Posted on 10/15/2021 8:45:49 PM PDT by ConservativeStatement
So what?
That’s only happened in the last few years. Amazes me that the song went over 3 decades without being censored.
The movie that gave us Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, Tar Baby, Briarpatch, and others is locked in a vault in LA, never to see the light-of-day again. Know what I mean?
I watched Blazing Saddles on netflix in this century, dont think it will be back on NF. I found it to be hilarious, funnier to me then when I first watched around it’s original release time.
“Kung Fu Fighting” is edited, too.
“Do you have a citation for that? I heard the orginal version on Sirius or over the air recently.”
That happened back during Jug Ears first term. Canada got the ball rolling by deciding to ban the song. Clear Channel, which was buying up broadcast radio left and right jumped on the bandwagon.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/dire-straits-money-for-nothing-banned-in-canada-244638/
Other songs have been censored as well. Gargle (Google) it.
It should be noted that Richard Pryor cowrote the screenplay for Blazing Saddles. I would have loved to been a fly on the wall when Richard and Mel were working on it.
That movie killed C. Thomas Howell's career. He would've been an A-lister.
Putney Swope
The song was portraying someone: “The little faggot with the earring and the makeup...”—that’s being said by someone the singer is portraying. Just like Short People—Randy Newman wasn’t making fun of short people, he was making fun of bigotry. “Short people are just the same as you and I”,
the background singers go.
“The fools such as I,” sings Randy. Bing.
But I guess that went over people’s heads.
Watched an old SNL last night—host Buck Henry, musical guest Bette Midler. Garrett Morris posed as an intellectual commenting on the song Some Girls and he slightly cleaned up the line about black girls wanting to get f-—ed all night. He takes off his glasses and says, in a more guy-next-door
tone: “So..where ARE these girls, man?”
Could that be done? Maybe.
I do know Eddie Murphy’s bit as Mr Robinson a few years ago was like the good old days. Bits about liberal whites spending big bucks to live in his old building. How can
he afford it? Squatters’ rights, boys and girls. He angrily denounces them for even insinuating he took the TV set they ordered.
Then he teaches the kids an important word: RACISM
I had to order it from an overseas supplier (Song of the South). Ironically enough it also included a short that wasn’t even by Disney—Looney Tunes’ Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarves, one of the “censored eleven”.
The Sat Night Live animated bit about “the Disney Vault” poked fun at the whole SotS controversy. It implied Walt’s original version of the movie had Uncle Remus sing “Negroes are inferior in every way”.
So the Mouse could just re-issue it and have a short bit at the start with Whoopi G saying “This film was made during a different time”.
No, instead it must be banned.
Jello Biafra of punk’s Dead Kennedys did some spoken word
albums; certainly not the type of politics many of us may agree with but he had an amusing bit about political correctness: “BAN EVERYTHING”
Stan Freberg comedy sketch had “the CBS Censor” (Daws Butler, voice of Yogi Bear) objecting to his singing of Old Man River, and he had to keep changing the words. “We must remember the tiny tots,” the Censor says.
Elderly Man River, that elderly man river, he must know somethinG but he doesn’t say ANYTHING.
Soul Man was truly an awful movie, although Tommy Chong’s daughter was a babe in that film.
Thanks for the ping. I’m looping in the usual suspects.
We can lament great comedies of the past that probably couldn’t be made today. That said, I do note with interest that a pushback against cancel culture seems to be emerging. It’s too early to predict how it will play out, but Netflix is (so far) standing up for Dave Chappelle and even fired one of the wokesters who went to war over the issue. Not that Netflix has switched sides ... far from it ... but we should note points of inflection when somebody finally gets tired of the bullying. Some of the liberals are noticing that the revolution is eating its own. It’s not surprising that quite a few comedians especially are now speaking out. The comedians know where the sacred cows are today, and they know the commissars are trying to silence them.
My question, as always, is what the film industry has done for us lately. There are many great comedies from the past. Does anyone have a recommendation from, say, the last five years? Good comedies, recent, that people on our side might appreciate?
Switching gears ... I finally saw Greyhound. It is exclusive to Apple tv, to which I don’t subscribe, but I have an adult daughter who took the one month free (?) subscription to binge watch Ted Lasso, which I’ve not seen and about which I have no opinion. I took advantage of that limited window to catch up on the Apple tv exclusives on my list, of which there are three.
Anyhow: A conservative movie? Yes, in spades. The story opens with a very short bit of character backstory, just to establish that naval officers are real human beings (which we all know is not really true, but let that pass). This is perfectly tasteful and unobjectionable; it’s a very sedate scene in a nice restaurant. Then Tom Hanks is instantly transported from the restaurant to the bridge of his ship, a destroyer escorting a Britain-bound convoy across the North Atlantic in 1941.
What ensues is a straightforward running fight. You could do this story with B-17s over Germany, a British column fighting its way through the Khyber pass, or a wagon train in Indian territory. A wolfpack has found the convoy. Submarines, submarines everywhere. You know how this turns out, but that’s ok. It’s well done.
Conservative, yes, and not just in general theme and old-fashioned presentation. Tom Hanks is the prayingest captain you’ve ever seen in the movies. He’s on his knees in his cabin. He says grace over every meal. His officers instantly apologize if an untoward word is uttered in a moment of stress. None of this is overplayed at all; these scenes are quick. They’re just there. It’s the character of the man and his crew.
The narrative is highly tactical, which is again a throwback to the old-fashioned ways of doing a war film. Contacts at such and such a bearing; come to such and such a bearing; ranges and closing speeds; rapid fire mental math well beyond the woke generation. You know who the good guys and bad guys are, and the story is simple. The convoy has to run the gauntlet in the mid-Atlantic, where it’s out of range of land based air cover. That’s where the wolfpack lurks.
Greyhound was released last year. It’s been on my watchlist but I wasn’t going to take out a subscription for it. But it’s worth watching if you get a chance. It’s a film I would recommend to high school teachers as a very good introduction to the Battle of the Atlantic, which is among the many stories on which the schools have mostly defaulted.
Oh, by the way, there is one major suspension of disbelief issue with Greyhound. Tom Hanks is 30 years too old for his role. But let that pass. It’s Hollywood. If John Wayne can parachute into Normandy in The Longest Day, Tom Hanks can stand on the bridge of a destroyer. Hanks is also credited with writing the screenplay. While he’s not credited as the director, it looks like this was very much his project from the start. If he wants to play a captain, it’s ok with me.
“The Good Shepherd” by C. S. Forester is a great book. The book was republished under the new title “Greyhound” after the movie came out. That was something I’ve not seen before.
The rapid mental math gets a lot harder when you’ve been on the bridge for 36 straight hours, you are freezing to death, everything on the bridge is coated in ice, and your body is taking a physical pounding in the rough North Atlantic seas.
As you point out, it is a great story of bold, conservative values when ordinary men are thrust into very un-ordinary circumstances.
I don’t remember the captain praying so much in the book, though. I wonder if Hanks added that to the movie.
Meanwhile, Deep State’s very real on women and kids continues apace...
And modern feminists remain silent.
***We can lament great comedies of the past that probably couldn’t be made today.***
How true. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I began to notice that comedy was becoming less funny. Some of the movies were slapped together to show off new “special effects” more than a laugh.
I sat through several and thought...”This is supposed to be funny”.
Thanks for the write up.
I haven’t read the book so I can only speculate about what Hanks might have added. Obviously books and films are two different critters. Actors in a film adaptation will perform all manor of stage business that no author would put into the text. They will also keep acting in the background, even when the camera’s attention is elsewhere.
Hank’s character saying grace might be a good example. It’s not a point of emphasis in the film. There is no buildup or staging involved. The story is about a 50 hour run through the no-air cover danger zone. The captain is on his feet almost continuously. He catches a couple of short naps but basically is going without sleep. He’s chugging coffee but is too stressed to want to eat. The stewards are bustling around trying to get him to eat something. Every time he does sit down to eat a few bites, he pauses, bows his head, and is obviously saying grace, though he remains silent.
The whole sequence only takes a few seconds each time. It’s exactly the sort of stage business that an actor might add in projecting his character in a visual medium. It’s just there. It’s entirely natural. It’s an automatic, reflexive behavior. If Forester at any point established the captain as a religious man, an actor would say, “what does this translate into visually?” Nothing needs to be said.
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