Double Standards in cartoon censorship

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2314132y4h

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After watching alot of the old school shows of the 90's I need to ask everybody a question: Did anybody notice the Double standards in cartoon censorship in certain shows next to others and how do you feel about it?

After watching episodes of Batman, X-MEN, and Spiderman I gotta say that the SPiderman crew got hosed. They were subjected to the strictest censorship constraints on any of FOX's shows (they couldn't even say kill or show real guns) meanwhile Batman was allowed to show real guns and an episode was dedicated to Jim Gordon being shot and nearly killed.

And the X-Men was crazy. They were from the same company and X-MEN was given a whole bunch of freedom while Spiderman had to play nice. Go watch the Mr. Sinister origin episode ("Descent"). The X-MEN crew were allowed to do things that Spiderman wouldn't have never been allowed to get away with.

Mr. Sinister had hired the man who was behind the Jack the Ripper murders as a means to collect organs to complete his experiments. The episode featured imprisonment, torture, showing the foot of a murdered body on the ground, and Jack giving Sinister samples from humans with Sinister calling him a fool for not bringing the person back alive
 
I never got any of that thing about gunplay myself. I know Darkwing had quite a bit of bullets flying around (A lot from Negaduck, BTW). But I guess they played it off as comedy, so they clearly wouldn't have had as much trouble. Plus, most of the episodes were syndicated, and syndication has different censorship standards than network television anyway.

But then again, I always felt it was a double standard that parents complained about animated gun play, yet buy their kids toy guns.
 
Not sure if this counts as "censorship", but ive noticed that most cartoons that depict WWII (either via time travel, flashback or a straight depiction) only have nazis as the main villain, but not the Japanese or Italians, save for WWII-era toons (also, russias involvement on the allies is usually de-emphasized as well). Just thought that was kind of a weird thing, and i wonder if S&P has anything to do with it (ie, not wanting to offend any Japanese or Italians) or if the writers didnt want to go too far into detail with the war.
 
That's not really censorship per se as it is using the classic paradigm of writing. Nazis just make better villains than Imperial Japan, with its constant infighting did.
 
It's not necessarily censorship; more likely the producers of Spider-Man wanted stricter controls over what got shown. They may have chosen a target audience that was younger than the other two shows, and so they showed less offensive material. Considering that all three show ran on the same network (at least until B-TAS jumped to the WB), they probably all had the same restrictions under the network's Standards and Practices and it was up to the individual production companies to decide what was permissible within those standards.
 
I do remember a Histeria episode about World War II that had all the axis countries as Villians.(Germnay,Italy and Japan) It also had all the allies and an actual physical depiction of Hitler(though as the devil) I think I only seen that once on TV when Histeria was on. So I guess as long you can give a historical lesson, maybe you can get away some things.
 
In terms of dubs, I've noticed Code Lyoko and Totally Spies can get away with a lot more than Tenchi or other Japanese shows have. Most notably how they'd put digital bikinis on girls in the bath, even if all you see is their shoulders, but they never do that for CL or TS.
 
I'm amazed that Nickelodeon, a network that's known for always playing it safe and being kid-friendly, actually allowed Hey Arnold to have an appearance of Hitler.
 
May I add that they were able to get away with death multiple times in TMNT, while 4kids made darn well sure that no one on One Piece didn't mysteriously vanish after getting shot by a pop gun. Maybe the Mirage people put up a bigger stink than Toei would have.
 
I've never understood why comedic cartoons get a pass on graphic violence and action cartoons can't show death on screen. I can't count the number of times I've seen someone's skin get ripped off or brain removed while watching the "Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy".
 
That's probably because in most comedy cartoons, characters can be horribly mutilated or graphically killed, but will usually return alive and unharmed in the very next scene (or in the most extreme cases, the next episode). Meanwhile, in most action cartoons, when a character is killed, they often stay dead.
 
I think 4K played it alot safer with anime cuts because 1. Those shows were prepared for a different culture and 4K, being a public company (however inept) erred on the side of caution. 2. TMNT is an established franchise in the US and this most recent, preFF show was comic book-based and took creator input. 3. Native production teams can and do learn their boundaries and push them for better shows.

Here's one... Naruto's first kiss versus Jake Long's stage kiss. In Japan, the former was shown in the anime version. And I'm guessing that was done in the anime for the same reasons TMNT got all that leeway: trying to keep watering down to a minimum or why mess with what's so successful already. I think Toei's YGO adaptation was a lesson picked up well.

But it's different in the US because it's all tied in with politics. Which is why Jake and Spud kissed offscreen while Naruto and Sasuke's kiss was cut on CN.
 
Which is why the edit doesn't make sense to begin with. The kiss was done for comedy purposes, which is pretty mild even by American standards.
 
After doing edit lists for about eight years now, I've come to the conclusion that it's impossible to discern any sort of pattern with the way censors handle things and that the standards change from episode to episode, series to series. The hypocrisy of it all is quite amazing.

I was watching an American Dad! DVD commentary the other day, and Seth MacFarlane was talking about how they aren't allowed to say friggin' even though Marge said it on The Simpsons. When they asked Fox why they couldn't get away with it but The Simpsons could, they replied with a "Well, they're The Simpsons. That's why."
 
I was shocked when during a FOP marathon, with that trivia special, they actually mentioned and showed an image of Family Guy, because Seth McFaralane and Butch Hartman are buddies or something.

As inappropriate as that show is for children, I figured Nickelodeon would try to avoid mentioning Family Guy altogether.




Well, that does prove the theory I had, the more popular a show is for the network, the more things they'll let slide.
Which of course, sucks.

One thing I noticed in Avatar, is how I haven't heard them say the word kill or die in for nearly a season or a half. They used to say it on a regular basis in the first season, but now all we end up is a ridiculously vague story of what happened to Zuko's mother.
 
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