Tonight's CBS Sunday Night Movie is a
Grease sing-along, and since I have a morbid fascination with TV censorship, I kind of want to see it. I saw
Grease on network broadcast TV quite a few years ago, and the song "Greased Lightnin'" was hacked and slashed into a pointless absurdity. I'm curious to see how they'll deal with it today in a "sing-along" context, since nobody could ever have been expected to sing along with the mess I saw over 20 years ago.
UPDATE: I watched it. What they did with "Greased Lightnin'" was actually as unobtrusive as possible while still satisfying the FCC and Standards & Practices. They silenced the problematic words and left spaces in the onscreen lyrics.
Some memories of broadcast TV versions:
The Breakfast Club: Ridiculous replacements of words, such as "airhead" for "asshole".
Repo Man: The same thing happens here (melon-farmer!), but since director Alex Cox had control of it,
the result is worth watching in its own right. Best of all, the TV version even includes some scenes that were cut from the theatrical version. "Lorna Doones? I love Lorna Doones!"
for the Criterion DVD/Blu-ray release including the TV version as an extra.
Heathers: Not only mercilessly chopped up, but some scenes were even reassembled out of order. I had the foresight to tape the TV version, because I knew that any attempt to make this movie broadcast-friendly would result in an atrocity.
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: Released with an X rating in 1970, this movie showed up on late night broadcast TV a few years ago with surprisingly little censorship. Some "language" was silenced here and there, and butt cracks were blurred out, but all of the violence (some of it quite gruesome) was intact. Because seeing someone's bare backside is somehow more offensive than someone having their head chopped or blown off.
Speaking of Russ Meyer films, I've never seen his cult classic
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! on broadcast TV, but I'd like to. Even though it was released as an adults-only feature back in 1966 (
arguably the best year in pop culture history), there's absolutely nothing in it that would prevent it from being shown on prime-time broadcast TV today,
completely uncut.
