- Nckdictator
- Sep 8, 2006
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Just..someone
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The episode Heart of Ice also featured a scene where Mr. Freeze points his gun directly at the camera which was apparently a big no-no for cartoons too.
Considering in 1903 audience members reportedly fainted at this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hknJkYN5dqQ
Speaking of cartoon censorship.
http://www.newsfromme.com/2008/12/11/scrappy-days-part-five/
quote:...Censorship of broadcast television has declined greatly in the era of HBO, Showtime and DVDs…but in the early eighties, if you were creating a show for CBS, NBC or ABC you usually found yourself in the following dilemma. You had to please the Programming People who bought the show and prayed for ratings. They wanted your program to be edgy and sexy and full of action and excitement. And then you had to please the Standards and Practices People. They wanted your show to be nice and quiet and non-controversial. The two divisions rarely spoke with one another. In fact, in some cases, they hated each other too much to converse. Either way, they fought their battles by playing tug-o'-war with you and your show.
We quarrelled often and usually unproductively with these folks over what we called "action" and they called "violence." Sometimes, their definitions were insane. You'd write a scene where the good guy grabbed the fleeing bad guy and held onto him until the police could arrive and the Broadcast Standards people would react like your hero had chopped off someone's head. Criminals could rob banks and cops could stop them but neither could brandish weapons. One time, a writer friend did a script (a pretty good script, I thought) where the climax depended on the hero cutting a rope at a precise moment. The hero, it had been established, was a former Boy Scout…so my friend had the hero whip out his Boy Scout pocket knife and use it to cut the rope.
Well, that couldn't be allowed. Encouraging children to carry knives, even though the Boy Scouts do? You might as well have them packing howitzers and blowing bodies away on the playgrounds of America. There was much arguing and the scene ended up being staged with the rope being cut by the edge of a sharp rock, which was just silly. The rope was being used to lower a car. Given how sturdy it would have to be to do that, it was already stretching reality for it to be cuttable with a pocket knife. A sharp rock was ridiculous.
At times though, the bickering went beyond Broadcast Standards trying to prevent the network from being sued or having its advertisers shrink from advertising. Every so often, someone there got it into their heads that childrens' television could mold the youth of today into the good citizens of tomorrow. That's a questionable premise but let's say it's so. The question then becomes what you teach, how you mold. I found that those who approached the arena with that in mind had some odd ideas of what we should be trying to impart to impressionable viewers. Acts of extreme violence — like carrying a pocket knife — weren't as big a problem as what they called "anti-social behavior" and what I called "having a mind of your own."
Broadcast Standards — at all three networks at various times — frowned on characters not operating in lockstep with everyone thinking and doing as their peers did. The group is always right. The one kid who doesn't want to do what everyone else does is always wrong. (I rant more on this topic, and show you a cartoon I wrote years later for another show just to vent, in this posting.)
Scrappy Doo was intended, as per his name, to be scrappy — scrappy and feisty and in many ways, the opposite of his Uncle Scooby. Faced with an alleged ghost, Scooby Doo would dive under an area rug and you'd see the contours of his doggie rear end shivering with fear beneath it. Scrappy, as I wrote him in his first script, would go the other route: He'd say, "Lemme at him" and go charging after the bogus spirit of the week.
Shortly after the last of many recordings of "The Mark of the Scarab" (that first script), it dawned on ABC Broadcast Standards that maybe Scrappy was a bad role model for the kiddos. He was — and one person in that department actually used this term to me — "too independent." Weeks after I thought that script was out of my life, I got a call: Joe Barbera needed me in the studio, tout de suite, to discuss rewrites the network was demanding. I hopped in the car, zoomed up to the H-B plant on Cahuenga and was directed into a meeting with Mr. B and a covey of censor-type people.
Scrappy, they said, had to be "toned down." He was too rebellious, too outspoken…I forget all the terms they used but I vividly recall the "too independent." I made all the counter-arguments you'd have made. Mainly, I pointed out that Scrappy, as written, was an effectual character. He got things done, always (eventually) for the better. Our heroes, Scooby and Shaggy, fled from danger, panicked, hid, trembled, etc. If they contributed to the resolution of the problem and catching the villain, it was only by accidentally crashing into him. "Why," I asked, "do you want to make that the role model Scrappy and our viewers should emulate?"
The debate went on for maybe half an hour…and usually in these, no one scores a TKO and you wind up compromising. In fact, a compromise is so often the resolution that we often write with some wiggle room, inserting more sex 'n' violence than we really want to put on the screen. That's so that when the censors censor and we wind up compromising, it gets us down to the level we wanted all along. This time though, I had not done that. I'd written what I thought the cartoon oughta be. And this time, I thought, I'd won the argument.
Suddenly, everyone in the room had said everything three or more times and my talking points somehow prevailed. One of the Standards and Practices people shrugged and mumbled, "Well, maybe Scrappy can stay as he is." Another said to me, "You sure talked us out of what we had in mind."
Mr. Barbera, who'd been largely silent throughout the mud-wrestling, leaned forward in his chair and said, "That's because Mark didn't grow up on shows that you people f*cked up." I think he even pronounced the asterisk.
I left the meeting in the warm glow of triumph. I had saved Scrappy Doo's testicles, small though they might be.
The next day, someone (I don't know who) had another writer (I don't know who) rewrite a couple scenes in that first Scrappy script to tone him down, and the affected lines were re-recorded. The other writers working on Scrappy Doo scripts were told to adjust the character accordingly. Scrappy was still somewhat scrappy but nowhere near as scrappy as I thought he should be. For what it's worth, I suspect that the decision to capitulate was made within Hanna-Barbera. Someone, I theorize, feared that even if ABC would now accept Scrappy my way, at some point down the line, they might change their minds. And if they changed their minds, they might not rerun the episodes we were now doing and H-B would lose out on those revenues.
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Feb 22, 2016 19:35
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- Nckdictator
- Sep 8, 2006
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Just..someone
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Last year I read a pretty great book on the development of the Comics Code and the moral panic against comics called THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE:The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. The Comics Code is pretty laughable and almost universally derided for good reason, and the effect it had on the industry was devastating. That said as I've been reading more,and more pre-code works the more nuanced my view on the Comics Code becomes.
I mean, a lot of the Golden Age comics were pretty hosed up and the fact that an 6 year old could buy them just seems iffy. Some sort of system saying something like "X,Y,and Z Are in this book, keep that in mind before reading" was needed but the Comics Code was just too heavyhanded.
(Examples of pre-code stuff below, I love them but their not something I'd want my hypothetical first-grader reading)
___________________________________
________________________________________________
1944 anti-comic editorial
http://library.nd.edu/documents/catholic_pamphlets/texts/830115.txt
quote:A large number of the comic books depict the heroic adventures of one or more characters whose philosophy may only be described as un-American and in a few instances, anarchistic. The vigilante spirit is rife in the comics: the gestapo method is glorified. A plot-pattern is used by many scriptwriters with a self-imposed mission to correct injustices, to eradicate evil and its practitioners. Throughout subsequent episodes he will be shown ferreting out criminals, determining their guilt, pronouncing judgment, inflicting punishment-usually capital-upon them, all this without reference to due processes of law. Always, in these sequences, the offenses committed by the malefactors are portrayed in such detail · as to constitute a veritable handbook of criminal tecniques for impressionable young readers. An important part of what we proudly esteem as "The American Way" has to do with our lawfully established methods of dealing with lawbreakers. We set up and maintain police organizations;.prosecuting attorneys, grand juries, judges and trial juries, and have created an elaborate series of safeguards to assure that no man, however grave his offense, shall be tried, convicted, and punished except by due process of law.
Any limitation placed upon these safeguards constitutes a threat to the perpetuation of American liberties and represents a step toward the type of oppression of which Adolf Hitler stands as a current symbol. Of late, there has been a tendency on the part of comics to glorify characters who are engaged in crusading activities which infringe upon these liberties. Even harmless appearing child "commandos" act in the comics, as investigating police officers, as grand juries, as trial judges and juries, and, in certain instances, as jailers and even as executioners. The individuals upon whom all of these illegal attentions are visited are, of course, shown to be lawbreakers-but where in all the body of our laws is to be found provision for such action 'by volunteer vigilante groups working outside the regularly constituted agencies of law and order?
Manifestly the ultimate result of a steady diet of such fare must be to condition the child mind for a philosophy akin to that fostered by the dictators. Certainly all of it is in conflict with the standards and principles of the United States and of our democratic form of government. It is one of the noble and inspiring tenets of our national creed that it is better that a hundred guilty persons should escape than that one innocent individual should unjustly suffer-and to this principle the whole spirit of vigilante procedure is in opposition. The vigilante spirit is the mob spirit, the Ku-Klux spirit, the unleashng of wild, unreasoning passions to deal with situations which call for the calm deliberation and impartial judgments which are provided by our laws. It is a serious count in the indictment of the comic books and strips that they do violence to this American principle.
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Feb 22, 2016 22:14
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- Nckdictator
- Sep 8, 2006
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Just..someone
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In an example of pseudo-censorship not being all bad I have to bring up the 1962 movie Cape Fear. It's a wonderfully creepy thriller about a lawyer and his being stalked by a former client of his who has just been released from prison for a unspecified crime. The crime is never stated but it's heavily implied to be rape. There's a scene that stands out where the lawyer and a detective visit one of the felon's victims who has just been "beat up" by him. For a modern viewer it's obvious the character was sexually assaulted but everyone in the movie refers to it like "he beat her up"
The fact that the movie self-censors and never bluntly refers to "rape" or sex of any kind just makes it all the more creepy.
quote:"Speaking about your wife and kid... I got a little caper planned for them! Remember that story I told you 'bout my old lady? That was just laughs, Counsellor. That was kid's stuff! I got somethin' planned for your wife and kid that they ain't NEVER gonna forget. They ain't NEVER gonna forget it, and neither will YOU, Counsellor." Nckdictator has a new favorite as of 20:01 on Mar 2, 2016
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Mar 2, 2016 19:59
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Feb 22, 2016 19:35
