Toy Story 2 Home Video Release - Retro-Censoring Being Done

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by BILLONEEG, Jul 10, 2019.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. ShockControl

    ShockControl Bon Vivant and Raconteur!

    Location:
    Lotus Land
    Film studios are not in the business of historic preservation, as the 2008 Universal fire attests. They are in the business of providing entertainment. If a film like Song of the South does not speak to contemporary tastes, it will be kept out of circulation. If thirty seconds need to be cut in order for the film to speak to contemporary tastes, then those thirty seconds get cut. This falls within the studio's rights. I don't necessarily like it either, but that's the reality.
     
  2. overdrivethree

    overdrivethree Forum Resident

    I like how flinching and going “ugh, that joke/reference/scene hasn’t aged well” somehow automatically equals “DELICATE CRYBABIES.”

    There’s a really good article that was going around earlier this week about how badly the movie American Pie has aged. I was 18 when it came out - prime demographic - and I discussed with friends about how, yeah, wow, that movie does *not* hold up and maybe the current generation of young folks is better off than we were in recognizing that.

    And not once did anyone get all fired up and say “PULL ‘AMERICAN PIE’ OUT OF CIRCULATION NOW!” Just that yeah, wasn’t a high point in entertainment for my generation. It’s good to see that now.
     
    BeatleJWOL, danner, intv7 and 3 others like this.
  3. balzac

    balzac Senior Member

    Ideally, Disney would make all sorts of uncut, historically important pieces available in perpetuity. But ultimately, while they will always have all of that important stuff archived, they will only share what makes them money (or, at the very least, will only share what doesn’t cause them more headaches than it’s worth).

    They edited that little blip out of “Toy Story 2” for the same basic underlying reason that “Song of the South” remains unavailable: Namely, they’re going to get *way more* headaches and complaints than it’s worth to just leave it alone. It’s just not worth it.

    While I love many Disney products, I’m no fan of the corporation, and I’ve long felt they have too much control and ownership of too much (buying Fox makes it so much worse). But I can’t deny that they’re right about the cost/benefit when it comes to these bits of censorship or holding back product. They’re not going to lose huge swaths of fans or sales for cutting a few seconds out of the credits of “Toy Story 2”. Now, in that particular case, there’s an open question as to whether someone would have “resurfaced” that little questionable bit from the credits and essentially stoked the flames of getting “re-offended” by something that’s been out there for so long. But it may have happened, and they obviously didn’t want to risk it.

    In the realm of “censored” materials, this is pretty low on the list of troubling instances, mainly because there are about TEN GAZILLION Blu-ray, DVD, and VHS copies floating out there of that particular film.

    Something this *should* bring to light is how the “Disney Plus” streaming service is going to potentially cause more issues like this and exacerbate these issues. Namely, at *some point* they are going to stop putting out certain segments of their library as physical product and reserve it for their streaming service exclusively. I’m not saying they’re imminently going to skip doing 4K/BD/DVD releases of big MCU or Pixar films or anything. But some section of material is going to be held back only for streaming, and some number of years down the line probably everything will be there exclusively. At that point, they can re-edit stuff, “vault” stuff, do whatever they want at a moment’s notice.

    This has obviously always been the case to *some* degree, but less people ten years from now will still have physical copies of Disney stuff than they do now. I’ve already seen people in recent years complain that such-and-such Disney movie isn’t available digitally, as if buying a used BD or DVD copy on Amazon or eBay for $20 was like outside the realm of possibility. Look at the recent headlines about “Friends” leaving Netflix. People really view the *millions* of DVDs (and that show even got a full Blu-ray treatment!) and reruns on broadcast/cable as if they don’t exist and streaming is the only option.

    I’ve obviously digressed, but I think this “Toy Story 2” thing highlights far bigger problems on the industry/consumer side of things rather than the political debates it seems to be provoking.
     
  4. overdrivethree

    overdrivethree Forum Resident

    Cable is going to die out within a decade. The three major networks will divide up news, entertainment and sports by streaming channel.

    The outcry of Friends and The Office leaving Netflix has fans going “ugh, NBC wants to have their own streaming service, but no one’s going to pay for all that!”

    News flash: oh, yes you will.



    PS: people’s total disregard for physical digital media is slightly worrisome. In 10-20 years, working DVD and BluRay players will be at a premium once people realize the movie they want isn’t available on streaming. And gosh, that DVD they unloaded for next to nothing is now worth $$$, never mind finding a working player that still hooks up.
     
    bmasters9 and clhboa like this.
  5. Drifter

    Drifter AAD survivor

    Location:
    Vancouver, BC, CA
    Greedo didn't shoot at all.
     
    BeatleJWOL, wayneklein and Gaslight like this.
  6. ElevatorSkyMovie

    ElevatorSkyMovie Senior Member

    Location:
    Oklahoma
    That was my point.
     
    Drifter and Gaslight like this.
  7. Pastafarian

    Pastafarian Forum Resident

    That scene is creepy, somethings wrong if you don't feel queasy and to stick with it gives tacit approval to such behaviour.
     
  8. Strat-Mangler

    Strat-Mangler Personal Survival Daily Record-Breaker

    Location:
    Toronto
    Says who? It's basically changing a work regardless of who said what. In this case, it's the makers of the work who opted to do so, same as when the Beatles decided to come out with Let It Be...Naked, only difference being that the original will no longer be accessible.
     
  9. agaraffa

    agaraffa Senior Member

    Exactly my sentiment! Thanks for saying it. :righton:
     
  10. Strat-Mangler

    Strat-Mangler Personal Survival Daily Record-Breaker

    Location:
    Toronto
    It's a slippery slope for sure. I remember there was a service when Blockbuster existed that'd censor all the movies to make them G-rated for everyone. I don't mind such a service as long as the original is still available for those who aren't thin-skinned. Unfortunately, this is revisionism at its worse, removing from circulation the original and replacing it as if it had never existed with censored versions.

    What does that say about a society that can't take a 10-sec joke in a kids movie? Yikes.
     
  11. Something wrong if that scene on its own makes you feel queasy and any adult should know that to depict something is not to endorse it.
     
  12. Pastafarian

    Pastafarian Forum Resident

    Well it's not on it's own now that's the issue, if you still think it's funny that's approval in my book and it will offend many women.
     
    drivingfrog and DML71 like this.
  13. Holerbot6000

    Holerbot6000 Forum Resident

    Location:
    California
    I think the Toy Story 2 scene is funny and I'm glad to have a copy with it intact. Kelsey Grammer's voice makes it and hey, he is supposed to be a creep - he is the BAD GUY. Maybe someone was even taking a surreptitious shot at Lassiter - you never know. Anyway, erasing history is just dumb.
     
  14. Spaghettiows

    Spaghettiows Forum Resident

    Location:
    Silver Creek, NY
    There is more than one type of censorship. There is hard censorship, which would be forcible censorship dictated by a government entity. Then there is soft censorship, which is a corporation or other private entity practicing self-censorship, which can be annoying, is often unnecessary, but much less sinister than hard censorship.

    Disney is free to edit their own intellectual property any way they see fit. And we as consumers are free to either criticize or applaud Disney for doing so, depending on our point of view.
     
    BeatleJWOL, lightbulb and mmars982 like this.
  15. Ken_McAlinden

    Ken_McAlinden MichiGort Staff

    Location:
    Livonia, MI
    The Toy Story 2 end-credit bloopers were added after the initial theatrical release and were by definition not an essential or editorially necessary part of the film.

    Different showings had different sets of bloopers/outtakes or none at all depending on when and how you saw it.

    Deciding to omit this or any other of the bloopers/outtakes is no big deal. I though it was much weirder when they redesigned the mermaid character from the Knick Knack short prior to a home video release to have a more modest figure.

    I will be changing the title of this thread to mention Toy Story 2 since it is in no way clear and not even mentioned until a link at the bottom of the first post.
     
  16. Simon A

    Simon A Arrr!

    So this scene is creating a stink but Tony Stark saying he'd reinstate Prima Nocta in Avengers: Age of Ultron is OK?

    The world is a strange and sad place too often.
     
  17. Dillydipper

    Dillydipper Space-Age luddite

    Location:
    Central PA
    The collector mentality in me is the only part that holds any empathy for all the archiving and cataloging a company like the Mouse House must do...even with the prospect that, in no reasonable future, would there be any legitimate need to save most of these seconds of artwork that would find no place ever again within the marketplace. Any minimal reason to resore supposedly-offensive historical versions to the public sector even for reasons of "accuracy", is still too dangerous to the company's overall image, were they to even come out prefaced by graphics, packaging notices, or even Whoopi Goldberg, setting-up the situation for mom, dad and all the kids (just to appease who - Comic Book Guy-?). Zero-sum artistic justice.

    And besides, we all know, despite the leviathan hold Disney has over their properties, there is always gonna be some smarty-pants out there with a copy of previously-public-domain Mickey dailies, or some tijauana-bible of the girl from the Alice Comedies, meeting up with Koko behind a circus tent, or WALL-e showing off his "ribbed, for her pleasure" attachment (" Oh, Eve-ehhhhh...!"). And their lawyers will never get permission to come to your houses and physically remove those from under your mattress.

    If you ask me, there's plenty of room in that hypothetical "vault" for an extra pedestal for brother Roy's head next to Walt's, once they stop wasting storage on things they're never gonna get any more bang out of again, moreso than just the stories themselves about those milliseconds of film that once existed.
     
  18. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    No doubt The Beatles : Abbey Road cigarette will be airbrushed out of the cover for this years 50th Anniversary.
     
    spindly and clhboa like this.
  19. GregM

    GregM The expanding man

    Location:
    Bay Area, CA
    Context is everything. Stinky Pete was always a creepy, immoral character. In the story, he had let Woody believe that Jessie had used the remote to prevent him from getting his dismembered arm back and escaping. Stinky Pete did not care about kids, which was antithetic to the show's overarching theme.

    This issue is not unlike exposing your baby to microbes to ensure their immune system develops properly. You keep the kid in an antiseptic cleanroom its entire childhood and as soon as it goes to school and encounters pathogens, the immune system will be overwhelmed.

    Similarly, if you don't expose your kids to the idea of stranger danger and immoral people, they won't know what to do when they encounter one. Censorship is never the answer.
     
  20. mmars982

    mmars982 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Pittsburgh, PA
    I'm really not trying to be a smart-aleck, but I truly think the definition of the word censorship includes that it comes from outside. If you decide to do it to your own work, it is called editing.

    The Let It Be analogy honestly confuses me. Are you saying that Phil Spector was censored?
     
  21. Pastafarian

    Pastafarian Forum Resident

    To some extent I agree, my experience is with Enid Blyton's Famous Five books, which I'd devoured as a child.

    Sexist, racist and very middle class, I bought some secondhand books, when my daughter was 5, my feminist work colleges were outraged.:cussing:, even when I explained my thinking.

    Invaluable tool, we could discuss why all the bad people were Irish tinkers and the boys had fun while the girls cleaned the caravan, result my daughter is a very strong feminist and could call out discrimination and indirect discrimination from the age of 7.

    The problem I can see with such a short episode it would feel like a lecture and really boring when you come home after seeing the film.
     
    BeatleJWOL likes this.
  22. Strat-Mangler

    Strat-Mangler Personal Survival Daily Record-Breaker

    Location:
    Toronto
    The definition does not include interference from the outside.

    I was giving an example of how having both versions is fine as they're both available but removing the original from the market to replace it with the newer one is something I can't get behind.
     
    EdgardV likes this.
  23. Otlset

    Otlset I think I am I think

    Location:
    Temecula, CA
    And woe to "Run For Your Life" from Rubber Soul in some distant future.
     
  24. Vahan

    Vahan Forum Resident

    Location:
    Glendale, CA, USA
    For I Want to Hold Your Hand's 20th anniversary in 1984, a ciggie was airbrushed out of Paul's hand by Capitol.
     
    Strat-Mangler likes this.
  25. Strat-Mangler

    Strat-Mangler Personal Survival Daily Record-Breaker

    Location:
    Toronto
    I'm giving it a few years before somebody starts a movement to change the White Album's cover under some twisted racism-based reason.
     
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.

Share This Page

molar-endocrine