In today's It's About TV post, host Mitchell Hadley notes that night's NBC movie was "The Evil of Frankenstein". He rightly notes that it's really bizarre for NBC to air one of those cheesy Hammer horror flicks as a primetime movie. That started me thinking what's the least likely movie to get a prime time airing, either on a network or local station? My nomination is "My Son John", the infamous Red Scare flick of 1952. Many considered it McCarthyite propoganda when it came out, and its reputation got worse as the years went on. Yet somehow ABC aired this on Sunday night in 1970--even though it's in black and white!
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Least likely movie presentation
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About ten years ago Hagerstown, MD's WJAL channel 68 did air the John Waters flick with Tracy Ullmen and Johnny Knoxville called "A Dirty Shame". Considering that the movie was all about sex ( it was rated NC17 for goodness sake ) and WJAL called themselves "Family TV"....WEIRD !!! Obviously nobody was minding the store !!
They must have aired a heavily-edited version. Also, did any OTA stations air the NC-17 film Showgirls with Elizabeth Berkley of Saved by the Bell fame?
..or as John Waters himself would say the "Neutered" version. Don't know about Showgirls but this goes back a ways but back in the 80s did some of those so-called teenage sex movies such as Porkys, The Joy of Sex, Ski Patrol and the like ever get any airtime on OTA television ?? I do know that some flicks like Midnight Cowboy and Steven King's original Carrie were so edited for TV that they more/less did NOT make sense. Actually it took me almost a decade to figure out just why the girls were laughing at Carrie White in the locker room. It took me longer to figure out Midnight Cowboy. I do remember back then when Hagerstown's WHAG showed The Deer Hunter one Sunday afternoon. The violence was left as is but that scene of a naked man running down the street in the dark was cut out even though WHAG in the promos said the movie was "unedited".
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i can think of three of them
I can think of three of them:
Boogie Nights
The Crying Game
Wild Things
I can think of three of them:
Boogie Nights
The Crying Game
Wild Things
Slap Shot
There is an edited for TV version, but the dialogue has to be so horribly chopped-up and
dubbed over to pass muster, it's hardly worth sitting through.
The electronic black bras added to the dancers on the TV cut of Showgirls are hilarious!
There is an edited for TV version, but the dialogue has to be so horribly chopped-up and
dubbed over to pass muster, it's hardly worth sitting through.
The electronic black bras added to the dancers on the TV cut of Showgirls are hilarious!
I refuse to watch movies on broadcast TV. The worst I can remember was Car Wash. There's scene where one of the actors does a riff on the word "chicken s--t. For the broadcast TV version, they changed it to "chicken stuff." Nobody talks like that.
There is another edited for TV version of Slap Shot then again it could be the same version as yours where the music was replaced. In one scene taken place in a bar in the background on the juke box one heard Leo Sayer's "You make me Feel Like Dancing" but in this version that was replaced with light and royality free classical music. Oh the ending scene where the credits were rolling instead of Maxine Nightingale's "Right back Where We Started From" one heard a group of guys just laughing.
One very odd TV edit was Smokey and The Bandit. Instead of calling others SOB Jackie Gleason's character said "Sum Brick" instead even though in those days I heard SOB on other shows on TV like MAUDE as well as on the radio too such as Charlie Donovan on Baltimore's WFBR "...stop it you son of a bitc* !!". That one I didn't get.
I have an old VHS copy of Slap Shot where all of the original foul-mouthed dialogue is intact,
but the original music was replaced. Apparently they were not able to clear all of the rights for
home video use.
I understand this was rectified by the time the DVD came out.
Perhaps my favorite editing job is the broadcast TV version of the movie Fargo where all of the f-bombs are replaced with the word "frozen". "No f***ing way!" becomes "no frozen way!" Clever, and it kind of works!
but the original music was replaced. Apparently they were not able to clear all of the rights for
home video use.
I understand this was rectified by the time the DVD came out.
Perhaps my favorite editing job is the broadcast TV version of the movie Fargo where all of the f-bombs are replaced with the word "frozen". "No f***ing way!" becomes "no frozen way!" Clever, and it kind of works!
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Regarding absurd changes made for foul language, I recall when Bugsy (the Warren Beatty film) was shown on NBC, Ben Kingsley dropped an F-bomb to show his anger at Beatty. Of course, this being commercial TV, it was the always believable, "Freak you!"
Another memory: when Midnight Cowboy was first shown on ABC in 1974 or '75, the network reportedly cut 23 minutes out of the film that was technically rated X when it was originally released.
Another memory: when Midnight Cowboy was first shown on ABC in 1974 or '75, the network reportedly cut 23 minutes out of the film that was technically rated X when it was originally released.
About Midnight Cowboy..even though I am sure he didn't care himself but that clip of John Voight turning on his radio to WABC only to hear Ron Lundy when John Waters did Pink Flamingos back in 1972 there is a missing clip even on later DVDs where Divine was walking down a street in Baltimore only for the camera to catch a billboard for WLPL "stereo 92" radio. Apparently WLPL was not too happy to be in such a movie so the scene was edited out and has been ever since. Only in theaters was where one could catch the WLPL scene.
Another example is the series of Charlie Chan mysteries that were made back in the 30's and 40's.
Rarely seen today due to racially insensitive stereotypes. Back in the 80's though one of our local
television stations used to run Charlie Chan Theater on Saturdays. They would try and edit out scenes
which they thought might be deemed racially offensive.
The result of one of these edits was that you never found out Who Done It after watching a two-hour film.
Rarely seen today due to racially insensitive stereotypes. Back in the 80's though one of our local
television stations used to run Charlie Chan Theater on Saturdays. They would try and edit out scenes
which they thought might be deemed racially offensive.
The result of one of these edits was that you never found out Who Done It after watching a two-hour film.
The old Blondie & Dagwood flicks from the 40s had a few scenes on the chopping block over the years as well.
Back in the 80s the films aired on Baltimore's WBFF. One copy I had taped from WBFF, in one of the early Blondie movies there was a scene of a black man on a bike delivering the mail. When he got to the Bumsteads Daisy the dog runs out of the house and the man falls from the bike scared to death of Daisy and the man was speaking in broken English too. By the mid 1990s when the Blondie movies were airing on AMC that scene was cut.
One local airing that always stuck in my mind was KAPP Yakima (Wash.) airing "Rock and Roll High School" in the early 2000s after a Saturday afternoon football game. That movie, which was at best a cult flick even on release in 1979, starred the Ramones as a parody of those fifties deliquency films. Yakima is a largely rural area with a large Hispanic population. I'd be shocked if even 5% of the audience had even heard of the Ramones, much less this film.
Movies aren't even ran that much on KAPP anymore. They used to have an occasional syndicated movie on weekends a few years ago, usually from Disney/Touchstone etc. Now just infomercials, religious shows, and magazine shows like LatiNation outside of ABC Sports. KIMA used to have their long-running Starlight Theater Movie, those were gone by the mid 1990s. Most of those movies were classic shows pre-1970.
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