Current Events > Is HBO Max censorship heavy?

(+) Yeah! (+)

They're missing the first two episodes of Popeye the Sailor. Admittedly, they are pretty bad. The first one has Popeye hitting a Black carnival employee with a baseball and the second one has him punching a Native American chief to turn him into Gandhi. (Geddit? Now he's a peaceful Indian. Hi-lari-ous.)

I decided to check out the original Johnny Quest, a series I haven't seen in 25 years, and the intro is missing. I go on YouTube to find the missing intro. It starts out with some unflattering South American native stereotypes in a canoe. It's possible the intro was omitted due to the music being used, but I doubt it.

Aren't they supposed to have disclaimers on these things like they have for Looney Tunes and Gone With the Wind? I wanna watch the whole show, dammit.

Yeah, there's a bunch of MadTV episodes missing. Same with Whose Line is it Anyway.

Could be due to rights issues. That shit annoys me

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They should just leave it in tact and put a disclaimer warning if anything.

Shit like this is how lost media gets made

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AlCalavicci posted...

Yeah, there's a bunch of MadTV episodes missing. Same with Whose Line is it Anyway.

Could be due to rights issues. That shit annoys me

Whose Line Is It Anyway is made up of literal improv and a lady playing hoedown on the piano.

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They don't have the Muhammad episodes of South Park either.

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masticatingman posted...

Whose Line Is It Anyway is made up of literal improv and a lady playing hoedown on the piano.

Well, they aren't there for a reason. Idk what

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I like how they handle this in reprints of old comics. I have some collections of golden age Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman comics from the late 30s early 40s. And each book has disclaimer in the beginning about how the stories inside sometimes contain material that might be considered in bad taste by modern standards and is presented as is, for its historical value and context. Or something like that

It's weird how much of the fantasy technology of the 1960s is the everyday reality of today. In a roundabout way, Dr. Quest has cellphones with video screens, the internet, and Siri.

wbloechel posted...

welcome to 2021

They better not have censored anything in Sealab 2021.

<____<

Flauros posted...

They should just leave it in tact and put a disclaimer warning if anything.

Shit like this is how lost media gets made

Reminds me of like a decade ago, when Cartoon Network decided to run ALL the old looney tunes. They more or less showed them in chronological order. But the ones with the blatant stereotypes and racism, they held them back to air during the wee hours of the night, along with disclaimers.

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Zikten posted...

I like how they handle this in reprints of old comics. I have some collections of golden age Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman comics from the late 30s early 40s. And each book has disclaimer in the beginning about how the stories inside sometimes contain material that might be considered in bad taste by modern standards and is presented as is, for its historical value and context. Or something like that

tbh I dont really think theres any value in preserving stuff like described in the OP

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Not a fan of pretending things never existed. They have historic value. Have a disclaimer and if it anyone complains, tell them to grow up.

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I hope so. We need to be protected at all times.

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You can thank Twitter for shit like this

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loafy013 posted...

Reminds me of like a decade ago, when Cartoon Network decided to run ALL the old looney tunes. They more or less showed them in chronological order. But the ones with the blatant stereotypes and racism, they held them back to air during the wee hours of the night, along with disclaimers.

I have mixed feelings about All That and Rabbit Stew. One one hand, the nameless antagonist is pretty insensitive. On the other hand, he's Elmer Fudd -- only Black. Part of me thinks the short should get a pass because the way the character is depicted is consistent with how Elmer Fudd (and everyone else) is depicted. Looney Tunes was basically the South Park of the mid-20th century.

But at the same time, I'll freely admit that White people were treated much better in both animation and live action than what Black people and their animated counterparts were treated. That episode gets a pass when matched against other Looney Tunes episodes. When taken in a collective context of how people of different ethnic groups were depicted at the time, it's sadly consistent with how badly Black people were stereotyped in other media.

Of course, maybe I should revisit that short before I comment on it. I haven't seen it in a decade or so and it's possible that it's far worse than I remember it being.

TheGoldenEel posted...

tbh I dont really think theres any value in preserving stuff like described in the OP

I wouldn't have known that the African Dodger was a thing if not for that Popeye short. It was a game in which a Black carnival employee would stick his head in and out of a hole and attempt to dodge baseballs thrown at him by White patrons.

It's things like Popeye that keep things like the African Dodger from becoming rumor or hearsay. Few things can drive home societal inequality quite so quickly as the knowledge that there were once Black men who had to dodge baseballs to put food on the table.

So, I finally finished the first episode. The second episode has the intro intact. I don't get why the first episode would leave it out. It's not a censorship or licensing issue.

*shrugs*

Edit: Also, I'm gonna assume that Steven E de Souza (screenwriter of Die Hard, Predator, and Die Hard 2) was a fan of this show when he was young. There's a stunt performed in a speedboat which is done in Die Harder and there's a ventilation shaft Johnny has to crawl through which looks just like the one in Die Hard. It could be a coincidence. It could be that everyone was once a child. I'd still like to believe that's where he got those two sequences from.