10 Outrageous Moments of Censorship in Popular Cartoons
Who doesn't love a cartoon?
Censors, that's who.
For over a century, cartoons have been delighting audiences young and old... and for almost
just as long, censorship boards have been chasing after them with wagging fingers.
Sometimes, what the censors see is obvious, leaving us to wonder who in their right mind
thought it would be a good idea to put THAT in a cartoon – and other times, their decisions
seem to make no sense at all.
Here are 10 outrageous moments of censorship in popular cartoons.
Family Guy Despite being neither as clever as The Simpsons
nor as offensive as South Park, Family Guy nicely fills the space between those two shows.
A couple of episodes have been banned in the past – but in those cases, the episodes
were never even made.
Fox turned them down outright, and that was that.
However, that doesn't mean the animators don't have strong feelings about censorship rules.
They aired their grievances in the episode "PTV," which follows Peter's quest to
run a censorship-free TV network after the FCC starts cracking down too hard on other
stations.
The agency gets wind of Peter's project and heavily censors it.
Then things begin to spiral out of control as they start to censor all the citizens of
Quahog in their private lives.
Though nothing about the episode was actually ever censored, it sharply pointed out how
censorship can go too far and end up making things seem more risque than they actually
are, and for that, we had to give it a nod in this list.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Chances are, if you were born in the last
40 or so years, the Heroes in a Half Shell were a part of your childhood.
The cartoons and movies are pretty kid-friendly, but it's understandable that some parents
might get hung up on the show's violence.
However, when the original cartoon was released, Great Britain decided to take it a step further
and play national parent, with confusing results.
The country's censorship board opted to change the show's name to Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles
for no apparent reason.
Furthermore, Michelangelo's nunchakus were replaced with a turtle-themed grappling hook
– but none of the other turtles' weapons were changed.
Now sure, nunchakus can be dangerous, but not generally as dangerous as, for example,
Leonardo's razor-sharp katana.
It was just a strange censorship job from start to finish.
The Rescuers Disney's 1977 animated film The Rescuers is
a good-natured tale of mice on a mission to rescue an orphaned boy from his abusive relatives.
It's typical Disney fare for the time, G-rated and wholesome enough for the whole family.
So imagine the surprise when someone noticed a tiny flash on their late-'90s video release
of the film that looked slightly out of place, and discovered that two frames had a photo
of a topless woman pasted into the background.
This sort of thing isn't totally unheard of, but what makes The Rescuers unique is how
strangely Disney handled it.
They announced the problem before there was any widespread knowledge of it, and implied
that it may have been in the original theatrical release as well.
They also said that an earlier 1992 release wasn't affected because it was made from a
different print.
To this day, nobody's really sure what the company was doing, but the censorship was
still probably a good idea in any case.
Sailor Moon Thailand is well-known for making some odd
censorship decisions.
Fans of CBR know, for instance, that the country permanently banned all future Grand Theft
Auto games after one man claimed GTA 4 inspired him to murder a cab driver.
But for sheer strangeness, this one has to take the cake.
Sailor Moon isn't what most people would call a sexually suggestive show.
Sure, there are some short skirts, and some brief, sheer silhouettes of the Sailor Senshi
during their transformations, but by and large, this is a show made to appeal to preteen girls
– heavy on friendship, true love, and cute outfits; light on the sex and violence.
Thailand, though, apparently disagrees.
The country once famously blurred out the main character's plain-Jane pink one-piece
swimsuit in a particular episode, as though her bare arms and legs were enough to provoke
controversy.
According to online comments, Thai fans weren't very impressed either, but that was, nevertheless,
the version of the episode they got.
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut Anyone who's even a little familiar with Matt
Stone and Trey Parker's long-running cartoon series knows that it's no stranger to controversy.
It pushes almost every envelope and gleefully offends just about anybody it can.
Because this has always been the show's calling card, it actually hasn't been censored as
much as some people might think – the people who broadcast it know exactly what to expect.
Not so with the show's infamous feature film, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.
As Stone and Parker tell the story, the notoriously fickle MPAA wouldn't approve the movie's original
name, South Park: All Hell Breaks Loose, because of the word "hell" in the title.
The creators knew this was a bogus reason, so as revenge, they changed it to a penis
joke that technically had no foul language in it.
They were astonished when the MPAA approved it with no further ado.
Peppa Pig Peppa Pig is a popular TV character for young
children in Great Britain and elsewhere in the Commonwealth.
Peppa and her friends and family have small, safe adventures that help teach children how
to understand and appreciate the world around them.
If we had to pick a winner for "least offensive cartoon ever," Peppa Pig would be a finalist.
Even so, one episode of the show managed to earn a country-wide ban in Australia.
The offending show was all about a small black spider Peppa meets.
Though she's scared at first, she soon learns that the spider is harmless and befriends
it.
This is all well and good in the UK, where poisonous spiders are very rare, but in Australia,
they're a significant public health hazard.
We can't blame the Aussies - talk about sending the wrong message to kids!
Steven Universe Cartoon Network's beloved series Steven Universe
is a lot of things: it's wildly inventive, a creation of some of the same minds behind
Adventure Time.
It's whimsical and fantastical, with its own intricate lore to be learned and explored.
And it's about as straight as a circle.
The show explores gender identities and personality traits – in a very gentle, non-sexualized
way – with a cast of characters called Gems who have very different traits, but can merge
to become new Gems with a surprising mixture of the traits from the previous two.
This has been going on for a while now, with only a few ruffled feathers.
But one episode was censored in Britain for a scene in which one female Gem squeezes another
in order to make the other's male partner jealous.
Cartoon Network's UK censors were worried it might confuse children about parental roles
– but by the same logic, the whole show might very well do that.
There doesn't seem to be any reason why this single episode should stand out.
Dragon Ball Following the exploits of Son Goku from early
childhood up to the cusp of adulthood, Dragon Ball is the gleeful action-adventure show
that first introduced Son Goku to the world.
Written for a Japanese audience, the show followed Japanese conventions for the time,
using young Goku's innocent bouts of nudity and curiosity about other people's bodies
as a source of gentle humor, and using female nudity for some slightly raunchier laughs.
Needless to say, neither of those things fly very well on a children's cartoon in the West.
The question early importers faced was not whether to censor Dragon Ball, but how.
And the answers?
Well, they're pretty hilarious.
Dragon Ball's original North American release abounds with everything from strategically-placed
leaves and branches to bizarre substitutions, like swapping out a loose pair of woman's
underwear for a clip-art image of folded American money.
The Simpsons The Simpsons got as popular as it is by mastering
a balancing act.
It's satirical without being too grim, and edgy without pushing the envelope too far.
However, one country's "just right" can end up being another's "too far," as the
show revealed in 2002.
In the episode "Blame it on Lisa," the Simpsons find themselves in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil.
In typical Simpsons fashion, the city and its people are a rude parody of cultural cliches
and stereotypes.
However, Rio's tourism board didn't see it that way.
The episode caused a national uproar.
The board claimed that it was damaging to Rio's international reputation, and announced
it was planning a lawsuit against Fox for airing it.
Eventually, someone told them about the first amendment to the American constitution, which
protects parodies and satires, and they were forced to back off.
But Fox still issued them an apology just to be safe.
Pokemon Electric Soldier Porygon.
Some people who hear that episode name will already know exactly what it was and why it
got banned.
For everyone else, here's the short version: The episode didn't have any objectionable
content, but it did include an animation that flashed bright red and blue lights very rapidly
for a few seconds in a seemingly random pattern.
That short sequence wreaked havoc on people with epileptic photosensitivity, hospitalizing
nearly 700 viewers in Japan, some for as long as 2 weeks.
Needless to say, the episode was yanked, and the show went on hiatus for a few months while
the animators presumably checked to make sure they hadn't accidentally created any other
visual time bombs.
To this day, Electric Soldier Porygon has never been rebroadcast outside of Japan.
What instances of cartoon censorship surprised or confused you?
Ever see something that snuck past the censors?
Ever wish they'd caught it, or do you prefer to play along with the writers and animators?
Give this video a thumbs up and tell us all about it in the comments below.
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