Content Advisory

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flettino

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Is there, somewhere out there, an actual guide of some sort that specifies what can and can't be in a show based on its content rating?

I was wondering this while watching the Batman: TAS Volume 1 commentary, with the creators mentioning, for example, that they were allowed to have Batman bloodied only once, or that Mr. Freeze was not technically allowed to point the gun at the screen when he did. What else is and isn't allowed?
 
It's all relative on the board and the network. For instance, you could get away with a lot more if a cartoon was airing on Cartoon Network than the CW.

I remember Carl Macek once stated that during the edits for Robotech, censors said you could show blood but you couldn't show it exiting a wound. You could have characters die on the show, but only if they die valiantly in battle. For instance, you could have fighter planes and army tanks be destroyed, but you couldn't show innocent civilians being killed. That is why in the early DBZ edits, they'd use such lines as "they're okay I can see the parachutes" or "thank goodness they only hit that robot plane."
 
When X-Men The Animated Series adapted The Dark Phoenix Saga, they obviously couldn't have Jean kill off an entire universe (D'Bari). To remedy that, they have two Shiar guards stating that the star system was deserted. They pulled a DBZ there.
 
It's really at the discretion of the BS&P rep I think. I don't think there's a big book of things you can't do on television.



Yes he was. You can't do that so that kids don't feel like they're being shot at, which for some reason encourages kids to shoot each other. But Mr. Freeze could do it because no one has a freeze gun.

The one I never understand is when they try and pretend death doesn't happen. Kids are innocent... but that's just a fact of life. If they can't deal with the fact that death exists. (Not necessarily have to deal with it personally.) How are they going to exist as adults?
 
A lot of cartoons don't hide death. I mean, there tons of characters who were killed in Robotech, but, like I said, that was allowed because you can show people die if they fight valiantly in battle. It teaches kids that if you fight, you risk your life.

Now, showing innocent people being incinerated by a bomb or, better yet, showing them death scenes from Final Destination is going a little overboard in revealing death to kids. That just teaches them that death is around the corner at every turn. Despite it being a grim fact, it's really not the kind of content you want to reveal to a child because it will cause them to think and grow paranoid about the subject. I knew when I was 5 that I contemplated the end of the world and I kept having nightmares about it for a few months.

So, yeah, death is fine in cartoons as long as it isn't some pedestrian suddenly being crushed to death by debris.

However, in a PG cartoon, most of those rules go out the window.
 
As far as sheltering kids, there's a balance. You want them to understand how the world works, but you dont' want to scare them so bad that they become former shells of their previous happy go lucky selves either.
 
It also depends on the era. I recently recall a Battle of the Planets episode where all the army tanks and jets were referred to as robots. But in that very episode, a main character was killed by a robotic bug.

There is was also a certain code of moral ethics when censoring back then. For instance, in that very episode of Battle of the Planets, the daughter of the man who was killed was given the chance to seek revenge on the bug that killed her father. She declines and lets the heroes take care of him. But in the original version, the hero smacks her and forces her to kill it.
 
I actually watched an old Cartoon Cartoon online, Raw Deal in Rome. For a child's cartoon, it was rather graphic. Nobody actually died, but the main character, the dog, was blown up many times. Quite often, this included visible bones, organs, and muscles flying. No blood though. You never really see that on children's television anymore. Was there some slack in the general rules back then?
 
In the case of anime, the fact that these shows are usually shown overseas in time slots for younger audiences then they were originally in Japan may explain things. For example, the cut scene in Pokemon's "Holiday at Acopoco" with James' fake boobs (easily the oddest scene in the entire series) was probably too weird for early-afternoon syndication, and the unaired Safari Warden episode (featuring guns aplenty) probably was struck down in the US as a matter of cautiousness on the parts of the American distributor, not enforcement by a code. However, I'm sure there is a content advisory board, but I'm sure it doesn't have the same pull as the MPAA or ESRB.
 
Haha wow, Invader Zim must have broke the "can't show civilians dying" rule like a million times. That show even had an episode where the entire city got blown up. Although I do know that episodes produced after 9/11 had stricter guidelines for violence than say, an episode like "Hamstergeddon."

But yeah, this really all depends on the censors for that particular network. It's a pretty well known fact that Cartoon Network will allow more violence to be shown than Nickelodeon. I remember a few things mentioned on the Invader Zim commentaries like how they wouldn't allow Iggins to die at the end of Game Slave 2 (where it's not really a real death, you just wouldn't see him get away after the elevator crashes).

And other than Avatar I think, you never see blood on Nickelodeon cartoons anymore, whereas older shows like Rocko's Modern Life and Ren & Stimpy showed it pretty often.
 
Collateral damage is fine as long as you don't show civilians being burned or crushed or killed in the destruction. I mean, in the second episode of Robotech, Macross City was ripped to shreds.
 
See, this is amusing, because in the early episodes of the DBZ dub, we got stuff like "GOOD THING WE MANAGED TO EVACUATE THE CITY IN TIME, OR NAPPA'S DESTRUCTION OF IT WOULD HAVE CAUSED PEOPLE TO DIE!" several times an episode. Nappa would blow up a plane, then we'd get Tienshinhan yelling "THEY BLEW UP THE CARGO ROBOT!" They never had to do that on Zim, did they?
 
To echo the crowd here, I don`t really understand why random, faceless people aren`t allowed to die in these shows. Charachters that no one has any attachment to, literally "random people" who only exist in the show to be killed to show how evil a villain is, yes charachters that we have a chace to get to know and get close to are allowed to die... on screen no less?


Something is rotten in the state of denmark.(I`m on a shakespeare kick, sue me)
 
Exactly. But in "Hamstergeddon" they went so far as to show a woman getting crushed by a school bus. However, in "The Most Horrible X-mas Ever" they didn't allow Ian Graham to get crushed.

Oh and I'd also like to point out the giant car pile-up in "Walk for Your Lives." I'm sure Jhonen and the Nick censors probably had a field day fighting over that...
 
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