As a fan of the occasionally-embarrassing-but-never-boring 1981 animated opus, ‘Heavy Metal’, I’ve more than once confused my wife by turning away from the film during late-night TBS airings. Given the film’s extensive violent/sexual content, censors at Turner often chopped the hell out of Taarna’s preparations for battle, bowdlerized Harry Canyon’s dialogue beyond recognition and removed ‘Den’ entirely. (Although, given that the villainous queen and Den’s love interest spend the entire segment with their enormous breasts entirely bared, that’s hardly surprising.) Worst of all, though was the clipjob applied to the EC Comics-inspired zombie tale, ‘B-17’, the most harrowing bit of the film, with sections excised willy-nilly and the most potent scares neutralized into incoherence by edits. The upshot of it all is, while I love the movie dearly, I cannot and will not watch it on any channel that shows it edited for television, which begs today’s query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) thinks that editing out the sexuality and violence of ‘Wild Things’ will leave you with a six-minute movie, asking: What movies can you just *NOT STAND* to watch edited for television?
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I don’t really like to watch any movies on television – both because it’s weird to interrupt something not designed with commercials in mind and the nagging awareness that I’m more than likely not getting the full experience of the movie the way it was intended.
So I guess my answer is “All of them”
The Fast Times at Ridgemont High TV edit turned the film into a totally odd mismatch of bad voiceovers and nonsensical scenes. The strangest would be an overdub of a young Eric Stoltz as one of Spiccoli’s cronies exclaiming “witchen!” as opposed to the then taboo (I guess) “bitchen”.
Embarrassing admission: I only saw ‘Fast Times’ edited for TV until I was over thirty and never liked it because it never made sense. Having seen the unedited version, I realize it’s a really good movie.
Then again, I’m a sucker for everything Cameron Crowe has done, save for Jerry Maguire.
I imagine the censored version of Heavy Metal would be about 30 minutes long. The B-17 segment would probably be the least censored of the movie.
What irritates me the most is editing for time. Small segments are taken out of the movie, either to fit a 30 minute block or to allow for more commercials.
It’s a 91 minute movie, the version seen on TNT ran a brisk 70 or so, if I recall correctly. They did something similar with ‘Robot Carnival’, another fave-rave animated movie of mine.