Censoring and You!

To be perfectly blunt, I hate censoring. To quote X-Play, I hate it with the intensity of a thousand suns. In my mind, to censor something is to destroy the artistic intent of what the creator of what ever was being censored had in mind.

For example, let's take a movie, say... Die Hard. According to IMDB, Die Hard is rated "R", so basically this movie is a movie for adults, not for children. I saw it on TV a while ago, and most of the swearing and excessive violence was cut out. Now, why was this stuff cut out? "So the impressionable youth won't see it and try to mimic it!" the parents groups will say. And this would be a valid and good reply, were we talking about a movie that was actually target at children!

And so it is that movies about explosions and swearing and violence and turned into fun treats for the whole family. But is that so bad, you ask? If you wanted to watch a movie with lots of swearing and shit getting blown up, then yes, it is bad.

See, cutting things out of movies/TV shows/books is never a good thing. All that stuff is in there for a reason, and all your censoring is, more likely than not, destroying the message the creator was trying to convey.

For example, I turn to something I'm something of an expert in (having just read the manga, watched the anime and movies, as well as the live action series): Sailor Moon. While I'll be using this series as an example, the manner in which it was dubbed can be applied to most other anime, no, any foreign content that is brought to the West to be dubbed.

The most common one is that the names are changed. The youth would have no concept of a world beyond their shores, so no foreign names are allowed! Usagi is now Serena, Makoto is now Lita, and Motoki is now Andrew! (I will admit that dubbers are getting better at leaving names alone, but it's still fairly common).

Next we have to get rid of any of the weird, foreign customs that these people are doing! Flip the image around to it looks like people are driving on the proper side of the road! And no kanji anywhere, because it is foreign and strange! We must cover it up with poorly drawn American things!

Now we take the script and alter it to suit our needs! Cut things out to make room for a stupid little moral thing! Change the characters to be little more than stereotypes! Remove all the original music and sound effects and change them to our brightly coloured bubble-gum tunes! And no more lesbians! They're now cousins (though we'll inexplicable leave in all their subtle flirting)!

I really can't do justice as to how much exactly was cut from each episode of Sailor Moon. You'd be better off going HERE to see just how badly it was butchered. It's just.. bah, I can't even type coherently anymore.

To conclude, censoring destroys the intent of a show/movie/book, and it shits upon the concept of "free speech" that the ones who are doing all the censoring are going on about all the time. So, basically, the world is full of hypocritical bastards and I'm ashamed to be a part of the human race.