Bizarre Animated Spider-Man Censorship Stuff

[Spider-Man]

This comes from a John Semper interview at http://hometown.aol.com/drg4/index.html (or http://members.aol.com/drg4/index1.html) which I thought was sorta funny. It shows how crazy and weird the censorship was at FOX KIDS around 1994:

"John Semper: By the time Spidey came on, there was a LOT of censorship at Fox. They were having whole countries like Canada ban some of their shows (Power Rangers, for instance) and they were very nervous about violence. When I watch the older episodes of Batman that first aired on Fox, they do all kinds of things that we couldn't do. By the time Spidey came on, Fox wouldn't let us do anything like that. No fists to the face, no realistic guns, no fire, no crashing through glass, no children in peril, no mention of the words death, die, or kill. I used to read notes from the censors when I made personal appearances for the show. Some of them were quite funny. Like, "When Spider-Man lands on the rooftop, be sure that he doesn't harm any pigeons." Stuff like that."

And what they had in store...

"John Semper: Just briefly, with Spider-Man in limbo too, I wanted to do a mini-series in which he would end up chasing Mary Jane through the past, trying to find her. Not a big thing, just four or five episodes. I thought it'd be interesting to see Spidey deal with certain historic moments in time {one place would be Victorian England during the time of Jack the Ripper, being portrayed by the real Carnage}, not just the nation's history, but his own personal life, too. And somehow, this would lead back to the present. I had more specific ideas, but that's where it was headed. But then again, I really didn't want to go any further. Everything Everything had been wrapped up neatly. All the important stuff...Spidey now liked himself, he'd met his creator and said, "You know what, I beyond you now...I've grown." That's really the end of Peter Parker's story. He'd saved all reality. You can't really top that. If we had continued, I'd just have been doing it for the money. My real saga was done."


The interview can be found here:

http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/drg4/spinterviews.html

[Nightwing]

Hehe, that's right. And it all goes downhill from there. Batman: The Animated Series was lucky, bless it's heart.

The most memorable one was Spidey was never allowed to punch anyone in the face. I think it was originally punch in general, but it was quickly changed. Eh, despite some animation laziness in the last seasons and the changed storylines, I still think it was a great series.

[James Harvey]

"Harm any pigeons"? Really? Geeze! I knew FOX has some tight censorship stuff goin gon for the show - but that is ridiculous. I remember seeing Spider-Man throw some punches, but I don't think most of them actually conntected. I can't believe FOX really laid down hard on those rules...geeze...

[Naraht]

*sigh* what's next...Spidey is supposed to talk Carnage out of killing people, and calmly turn himself in?

Fox is Dum.

[Supernovametalstar]

Originally posted by naraht
*sigh* what's next...Spidey is supposed to talk Carnage out of killing people, and calmly turn himself in?

Fox is Dum.

Sounds like what happened at the end of Power Rangers Time Force to me . In other PR shows, the rangers couldn't even get shown getting hit in their helmets. They had to splice in some american scenes of them getting hit in the chest whenever a heat shot came up in the original footage.

It started to get better in the animation department, but I still curse those white outs There are some episodes of Digimon that almost made me go blind because of them.

[James Harvey]

I wasn't too fond of the white flashes that would be spliced in so the moment of impact couldn't be seen, although it was extremely obvious what was going on. In th eedited version of BB: ROTJ, a tonne of those were spliced in during key scenes (like when Harley hits Robin with a mallet) and I think it's ridiculous.