How much have standards changed in the last few decades?

[SpaceCowboy]

How long ago was it that cigarette smoking, guns, and adult-related material became taboo on networks like Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon?

[SlyBoy]

Forever.

[Mist]

Things have changed very much since the 90's. Just look at Ren & Stimpy. You know, had Zim been made back in the early 90's, most of the stuff edited from the series probably would've remained intact. Cartoons used to have guns, (Heck, they made a kids cartoon out of MORTAL KOMBAT. No blood and gore, of course.) but ever since Columbine, they're very taboo. I shudder to think what will be considered "offensive" and edited out from cartoons 10 years from now. . Eventually, things will get so bad, cartoons will be reduced to animals playing a ukelele like in 30's cartoons. :P

(sorta OT) Why is it okay to say a** on TV, but if you say a**hole, the word hole is bleeped out, but a** still remains. Isn't a** a more foul word than hole? That's like bleeping out mutha and leaving in f***er. Another thing, i remember sh*t being said clearly and not edited out on Broadcast TV many times in the 90's.

[Samurai Karasu]

Things have changed very much since the 90's. Just look at Ren & Stimpy. You know, had Zim been made back in the early 90's, most of the stuff edited from the series probably would've remained intact. Cartoons used to have guns, (Heck, they made a kids cartoon out of MORTAL KOMBAT. No blood and gore, of course.) but ever since Columbine, they're very taboo. I shudder to think what will be considered "offensive" and edited out from cartoons 10 years from now. . Eventually, things will get so bad, cartoons will be reduced to animals playing a ukelele like in 30's cartoons. :P

(sorta OT) Why is it okay to say a** on TV, but if you say a**hole, the word hole is bleeped out, but a** still remains. Isn't a** a more foul word than hole? That's like bleeping out mutha and leaving in f***er. Another thing, i remember sh*t being said clearly and not edited out on Broadcast TV many times in the 90's.

Probably because you're reffering to the actual hole of the ass and not just the ass itself. I assume that it would be smarter to bleep the whole word but eh.

Yeah I heard that the word Fuc* is going to become ok to say on TV now (THIS IS ONLY WHAT MY DAD TOLD ME DON'T YELL AT ME)

[DianaGohan]

Yeah, thinks are a lot more censored nowadays. Then again, what did you expect.

[Beat]

On network TV. Cable is getting looser, while networks are getting tighter.

[Eddie G.]

On network TV. Cable is getting looser, while networks are getting tighter.
I don't know, Nick seems to be getting a little more limited but I think they're just trying to be more "kide oriented". Hell I think Sponge Bob and FOP are the only current nick shows with adult appeal. Cartoon Network seems to still push things like in the old days, however they seem like they are trying to get more of a ki's market wich many not be too good..

As for Network TV I think WB and Fox are the biggest examples of networks who have lost their edge. I mean Fox used to have Eek the Cat, Batman, Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, and other shows that pushed the envelope. Now both stations consist of mostly badly dubbbed anime and American overly PC shows that insult children's inteligence.

[Frank Castle]

Well I think Justice League is getting more adult oriented. GL always talks about sleeping with Hawkgirl. Although he doesn't say it directly anyone with half brain could point it out.

[Beat]

Well I think Justice League is getting more adult oriented. GL always talks about sleeping with Hawkgirl. Although he doesn't say it directly anyone with half brain could point it out.

Adult Swim's standards are getting looser by the day. Shake will be dropping s-bombs soon at this rate.

"The Shield." Another example of pushing the limits.

[SpaceCowboy]

I don't know, Nick seems to be getting a little more limited but I think they're just trying to be more "kide oriented". Hell I think Sponge Bob and FOP are the only current nick shows with adult appeal. Cartoon Network seems to still push things like in the old days, however they seem like they are trying to get more of a ki's market wich many not be too good..

As for Network TV I think WB and Fox are the biggest examples of networks who have lost their edge. I mean Fox used to have Eek the Cat, Batman, Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, and other shows that pushed the envelope. Now both stations consist of mostly badly dubbbed anime and American overly PC shows that insult children's inteligence.

So maybe it's because of the higher network execs trying to appeal more to the 2-11 age demographic and paying less attention to older audiences that there is more restrictions on content in some programs.
I think the reason why Kids' WB has changed from the way it was back in 1995 is due to pigheaded Kellner. "Astroboy" feels really out of place with Pokemon and YuGiOh since it's not a marketing tie-in and is more mature compared to them.

But my main question was referring to why some shows are over-PCed today as in why anime on Kids' WB and Toonami are having more and more censorship to the point of utter rediculousness (removing *any* referecnes to death and tobacco use for example). This was less common in the '80s (GI Joe has a lot of guns being fired and Robotech had drinking). Gargoyles really pushed the envelope for Disney as far as a mature story (allowing guns, blood, mild cursing, etc) and they went back years later and PC-ed it. :sad:

[Peter Paltridge]

I think one big reason is just plain change in management. The 90's saw a lot of executives who thought, "If I hold high standards of quality and have guys produce creative stuff and don't limit them, I can create true classics, and be remembered forever!!" This decade, they've retired and been replaced by job-doers....the kind of execs who live by rules and just want a paycheck, then to get out of the building every night. They don't care what they put on, and shortly before they got appointed to their positions, some pretty dark things began happening in real life, and that definately affected their future decisions.

[SpaceCowboy]

Adult Swim's standards are getting looser by the day. Shake will be dropping s-bombs soon at this rate.

"The Shield." Another example of pushing the limits.

America's got awhile before they can get away with showing the stuff that European and Japanese game shows can get away with. :p

[BrendaBat]

It seems like everytime something really bad happens (like Columbine or 9/11) cartoon censership gets tighter. The PC age is also a big factor.

As far as edits go, I think the one of the worst examples is ToonDisney editing classic series like Gargoyles and Darkwing for "content" that was considered perfectly acceptable when I was a kid :rolleyes:

[RAINMAN]

Fox Family is also getting out of hand whit the censership crap too.

[Dogasu]

As far as edits go, I think the one of the worst examples is ToonDisney editing classic series like Gargoyles and Darkwing for "content" that was considered perfectly acceptable when I was a kid :rolleyes:

Whoa whoa whoa...what, in DARKWING FREAKIN' DUCK, of all cartoons, needed to be editted!?!?!?!

[Peter Paltridge]

Darkwing was edited because they considered his "gas gun" to be a weapon of biological terror. Really.

Dogasu, update your site.

[Yash]

As far as edits go, I think the one of the worst examples is ToonDisney editing classic series like Gargoyles and Darkwing for "content" that was considered perfectly acceptable when I was a kid :rolleyes:

Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog was edited too... they digitally removed unused bombs in one episode... which is odd, since the ENTIRE episode is about Sonic collecting various bombs that Robotnik places around the world that'll blow up the planet if he doesn't get them on time, as well as using them to blow up an iceburg for a ship that Tails ends up on.

[Jaguar]

I'm not really too sure, all I know is that Japan is lightyears ahead of us in looser standards and practices for animation.

[ClockStomper]

The networks have gotten much more conservitive. Looney Tunes used to have a gag that was used VERY often...someone sees something unusual, they say "Now I've seen everything" and then blow their own brains out. All the major networks are really hyper-sensitive and quick to censor. The only real exceptions are comic-based shows and Ninja Turtles.

Cartoon Network seems to be thankfully moving away from this trend. Although they were just as bad during the 90s.

[Mynd Hed]

(sorta OT) Why is it okay to say a** on TV, but if you say a**hole, the word hole is bleeped out, but a** still remains. Isn't a** a more foul word than hole?

The difference is that the word "ass" has another, "clean" meaning-- it's another word for "donkey," so calling someone an "ass" can be interpreted as being no worse than calling them a "silly goose."
Once you add the "hole," though, it becomes painfully obvious what you're referring to.

[Arxane]

Yeah I heard that the word Fuc* is going to become ok to say on TV now (THIS IS ONLY WHAT MY DAD TOLD ME DON'T YELL AT ME)

Ah, so your dad has fallen victim to those rumors that may or may not be true. Snopes.com has something to say (http://snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/f-word.asp) about it.

It's very funny, actually. I'm a college student, so of course I'm going to see a lot of stuff like this. A graduate student once told me about a friend who heard about penguins falling on their backs to watch planes (http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/penguin.htm), and a friend who thought the story about "Is Hell exothermic or endothemic?" (http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/hell.asp) originated with a professor at my college.

Strange times, indeed.

[RockItShipper]

In the '60s Beatles Sat Am show, there was a short set in a vineyard where the Beatles helped make wine with the kids who worked there. Try seeing that getting made for Satam now.

[Dudley]

From Jaguar
I'm not really too sure, all I know is that Japan is lightyears ahead of us in looser standards and practices for animation.
You got that right!

I've been watching cartoons on the television networks and notice that it's come to a point where they edit out scenes when the main character gets punched/pushed or anything that can afflict pain and all you see them is falling on to the floor hurt (except X-Men Evolution and Jackie Chan Adventures). People can't even say the words death or kill in a cartoon anymore!
Why do they bother making action-packed cartoons if they're taking out the action?


From RAINMAN
Fox Family is also getting out of hand whit the censership crap too.
Did they start applying the "no acts of terrorism" ban yet?

[Beat]

Political Correctness is a disease. It makes people dumb, and weak. Thankfully, the CN isn't editing pointless, going AGAINST the grain.

[candy17]

Thankfully, the CN isn't editing pointless, going AGAINST the grain.
Amen. I know there are times when CN is uptight about editing--and that's usually with the Japanese cartoons, but the rest (classic cartoons, the Cartoon Cartoons, most of Adult Swim--for obvious reasons, and some syndicated stuff) seems to get away with stuff that Nickelodeon and network TV would probably go crazy over.

[Karl Olson]

Whoa whoa whoa...what, in DARKWING FREAKIN' DUCK, of all cartoons, needed to be editted!?!?!?!

Even Ducktales, according to a friend of mine with Toon Disney, has had stuff edited out in recent runs. Can't show gun use or bomb use, no matter how comedic, I guess.

Personally, I think that's nuts, but that's age we're living in. Content is targetted very directly at one group or another, and anything might be considerable unacceptable for said target audience is excized. As such, it means stuff targetted at kids ends up becoming more and more milktoast as time progresses.

[Howard Fein]

In the '60s Beatles Sat Am show, there was a short set in a vineyard where the Beatles helped make wine with the kids who worked there. Try seeing that getting made for Satam now.

You're making it sound worse than it is! In that particular episode, the Beatles are touring a French vineyard whose stock is destroyed (by Ringo clumsily leaning on the dump truck lever). They must replace it all within two hours or the vineyard will close and put everyone out of work. So the Fab Four assist by (pulling instruments out of nowhere as usual) playing I'm Down, which somehow springs everyone to action so they produce a months' worth of wine by song's end. The workers consist of the owner, two other men, two comely young women and one little girl.

Variations of this plot, 'The Beatles help themselves or someone else out of trouble by playing a song' are common throughout the KFS series. The whole 'chase song' concept (pantomimed slapstick chaos and pratfalls), very popular in numerous 1970s H-B series, was pioneered here as well.

The Beatles cartoons do evoke one changing of animation standards. Virtually all first (1965) and second ('66) season episodes were grouped into 'story arcs' in which the boys visit specific locales: France, Italy, Spain, the American West, Africa, New York, Hollywood, mid-Europe, Hawaii, India, the Sahara and Japan. As one could imagine, many of these locations inherently feature some quite blatant comic ethnic stereotyping that passed muster at ABC Standards & Practices in the sixties.

(Of course, African-American being made the butt of gags- dull-witted but easily frightened porters, a character 'blackfaced' by explosion, shoe police or ink- had pretty much been unacceptable since the mid-fifties. Even by the early sixties, many cartoons and theatrical short subjects rerun on local TV stations were edited to remove such images and sequences.)

The Japanese episodes, in particular, are quite shocking in their frequent use of buck-toothed, slanty-eyed natives who say "Ah, so" constantly and predate every spoken noun with "Honolabre- staples of WWII-era theatrical shorts. Likewise, all French characters begin every sentence with "How you say-". All German/Swiss men are very portly, wear short/overall combos, have huge white mustaches, and r-r-r-roll their 'R's. Asian Indian men are all heavily bearded, turbaned, wear little more than what appear to be diapers and come off as conniving, fast-talking salespeople (a trait is quite surprising for the time, considering the comic stereotype of South Asian convenience store owners really didn't come into vogue in the early nineties).

No ethnic group really seemed to be spared in the BEATLES:

-The Italian policeman in I Wanna Be Your Man is more interested in flirting with women than directing traffic or chasing crooks.

-In Can't Buy Me Love, the Hawaiian tribal chief appears bare-chested, but wearing collar and tie, to his (very obese) daughter's wedding. All the natives slobber at the mention or appearance of pineapple.

-The female gypsy in What You're Doing is homely and aggressively longing for a man. The local justice of the peace practices under a banner marked 'Cheap Weddings.'

-New York policemen have heavy Irish brogues in Hold Me Tight and Roll Over Beethoven.

There is some brilliant deconstruction of Native American stereotypes, however. In Little Child, the reservation's chief breaks off from basic Hollywood 'heap big' Injunspeak to confide to the camera in a Rhode Scholar accent (standard refined Paul Frees enunciation) that he "really speaks like this, but doesn't want to disappoint [the tourist Beatles]" before reverting to the expected 'ughs'. Later in the episode, a charging horde mistakes John's bugle playing for the Cavalry and retreats- with one member saying in the same refined voice "Don't they ever get tired of winning?" Such ironic context-busting must've been very cutting edge at the time.

Comic American Indians and Orientals seem to have hung on until around 1970, the latter getting a tremendous skewering in a SCOOBY-DOO episode set in San Fran's Chinatown. Shag and Scoob disguise themselves as Chinese waiters, assuming the usual Coolie Hats, slanted eyes, buck teeth and comic garbled speech: "Wercome to Shag and Scoob's haunted Chinese lestaulant, whele the ghosts eat the most. Speciarty of the house: chocorate chop suey spale lib a ra mode." The laugh track offers its approval.

[Antiyonder]

1. Why does Toon Disney need to censor at all? I thought cable channels are allowed to get away with risque stuff. Cartoon Network is a more common channel in the households (I'm guess anyway) yet they actually have the guts to lighten up one censorship.


2. Does anyone here beside me think these shows/toons need what I would call a censorship protection certificate (I apologize for the lame name)? Here's how I'd go about it:

If show in question (like Gargoyles) airs it's full run without out controversies (I'm talking about boatloads of angry letters or mob of angry parents, not a few complaints) then the show will recieve the certificate making it against the rules to edit even a nanosecond of the episode. The network who censors the show will then have to pay a $100 fine.


Anyone agree?

[Peter Paltridge]

And now they've cut that scene in Scooby Doo, right?

Boy, now we know why the Beatles cartoon has never been seen again. Maybe the Monkees cartoon is unseen for the same reason.

[lostrune]

1. Why does Toon Disney need to censor at all? I thought cable channels are allowed to get away with risque stuff. Cartoon Network is a more common channel in the households (I'm guess anyway) yet they actually have the guts to lighten up one censorship.

Well, just because cable channels don't answer to the FCC does not mean they don't answer to anyone. In this case, as in so many others, they answer to the almighty dollar, that is, their commercial sponsors. :p


2. Does anyone here beside me think these shows/toons need what I would call a censorship protection certificate (I apologize for the lame name)? Here's how I'd go about it:

If show in question (like Gargoyles) airs it's full run without out controversies (I'm talking about boatloads of angry letters or mob of angry parents, not a few complaints) then the show will recieve the certificate making it against the rules to edit even a nanosecond of the episode. The network who censors the show will then have to pay a $100 fine.

Anyone agree?

And who's gonna make the certificate? The network itself that made the show. :p
Certainly not the government who has no business regulating here. And certainly not the viewers who own nothing, not one iota of the show and thus have no legal claims to it nor have any legal authority to authorize a certificate. So basically the network is signing a contract with itself, which means they can still do whatever they want because they represent all signatorees and can always change the conditions so long as all relevant parties agree. :p

See what happens when one goes thru these rationally? :D

[Howard Fein]

And now they've cut that scene in Scooby Doo, right?

Nope. As far as I know, Cartoon Network still airs "Mystery Mask Mix-up" intact.

Boy, now we know why the Beatles cartoon has never been seen again. Maybe the Monkees cartoon is unseen for the same reason.

First of all, the Monkees were a live-action prime-time sitcom, albeit with cartoon elements (H-B like SFX, many chase sequences, frequent use of fast and slow motion) that originally aired on NBC for two seasons, 1966-'68. It was rerun on at different times through the early seventies on ABC's and CBS' Saturday AM schedule. The series has been repeated irregularly on Nick at Nite, and later TV Land in recent years.

As for the Beatles cartoons, they reran in syndication very sparsely since they left ABC's Saturday AM lineup at the end of the 1968-'69 season. (In NYC, future Fox affiliate WNEW-5 reran it during summer 1972. It was never seen on broadcast TV in that market again.) During the late eighties and early nineties, it was rerun on Disney(!) and MTV respectively.

I recently came upon some bootleg videos of the cartoons, which were taped off Disney, evidenced by the Mouse logo that would appear briefly after the end of a half-hour showing. (How Disney acquired the rights to a KFS property is another question entirely. But then Disney always somehow showed things it had no business even having, like made-for-TV H-B movies and theatrical WB animation anthologies along the line of the BUGS BUNNY ROADRUNNER MOVIE.)
Anyway, Disney didn't shy away from showing Beatle episodes with overt racial/ethnic stereotyping, such as the ones set in Japan.

As to why the Beatles cartoons don't seem available on cable or legitimate video, theories abound. The most prevalent one lately is that Apple Records bought the series from King Features some decades ago and got tangled up in litigation with John Lennon's estate, Brian Epstein's estate, Capital Records or some combination thereof.

So it's in same legal limbo that has kept most Filmation, DFE and Rankin-Bass series off the air as well.

[Pilmedium]

Amen. I know there are times when CN is uptight about editing--and that's usually with the Japanese cartoons, but the rest (classic cartoons, the Cartoon Cartoons, most of Adult Swim--for obvious reasons, and some syndicated stuff) seems to get away with stuff that Nickelodeon and network TV would probably go crazy over.

That is true for Cartoon Cartoons, but classic cartoons are being edited somewhat badly on Cartoon Network; it cannot be much better than Nickelodeon was. Network TV was notorious for editing scenes that were "not appropriate for children." Generally, looser standards are being accepted in some kinds of new cartoons, while situations that are no more offensive have only been restored to previously edited classic cartoons at the expense of different scenes in different classic cartoons.

[BabySealClubber]

I believe cartoons directed at kids have become much more restrictive recently as is really evident in the CN airing of Dragonball GT where even the type of combat that was once permissable in DBZ is now edited out. On the other hand, censorship regarding toons meant for adults is now practically non existant, as recent uncensored broadcasts of South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut on Comedy Central have shown.

When Batman: The Animated Series first aired, I read that the producers got alot of flak from FOX's Standards and Practices over the Dark Knight's scenes of punching and hitting with fists. The development team had to tone it down so they used more throws, kicks and off camera tricks to imply combat than they previously had. The current Justice League seems to be more forgiving on this aspect, perhaps because it is on cable tv.

I still recall when the mainstream media got into a huff over an episode of Ralph Bakshi's New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and a scene in which MM was viewed by some to snort cocaine. I haven't seen that kind of a hoopla directed towards a toon in a while, even with the whole Spongebob is gay rumors.