How many movies would be suitable for under 15's but for a few moments of excessive swearing/violence/sex/gore etc?
Why not use the extra capacity of a DVD to allow a "child"' mode for these films. This could be activated by a parent before the child starts watching the film (password protected of course).
Then whenever there's any unsuitable moments in the film, corrective action would be taken. For example, if someone swears, this would be bleeped out (or dubbed, e.g. "oh shoot!" instead of "oh shit!". Any small acts of violence could be blurred out (a la MTV).
It's obviously not to going work for all films, as the subject might not be suitable (Blair Witch Project for example) but I would imagine many 15-rated films could be included in this.
This is my first half-baked idea, so be gentle with me!!-- cjlove, Mar 09 2001 Movie Mask http://www.moviemask.com/Baked into a player for DVDs on your PC. [krelnik, Oct 25 2002, last modified Oct 04 2004] Would the password protection not need to be on the 'adult' version? It's implied that the child version is protected.-- Scotty, Mar 09 2001 Sounds like a pretty good idea. My mom just covers my eyes while my dad shields my virgin ears. ;-)-- salmon, Mar 09 2001 They do this for movies that they show on airplanes..so someone is already going through the trouble to make these alternative edits. They should be able to stick that on a DVD.-- blahginger, Mar 09 2001 TBS is notorious for this. But, I think most kids know where the swear words are supposed to be. I can remember watching Backdraft, and when some guy fell to his fiery death, his last words were "oh shoooooooot!!!".-- Wes, Mar 09 2001 They do something similar for films on TV here in the UK. Dunno if there's the same idea in the States, but anything that's shown here before 9pm is supposed to be suitable for family viewing, and they'll sometimes redub some bits of movies that are going to be shown before 9, which can lead to some odd things happening.
Two prominent examples spring to mind - the first is the infamous Die Hard scene where Bruce Willis is heard to shout "Flip you, you muddy funster" at the bad guys (and a nation's children turn to their parents and say "But his mouth didn't say 'flip'...").
The other was Beverly Hills Cop where Eddie Murphy says "heck" a lot all the way up to the ad break that took the film past nine o'clock, but doesn't say it again afterward. Just something quite a lot like it. Which was fine until a few years later when they reshowed the film in an earlier time slot but didn't think to change the soundtrack. Ooooops.
Actually the "Flip you, muddy funster" thing might well be a world wide phenomenon, but the same film certainly contained some dreadful UK only dubbing when Bruce, for no apparent reason, appeared to start doing an impersonation of Dick Van Dyke's accent in "Mary Poppins". Very very bad.
Right, think I might go and change my account name to "Muddy funster" now...-- mark_t, Mar 09 2001 I can also remember watching "Major League" on TBS. Rather than saying "Strike this [mommy-effer] out", they lazily left it as "Strike this...... guy out". Pretty lame.-- Wes, Mar 09 2001 Oh, I know all about that editing thing that TBS and other stations do for movies.
BREAKFAST CLUB -- BITCH became BRAT, FUCK ME OVER became MESS ME UP. VACATION -- FUCKED IN THE HEAD became OUT OF YOUR MINDS. FERRIS BUELLER -- PIECE OF SHIT became PIECE OF TIN. DUMB AND DUMBER -- SUCK ME SIDEWAYS became SLAP ME SIDEWAYS.-- Sparki, Oct 08 2001 Shouldn't be too hard to do this, just with an alternate soundtrack for the voices. It would require a completely different version for the visual part of it, though, and I'd rather it not crowd out special features or things.
Make it a completely seperate DVD, instead, like 'widescreen' usually is.-- StarChaser, Oct 08 2001 I don't know the details of the DVD format, but if two "angles" of a film are identical for most of the film's duration, the material which is identical only has to be included on the DVD once. Many multi-language DVD's use different camera angles to show different versions of the opening/closing credits; I'm pretty certain they don't have multiple copies of everything in between.-- supercat, Jun 24 2003 That is correct, it is referred to as "seamless branching". The DVD "Terminator 2: Ultimate Edition" uses this technique to include three distinct cuts of the film (original theatrical, "directors cut", and "extended") all on one side of one DVD, by re-using the parts that are the same.-- krelnik, Jun 25 2003 I hear there is a company called www.cleanfilms.com that edits Hollywood movies to make them more family friendly. From the look of the website they rent and sell the movies nationwide through the mail.-- ubiquitous, Jul 25 2003 Well, it's a bit close to censorship for my tastes, and I'm against shielding young people from the world, as it can cause problems later on. But, I would have appreciated this when I was younger, as there are many movies I could have watched if not for one or two scenes, or language.-- JimX, Dec 21 2003 krelnik: Can the "seamless branching" work if there are two versions of a scene that aren't the same duration?-- supercat, Dec 21 2003 random, halfbakery