Censorship Around the World

Expanded! I'd like to find some way to include some other weird Chinese censorship decisions, for instance the ban on showing skeletons... which means that all the Magic: The Gathering cards sold with pictures of skeletons have to have their art slightly altered to make it look like there is some skin/flesh left on the skeleton. Or the more recent decree against depicting time travel, but haven't come across a good way to fit these into the quiz.

Sat through another movie this weekend courtesy of Bahrain Cinemas- World War Z. Thanks to the idiot censors I'm really not sure why they went to Israel, that bit of the movie has chopped to pieces. I assume the offensive thing here was that Israel exists- can't let that bit of news get out in this part of the world.

Another hilarious and perplexing example... this one via a Gulf Air flight in the airspace over Oman... I was watching Anchorman and, among a long list of other extremely odd censorship decisions, there was the choice to bleep out such offensive words as "hynie" and "poop mouth," a re-dubbing of the audio so that "intercourse island" because "wife swapping island" (how the heck does that make it better? I guess as long as they're married then any sexual deviancy is a-okay!), and, perhaps most odd, the scene where Jack Black kicks Baxter (in the scene replaced by what is obviously a stuffed toy) off a bridge, the kicking part is cut out. You just see Jack Black walk to the right with a stuffed dog in hand, and then you hear a splash. "Now this is happening!" er.. what exactly? haha... I guess there's a policy against showing animal cruelty on Gulf Air? They also cut short the scene where a guy gets his arm cut off, but the show a man getting stabbed in the chest with a trident.

Just watched The Wolf of Wall Street at the cinema in Bahrain the other day. It was awful. Sometimes could barely tell what was going on and the dialogue getting muted every 30 seconds for this or that was highly distracting. Plus it would have been nice to see that chick naked, I know she was a couple times. Censorship blows.

I've come across another rather hilarious case of censorship here in Turkey. Apparently... there must be a ban against showing certain things on TV, including I think nipples, blood/gore, and cigarettes. This has resulted in some interesting and humorous edits. Often, they just blur the offensive object out. For instance, the film Munich was shown on TV here, and in the scene with the lady assassin where she tries to save herself by baring her breasts, that's still in there, but they just replaced her nipples with two small blurry spots. And in the South Park episode where the cable TV guy is rubbing his nipples talking about how their customers have no choice, they just zoomed in on his face. You can see his arms moving but no nipples. By far the funniest thing, though, is that typically when someone is smoking, the cigarette has been replaced by a cartoon flower. So... frequently there are people on screen holding smoking flowers in their hands or lips, like we can't figure it out.