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"Peter, your excuses are lamer than FDR's legs."
[everyone gasps]
"Too soon?"
"Comedy is tragedy-plus-time. For instance, the night Lincoln was shot, you couldn't make a joke about it, but now it's fair game, see? Tragedy-plus-time."
— Lester (Alan Alda), Crimes and Misdemeanors
A kind of censorship borne out of sensitivity to current issues (although Your Mileage May Vary as to whether this is oversensitivity or not). One frequent situation is when a new episode (or possibly an old one) is edited or not broadcast because it coincides with some recent tragic event. Can be taken to ridiculous extremes, especially if Executive Meddling is involved. After President Reagan was shot, The Greatest American Hero had the name of its main character changed because his name was Hinkley, the same as the would-be assassin.
A prominent example for Americans was that, for several years, any show featuring the World Trade Center tended to be tweaked a bit. Some older shows and even movies had broadcasts digitally edited to remove it from the skyline. This sometimes happened even when the show or movie was set before 2001. This has Unfortunate Implications, in that it allows the terrorists to destroy the World Trade Center retroactively.
In other cases, the result ends up being a Missing Episode.
Ironically, sometimes it is the very act of censoring a scene that gives it its Too Soon quality. A seemingly innocuous scene has been edited out of a repeat; the only explanation is that it referred to the same kind of situation as in Current Issue X. What was a vague connection has now been made explicit.
For obvious reasons, what qualifies as Too Soon is a matter of opinion (see: Dead Baby Comedy). Johnny Carson famously found out in the 1970s that the Lincoln assassination was still Too Soon for his audience, while few comedians even today are brave enough to poke fun at Kennedy's murder (although the conspiracy theories have come in for their share of ridicule).
Easier for dramatic series to avert than comedy series, since at least in dramas the sensitive subject matter is being tackled with a degree of seriousness and respect. On the other hand, it's a comedy series' prerogative to satirize and make light of its subject matter, which may be seen as more offensive. If the satire isn't aimed directly at the target, though, audiences might even find it more offensive.
Has elements in common with the Unfunny Aneurysm Moment.
9/11 Examples:
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Advertising
- Ford recalled the 2002 U.S.-market showroom brochure for the Focus just as the model year was getting underway, because the towers were reflected in one of the cover car's windows. A second edition was released, identical except that the towers were photoshopped out.
Anime and Manga
- In the United States, Cowboy Bebop had delayed reruns of episodes featuring a building bomber because of 9/11, and an episode featuring the space shuttle Columbia after the real one was destroyed in an accident in 2003.
- A year after 9/11, "Cowboy Funk" (the episode featuring the building bomber) returned to Adult Swim rotation. "Wild Horses" (featuring the space shuttle) returned to rotation in even less time.
- Similarly, the North American airings of Mobile Suit Gundam was brought to a grinding halt by 9/11.
- Allegedly. Given that nothing in Mobile Suit Gundam even remotely resembled the events of 9/11, it's widely believed that Cartoon Network was shamelessly exploiting the tragedy to weasel out of a contractual obligation to air the whole series at least once, with disappointing ratings being the real reason.
- Well, there was the colony drop in the narration at the start, which is sort of an extreme version of the 9/11 attack - wasn't that at the start of every episode? Or was it dropped when they switched to that stupid second title sequence?
- Exception: Simoun prominently features a plot twist involving a suicide bombing by religious fanatics aboard a large aircraft. (Of course, what's Too Soon in America may not be so in Japan — and it was already 2006.)
- Full Metal Panic was scheduled to premiere in 2001, but was delayed due to its Too Soon themes (the first major arc even kicks off with the hijacking of a commercial airliner). When it was released, Sousuke's homeland was Bowdlerized from Afghanistan to a semi-pronounceable Qurac.
- An episode of Pokémon was pulled from rotation after 9/11 because a giant Tentacruel destroyed a large building that didn't even remotely resemble one of the Twin Towers (it was longer than it was tall). Particularly bizarre because the scene it was banned for was, and continued to be, part of the opening montage of every Kanto episode. Another episode, "Tower Of Terror", was pulled simply because it was called "Tower Of Terror". (The titular tower is a haunted tower that's an important location in the games.) These lasted until the show Channel Hopped to Cartoon Network many years later.
- The third arc of Digimon Adventure is about the Chosen Children trying to find their eighth member before Vamdemon/Myotismon does. They follow him to what just-so-happens to be the district where they all used to live, and start wondering why all of their families moved away. In the first runs of the dub, Joe, the oldest in the group, tells everyone that a terrorist bombing happened around that time and that nobody knew who was behind it, so their families probably all moved away out of fear. Later in the episode, the kids discover they've repressed their memories of the night of the bombing, and that it was really a battle between two huge Digimon. They conclude that witnessing this battle was probably the common factor that led to them being chosen and that the Eighth Child saw it, too—obviously, this is very plot-relevant, so the episode couldn't just be cut. More recent broadcasts of the episode on Jetix just cut every bit of dialogue relating to "terrorists" or "bombs."
- Dragon Ball Z's American airing had the misfortune of reaching an episode about Gohan and Videl saving people trapped in a burning skyscraper just a few weeks after 9/11. The episode was skipped over during its first run, although subsequent rotations on Cartoon Network have restored it.
- The law of "Too Soon" pretty much devastated Transformers: Robots in Disguise. Only three episodes into its American broadcast run when 9/11 occured, multiple episodes of the series had to be held back so their dub scripts could be reworked, three episodes didn't air in the United States at all, and one for which the dubbing had already been completed had to be held back for weeks until it's entire opening sequence could be disassembled and rebuilt using footage from another episode. In every single case, it was because some buildings were destroyed during the course of the action, and it resulted in a series that was aired thoroughly out of order up until the very end of its run.
Comic Books
- Interestingly, there was also a 1985 issue of X-Men that opens with a flashback dealing with Rachel Summers' life in the dystopian future of "The Days of Future Past". One panel explicitly shows a ruined World Trade Center, with the implication that it was destroyed in a terrorist attack. Although there is absolutely no way that Chris Claremont and John Romita, Jr. could have possibly foreseen that 16 years later the World Trade Center would be destroyed in such an attack, the panel now strikes viewers as eerily Too Soon.
- A similar panel had been printed in an issue of Superman depicting the aftermath of an alien assault on Metropolis, including a partially-collapsed LexCorp towers (the Superman analogue to the WTC). The issue was due to hit newsstands on September 11, 2001, and was very speedily recalled as the news became apparent of what had happened in New York.
Film
- At least one trailer for the first Spider-Man movie was pulled from distribution because it showed a helicopter filled with bank robbers getting caught in a web stretched between the towers of the World Trade Center. In a more positive note, the movie was edited to feature New Yorkers throwing things at Green Goblin and shouting Narmic yet uplifting things like "You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!"
- The two-part climax for the Neogenic Nightmare arc in the 90s Spider-Man cartoon hasn't been seen in years, due to scenes taking place at the World Trade Center. Similarly, a Spider-Man/X-Force comic crossover in the early 90's had part of the WTC destroyed by supervillains. Try finding it now. Notably, it was either the last of Todd McFarlane's run, or the first of his replacement.
- The original ending of Men In Black II was scrapped after 9/11 because it featured the World Trade Center opening up and disgorging hundreds of flying saucers.
- On the night of 9/11, The BBC pulled its scheduled evening film involving a tunnel explosion in New York.
- Later that week, an Australian channel pulled The Towering Inferno.
- Big Trouble, where some people sneak a bomb onto an airplane, was due to be released the Friday after 9/11 but was delayed.
- A particularly infamous post-9/11 edit of Back to the Future removed all references to terrorism. As Marty goes back in time while escaping Libyan terrorists, that scene made no sense, understandably overshadowing the also egregious blurring of a great deal of product placement.
- Pretty much any film adaptation which originally had Islamic terrorists as the antagonist in the source material. In The Sum Of All Fears, the antagonist was changed to a neo-Nazi. In Jumper, it was changed to a bunch of crazed Christians, etc.
- Not true for The Sum Of All Fears; they finished shooting at least 4 months before 9/11 occurred; they changed because the CAIR protested that it was xenophobic.
- One sign that it is no longer Too Soon after 9/11 is in Watchmen, where the villain's final plot levels much of Manhattan, with the World Trade Center looming in the 1985 skyline.
- Collateral Damage, about a man chasing down the terrorist who killed his family in a bombing, had its release delayed from October 5, 2001 to February 8, 2002. It also originally contained a scene involving an airplane hijacking that was later cut from the movie.
- Subverted by Lloyd Kaufman's refusal to remove the Twin Towers from the opening shot of The Toxic Avenger 4. His choice to keep them was met with thunderous applause by the audience at its New York premiere.
- The Postal film, intended to be shown in 1500 American theaters, ended up only being shown in 4 of them, 7 1/2 months after it was intended to, apparently because the opening scene portrayed the 9/11 attacks as an accident on the part of hijackers who merely wished to head to Arizona. A bit extreme, considering the film was released in 2007. (May not necessarily be a bad thing; the film was directed by Uwe Boll.)
- The film of BS Johnson's Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry, about a bookkeeper who turns to terrorism, was due for its British release in the autumn of 2001. However due to events that September, which made terrorism seem less like a fun response to life's iniquities, the film's release was postponed and it barely made it into cinemas at all.
- Cloverfield received negative criticism from Fox News for being "insensitive" to the victims of 9/11 because it showed New York buildings being destroyed and clouds of debris.
- Parodied recently by Robot Chicken, with New York citizens bashing the monster as it destroys buildings.
- Margaret Cho's Notorious C.H.O., released as a film in 2002, opens with a joke about her giving blowjobs to rescue workers at Ground Zero.
- Certain television stations when airing The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad, show the film without the full beginning having the assembled terrorists talking about concocting a terrorist act to show the weakness of the United States.
- The original script for Terminator 3 had an insanely destructive finale, showing several major American cities and landmarks being obliterated by nuclear blasts. By some accounts this was chopped down to a much-abbreviated sequence because the studio felt that showing such detailed death and destruction wouldn't sit well with audiences that soon after 9/11. However, it has also been suggested that the original ending got changed because it would have been way too expensive to produce, leaving this one up in the air somewhat.
Live Action TV
- CBS ran a special about the first fire station that handled the alarm when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. By coincidence, a film crew was doing a documentary about that station and was there with cameras in hand on September 11, 2001. There was a great deal of controversy because the show about the firefighters and how they handled the events was run exactly six months - March 11, 2002 - after the towers fell.
- Another exception: the new Battlestar Galactica has prominently featured two different storylines involving suicide bombing, and another storyline involving secret prisons and torture.
- 24 was scheduled to debut in September of 2001, and the first episode featured a scene of a jetliner being bombed. The premier was delayed two months and the scene was taken out (though the event itself is still implied).
- The first episode of Scrubs (premiering in the Fall of 2001) featured a frustrated outburst "I swear to Aisha" which didn't quite seem to match the actor's lip movements. "Allah" would have matched far better, however.
- Also in 2001, the producers of the Law And Order franchise planned a huge multi-part crossover between all three series, which would have revolved around a terrorist plot. After 9/11, the plan was scrapped, and no major crossover has ever been attempted.
- Power Rangers Time Force experienced an exceptional number of episodes edited before being re-broadcast in order to modify or remove the series staple of exploding buildings during mecha battles. The franchise has never entirely gotten over it since; sparkle effects are added to most instances of fire, and what few exploding buildings that remain from source footage are always empty beforehand. Usual explanations for this consist of Abandoned Warehouse districts or building occupants all successfully evacuating off-screen.
- Also, footage of the Time Shadow Megazord standing on twin skyscrapers was edited from the series, and the shot of it in the opening credits was replaced by the Q-Rex posing.
- This was parodied by a Saturday Night Live sketch where the Turner Classic Movies channel tries to edit the World Trade Center out of the 1970's remake of King Kong. The final ten minutes of the movie (where Kong climbs the World Trade Center) are replaced by new footage (starring TCM employees) of people looking out a window, describing Kong climbing the Chrysler Building.
- The first episode following 9/11 had New York City Mayor (at the time) Rudolph Guliani as the guest star. He opened the show introducing the various rescue workers as heroes and then states that SNL should continue on as a testament to the human spirit. Lorne Michaels asked if it's okay to be funny again and Guiliani responds, "Why start now?"
- The pilot episode of The Agency featured a terrorist plot by Osama bin Laden/Al Qaeda; that episode was delayed after 9/11. Another episode featuring an anthrax scare was delayed after several real-life anthrax attacks.
- Less than a year after 9/11, the Fox sitcom Titus featured the titular character suffering an emotional breakdown on an airplane, crying hysterically in front of the other passengers, his younger brother wearing a towel around his head while making loud gargling noises, while their friend was on his knees in the aisle, arms raised, shouting "A la! A la!" after a fellow passenger continually referred to his meal as "Chicken King" instead of Chicken ''Al la King. Though this was in line with the series' rather dark humor.
- The weekend after 9/11, the scheduled rerun of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda was to be an episode opening with an ecoterrorist group ramming a small fighter into a commercial space liner, killing everyone aboard. It was replaced with a rerun of a different episode which was more of a sweet love story transcending time. Ironically, some stations owned by the company which made the show, which run episodes a week later than independent stations that syndicate the series so as to not cut into their ratings with possibly earlier-scheduled airings available over cable or satellite TV, ran that week the previous episode in the rerun schedule...which featured a would-be suicide bomber.
- Shortly before Touched By An Angel started its eighth season in September 2001, CBS was scheduled to repeat the Season 7 story "Netherlands" from the previous May.The plot
 has heroine Monica witnessing a building being destroyed by a bomb; many are killed, and though she's an angel she has a crisis of faith that culminates in her being tempted to forsake God by Satan himself. Plus, the B-plot has new angel Gloria interacting with a little girl injured in the blast who subsequently dies. Rather understandably, that repeat was pulled, but Season 8 went on to have a Christmas Episode ("A Winter Carol") in which 9/11 was central to the plot. The following and final season's "The Christmas Watch" also involved 9/11.
- Fringe inverted and possibly ended the application of this trope when, at the end of the first season, Olivia switches to a parallel universe where William Bell has offices in the World Trade Center, revealed by a dramatic pullback crane shot.
- Although we do see a newspaper headline with "Obamas prepare to move into new White House", meaning that, well...
- A few months before this, the American Life on Mars provided a harbinger: a stunning reveal of World Trade lets Sam Tyler know he's no longer in 2007.
- Australian kids show Playschool, which runs in a 9AM timeslot, had as its theme for the day of Sep/12/01 building up towers made of wooden blocks and knocking them down, all to a tune. Playschool records its episodes more than six months prior to having them on the screen, it was completely unintentional, and it still marked the first time the producers received hatemail.
Music
- A list of songs that radio stations owned by Clear Channel Radio were advised to avoid playing in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 did the rounds on the internet. Some of the entries were obvious, others much less so. As the Snopes link above shows, some people misread the list as being songs that were outright banned from playing on the air, instead of suggestions about what might not be well-received by the audience.
- The Dream Theater album Metropolis 2000: Scenes from New York was scheduled to hit store shelves on 9/11. The original album artwork had a burning apple wrapped in barbed wire with a silhouette of New York City in the flames (with the World Trade Center towers clearly visible), in what is a very scary coincidence. The album was pulled, given new artwork, and put back on shelves in a few weeks.
- The Jimmy Eat World album Bleed American was released on July 18th, became self-titled following 9/11, and has since switched back for the 2008 reissue.
- "A Dream" by Jay-Z, a tribute to the Notorious BIG, includes a sampled verse from Biggie's classic "Juicy," but the line "Blow up like the World Trade" (referencing the 1992 attack) is edited out. However, this doesn't stop people who know and love the original from keeping the line in when singing along.
- A rap/hip-hop duo actually called The World Trade Center made an album that featured an exploding building that oddly enough wasn't the WTC.
- Not to be confused with The Coup, a hip-hop duo whose scheduled November 2001 release was to have an exploding WTC on the cover. See here.
- The band I Am The World Trade Center, whose debut album was released a few months before September 11th, briefly changed their name to I Am The World.
- Weird Al Yankovic's song 'Christmas at Ground Zero' stopped being aired duing the winter holiday season after 9/11, due to the site of the attacks being commonly known as Ground Zero. The actual song refers to celebrating Christmas in the middle of a nuclear war.
- After the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, Anthrax put out a press release joking that they were going to change their name to Basket Of Puppies, but ultimately kept the name. They did, however, temporarily put up information about the disease on their official website, since concerned people were typing anthrax.com into their browsers.
- Anthrax kept a very good sense of humour about their unfortunate coincidence at the time. During a talk show appearance, when jokingly asked if they still received fan mail (referencing the infamous delivery method at the time) a band member responded along the lines of "Yeah, but we don't open it." while another quickly added "Yeah, no ironic death for us".
- The early Cure single "Killing An Arab" was somewhat controversial to begin with due to the Unfortunate Implications of the title (though it's actually about the shooting scene in The Stranger), but gained further controversy during the Persian Gulf War and again after September 11th. The 1986 compilation Staring At The Sea included the song, but had a sticker on the front cover explaining it's meaning, and it was conspicuously the only non-album single of the period not included in the 2004 reissue of Three Imaginary Boys. It has been played live post-September 11th, but with the chorus changed to "Killing Another", or more humorously "Kissing An Arab".
- The song No Hard Feelings by Bloodhound Gang includes the line "I'm missing you like a hijacked flight on September eleventh/I don't know who got on you but I'm not wrong in thanking them since it/ain't my job to fuck you on your birthday anymore." The album came out two years (almost to the day) after the attacks.
Radio
Video Games
- In Deus Ex, during sections of the game where the New York skyline is visible in the background, the two towers of the World Trade Center are noticeably missing; the real towers were destroyed a year after the game was released. Harvey Smith has explained that due to texture memory limitations, the portion of the skyline with the twin towers exists in the game's data files but had to be left out of the final game, with the other half mirrored in place of it. According to Smith, during the game's development, the developers justified the lack of the towers by stating that terrorists had destroyed the World Trade Center earlier in the game's storyline.
- Of course, there's the wreckage of The Statue of Liberty, which was publicly stated as being destroyed by terrorists. (Which turns out to be a government lie.)
- That's really more an eerie case of "too early" rather than "too soon (after 9/11)."
- A last minute cut to the ending of Metal Gear Solid 2, which originally involved a huge mobile fortress destroying Manhattan, compounded the game's Gainax Ending with illogical scene-switches.
- A line in which Raiden states that the "U.S. President is a terrorist" (after finding out that the President was willingly cooperating with the Sons of Liberty) was re-recorded as well.
- The first mission of the Soviet campaign in Command And Conquer: Red Alert 2 tasks the player with invading Washington and destroying the Pentagon. In a later Soviet mission where the player must set up a Psychic Beacon near the World Trade Towers, if the towers are damaged, they look eerily like they looked after the September 11th attacks. The game was released in October 2000, months before the attacks. After the attacks, Westwood pulled all remaining covers that showed a plane flying towards the Twin towers, and re-named the famous landmarks. The Trade Towers are now just Towers, and the Eiffel Tower is "Paris Tower", the Arc of Triumph is the "Paris Arc of Winning" and The Louvre is "Generic World Famous Art Museum". (Though Game Mods can restore the names if you wanna.)
- Grand Theft Auto III (release date: October 2 2001) went under a few changes following 9/11. They changed the color scheme of the Liberty City police from the distinctive blue and white scheme to a Los Angeles inspired black and white color scheme. They also removed Darkel, a revolutionary urchin who wanted to bring down the city with acts of terrorism and violence. (They merely removed the framework of these missions- most of the Darkel missions were given without context as Rampages)
- Averted in KOF'98: Ultimate Match. The original '98 featured a background of what was ostensibly New York, with the WTC off in the distance. UM's new background (as well as the usable original background) still features the towers. Justified in that this takes place in 1998 (non-canonicity aside)... and in that SNK Playmore probably didn't care either way.
- The final boss battle of the Spider-Man 2 Playstation 1 game originally took place on the World Trade Center. The game's North American release was shortly before 9/11, and at least one UK magazine had published a walkthrough based on that version. The re-release of the US version and the PAL version changed the building to a nameless skyscraper, removed Electro's reference to the WTC and renamed several levels.
- The Japanese version of Advance Wars, Game Boy Wars Advance, was slated for an October 2001 release in Japan. It was pulled and wasn't properly released until 2004, when it was included in a 2-in-1 bundle with its sequel.
- Six Days in Fallujah, a videogame account of several real US Marines during Operation Phantom Fury, has drawn quite a lot of flak. Notably, the brains behind the idea are the actual Marines themselves working with the developers, who wanted to tell their story in a medium that people actually experience; people play more videogames than they read books these days. According to official material, the game is being designed with a Survival Horror mindset to emphasize the tension and fright of actual small-unit urban combat. Early first-hand accounts of the game being shown in preview-form have accused the developers of flat-out lying, however, claiming that it plays more like Gears Of War.
- On the gaming front, it's never too soon for the internet! At least as far as flash goes. Anyone who frequented Newgrounds in the following days was privy to many Trade Center parodies already, those which survived landing squarely in the Bastard category of flash games/movies. Among these was the infamous NYC Defender, later deleted to make room for the finished product a couple months down the line. However, the game's main site took it down for the usual reasons, as pointed out in this Sep1401 article. Yes, it really WAS made that soon. Eventually requested NG removal when they began trying a more serious angle, [1]. (I wasn't there when it was but found a few topics relating to it) Of similar note is a flash game revolving around that one Marine who lobbed a puppy. For anyone that missed WTC Defender, you had to shoot down hundreds of planes flung at the trade centers as if launched by catapult. Due to the oddly random scoring system, many surmised it represented the amount of people per plane. Ironically the far more offensive fly a plane into the trade center remains, as the author never asked for it removed. :Ţ
- The backstory for The Conduit (release date: June 2009) features a near-future terrorist attack on Washington D.C. ... on 9/11 (again).
- The Modern Warfare 2 "Infamy" trailer has a part where Washington D.C. gets pretty beat-up into a warzone, including partial destruction of the Washington Monument. And guess what happened next.
Western Animation
- The Futurama Couch Gag where the spaceship crashes into a building was cut out for a while after 9/11.
- A pre-9/11 episode of Family Guy showed Osama bin Laden getting past airport security by singing "I Hope I Get It" from "A Chorus Line". The scene was cut for subsequent broadcasts. Incidentally, series creator Seth MacFarlane had been scheduled to be on one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center, but overslept with a hangover and missed the flight.
- The Simpsons had one episode that took place in and around the World Trade Center. While no official move was made by Matt Groening or FOX themselves, several stations acted individually and pulled the episode from their syndication schedules. The ban lasted several years in some cases, but most have re-inserted the episode by now.
- A recent (2009) British repeat hacked some bits out at random - the towers, being pretty central to tone of the plot threads, were still present, but the bitching workers ("They put all the jerks in Tower 1") were edited out.
- An episode of Invader Zim was delayed so that a scene depicting hypothetical destruction of a city (Zim's prediction of doom if a family didn't buy the school fundraiser chocolate bars) could be toned down.
- Lilo And Stitch had to reanimate much of its climax as a response to 9-11; originally Stitch commandeered a 747 to rescue Lilo, flying around the skyscrapers of Honolulu. The plane was changed to a spaceship, although you can still tell it was once an airplane by looking at its doors.
- South Park also spoofed the war on terror with a Looney Tunes routine, with Cartman as Bugs Bunny and Osama Bin Ladin as Elmer Fudd.
- An episode of Justice League was originally to feature a plane crash but was rewritten into a train wreck.
- An episode of the 90s Spiderman cartoon involving an incident with the World Trade Centre was edited post 9/11 in such a manner the episode's opening is confusing.
- A Season 4 episode of "Robot Chicken" featured Cloverfield (see above), with people *in the movie* yelling out "Too Soon" at the monster as it rampaged through NYC.
Other
- The Friar's Club Roast of Hugh Hefner took place barely a couple of weeks after 9/11, with the result that none of the comedians involved really knew how far they could go with the jokes. Rob Schneider delivered a very tame set, which wasn't well received, but then up stepped Gilbert Gottfried. His first line was that he had been delayed because "he had a connecting flight at the Empire State Building", which was met with booing and calls of "too soon". His response was to launch into The Aristocrats, probably the most "too far" joke in existence - and utterly brought the house down, largely because his fellow comedians appreciated the catharsis of what he was doing (and largely because Gilbert Gottfried's voice can make pretty much anything funny). The footage wasn't aired when Comedy Central showed the roast, but it did turn up as part of The Aristocrats film.
- George Carlin's HBO Special changed its title from I Like It When a Lot of People Die to Complaints and Grievances because of the attacks, and he added a 5-minute set about 9/11 in front of it. He would similarly have to change his last HBO Special from the same original title to Life is Worth Losing after Hurricane Katrina.
Other Examples:
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Advertising
- An unfortunate aversion: Mere hours after Billy Mays' death, the Discovery Channel ran a regularly-scheduled episode of the Mays-featuring Pitchmen, while several other networks ran infomercials (programmed well in advance of the news of Mays' death) which starred Mays.
- The Discovery Channel, at least, has been very respectful of Mays following his death. The channel that showed one of his life-insurance commercials two days after he died, however....
- Hell, his commercials are still being shown in regular rotation. Methinks he was just SO ubiquitous in what he did that it would take a ludicrous amount of money to re-film advertisements for their products, so they just continue to run Mays.
Anime and Manga
- X1999, which has been suspended at 18 out of a planned 21 volumes since 2003, has been struck by Too Soon repeatedly. The series is intentionally violent and disturbing, but uncomfortable resemblances to real-life tragedies have caused repeated suspensions in publication. In particular, beheadings depicted in the story became controversial after the gruesome Sakakibara Incident and the recurring theme of earthquakes as a sign of the end of the world after the Kobe Earthquake. The current publication hiatus does not seem to have a single trigger, but may be due to the general post-9/11 climate towards terrorism (which is essentially what the antagonists are engaging in). CLAMP has stated in interviews that they did not believe that they would be able to get the planned ending published at the time and that they have not abandoned X. Fans have mixed opinions about the likelihood of the series restarting publication.
- One Full Metal Panic episode which featured a kidnapping didn't run due to a high profile kidnapping case in real life.
- The third episode of the most recent Black Jack anime series was left unaired, as it was to deal with an earthquake, and one had just recently struck Japan.
- An episode of Pokémon was never aired for the same reason.
- Two words: nice boat.
- One episode of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni Kai and the final episode of School Days had to be delayed for a week in Japan because the contents of it were eerily similar to a murder case in Tokyo, where one girl killed her father with a cleaver...which was identical to the kind that Rena has. This eventually led to Higurashi Kai and School Days being dropped from several channels' prime time line up and Higurashi's opening song being reworked to change the scene of Rena's cleaver to that of the junkyard where she goes to. In terms of School Days' changes, see the link in the entry above.
- The long-awaited Chinese Federation story arc of Code Geass R2 was delayed a week, presumably due to the earthquake that struck central China in early May 2008.
- The Dragon Ball Abridged has a scene where Tenshinhan, Chaozu, Yamcha and Krillin are training in Mr. Popo's time room. The characters remark about how desolate and run down everything looks, leading Krillin to remark "What is this, New Orleans"? Tenshinhan berates him for it with the above line.
- Berating Krillin for joking about stuff too soon is a Running Gag. For example; rejoicing that he isn't the first one to die in the new series... seconds after Goku bites the big one.
- In Axis Powers Hetalia, the character of South Korea had to be pulled out of the webcast due to protests by Korean groups. This might also explain why Tibet, featured as a part of the East Asian group in one of the strips, was replaced by a panda when said strip was animated.
Comic Books
- The British adult humour comic Viz satirised the tendency of companies to cash in on tragedy, by running a spoof advertisement for a commemorative plate (of the kind that cropped up en masse following the death of Princess Diana) celebrating controversial comedian Bernard Manning, who had himself recently died. It was headlined "Fat Racist Cunt of Hearts", a parody of Diana's tabloid nickname (quoted by no less than Tony Blair) "Queen of Hearts". At one point it also ran a comic strip about serial killers Harold Shipman and Fred West competing to be the first to murder a new neighbour. This resulted in a small-scale media outcry, including complaints from the families of some of Shipman's victims.
- The comic's creator, Chris Donald, wrote a book about the origins of Viz in which he admitted he wanted to satirise the mawkish outpour of public mourning over the death of Princess Diana, but feared Too Soon-related backlash because she was so beloved. Instead the comic ran a spoof news article about Monkees fans mourning Micky Dolenz, despite the fact that they knew he wasn't dead.
Commercials
- TV coverage of Heath Ledger's untimely death from an accidental Ambien overdose ran with commercials for... Ambien.
- In 1994, the restaurant chain Jack-in-the-Box released the first commercials with the "Jack" character. In the commercials, he referenced the 1980 commercials where they blew up the Jack-in-the-Box head that was their trademark, saying they had fired him. He then claimed that due to plastic surgery, he was back, announced to the board of directors that they were all fired. Immediately after this announcement, the commercial showed a floor of a building, presumably the board room, exploding. Unfortunately, the commercial was Too Soon, and was bowdlerised when the Oklahoma City bombing occurred.
Film
Live Action TV
Literature
- Dean Koontz set up his Frankenstein trilogy to involve artificially-created monsters rampaging through New Orleans during a hurricane. Due to the destruction caused by Katrina, the final book still has not been released. (Currently set for July 28th, 2009.)
Music
- After Hurricane Katrina, many radio stations made it a policy to avoid playing "New Orleans is Sinking" by The Tragically Hip.
- And surely Katrina and the Waves took a big hit to their careers. What? Too Soon?
- The Black Sabbath album Paranoid was originally going to be called War Pigs, but was retitled due to the Vietnam War.
- Aversion: Can anyone say "I Don't Like Mondays"?
- The aversion is subverted (at least partially) in that, while Bob Geldof didn't think it was too soon, perhaps understandably given that his intent was to express his horror and revulsion at the crime in question, many in America did. Didn't stop the song from becoming a hit, though.
- John Adams wrote a piece of classical music called "Short Ride in a Fast Machine". It has several times been scheduled to be played at the Last Night of the Proms (an annual British classical music concert), with terrible timing. The first time, in 1997, would have been just a few weeks after Princess Diana's fatal car crash, so the piece was pulled. It was scheduled again a few years later - for September 15th, 2001. The mood of the entire concert was changed that year of course, but that piece in particular had to go. (It finally got performed at the Proms in 2004.)
- In 2004, after the devastating tsunami in the indian ocean, many german radio stations stopped to play a song of the band Juli, which was a great hit at the time. The song was called "Die perfekte Welle", aka "The perfect wave".
News
- In late July 2000 a newspaper announced a competition on the bottom of its first page, with the prize a two-person travel aboard Concorde. The upper half of the same page showed the Concorde in flames, with a huge title saying there were no survivors to the crash.
- Is it too soon to make fun of the Boston Massacre?
- Football pundit Rodney Marsh was sacked by Sky Sports for making a pun about Newcastle United fans (the "Toon Army") shortly after the tsunami in 2004.
Newspaper comics
- A Dilbert strip received complaints when the Pointy-Haired Boss survived a plane crash thanks to the 'padding' of the Catholic nuns that were on board, which coincidentally ran the same week Mother Teresa died.
Professional Wrestling
- An episode of WWE SmackDown! featured men dressed similarly to the terrorists in the various beheading videos that have come out of the Middle East attacking The Undertaker at the behest of Muhammad Hassan, then carrying Hassan's manager, Daivari, out spread-eagle like a martyr. It happened to be aired on the very same day as the London train bombings (it was taped two days before), causing general viewer outrage and leading UPN to demand that Hassan and Daivari be removed from the program.
- Most of the people who were truly outraged weren't even WWE fans. Pro wrestling fans recognize that the point of heels is to offend the viewers (hence a standard part of any heel's dialogue being direct insults to the audience). And Hassan was developing into one of the WWE's most effective heels in years, to the point that he was purportedly scheduled to win the WWE Championship at the next pay-per-view event. Of course, they could have just moved him to RAW, which wasn't on UPN, but that would've made too much sense.
- WWE stumbled into another Too Soon moment during the airing of a live broadcast. On the day it was discovered that wrestler Chris Benoit and his family were dead, WWE replaced the airing of a regularly-scheduled RAW episode with a live tribute to Benoit's career. During the airing of the tribute, it became clear that the deaths were a murder-suicide, and that WWE was honoring an alleged murderer. Of course, it was now both Too Late (as the show was on the air) and Too Soon. WWE just has rotten luck when it comes to tragedies. WWE instantly turned a 180 — not only did Vince McMahon apologize for the tribute show, but ever since that apology, Benoit has never been mentioned by name on any new WWE programming that has aired since his death, his name is almost completely wiped from their website (save for some minor mentions in title histories and whatnot), and footage containing Benoit in which he was a major part of the footage has not been used on WWE programming. Hooray for Hand Waving. Classic Benoit footage is popping up here and there on WWE's On Demand network, several passing mentions of Benoit have come up on recent DVD releases, and — starting with Shawn Michaels a few months after Benoit's death — several WWE wrestlers have used the Benoit's signature submission hold, the Crippler Crossface (including the man who tapped to it at Wrestle Mania 20, Triple H... and, on the same night Trips busted it out for the first time, so did The Great Khali.)
- Ironically, once questions about Benoit's mental state and whether he was responsible for his actions that night arose, some fans and critics complained about McMahon's apology for the tribute. The WWE really just couldn't win in that situation.
- You're not kidding about WWE can't win. They did EVERYTHING critics said they should have done for Owen Hart (stopped the show that day, ran a tribute with just memories and greatest matches). And then the news broke, and you know...
- Meanwhile during the Roast of Flava Flave a comedian said, "You know Chris Benoit's a better parent than you," about a month after it happened.
Close Professional Wrestling
Video Games
- Although it was first of a two-part videogame, Persona 2: Innocent Sin was not translated into English despite Atlus' interest in localizing the title. This was due to the game's storyline involving Nazis and the resurrection of Adolf Hitler, as well as fighting the main character's high school principal and a teacher in the game committing suicide in a school's belltower. Although games such as Wolfenstein 3D carried similar story elements such as fighting said Nazis, Innocent Sin may have been translated had it not been at the time of the Columbine High School Massacre.
- Let's face it, Shin Megami Tensei is a series where you can become a Satanist who consorts with demons to kill God and blow up America for the good of the world, stay up late after school to preside over a cult where you and your friends summon shadowy monsters from within your psyche by shooting yourselves in the head, AND some of them are Dating Sims. Simply put, these games are totally un-exportable, so No Export For You.
- And yet Persona 3 was released domestically, among others (e.g. pretty much every Mega Ten game from SMT 3 onwards).
- Shadow The Hedgehog, famous for the censorship the developers did before the release, included a mission which, in the wake of 7/7, got a few players narked. Specifically, Shadow is required to assist an alien attack (by characters branded 'terrorists') on a capital city by detonating a series of bombs. Ouch.
- The NES game Bionic Commando involved Nazis resurrecting Hitler, but the US release was edited to change the group to the Badds and the resurrectee to Leader. The animations were not changed, though, and he still had the signature moustache.
Webcomics
- Parodied in Terror Island, Theorem 159:
The Green Grocer: Soon you will be late as well. Late as in dead!
Stephen: Aorist just died. It's too soon to tell dead jokes.
The Green Grocer: Oh. Late as in, um, pregnant?
- Averted in Irregular Webcomic. After one of the strips in the "Steve and Terry" theme coincided with Steve Irwin's death, the theme continued anyway. Of course, David Morgan-Mar's tongue-in-cheek denials that his characters are in any way based on something else are almost a running gag.
- Except he did acknowledge Steve's death, having removed tongue from cheek. He simply noted that though his version was based on the real person, he was also a fictional character with his own history.
- Mocked by Zexion in this Ansem Retort.
- Note that the creator, Duke, has no qualms about flaunting this trope. In fact, he proudly claimed that he was the first to make a joke at Patrick Swayze's expense after he died.
- Between Failures had one of these early on.
- Averted in Scary Go Round. The final story arc, "Goodbye", which began in June 2009, featured an unnamed Michael Jackson look-alike. As most of the strips had already been drawn, creator John Allison stuck to his guns and kept the character's increasingly prominent role even after Jackson's death partway through the arc.
Western Animation
- Due to the death of Pope John Paul II, Fox delayed a broadcast of The Simpsons episode parodying Catholicism.
- Another Simpsons example: in the UK, BBC 2 received complaints because shortly after Hurricane Katrina it aired an episode where Marge performs in a musical adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire, with a song about New Orleans being filthy and horrible. The channel made a public apology.
- Two Freakazoid episodes featuring Diana, Princess of Wales, were pulled for several years after her death.
- In one episode of The Simpsons, Homer plans to jump out of a window on to a car-mounted mattress. Barney, the driver, thinks he sees Princess Diana and drives forward to take a closer look. In the BBC edit following Diana's death, Homer just hurts himself for no reason.
- In a parody of this trope, a later The Simpsons episode has Homer crash the Duff blimp in a baseball stadium. This exchange occurs:
Homer: This is the second worst zeppelin crash ever!
Abe: Too soon!
- There's another The Simpsons example during an episode in which Bart is shown visions of the future, including Lisa as President of the United States. During a meeting at Camp David, Krusty offers up an opening joke:
Krusty (reading from a cue card he's holding): "What's the difference between Pakistan and a pancake? I don't know any pancakes that were nuked by India!" (he looks up to see everyone in the room staring at him) What, too soon?
- This episode was, itself, editted in the UK on one occasion, as India and Pakistan actually appeared to be on the brink of (possibly even nuclear) war.
- They make another such reference in the episode "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Marge". The family is watching Krusty's skit about Marge's alleged craziness. A disapproving Bart says "Too soon."
- Back in the late 90s, the episode "Homer: Badman" was aired on Sky TV in the UK and the brief clip of Mayor Quimby making out with an unidentified floozy in the back of his car was cut. the execs must have worried it was inappropriate in light of the President Clinton / Monica Lewinsky scandal.
- The usually shameless Drawn Together delayed the release of the episode "Terms of Endearment" (in which Captain Hero gets confined to a wheelchair as a side-effect of giving up his powers, a reference to the real-life accident which paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve) for over a year following Reeve's death. It was then almost delayed again when shortly before the rescheduled airdate, Reeve's widow announced she had a terminal illness.
- Happens to Family Guy quite a bit. One episode was pulled back due to a gag featuring Brian finding President Bush hiding in a tree house, and urging him to do something to help the Katrina victims.
- South Park has toyed with controversial concepts on many occasions.
- Another episode had the characters realizing they could make AI Ds jokes, because it had been 22.3 years, the exact period of time in which it was no longer too soon.
- An episode that aired soon after Steve Irwin's death ("Hell on Earth 2006") featured Satan throwing a costume party for Halloween. When someone showed up dressed as the dead Steve Irwin (complete with stingray through his chest), he was informed that it was "too soon"... until it turned out that it actually was Steve Irwin, at which point he was thrown out for not having a costume. This led to a fannish outcry over the joke, shocking Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who were surprised that fans drew the line there of all places, considering all the other offensive jokes they'd made on South Park. Their reaction? They threw gratuitous jokes about Steve Irwin's death into another episode shortly afterwards.
- "That kid's got as much hope as Steve Irwin in a tank full of stingrays"..."If you don't win this game, that boy will be deader than Steve Irwin in a tank full of stingrays."..."That little boy is gonna die faster than Steve Irwin in a tank full of stingrays."
- In "Jared Has Aides", Subway's Jared Fogle declares he lost all the weight because he had aides (as in assistants), but his failure to elaborate further makes everyone think he's promoting people getting AIDS. When the misunderstanding is finally straightened out, everyone laughs. It turns out that because 22.3 years have passed since the discovery of AIDS, it can officially be declared as being funny, and a huge parade is held in Times Square under the banner, "AIDS IS NOW FUNNY." Despite this, the episode is almost never shown on cable, for different reasons. It was aired on June 17, 2009, though.
- There was also this exchange in the same episode:
Cartman: Dammit Butters! Keep eating or I'll kick your ass 'til you're deader than Kenny!
Stan: Dude that isn't cool, you shouldn't joke about Kenny being dead. Enough time hasn't passed.
Cartman: So how long do we have to wait to joke about it?
Kyle: 22.3 years. That's how long it takes for something tragic to become funny.
Cartman: Oof, that's a long time to wait!
- In the South Park universe AIDS can be cured by concentrated money (Magic Johnson's money, initially).
- In "Cartoon Wars", the main plot of the two-part episode involves the kids trying to convince a television station to air an episode of Family Guy that contains a controversial scene with the Prophet Mohammad. The episode was written in response to the outcry over a foreign caricature of the individual that was published in a Danish newspaper. When the episode aired, the scene that would have showed Mohammad was blacked out, with the words "Comedy Channel has refused to broadcast an image of Mohammed on their network." Ironically, Mohammad appears in the opening credits for that season and was featured in a previous episode entitled "Super Best Friends".
- To briefly mention 'Hell on Earth 2006' again, it is amusing that the media paid a lot of attention to the depiction of Steve Irwin (despite being dead, he was depicted as attending a party with a drink in his hand and a smile on his face) and yet paid no attention to the fact that the C-plot of the episode featured Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, three of modern-America's most notorious serial killers, as a gory pastiche of The Three Stooges.
- A new episode is mercilessly mocking Michael Jackson at this very moment.
- Basically, South Park runs on this trope.
- The pilot episode of Futurama originally showed a man using the transport tubes to go to "JFK Jr. Airport." After JFK Jr died in a plane crash, they redubbed the line to become "Radio City Mutant Hall."
- An unfortunate subversion happened after the 2004 Indonesia tsunami; Cartoon Network was not quick off the draw and showed an episode of Teen Titans featuring tidal waves. Also, due to the tsunami, the Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi episode "Tsunami Yumi" was never aired in the US.
- A week's worth of strips of The Boondocks got the comic pulled from a number of newspapers, from people claiming it was Too Soon after the Columbine incident. The subject of the comics? Riley smacking people in the head with a plastic lightsaber.
- What? Just...what? This has strengthened this freelance journalist's resolve to become a media mogul and break this trope whenever and wherever possible, to whomever may have just perished. People that stupid deserve to be offended in every way possible. And possibly beaten with a big heavy stick afterwards.
- Kung Fu Panda was delayed briefly in the region in China hit hard by an earthquake because there was some concern that the film's seemingly light tone would be inappropriate and an artist tried starting a online petition to block distribution on the basis that it was "exploiting" China in the wake of the tragedy. This is also subverted in that there was a backlash with many Chinese saying that because of the tragedy, this would be right time to show an enjoyable film paying tribute to China and its heritage. In any case, the film went on to be a smash hit throughout China.
- To quote the Shanghai Evening Post: "Why the boycott? What's with the postponement? Is it about Zhao's own fragility, or does he genuinely believe that the quake-hit victims are too sensitive? The panda is cute, the kung fu is Chinese, the story is hilarious, and the theme is inspiring! Is this not what the people in the disaster area need most right now?"
- The death of Sonny Bono resulted in the broadcast of one Pinky And The Brain episode to be delayed due to a scene that features a spoof of Sonny and Cher.
Web Original
- The lonelygirl15 episode "Bree's Mom" was originally supposed to be entitled "Girl, Abducted", but was hastily retitled to avoid offending the fan community, after the vanishing and death of Nadia Kajouji, a friend of a prominent fan of the show.
- The Fine Brothers parody this in the seventh episode of their Lost parody, where the cast refuses to kill the Nolanverse Joker because it's Too Soon. Christian Bale, however, isn't dead, so Batman is fair game...
- Subverted in the Nostalgia Critic's review of Blank Check. After making a joke about Michael Jackson, he launches into a monologue where he tells the audience that it is now alright to laugh at him again because no matter how odd Jackson was, he will always be a genius and nothing can take that away from him..
Other
- Ricky Gervais got into trouble for making a jokes about murdering prostitutes during his stand-up act, just after 5 prostitutes were murdered by a serial killer in the English town of Ipswich.
- Jimmy Dore has a stand-up routine on Comedy Central where he jokes about JFK, and when the audience laughs a bit nervously, he asks, "Too soon? I waited the standard forty years, but—" and goes off on a short spiel about how he should've known.
- When my mom was a kid, her mother used to threaten that if she was bad, she would be sold to the gypsies. Then there was a news story where a kid was actually sold to gypsies. She didn't give that threat to my mom for years afterwords.
- Apparently, it is still too soon to joke about the crucifixion of Christ. Stephen Lynch Live at the El Ray includes a song called "Craig Christ" which has a single line about Jesus' brother Craig's feelings about the crucifixion: "Jesus was our mother's fave, all our love to him she gave//but there's no sibling rivalry, when he's nailed to that tree..." The audience, which has laughed through all the rest of the song, makes shocked gasps. Played straight when, during "Ugly Baby", he "wishes for SIDS" and then informs the audience "It's my f***ing baby!"
- Completely averted during the memorial service for Graham Chapman where John Cleese, whom was giving the eulogy, played the first half like you'd expect from a Python, stating
Cleese:"And the reason I feel I should say this is he would never forgive me if I didn't, if I threw — threw away this glorious opportunity to shock you all on his behalf. Anything for him but mindless good taste. I could hear him whispering in my ear last night as I was writing this"
... and scoring a Crowning Moment hat-trick of Awesome, Funny and Heartwarming in the process.
- The (numerous) jokes about Michael Jackson's death alomost invariably get this response. Also see Dude Not Funny.
- Yeah, well, you know... he was "gone too soooooooooooon!"
- The Onion ran a story titled "Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying" in every market except Denver.
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