Dumb moments in DVD censorship

The memory hole keeps expanding, and more and more art gets washed irretrievably down it with every passing day, it seems.

You can argue until your face falls off about what belongs on a compilation DVD. But if a DVD attempts to be a full movie or an entire season of a TV show, keep the memory hole plugged, because it's gotten too hungry. Movie and TV fans expecting their favorite works to be uncut are finding more and more disappointments.

The 2007 comedy film 'The Heartbreak Kid' fell victim to this censorship. Any DVD of the movie that you can buy or rent is labeled as "edited for content." A little bit of research has been done about this matter, and it turns out that this is because the DVD deletes a scene in which a youngster snorts cocaine. Fans of the movie describe the deleted scene as the most hilarious part of the entire film - but you can't get it on DVD.

A movie that was suitable for theatrical release just last year can't even appear on a DVD now without getting bowdlerized!

If people are so right-wing and thin-skinned that they find the scene offensive enough to censor, maybe they don't realize that it's just...a movie! The movie is not real life. It's fiction! It's make-believe! It's staged! Last I checked, 'The Heartbreak Kid' was not a documentary, so I don't see what the fuss is.

This act of censorship is bad, but it's perhaps less silly than what happened to the long-running TV police drama 'Hawaii Five-O'. Fans of the series noted the DVD of the first season is naturally called 'The Complete First Season'. The third season DVD is called 'The Complete Third Season'. But the second season set is just called 'The Second Season'.

The missing word unearthed an outrageous story of artistic suppression. It turns out the DVD of the second season excludes an entire episode called "Bored, She Hung Herself." According to several websites, this episode featured a young woman accidentally hanging herself while attempting a yoga technique. Reportedly, someone in real life was actually foolish enough to imitate this technique after seeing it on 'Hawaii Five-O' and ended up killing themselves. In other words, somebody saw a TV character doing something that resulted in death, and expected not to die if they did it themselves - and they died.

Because of this, the idiots at Paramount omitted that episode from the 'Hawaii Five-O' DVD collection.

A TV show that aired without any problems whatsoever on network TV way back in 1970 can't appear on a DVD that was released last year? Is that supposed to be progress? 'Hawaii Five-O' was an over-the-air network show, remember. Anything on the networks is vetted very carefully before airing so not one person who's ever lived gets offended. But someone always gets offended anyway. This time, Paramount kowtowed to the moral panic types by excluding a whole episode.

If this continues, maybe the memory hole will get so full that it'll burst and send a wave of suppressed TV and movie scenes crashing down on the viewing public. Then maybe people will question why they were ever censored.