Disney+'s Censorship Goes Way Beyond Butts
Remember TV edits? Those were fun, weren't they? If you wanted to watch a movie but not sell a moderately important organ for the price of premium cable (or, you know, get up and go to Blockbuster), you had to catch it on TBS or some other basic cable channel. Those channels couldn't show portray nudity or hardcore profanity for complicated legal reasons, so any movie with a rating higher than PG had to be dubbed into pointlessness. Thus, a generation spent their formative years thinking that "melon farmer" was a wicked burn, and that "Mister Falcon" was a character in Die Hard 2.
You might think the streaming era had done away with such nonsense, but as one Twitter user recently discovered, a certain streaming service found it necessary to unoffensify its own product. Specifically, Darryl Hannah's butt.
But really, the only thing that's surprising about this is that it's done so badly. This is Disney we're talking about. It seems like a seaweed bikini would be a better option than physics-defying hair, but they're the experts.
However, Disney has been censoring the properties it's added to its platform since they started adding things to their platform, under fairly arbitrary criteria. Viewers who had probably aged out of the shows' target demographic nevertheless noticed pretty much immediately that entire episodes of shows like The Suite Life of Zack and Cody and Andi Mack were missing from Disney+. Once you find out why -- one episode of Zack and Cody sees the former faking a disability for those sweet, sweet perks, and others feature guest stars who have since been outed as abusers of various stripes -- you can kind of see their point.
Meanwhile, although it was initially reported that the outrageously racist Jim Crows would be removed from Dumbo prior to its streaming debut, they've skated by with nothing more than a disclaimer. You know what's not okay? The emission of a few fuck-words from a record-holding rock climber as he attempts his greatest achievement in Free Solo, the documentary of Alex Honnold's ascent of El Capitan. These are key moments in a psychologically and physically demanding journey that are effectively neutered by a platform that deems systemic oppression A-okay but emotional outbursts big ol' no-no. We're returning to the "fight a stranger in the Alps" days, except worse. After all, you can't just go to melon farming Blockbuster anymore.
Manna has a lot to say about butts on Twitter.
Top image: The Walt Disney Company
