5 Scenes Audiences Saw Once Then Were Edited Into Oblivion
In 1940, a British director named Thorold Dickinson made a movie based on a recent play. Four years later, MGM released a remake, and they didn’t want the original drawing any attention from it. As part of their remake deal, they ordered every print of the 1940 film burned, as though to convince the world that it had never existed at all.
That movie was called Gaslight. When you hear people talk about gaslighting today, and about the movie that inspired the word, they’re talking about the 1944 remake, because MGM buried the 1940 version so effectively that few know anything about it. But MGM didn’t totally succeed in their quest. Dickinson kept one print for himself, and today, the entire film has resurfaced online.
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Every time Hollywood tries retroactive edits, it falls to us to preserve the truth.
You’ve Never Seen the Real ‘I Love Lucy’ Intro
You know the intro to I Love Lucy. Cursive text appears on a big valentine-style heart, while the familiar theme music plays. You know this even if you’re too young to have really watched the show — and even if your parents were too young to have watched the show.
But if we say you know that intro despite never watching the show back when it was new in the 1950s, we’re wrong. You know that intro because you never watched the show back when it was new in the 1950s. That intro never aired during the show’s original broadcast. It only appeared during syndication, which continued for decades.
During the original airings, the show instead began with a message from the show’s sponsor: Philip Morris. “Smoke for pleasure today,” said this message, “with no cigarette hangover tomorrow.” That was technically an honest promise, because there is no such thing as a cigarette hangover. This opening showed cartoon versions of Lucy and Desi smoking, followed by the real actors, now smoking for real to further advertise the sponsor.
I Love Lucy was the first show to air repeats, and these did not feature the Philip Morris spots. That wasn’t because TV no longer allowed cigarette ads (though that would happen eventually, starting in 1971). It was because Philip Morris hadn’t paid extra for the repeat airings.
‘The Flintstones’ Had a Forgotten Theme Song, Too
The Flintstones is another show whose opening is iconic among generations who never actually watched a single episode. But the “Meet the Flintstones” theme song wasn’t part of the show until its third season. Instead, for the first two seasons, they had a different opening, set to wordless music:
Then the label Golden Records released an album called Songs of the Flintstones for children. It put lyrics to the show’s theme song (“Rise and Shine”). It also put lyrics to another melody that played in the background of some episodes, and this song is the one you know as “Meet the Flintstones.” Elsewhere on the album were a couple other novelty tracks (“Bowling Alley Blues,” “The Dum Tot Song”), and it was all very silly, but the record was popular enough the network decided to make “Meet the Flintstones” the theme song from then on.
They also went and edited all previous episodes for syndication so they, too, now opened with the song.
This is starting to make us think The Flintstones didn’t care about accurately portraying the past at all.
Some Scenes From ‘The Shining’ Are Gone Forever
When you hear that a movie has “deleted scenes,” that almost always means the production cut the scenes before the movie made it to theaters. Occasionally, a scene that appeared on the big screen gets cut before the film appears on home media.
The Shining was weirder. When The Shining first went to theaters in 1980, it ended with a scene that you’ve never watched. Kubrick then had this scene removed, which meant physically cutting it from every reel. No copies of this footage remain, anywhere. Today, you can buy The Shining on disk and watch an alternate extended version that includes a bunch of scenes that never made it to theaters, but even this 146-minute cut doesn’t contain the original theatrical ending.
For years, fans of The Shining didn’t even know what happened in the scene. Apparently, none of the people who watched it in theaters were available to discuss the matter, having all been killed by a curse. But in 2013, Lee Unkrich (whom you might know for directing a bunch of Pixar films) managed to get his hands on the original screenplay and shared the scene with everyone, in text form at least.
If you don’t want to squint and read all that, Wendy and Danny are in a hospital, and investigators mysteriously tell them that they searched the hotel and saw no sign of the crazy stuff they witnessed. So, was it all a fantasy then — Wendy’s fantasy? Then one of the investigators rolls a ball to Danny, the yellow ball from earlier in the movie. Given that The Shining is one of the most analyzed films of all time, there are probably several documentaries out now just breaking down this one scene.
‘The Price Is Right’ Removed One Type of Scene
The Price Is Right, being a game show, isn’t exactly a work of art. You might think its individual segments aren’t worthy of preservation or revision. But one whole category of segment very much was removed from the show in repeats: any scene with a fur coat. Bob Barker became known as an animal rights advocate (famous for calling for pets to be spayed, for their own sakes), and he didn’t want any record of him giving away those murder garments.
ABC
This means there is now no footage available of the very first prize Barker gave away on the show because that first prize was a fur coat. Giving away that coat and feeling disgusted was actually what made him think he should devote himself to fighting animal cruelty.
Of course, if you’re confused about why someone would recoil at cutting off an animal’s hide but press everyone to cut off a pet’s balls, you should just ask a dog their opinion. We asked one, and they said, “Bark! Bark!” which we think should clarify matters for everyone.
No One Remembers How ‘Lord of the Rings’ Looked
In 2020, we got a 4K home release of the Lord of the Rings films. Though this version was sharper than any of the Blu-rays we’d had before, some people cried foul. The fantasy tint they knew so well was gone, replaced with something more mundane. Apparently, the richness of the original movies had been sacrificed on the altar of realism.
New Line Cinema
But those fans were wrong. The extreme color they remembered hadn’t been part of the original movies at all. It had been added in one of the earlier home releases (the extended cuts, specifically). Along with exaggerating the colors, turning white into green and green into super green, this color grading had overridden a bunch of details. The 4K version isn’t just clearer — it’s more faithful to how the movies looked on the big screen. And since it captures the spectrum of color better rather than just tinting everything, it looks almost inarguably better than the super green version. The snapshots above don’t capture this only because they’re too low-res and don’t show HDR color.
Okay, so the original movies have been restored then, right?
Not so fast. This fancy 4K version actually did mess with color in some scenes. Flashbacks were lightened (to make them look more flashback-y), changing their look totally:
New Line Cinema
Dedicated fans have plotted out all the differences that the latest version introduced. These include new errors (perhaps by having A.I. do some nonsense) and even switching around actors (stand-ins who sometimes played the hobbits have had the more famous actors’ faces pasted over them).
If you want to see the movies as they truly once were, all hope is not lost. The physical prints of the movies are still out there, complete with perfect clarity, the original colors and four-foot actors wearing Elijah Wood masks. We will have to steal this collection, and we must keep it for ourselves. It must be preserved. It is precious.
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