Too Hot for TV

You know you have a dirty mind when your Imagine Spots are censored!

Material that won't fly past censors on TV and is too blatant to sneak past the censors, so it's included on video releases, often in the DVD Bonus Content. It can be used as marketing ploy to sell more DVDs.

Many ecchi anime that use censor steam will remove it for the DVD release. This also applies to violent anime with censor shadows.

So named because in 1990s, there were TV shows that sold VHS releases called "Show X: Too Hot for TV!". In reality, the "too hot" was often restricted to a few extra swear words.

A Sub-Trope of Deleted Scene. Compare Unrated Edition, Think of the Censors!, Explicit Content, Too Sexy for This Timeslot.

A thorough list of such censorship can be found here on this website.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Some of the controversial Confused.com adverts end up so racy the ASA won't allow them on TV, but they can be seen on the YouTube channel.
• Implied with GoDaddy.com's previous Super Bowl Special multi-year campaign, which involved ads which would cut to text advertising the website just as the ads were getting suggestive; the content on the website ended up being as tame as the broadcast commercials.

Anime & Manga

• Averted for Aria the Scarlet Ammo's anime adaptation, which was left censored for unknown reasons. Then the studio complained about low sales.
• A Bridge to the Starry Skies. Except Ayumu. His nudity is left untouched, despite being clearly used for Fanservice. Most fans were unamused to say the least.
• The DVD and Blu-ray releases of Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School - Side:Despair removed the many Censor Shadows obscuring the gorier parts of the Tragedy of Hope's Peak Academy, as well as one in the scene in Episode 9 in which a Reserve Course student decapitates himself with a chainsaw.
• Deadman Wonderland can be seen completely uncensored on DVD/Blu-ray.
• The anime of DearS had Episode 9.5, which was not televised (it's a Hot Springs Episode in an already extremely ecchi series, draw your own conclusions). It was released as DVD Bonus Content.
• Domestic Girlfriend had some rather explicit sex scenes added in its Blu-ray home media release, content which was based off of extra chapters in the original manga that were themselves way too spicy for shounen magazine publication and were relegated to the volume releases.
• Episode 26 of Excel♡Saga, the aptly-titled "Going Too Far". Numerous aspects of it, including its running time, were designed to make the episode not get past the Japanese broadcast standards authority.
• Fly Me to the Moon also has extra chapters which have a bit more risque content. While nothing too explicit is shown, it's definitely more than what the cutesy main story would have you expect.
  • This is also the case for the first season's OVA, which shows that Nasa and Tsukasa aren't such a chaste innocent couple when they share several steamy kisses with each other, with the last one being a particularly sensual Spit-Trail Kiss.
  • The second OVA is pretty spicy as well, with the main plot centering on Charlotte and Aya pushing Tsukasa to try on a French Maid Outfit and later Sailor Fuku to try to turn Nasa on (it works). This culminates in a scene where he sensually removes her long stockings and even kisses one of her legs while she's wearing the sailor uniform. A Fade to Black follows...
• Haganai's second season is a unique example which not only was too hot for TV but international DVD release; a shot of a girl who looks like Kobato in a graphic eroge scene was censored on all DVD/Blu-ray and streaming releases outside of Japan, and on Japanese TV.
• Hayate the Combat Butler: Because of airing on an early timeslot, a lot of the action and risque shots had a guy holding up a sign saying "Can not show", and all shout outs were done this way as well.
• High School D×D had an interesting case with the anime's second season. While it is normal for the normal broadcast version of all its seasons to cover the girls with Censor Steam, Lens Flare Censor or stylized versions of its logo, second season Blu-ray versions also had the camera shift to actually view some of the action in more sexualized ways and including scenes that were left out possibly due to time constraits.
• I Don’t Like You at All, Big Brother!!: In the same situation as Rosario + Vampire censors are completely arbitrary.
  • The DVD release seems to show most of the arbitrary ones were actually hiding cameltoe. Still doesn't justify censoring feet...
  • And the manga as well was uncensored in its tankobon release.
• Interspecies Reviewers' anime adaptation is much Hotter and Sexier than the original manga — while the manga would simply cut to a large page detailing each review and its associated score instead of actually showing any sex, the anime isn't bound by such restrictions, and can animate sex scenes while having each reviewer narrate their analysis. While the anime does not go into outright hardcore pornography territory, it certainly does skirt on the edge of the line at times and definitely has a lot of content that unambiguously qualifies as softcore material. The censored broadcast of episode 3 omitted several scenes and gave the viewer a black screen with the audio intact. This went to the point that Funimation eventually dropped the series in late January 2020, with Amazon following suit in early February (making it so the only way to watch the series in the US was via piracy), and the TV channel Tokyo MX even pulled the show from its broadcast about a week later. Not too long after, Sun TV also pulled the series from broadcast. Even AT-X, a station normally (in)famous for its laxness regarding nudity and other "edgy" content, would up censoring part of a scene in Episode 7 (for context, it was Meidri's egg-laying scene; apparently the showing of birdmaid cloaca crosses a line for what can be shown in a broadcast). The series was eventually given a North American Blu-ray release by Critical Mass Video, the hentai division of Right Stuf.
• Referenced in K, in the episode preview dialogues, when Neko says she'll make everyone go naked in the DVD, so that it won't look weird when she doesn't want to wear clothes.
• In Kill la Kill the infamous bath scene was cut when watching it on [adult swim] but it is shown in the DVD and Blu-Ray. That scene was also responsible for the show getting an R18+ in Australia, again only on DVD and Blu-Ray.
• The broadcast version of Maken-ki! was so borderline, that many of its scenes made liberal use of Lens Flare and Censor Steam to make it suitable for television. While other scenes were edited to include conveniently placed foreground objects to cover the girls' naughty bits. The Blu-ray/DVD release is uncensored and includes a set of mini-specials that're exclusive to the boxset.
• The Monster Musume anime was Nipple and Dimed, though the censorship was slightly more subtle than usual. The Blu-ray versions put everything back in.
• Outlaw Star had "Hot Springs Planet Tenrei" episode that never aired on Cartoon Network or [adult swim] due to its use of Fanservice. It wouldn't be until its airing on the revived Toonami block that the episode would finally air on US airwaves, with the breasts Nipple and Dimed in order to pass for airing. Made worst is unlike other Hot Spring Episodes, there is a significant plot point in this episode that may lead to confusion in following episodes.
• Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is an interesting case because none of the English dub was allowed on American/British TV at all due to being so extreme. Funimation pitched an edited dub of the show to [adult swim] and encouraged fan campaigns to the network, but it was ultimately rejected. It is on DVD, but has a logo saying it's a TV-MA in America and a standard 18+ logo in Britain.
• An example caused by being Distanced from Current Events instead of raciness: Puella Magi Madoka Magica had its 11th episode censored to remove references to rocks falling and hurting people as well as evacuation scenes in response to the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake. The 10th episode, which aired just 12 hours before the earthquake, already gave a taste of what would happen. This is even after an embargo for 6 weeks. Internet broadcasts have included these scenes and they are on the DVDs, along with an explict mention of earthquakes and tsunami.
• Rosario + Vampire: The censors are completely arbitrary, as some scenes get censored and other more racy scenes are not.
• Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei: Most gag censors stayed. However, there are a few that flat out say "Censored for broadcast" that were removed in the DVDs.
• The DVD release of School Days recolors the Black Blood in the last episode red. Though for some odd reason, the second murder during the same episode has red blood, even in the censored version.
• Seikon no Qwaser. Unless you view web broadcasts a week later or the Blu-rays.
• The DVDs for Strike Witches cranks up the fanservice with some uncensoring.
• Viz Media's Shonen Jump subscription service makes many manga series (some of which actually run in other Jump magazines in Japan) available on their website and Shonen Jump app. However, because of app store restrictions on adult content, some chapters or series are only available on their website. (The related service MangaPlus has every series on the website on the app as well, probably because it's not a paid app.)
  • Unlike every other series in Weekly Shonen Jump proper, Ayakashi Triangle is entirely website-exclusive because of its high sexual content. Notably, Viz tended to entirely pass on licensing Shonen Jump's more sex-heavy titles (like To Love Ru or Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs), and may have only licensed Ayakashi Triangle because of getting every new Shonen Jump manga since 2019 as a package deal. Even then, two chapters (74 and 75) were skipped entirely, even on Manga Plus, for a suggestive scene involving a particularly-young character. Once the series moved to Jump+ and the license for the collected volumes was transferred to Seven Seas Entertainment, Viz entirely stopped simulpublishing new chapters, making them exclusive to Manga Plus.
  • Despite incredible violence and frequent nudity, most of Chainsaw Man is available on the app. The exception is chapter 59, which has a two page color spread of Quanxi and her four Fiend girlfriends having group sex.
  • Though the content of Protect Me, Shugomaru! is generally pretty mild, chapter 8 is website-exclusive because the running joke throughout is how phallic the Mushroom Man antagonist is.
  • Hell's Paradise: Jigokuraku, Fire Punch, Dandadan, and Golden Kamuy are entirely website-only because of their graphic violence and sexual content. Not too surprising, as the latter is an outright Seinen series.
• Averted with Yosuga no Sora: Compared to most post-midnight anime. Whereas most networks still shy themselves from showing uncensored nipples after midnight, Yosuga no Sora dares to go the whole nine yards and show full sex scenes on network TV, akin to HBO's Rome and The Sopranos. Examples, while not extremely explicit, include Motoka shown masturbating (and implicitly on a frequent basis) and the show has no qualms showing nipples in full detail. Then Episode 4 (Kazuha 4) literally gives the starting act of a sex scene, and Episode 6 (Akira 4) goes all out showing Akira in all sorts of surprising sex positions. Also, the anime as compared to the visual novel, somehow managing the exact opposite of most visual novel-based anime.
• Sometimes averted as some European television channels (mostly adult) aired Hentai complete with graphic sex scenes and extremely explicit genitalia very clearly intact in addition to nipples, something not even AT-X can show.

Comic Strips

• Mort Walker (creator of Beetle Bailey) is one of the few cartoonists to have been ahead of fans in regards to Rule 34 versions of his own work. He once drew Ms. Buxley nude and released the drawing as a limited edition series of art prints. Walker and his staff also make several dirty gag strips that never make it past the sketch level. Mostly, they do this for their own amusement, but some of the strips have been published in Scandinavian magazines, and were later collected into a complete album. With Walker's blessings, of course.

Fan Fiction

• SeerKing has had this happened to him twice. Both Code Geass: The Prepared Rebellion and Uzumaki Naruko To The Victor The Spoils V 2 originally had lemons that went unreported for a while until they were and were subsequently deleted. While FanFiction.Net has always had controversies regarding lemons, SeerKing decided not to quibble about it and had the lemons posted on Archive of Our Own, which in fact is one of the reason the latter website was founded.

Films — Live-Action

• Inverted by the network TV cut of Jaws 2, which had material that had been cut to avoid getting an R-rating re-inserted to add running time.
• Of course, Basic Instinct is already too "hot" to be shown on anything but premium channels, but director Paul Verhoeven cut about 45 seconds of the most explicit sex scenes out of the original to avoid an NC-17 rating. An uncut version was later made available in a DVD release.
• Showgirls is an NC-17 sexploitation film that was infamous for being heavily censored whenever it was shown on network television.

Live-Action TV

• Dating show-cum-Point-and-Laugh Show Blind Date put out several of these collections. Lots of low, low, low points... and quite a few high points that actually made for halfway decent porn.
• The last 30 seconds or so from the end of the Buffy episode "Smashed" were cut off for being too "porn-y".
• COPS was one of the shows that had the trope name as bonus videos.
• Jerry Springer had a few VHS and PayPerView releases of such episodes, typically containing either conflicts involving nudist, or conflicts involving too much swearing to be bleeped out while remaining entertaining.
• Have I Got News for You did this with VHS in the 1990s. One was entitled "The Pirate Video". With the cast dressed as pirates on the front cover, natch.
• The Mock the Week DVDs are named Too Hot for TV and are largely material which The BBC considered inappropriate for TV. There are now three such DVDs, each running for about three hours.
• Mr. Show spoofed this with "The Car Wash Change Thief Action Squad", an investigative reporting show, having an ad for the THFTV version.
• For the DVD release of TV Funhouse (the Comedy Central incarnation), uncensored audio tracks were included, but the original recordings were no longer available; lines were partially rerecorded to add the cursing back in (this makes it a borderline case of Keep Circulating the Tapes, along with the missing Globetrotters segment).
• The Whitest Kids U' Know took this to a ridiculous extreme, showing pixellated breasts with no justification except to say, "Buy the DVDs; this part won't be censored!" The funny thing is IFC shows those scenes uncensored.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway? had "Too Hot For Whose Line?," featuring some of the show's raunchier material. These were still aired on ABC, but with the "Too Hot" tag to indicate the less-than-family-friendly content.
• With the rise in popularity of made-for-cable and made-for-streaming TV series that allow for explicit sex, language and violence of a type still (for now...) forbidden on mainstream commercial and non-premium cable networks, it is becoming more common for DVD and Blu-ray series releases to feature different edits of episodes to ramp up adult content.
  • Aquarius does not just add in sex scenes and nudity to its DVD release, but entire alternate versions of scenes featuring cable-friendly language. This fact is used in the promotions for the releases.
  • The US network Syfy often airs family-friendlier versions of original series such as Bitten and The Magicians. For sex scenes and other racy content, you need to either view the shows outside the US or buy the "unedited" DVD releases later. Although "Too Hot for TV" isn't invoked directly, the 2016 DVD release of The Magicians, for example, does promote the fact that the episodes are uncensored.
  • Actually somewhat predates the rise of streaming and premium cable as the early-2000s series. Las Vegas also released racier versions of its episodes to DVD, though by today's standards those episodes could probably air as-is even on network TV. At the time, though, the DVDs were promoted as being too hot for TV.
• The early eighties British VHS release of the Star Trek: The Original Series episodes The BBC declined to show on the grounds that they "dealt most unpleasantly with the already unpleasant subjects of madness, torture, sadism and disease" ("Whom Gods Destroy", "Plato's Stepchildren" and "The Empath") had NEVER SHOWN ON UK TV stickers and, in the case of "Whom Gods Destroy", a rather misleading cover image of Green-Skinned Space Babe Marta.
• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has some songs made with two different versions: One with explicit lyrics that include swearing and raunchier jokes, and a version made for the show's broadcast that's toned down. The explicit versions can be found on Rachel Bloom's YouTube channel, some of the streaming versions, and the official soundtrack releases.
• The It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Christmas Special, "A Very Sunny Christmas", was originally released on DVD format, and contained uncensored use of "fuck", nudity, and a scene of explicit, bloody violence, most of which was toned down or censored for the TV broadcast on FX. The show was eventually able to build up the clout to get away with such things without censorship, to the point where a Season 12 episode had Charlie saying "nigger" and "cunt" uncensored.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Downplayed In-Universe. At the start of "Assaulting Reality" (about a rape accusation on the set of Heart's Desire, a Take That! to The Bachelor and Reality Shows in general), the producers show sex footage from The Dream Suite. In reality, this would lead to the producers and the network getting penalized by the Federal Communications Commission for showing an actual sex act, which could fall under "Indecent Content" or even "Obscene Content."
• Parodied on Saturday Night Live with Punk D: Barely Legal, a DVD with pranks MTV couldn't air: presented with two robbers, Fred Durst offers to "touch your wiener"; Christina Aguilera's birth controls are switched; and 50 Cent shoots dead a guy dressed as a vampire.

Music Videos

• In the Music Video for Chris Rock's "No Sex in the Champagne Room," some of the strippers are censored with a "sticker" that says this.
• Lil' Kim uses this in her Music Video for "How Many Licks" when a guy in prison is fantasizing about her having sex with him.
• The version of Eminem's "Superman" seen on music video channels in the US censors the swearing, as well as pixelating both porn star Gina Lynn's breasts and Eminem's buttocks. The uncensored version can be found online, as well as on the bonus features of some versions of the 8 Mile DVD^note Some retailers carried a version with the film uncensored but the "Superman" video censored, labeled online as the "censored bonus features" version.

Print Media

• The Best of the Rejection Collection: 293 Cartoons That Were Too Dumb, Too Dark, or Too Naughty for The New Yorker.

Pro Wrestling

• During the Attitude Era, the WWF released Banned in Canada, a tape consisting of material unfit to air on Canadian broadcasts of Raw.

Radio

• The Bob & Tom Show parodied this with "Mr. Obvious: Too Hot for Radio!"

Video Games

• Parodied in Project × Zone if you place Ulala with Haken and Kaguya: Haken suggests that Ulala interview the buxom Kaguya, which causes Ulala to muse that the censors probably won't allow her to show it.
• While it's often inverted with Visual Novels, there are a few that qualify as this. Most notably, there's Little Busters!, which was later released as Little Busters Ecstasy and added h-scenes. Less notably, there's Starless: Nymphomaniac's Paradise, which has a censored version on stores that have no problem selling 18+ content uncensored simply because it's that depraved and messed up. Sure, you can look up an uncensor patch, but you need to do that yourself.
• Street Fighter V of all games faced this problem. During the middle of the EVO 2016 finals, ESPN (who was broadcasting the game) realized that the character R. Mika (a flashy puroresu-style wrestler in a very flashy and stripperiffic costume) was too steamy for primetime, and during the middle of the match, the player using her was asked to change to her alternate "Story Mode" skin (which, amusingly enough, while covering up more of her butt and cleavage, still reveals a lot of underboob and ultimately has the same amount of net coverage). This also didn't stop her from her visibly slapping her ass during her Critical Art, an element which was later edited entirely out of the game by Capcom.

Web Animation

• Deep Space 69 episodes released via Google Play and Mondo Media's digital shop includes far more explicit scenes that couldn't be shown on YouTube due to the site's strict guidelines on sexual content.

Web Original

• Parodied by The Onion: "C-SPAN Releases Too Hot For C-SPAN! Video".

Western Animation

• American Dad! and The Cleveland Show include a lot of scenes that couldn't air on TV (including an uncensored English audio track as part of the language selection).
• Is the motive why Minerva Mink, an anthropomorphic sexy mink, has little screentime in Animaniacs. Censors found her cartoons too hot and scrapped them, but kept the character. She does make cameos sometimes, including the movie Wakko's Wish and gets a much larger presence in the comics.
• Drawn Together also. There are also a large number of deleted or extended sequences included with all three seasons. Also, the show was allowed to be shown on Comedy Central's late-night block The Stash but a scene from "The One Wherein There is a Big Twist" depicting Spanky masturbating off the side of a wrestling cage was covered by a Censor Box reading "DVD Only - Too hot for the Stash!".
• Family Guy has lots of swear words and alternate scenes that were too offensive to air on American network TV put on DVD, often in the episode proper.
  • The episode "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein" was considered this by Fox execs, but not [adult swim]. (The AS version of the episode changed one of Peter's lines in a song.)
  • "Partial Terms of Endearment" was considered too controversial to air on American TV at all.
• Robot Chicken also unbleeps the swear words on DVD.
  • Rick and Morty does the same.
• South Park's later DVD and Blu-ray sets, beginning with season 11, remove most of the bleeps. This extends to the remasters of the seasons done prior. That said, there are cases where the dialogue is still bleeped for various reasons:
  • Season 1 (except for "Mecha Streisand") and part of Season 2 were still censored, with a message that shows up on the Blu-Ray releases of said seasons explaining that this is due to the uncensored audio tracks being lost.
  • The dialogue in scenes where the voice acting is done by actual children (primarily Ike) is left bleeped, but that's because the dialogue in question is actually clean and was bleeped to sound worse than it was.
  • A scene in "It Hits the Fan" that's based around characters knowing when the word "fag" is being bleeped is naturally left as-is.
  • All mentions of Muhammad (and Kyle's speech at the end) in "200" and "201" are still left bleeped due to terrorist threats from the terorist group "Revolution Muslim" over his depiction.
• The Simpsons had a VHS released in the UK under this title, including episodes claimed too violent or racy to show in the UK.^note In reality, two of the episodes - "Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy" and "Treehouse of Horror IX" - aired in the UK just fine, and "Natural Born Kissers" was delayed by only a few months. The only truly 'controversial' episode on the set was "The Cartridge Family", which had yet to air in the UK at the time (and would not do so for several years until after the video came out) as it was banned by Sky One. When the BBC got the rights they had no qualms about showing it uncut, and Sky followed suit when the episode returned to them.
• Stripperella's full frontal performances are exhibited in full on the series' DVD release.
• The Venture Brothers has done this on DVD releases restoring nudity that was censored in the original broadcast. For both genders. Some previously bleeped language was restored too.
  • The Boondocks does the same thing.
• Father of the Pride inverts the trope: DVD release of the show actually has several jokes presented in original broadcast cut (one common criticism of the show at the time of broadcast was going way too far with sex jokes on a show about animals).
• Total Drama used to do this on Netflix, showing all of the things Cartoon Network put on the chopping block when it was exported to the United States. Eventually, when they replaced the SD prints with HD ones, this trope was averted and Netflix started using the Bowdlerized American versions instead of the uncensored Canadian ones.

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