Fox Censors Had a Big Problem With ‘The Simpsons’ Depiction of Dog Romance

The Simpsons has run afoul of the Fox censors on a number of occasions over the years, up to and including the time that they literally opened an episode with the brutal murder of a Fox censor. Which wasn’t exactly a shocker, in retrospect. Later that same season, there was another heated debate about the show’s content, but this time it wasn’t over violence, it was involving canine copulation. 

As you’ll no doubt recall, “Two Dozen and One Greyhounds” found Mr. Burns kidnapping Santa’s Little Helper’s puppies, with plans to kill them and turn their hides into a fashionable ensemble, à la Cruella de Vil. He does a whole song-and-dance number about his love of animal cruelty in the style of “Be My Guest” from Beauty and the Beast. I mean, the show was already tempting the legal wrath of the Walt Disney Corporation, so why not?

The inciting incident of the episode comes when a horned-up Santa’s Little Helper returns to the racetrack where Bart and Homer first met him, and immediately hooks up with a female greyhound who’s right in the middle of a race. We briefly see Santa’s Little Helper mount “She’s the Fastest” before the show cuts to Bart, Lisa and a horrified Marge watching from the stands.

The doggy love scene apparently became an issue for Fox’s Standards and Practices Department. “It was a big fight with the censors,” producer David Mirkin revealed during the episode’s DVD commentary, “but I knew we could shoot it in a way where we could kind of have dogs having sex carefully (and) tastefully.”

Part of the reason for their objection may have been because director Bob Anderson’s early animatic for the show contained a “more graphic version” of the scene that, according to Mirkin, “took us a little further than maybe we wanted to go.” Yup, even some of the Simpsons writers thought that the scene was a little too racy for their 101 Dalmatians parody.

Fox eventually okayed the version of the scene that we got in the final episode, which comes close to showing the dogs hooking up, but never devolves into anything obscene.

Still, arguing over the specifics of cartoon dog mating does seem like a pretty low point for the department.