In the very early 19th Century, a man named Thomas Bowdler worried that the works of William Shakespeare, with their racy implications of sex and naughty words, were too spicy for the women and children of the world. To spare the pearl-clutching cataleptic fits that might come from unexpurgated reading of “Out, damned spot!”, Bowdler edited and represented the work of the Bard in sanitized form, forever tying his name to the process of disguising offensive content. I mention all this solely because I watched ‘The Breakfast Club‘ on basic cable recently, with its defanged cries of “You piece of slime!” and “Flip you!”, all the while leaving in the underage consumption of marijuana and the implications of teen sex in the library. No matter how you feel about the not-even-close-to-Anthony-Michael-Hall voice used, we can all agree that subbing in “Eat my socks” was probably unnecessary, leading to today’s *BLEEP*ed query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) thinks that the pinnacle will always be the classic bowdlerized line from ‘The Big Lebowski’, “You see what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps?” moment, which is actually funny, in a meta way, asking: What film would you NEVER want to watch in bowdlerized form?
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Pulp Fiction comes to mind. That thing is so laden with profanity that there probably would be fewer than ten lines of dialog that would remain untouched.