: (speaking with Baroness' accent) Oh, I could get a real kick out of that.
Destro: That playful little minx.
- Made even more blatant if you consider that in the comic books, Destro and Baroness were secretly married.
- For Nightmare Fuel or Fetish Fuel, add in the fact that Lady Jaye is Destro's somewhat removed cousin! ("Lady" ain't just a codename, though she doesn't have a formal title.)
- In the Fairly Oddparents TV movie, "School's Out!", Jorgen refers to the pixies as "conedomes". I don't think the word made by removing the Es was accidental...
- Probably was a mistake. Though they got dozens of dirty stuff through. Like once I heard Wanda use the word piss during Abra-Catastrophe. Either I wasn't listening right but I could have sware I heard Norm say "Damn it." Seems Ren and Scampy have a censor breaking friend.
- One episode of Chowder featured Panini and Chowder both taking care of the same blue not-a-banana-honest food as if it were a baby (it turns out actually be alive at the end). After they're done feeding it (squirting milk onto its peel), Panini tells Chowder to kiss the banana. No, definitely not a blowjob reference.
- Not to mention Endive spending most of "Schnitzel Quits" hitting on Schnitzel (who was working for her) and even has him being her pool boy.
- "Sing Beans" features a scene in which Mung, Shnitzel, and Chowder each tell jokes to pass the time while waiting for the sing beans to cook. Before Shnitzel tells his joke, he tells Mung that it might not be appropriate for small children, to which Mung assures him is fine. Shnitzel's tone changes to that of a suggestive one as he tells his joke, making equally suggestive movements with his fingers until Mung is fanning himself from the "heat", saying "Shnitzel, you naughty boy!" The joke of course goes over Chowder's head, and Mung tells him he'll explain it to him when he's older. The troper immediately thought of this trope as soon as he saw the scene.
- More details on Chowder's page on their other censor breaking stunts.
- SpongeBob SquarePants' frequent Ho Yay with either Patrick or Squidward is common enough, but in the episode "The Many Faces of Squidward", Squidward gets plastic surgery after Spongebob breaks his face by accident. SpongeBob's obsessive worry over Squidward's recovery, coupled with Squidward's new face being extremely handsome, makes for a particularly interesting episode. Then Squidward runs into SpongeBob's house in a towel and begs him to break his face again to bring him back to normal, to which SpongeBob replies: "But I could never hurt you, Squidward!"
- Also this bit of dialogue:
SpongeBob: Patrick, your genius is showing!
Patrick: Where?! (covers crotch)
- The writers must have chloroformed the Media Watchdogs for the "Karate Island" episode. It's not the #1 most popular episode because kids get any of the jokes.
- This cleverly hidden joke in an episode in a comic book store:
SpongeBob: You can't always trust ads in comic books. Those X-rays specs I ordered couldn't see through people's skin at all, only their clothes!
- Another little gem from when SpongeBob and Patrick go out to work in a new submarine rehashed to become a portable Krusty Krab:
SpongeBob: Goodbye, Squidward! Goodbye, Mr. Krabs! Goodbye, Squidward! Patrick: Wait, why'd you say goodbye to Squidward twice? SpongeBob (happily and quietly) I like Squidward.
- In the episode "Rule of Dumb", a clerk from the Royal Ministry informs Patrick that he's a royal heir; the clerk announces, "I have something to show you," and reaches for a document—by holding open his trousers and rummaging around inside them (while SpongeBob and Patrick exchange a glance).
- Then there's the episode where Squidward teaches an art class:
SpongeBob: (showing off his artwork) Look, Squidward — it's you and me playing leapfrog!
(Squidward angrily tears up drawing; SpongeBob rearranges the torn pieces to make another image.)
SpongeBob: Look, Squidward, we're playing leapfrog again! Only this time, you're on top!
- In the begining of The Movie when Mr. Krabs whispers to Spongebob that he didn't get the manager promotion, Spongebob asks: "I'm making a complete what of myself?". When he whispers again, you can hear him say "jackass". Let's not forget to mention afterward, when Spongebob and Patrick get drunk off ice cream. Hang over included.
- I recently had my own Swiss Moment regarding Spongebob Squarepants: the karate running gag between Spongebob and Sandy makes a lot more sense (and is a lot more subversive) when you consider that 'karate' is clearly a euphamism for something else entirely. The clincher was the sequence in the woods in 'Karate Choppers': if that wasn't a metaphor for UST, I don't know what is. Especially that shot of Spongebob lounging against a tree basking in what can best be described as a "glow"...while Sandy chops wood with her hands. This actually puts a new spin on several gags, come to think of it...
- Disney's The Weekenders has done this quite literally on at least one occasion where Carver states that he wants to be CARP, Cool And Radically Popular, to which Tino responds "It's a good thing you don't want to be Cool RICH And Popular."
- One of the Garfield animated specials, Babes and Bullets, had Garfield in a Film Noir story playing Private Detective Sam Spayed:
- The same special also essentially had Garfield get laid. Twice. By human women. The first time, in typical noir style, the sexy female client invites Sam Spayed to "have a little milk with her", and he reacts much as if she'd invited him in for coffee. At the end, his secretary picks up a pair of glasses and a bottle of milk, sashaying into Sam's office while throwing a few fanservice poses, inducing an "oh wow" reaction from Sam.
- The original comic-strip version (part of the book version of Garfield: His 9 Lives) had the line "It isn't easy being a private dick with a name like Spayed".
- In Garfield's Halloween special, when Garfield and Odie go inside the haunted house and see the old man Garfield jumps up and shouts something that sounds like "AHH RUN FUCK IT!" it is unconfirmed if he actually saying this.
- An episode of Rugrats has Tommy say he needs something hard and thin to put through the Chinese fingertrap in able to take it off his fingers. He then puts his hands into his nappy... to get a screwdriver, but even so...
- More outrightly disturbing is the episode when the babies decide not to wear clothes anymore. After the twins strip naked, Tommy says, "Uh, Lil, can I ask you a question?"
- In the same episode, Didi is trying to tell Betty that the nakedness is a natural stage for babies to go through. Betty is not sold on this, saying, "The sixties are over, Deed, and we lost!"
- Interesting episode isn't it. Still funny.
- An even better (or worse) line occurred in the episode in which Chuckie became obsessed with playing with an inflatable clown doll named Boppo to the point of ignoring the other babies. Says Phil, "A kid his age should be outside playing with his friends, not sitting alone in his room bopping his Boppo." Cue massive Double Take.
- Also, in the movie, Charlotte says that she just knew Didi was going to have a boy, with the following line: "You know what they say: born under Venus, look for a—" (At which point her cell phone rings and interrupts her.)
- Um, Doctor Dr. Lipschitz.
- That's a reasonable Aschkenazi name. Funny, though.
- And what about Boris grabbing his phone and calling Dr. Kevorkian during home movies.
- The (regretfully) short-lived Road Rovers had quite of bit of these, taking advantage that the main characters are essentially dogs. Just to mention a few:
Exile: I give all my comrades big kiss!
Blitz: Stop with the kissing, or I'll start with the biting.
Exile: OK, I give you big bear hug instead!
Blitz: (straining) Go back to the kissing! Go back to the kissing! Kiss me! Kiss meeee...
Exile: Don't be a weird boy.
- In Garfield And Friends, "Sooner or Later", a disguised wolf sells Roy on the idea of... procrastination, but not before Roy protests, saying, "You can't talk about that on a cartoon show!" A similar response is voiced when Roy starts by spreading this radical new idea to Wade.
- A goldfish/pimp-themed villain in Yin Yang Yo gets away with shouting "Bitches!" in reference to his antromorphic dog henchwomen.
- Danny Phantom has this little tidbit:
Sam: You'd scream, too, if you were stuck in a sleepover with [Paulina].
Danny: Actually, I kinda doubt that.
- There was also a little scene in "Bitter Reunions" where an adult was bouncing around with a lamppost on his head. I don't need to elaborate further on what he's been drinking.
- Vlad's line in "Livin' Large": "That sounds fun, akin to sticking hot needles in my—" The inquiring mind wonders on what he was going to say.
- The short-lived (and by this, I mean 6 episodes long with only 2 aired originally) Clerks: The Animated Series had several dozen of these. In the commentary, Kevin Smith and company actually expressed surprise at several of the jokes they were capable of getting past the censors.
- Code Lyoko's Fanservice saw a lot get past the radar, likely helped along by the fact that the show is produced and translated by the same (French) company. Here's a few examples of what we got to see on TV (keep in mind, this is a TV-Y7 show on Cartoon Network in an afterschool slot):
- One certain episode of Two Stupid Dogs had said dogs try to watch a drive-thru movie. After sneaking in with their own car, the smaller dog got bored and asked "Why do people come here?". Zoom out to the entire car-filled lot (and even the film, with a car on a cliff) bouncing and squeaking suggestively. If you don't know how cars can bounce and squeak suggestively, you're too young to get this.
- Another episode had a dorky unpopular kid take the dogs in for show and tell. While showing the dogs to the class he says "They're... boy dogs. You know how you can tell if they're boy dogs?" After this he lifts up the smaller dog to show the class his privates causing two boys to gasp in shock and one girl to smile with an excited "Ooh!"
- Yet another had the dogs attempting to get into the supermarket by piling shoes on the rubber mat outside. At one point on their search for more shoes, they find themselves at a strip club, with the little dog telling the stripper to kick off her shoe.
- And of course the episode featuring the parody of The Brady Bunch, which included the teenage brother and sister having an argument, then making up by making out.
- Cartoon Network's Time Squad had a lot of crap that got past the radar, mostly references to homosexuality (mostly centered around the Larry 3000 and his "relationship" with Buck Tuddrussel), drugs (there's an episode where Betsy Ross is a hippie and all the hippies there have bloodshot eyes and act spacey and another episode where Larry acts drunk after getting electrocuted), and your typical heterosexual innuendo (Tuddrussell reading a laser gun magazine as if it was a copy of Playboy).
- ...How can one tell if a laser gun is female?
- Easy: check for a trigger. (I have no idea what the other half of that DE was...)
- The cartoon adaptation of The Mask had crap that got past the radar, but there is episode that sticks out. The season two episode "Flight as a Feather" where The Mask chases after his fedora feather and ends up at a City Hall event where The Mayor is making a speech when his ex-girlfriend comes and crashes it. Did I mention that the Mayor's ex-girlfriend is a
stripper "exotic dancer"? No? Well, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Here is part one and part two of that scene.
- I really saw that episode when I was like, 5 or something. With my two years younger brother...
- An episode of Ed Edd N Eddy had Eddy flipping the bird at Rolf and his "Urban Rangers". Well, he would have been if he had a middle finger.
- Not to mention the episode where the boys take care of Rolf's two rabbits. By the end of the episode, there are so many bunnies that they flood the street. The sight causes Double D to say:
Double D: Oh my... It seems Mr. and Mrs. Rabbit have been practicing their multiplication tables....
- Darkwing Duck featured an episode in which Gosalyn joined a wizarding academy, discovered magic was actually hard, and sold her father's soul to Satan for magic powers. It aired once before Disney quickly pulled it from the reruns.
- And in another episode, when an alien says that an alien princess and Launchpad are going to "oompah", Darkwing Duck quickly covers Gosalyn's ears.
- Disney's Aladdin franchise, particularly the direct-to-video film sequels The Return of Jafar and Aladdin The King of Thieves, as well as the Aladdin TV series, had several of these. In Return of Jafar, Jafar is freed from his lamp and immediately begins scheming against Aladdin. After tricking the man who finds his lamp into wasting two of his wishes, Jafar tells him, "That was two wishes. Take your time with the third, or you will wish you had never been born." And mere moments later, Jafar says that "It's not enough that we simply destroy Aladdin. After all, there are things so much worse than death."
- At the very beginning of King of Thieves, during the earthquake that breaks up the wedding ceremony, Genie says, "I thought the Earth wasn't supposed to move until the honeymoon."
- And at the end of the same movie, where Aladdin and Jasmine are flying off on Carpet, presumably towards their honeymoon. Aladdin turns to Jasmine gives her an eyebrow-waggling look that says, "I may not wait 'till we land!"
- In one episode of the series, the heroes are trapped by Aladdin's Evil Counterpart Mozenrath. Jasmine pleads with him to spare Agrabah, saying "I'll give you anything." Mozenrath's response?
Mozenrath: By the time I'm through, princess... you'll have given me everything!
- He then proceeds to laugh maniacally while Jasmine looks horrified and Aladdin pulls her close while glaring at Mozenrath.
- Minor, but an early episode opens with a snooty prince proposing to Jasmine (she turns him down). After he leaves Genie calls him what sounds like "Prince Wazu", which may be a legitimate Arabic name but also sounds like another term for one's posterior...
- In The Chipmunk Adventure, the Chipettes encounter a roomful of snakes and decide to "charm" them. So they sing a song called "Gettin' Lucky", which includes a lot of gyrating, cooing at the snakes to make them react as if they were in love, and repeatedly singing "Gettin' lucky! Ooooo, gettin' lucky!"... and all of it while wearing harem outfits.
- In My Life As A Teenage Robot, "Hostile Makeover", Brad explains to Jenny she's going through robo-puberty, and lets her know what it's like for humans. Embarrassed by robo-acne, she puts a bag over her head and complains it smells like fish tacos.
- in "Mind Over Matter", Jenny has difficulty fighting an opponent and so tries to "download something off the internet" to help. Her mother replies, "XJ-9, no! You'll go blind!"
- In the episode "The Price of Love," which is about Sheldon wanting to make Jenny jealous by paying a girl to be his faux-girlfriend, there are a few things that caught this troper's attention. One is that all the popular girls get in on the action, all offering their services for cash. But don't worry, as the original girl put it, there are stripulations, causing Sheldon to go, "Don't you mean stipulations?" Granted, they're "no hugging, no kissing," and a few unreadable things, but this troper found some of the connotations with the plot to be... interesting for a Y-7 rated show.
- If you liked that, you'll love this. In the episode Voyage to the Planet of the Bikers the Space Bikers are revealed to have normal day jobs on their home world as staff and faculty in an elementary school. Tammy is a teacher shown standing in front of a blackboard with a diagram reading "birds + bees = babies". While pointing to this diagram she directs her students to turn to page 69 in their textbooks.
- Snoo--PENIS!--usual, I see!
- Arguable only on the assumption that Long John Baldry, the voice actor originally intended to stress the "pingas" syllables for comic effect. Whatever the case, another "use" of the word has been adapted from the Christmas special, in which Robotnik disguized as Santa, as part of an evil plan, declares, "Ah; happiness is always so much more enjoyable when it is based on the misery of millions!" This one is less popular, and here it seems less likely that Baldry deliberately stressed the wrong syllables for comic effect, but the clip gets some additional mileage because it can be used in plural tense.
- Incidentally, this troper recalls a very similar meme that circulated his Middle School for a while. The play, You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown closes with a song called "Happiness," which is based upon the Charles Schultz Peanuts book, Happiness is a Warm Puppy. The musical director cut the singers off during a rehearsal to tell them that their singing was not audible enough. She said to them, "Guys, you need to project your voice more, because I can't here the ha- part; I can only hear the -piness. She realized her mistake about a half second later, and howls of laughter ensued. From then on, it quickly became a schoolwide gag to sing the song in such an altered form, with resulting lyrics like "Penis is playing the drum in your own school band, and penis is walking hand in hand." It's even funnier if you try to envision it.
- Also, when Robotnik builds himself a robot wife...
Scratch: It's beautiful, doctor. Grounder: Yeah! It's got really big— Scratch: HAIR! (Grounder nods hastily)
- After being forced into a kiss with Quark, Robotnik blushes and smiles.
- At the end of the Super Mario World episode "Gopher Bash", Luigi finds that Yoshi has eaten the crops they just managed to recover. He punishes the Extreme Omnivore with this easy-to-Mondegreen line:
Luigi: Since you ate the whole thing, now you can do the hoe thing!
- In the Donkey Kong Country episode "Get a Life! Don't Save One!", Dixie's looking for her pet crab, Crabby. Diddy offers to help:
Diddy: Ah, never fear, Diddy's here! Just shove a hor d'evoure plate in front of me and I can find a crab with my eyes closed. HERE, CRAPPY! CRAPPY! Here, Crappy, Crappy...
Dixie: It's Crabby!
- In All Grown Up, in the episode Super Hero Worship, there's a scene where the gang is going into a building. The name of the building escapes me, but you can only see two letters of the name for about 10-15 seconds in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen, and they stand out quite a bit from the rest of the background. Guess which two? H. O.
- One of the characters in an episode of Pig City was a Principal Lardez. Which makes sense, what with being a fat pig and all.
- Even in the mid-nineties, it's hard to see how this line from Ruby-Spears' Megaman made it past the censors:
Protoman: (in response to a lame pun) Yeah. Whatever turns you on, Doc.
- In the classic Disney Goofy cartoon Teachers Are People, Goofy the teacher is watching a group of kids at recess. One kid calls his friends over and says "Hey, fellas. Ever hear the one about... (whisper whisper)". Goofy listens in, blushes bright red, and throws a lesson plan with pictures of birds and bees on it in the trash.
- In an episode of Jacob Two-Two, the titular character has to give a speech. His assignment? The birds and the bees. Buford doesn't get what's so bad about two cute little animals, and Renee whispers something into his ear. After getting off the ground, Buford decides,
Buford: I will never look at a bird or a bee the same way again.
- They also got away with saying "crap" a few times.
- In the opening to one episode of Being Ian, a sign reads, "Hello, students!" Then, the O falls off and the camera zooms in on the new word. Also, there's a Canadian Tire knock-off called... Crappy Tire.
- Isidoro managed to sucessfully portray Isidoro Cańones as a womanizer despite being a comic book/cartoon aimed mainly at kids and preteens. It should be noted that, unlike Johnny Bravo, Isidoro almost never strikes out, having thus to overcome harder censor restrictions than Bravo. Hell, the cartoon made a point of sexualizing Cachorra to a degree never found in the comics.
- Boogie el Aceitoso and Martin Fierro are both rated ATP (the Argentinian equivalent of a G rating), despite being based on an R-rated comic book and an R-rated book. The trailer for Boogie features a kid being gunned down, Boogie making a phone call among a sea of corpses, and Boogie scratching his balls and grabbing a beer after having sex with a hot woman. I blame the AnimationAgeGhetto.
- Patoruzito has Isidorito having a vision on how his life will be when he grows up. It's innocent enough until you remember he grows up to become the aforementioned Isidoro Cańones...
- Patoruzito 2: La Gran Aventura has the main villain, an old witch in the vein of Witch Hazel, capture a fairy and using her power to turn into a Maya, one of the ancient wizard-gods of Middle Earth. This powerup restores her lost youth, turning her into a pretty hot woman. Her two goblin assistants quite obviously leer at her regained curves.
- In the short-lived USA cartoon Wing Commander Academy, the episode "Invisible Enemy" features Maniac on the outs with the rest of the crew because they think he abandoned his wingman in favor of racking up more kills. In the mess hall, he complains to Maverick that it "Seems like I'm about as popular around here as chipped beef on toast." This dish is more commonly known as shit on a shingle.
- Fans who toured the Avatar The Last Airbender studios returned claiming that the original designs of the swimsuits the girls wore in the episode "The Beach" were rather... naughty. It was a Take Our Word For It, but they were implied to be something that most anime wouldn't have done in a Beach Episode. Considering that the final designs that made it to air were actually fairly risqué for what was nominally a children's cartoon (including highlighting Ty Lee's, ahem, character growth), these rumored original designs were probably sacrificial lambs to let them get away with the bikinis for Azula and Ty Lee.
- The Land Before Time IV, when Cera, Ducky, Petrie and Spike first meet Ali the female equivalent of Littlefoot:
Cera: See? She's not another Littlefoot. She's a girl.
(Ducky steps forward; pause)
Ducky: Yep, yep, yep. She is a girl.
- In one episode of The Smurfs, Bigmouth the ogre had just stolen the Smurf's entire warehouse of food and the Smurfs were trying (obviously) to get it back. Smurfette tries to use her "feminine wiles" to charm him into giving the food back. The opening dialogue was:
Bigmouth: (to the Smurfette standing in his open hand) What you want, Smurf?
Smurfette: (vamping) Oh, you silly ogre, I'm not a SMURF, I'm a SmurfETTE. (pause, hands on hips) Wanna see?
Bigmouth: (long pause, vehement headshake) ... No.
- Let alone the fact that Smurfette origin story was that she was made by the Big Bad in an attempt to seduce Papa Smurf
- Captain Planet's Very Special Episode about a kid having AIDS (!) manages to have one Jerk Jock nearly accuse his friend of homosexuality before getting cut off.
Random Kid: You sticking up for him? Maybe you got it too. Maybe you and him—
Jeff: Shut up!
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2003 manages to have quite a bit of it, but the only thing me and a sister recall is Mikey saying "This sucks", wow, 4Kids actually managed to MISS that?
- DePatie-Freleng, a studio known for Pink Panther, did a theatrical series in the early seventies called The Blue Racer, about a blue snake who chased a Japanese Beetle. In one cartoon, Beetle introduced himself to a bee by saying "I am Japanese Beetle and you are a son of a bee!" My guess is theatrical cartoons were allowed more freedom than the TV counterparts.
- From the X-Men Animated Series in the early 90's, the episode "Child of Light" showed Beast quoting Emily Dickenson, saying, "Parting is all we know of Heaven. And all we need of Hell". Keep in mind that this was originally aired on Fox Kids. It's a somewhat odd example, as it didn't so much sneak past the radar as it did squawk the proper IFF and get waved on through. True, the word in question was in the context of a quote from a respected poet, but it was still jarring to hear on a network and timeslot known for liberal use of Never Say Die.
- Also in X-Men, the episode "Time Fugitives" features Rogue calling a Friends of Humanity goon a "peckerwood," a slang term that means "white trash" and sounds dirtier.
- In The Marvelous Misadventuresof Flapjack, after being chased by a barber they thought was trying to kill them, K'nuckles says "Whew! I thought you were going to kill us! Now... do you have anywhere I can swab my poopdeck?" Yes, they got a joke about K'nuckles shitting himself past the radar.
- There's an episode where Flapjack draws a picture for K'Nuckles, and K'Nuckles (who fails at reading) thinks it's a map to Candied Island. Later, Flapjack reveals it's a picture he drew for him, and that the 'X' meant a kiss on the cheek. Flapjack then proceeds to kiss a rather beside himself K'Nuckles on the cheek. Did we mention Captain K'Nuckles is probably in his 40's or 50's, and doesn't protest such a gesture from a little boy, and in fact seems a little too ok with it?
- In the same episode with the cheek kiss, Flapjack spends 99% of the episode "blind" (he really needs a haircut). As such, his hearing becomes ultra-amazing.
Captain K'Nuckles: How'd you know what I was thinkin'?!
Flapjack: I can hear your brains! (knowingly, repressing laughter) I can hear LOTS of things lately!
Captain K'Nuckles: (worried) ... Like WHAT?!
Flapjack: I'm keepin' a diary about it! It starts last night, with us going to the Candy Barrel, and YOU eating all the candy! And falling down! And saying that I was your only friend! And promising to take me on an exciting adventure!
K'Nuckles: It was a long night, Flapjack. I'm sure I said a lot of things.
- Also, when Bubbie says the peepholes in the dock were her friends and Flapjack questions her, K'Nuckles replies with: "There are all kinds of friends, boy!" (He pulls out a bottle of Maple Syrup and downs the whole thing. After, he shivers and stows the bottle in his jacket.) "There's all kinds of friends." (He pats the bottle through his jacket.) That sure doesn't sound like a blatant, not even disguised alcohol euphemism to me, no sir.
Trolley Hag: Do you like my rear view... mirror?
Flapjack: Ooooh.
- In the episode "Skooled", features a gigantic octopus named Eight-Armed Willy. That wears an eyepatch. Willy. One eye. Think about it.
- K'Nuckles: These are my hands that I use every day! And soil everyday! Yeah, that could very easily be taken out of context...
- An episode of Robot Boy managed to get away with one of the bad guys calling a fellow villain a jack-ass.
- In an episode of The Penguins Of Madagascar the lemurs want to race the penguins for their car. While arguing in the Zoovenir Julien says this:
Julien: I do not intend to fail. I intend to do the opposite of fail!
Marlene: You mean... succeed?
Julien: No, I will not suck seed. No one will be sucking seed!
- also from The Penguins Of Madagascar, they were in for a checkup or something and the leader almost excitedly assures them by saying:
turn and cough boys, turn and cough.
- For some old school crap under the radar, don't forget Scooby Doo. Famous are Shaggy and Scooby's not so subtle hippie tendencies, including constant "munchies" for Scooby Snacks and smoke occasionally coming out of the mystery machine.
- In the second Addams Family animated series (from 1992), in the episode "Hide And Go Lurch" one of the items in the attic is a dresser dummy with three breasts.
- Pretty much the entire series of Ren And Stimpy. Seriously. Pick an episode—any episode.
- The Dreamworks film ''Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas" had several amusing moments in this regard. Two of the most notable:
- Sinbad relating to Marina the tale of how he met Proteus, in particular the sword pointed at his—"Pickles and eggs!"
- In an icebound region, Sinbad remarking to his first mate, "Put on a shirt before you poke someone's eye out!"
- In Soviet Union, many animators and directors managed to make satire animations about idol workers and bureaucracy. There Lived Kozyavin and Man In The Frame were a some of these which managed to not get a government ban.
- Phineas And Ferb featured a song called "Bow Chicka Wow Wow". For those who don't know what I'm getting at: "Bow-chicka-wow-wow" is commonly known as the verbalization of of typical 70s porn music.
- And the people singing this suggestive little tune? Yeah, they're siblings.
- Not to mention Bobbi Fabulous, whose song in the episode "Dude We're Getting the Band Back Together" is so very, very gay it's a wonder that it got past all those people who think Spongebob Squarepants is gay. By the way, the title? Fabulous.
- "I like doing it! It makes me feel rather tingly!"
- As Told By Ginger did this a couple of times. Some of the most common are any scene that references Courtney stuffing her bra. (In particular, when she went to a high school party, and the high school girls (in an effort to knock her down a peg) remove her bikini top to reveal how underdeveloped she really is.) It could also be said that her feelings for Ginger border on Les Yay. And let's not forget the episode Carl and Maude, where Maude was stuffing her face with brisket and Carl said, lovingly, "She eats like a wild cougar"
- In one episode of the Dilbert TV series, Dogbert hypnotises Wally into thinking that he's a cow. Dilbert gets angry at Dogbert, as he's supposed to be hypnotising Wally into reparing a computer. Dogbert offers him a glass of warm milk to calm him down. As soon as Dilbert takes a sip, Wally moos and Dilbert spits the "milk" out in disgust.
- In that same episode, Wally says "orgasms".
- In the Pinky And The Brain song/episode "A Meticulous Analysis of History" Brain sings about various would-be world conquerors who have preceeded him. Among these is Caligula, who's shown trying to sneak into a group of boyscouts while the song goes:
Brain:
Caligula was no boyscout.
He did things we can't even talk about.
The Romans knew he'd lost his head
when he filled a vacant senate seat with Mr. Ed.
Pinky:
What's wrong with being friendly with a thoroughbred?
Close More Western Animation
Real Life
- Longwood Gardens features a large pipe instrument. So what do they call it? "The Longwood Organ", of course. There's no way that wasn't intentional.
- If you ever visit, you may see a plaque proudly stating that the pipe organ's lowest note is produced by a 36 foot long, 32 inches wide wooden pipe, and that playing it causes "earthquake-like vibrations." Ohhh yeah.
- The Jockey Club has fairly strict standards of decency when it comes to the registered names of Thoroughbred horses. Nevertheless, some dandies get through by virtue of looking innocent in print.
- Hoof Hearted (say it out loud)
- Cunning Stunt
- Hardawn
- Rhythm Method
- However they did spot, and avert, "Norfolk and Chance" (say it quickly).
- There's so much crap you can get past the DMV when you want a vanity license plate....
- The official mascot of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo is a six-foot long wrench known as "The Ridgid Tool".
- This is actually some crap that didn't get past the radar, as the name was officially changed to "the TOOL" in the early 1990s due to someone taking offense at the double entendre. Of course, the wrench still has the brand name "RIDGID" forged into the handle and "the TOOL" is no less of a double entendre, so perhaps the crap got past the radar after all . . .
- Jeepers Media on You Tube features crap getting past the toy company radar. And oh my god, how it flies past.
- After the London 2012 Olympics logo was revealed, the BBC invited viewers to send their own logo designs in. One such submission was a thinly-veiled parody of Goatse (More or less safe for work).
- During the USS Pueblo incident at the height of the Cold War, where a naval reconnaissance ship and its crew were captured by North Korea, Commander Lloyd M. Bucher was tortured and mock-executed in an effort to get him to confess to wrongdoing. Eventually, when they threatened his crew, he wrote a confession and since they had no-one fluent in English they could only translate individual words to make sure what he was writing was a confession. He wrote "We paean the North Korean state. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung." The North Koreans missed the urination pun.
- On that note, there's Hawaiian Good Luck Sign...which just goes to show what lack of knowledge of the POW's culture can do.
- Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill actually managed to get away with writing an opera based off a story from the Talmud in Nazi Germany. It even got performed a few times; when it was shut down, it was for entirely different reasons. (Protip: do not start reciting Communist agitprop mid-performance, even to friendly audiances. Stick to your lines.)
- This.
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