What's the stupidest censorship you've ever seen?

In whatever media it may be, what censorship did you find utterly ridiculous?

For me, it's ********************

buttbuttinate and clbutt

I heard the word "killer" censored when this track was on the radio. (only happened once but was really a sign of how stupid the PC brigade is)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c84NHGJJ01U

Any kind of censorship is immature to me.

"Wahhhh! They're saying something that's hurting my pwecious wittle feewings! Make 'em stahp! Wahhhh!"

The mosaics in Japanese films. I mean, come on!

I've witnessed "crap" being censored, which I thought was beyond petty at that time. It actually makes the song sound MORE vulgar if they haven't heard it before. There's also the mid-2000s era where anything like gun, shoot, kill, and stuff like that got axed on particularly conservative stations.

Censoring nipples seems dumb to me. Why is it permissible to allow men to show their nipples, but not women?

Also, censoring asses is stupid as well. They allow people to see butt-cheeks, as long as there's a barely visible sting between them.

I have seen some channels censor beer and cigarettes before (can't remember anything recent though)

Then there's the odd dubbing over certain places. This sort of thing was big back in the 80s and maybe the 90s. For instance, that infamous bit in Back to the Future when it was first shown on network TV, where "Jesus Christ!" became "Geez Louise!".

I've thought a lot about why nipples are censored and I think it's because, besides the obvious sexual nature of the female breast, a nipple specifically has a different color and texture than the rest of the skin, and in some ways resembles the fleshy nature of the penis, or clitoris. It subtlety reminds people of genitals, although I fail to see why that's a bad thing. I remember seeing someone's butt crack censored on TV. Not like the whole butt...just the line down the middle. That's literally the darkest part of the butt, the part that receives the smallest amount of light, but somehow that equates to being offensive, I guess because it's dangerously close to the anus.

I've also been astonished by some of the censoring I've seen for children's shows, suggesting that censors are really just perverts who can't handle certain images or ideas. In particular, I'm thinking of the carton "Reboot," remember that? It was a mid 90s CGI cartoon and the censors made them change the females' clearly defined separate breasts into a "monobreast," because apparently the full shape was too sexual, even though it was a CGI, a cartoon, and the characters were clothed.

A Finnish court recently fined a woman for criticising Islam. This is just one example of many across Europe.

http://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finns_party_politician_convicted_of_incitement_will_appeal_verdict/9328734

As a German, I see so much stupidity in media censorship, I don't even know where to start!

Replacing all characters with robots is a classic in German video games.
Like Soldier of Fortune 2, which had its Mercenary vs. Terrorists gameplay replaced by a plot involving Androids from another world assimilating mankind.
Quake IV had the "assembly line" part completely removed, so you start the game as a human and become a machine halfway into the game without knowing what the fuck happened.

A recent example, I like how the movie "Moana" is released as "Vaiana" in Europe, out of fear someone might confuse a Disney movie with an Italian 80's pornstar.

No Man's Sky has a filter for uploaded names. Things like planets, creatures, etc. It obviously has to or there would be far too many planets with names like "Penisworld D" or whatever. The filter is way too sensitive, though. Players can't use words like "spikey." On Sunday I found a planet with a procedural name "Kanzaifus <something>", but when I tried to rename it and keep the "Kanzaifus" part of the name the profanity filter kept telling me no.

I saw a version of the movie "The Machinist" on tv and they blurred out Jennifer Jason Leigh's brief topless scenes, yet didn't censor out any of the language (like fuck, shit, etc). This was on Canadian broadcast tv and I'm not sure why that version of the movie even exists (full nudity is allowed any time of day here).

On US broadcast tv I saw "Species" that had shirt/bras digitally painted on for the nude scenes, it didn't look good. I also saw a version of "Carrie" that had extra steam/mist digitally added to the opening locker room scene to hide all the nudity, but I thought that did actually look pretty good.

Ichor said:

I have seen some channels censor beer and cigarettes before (can't remember anything recent though)

Then there's the odd dubbing over certain places. This sort of thing was big back in the 80s and maybe the 90s. For instance, that infamous bit in Back to the Future when it was first shown on network TV, where "Jesus Christ!" became "Geez Louise!".

My favorite one of these I saw probably 20 years ago when we were watching Major League on a network. Dorn walks up to Vaughn on the mound, but "Strike this motherfucker out" became "Strike this ______GUY______ out", didn't flow or blend at all. Still one of my favorite in-jokes between my dad and I

Katt Williams had a Comedy standup special on Comedy Central that was nearly impossible to listen to because he swears so much, at least 50% of his vocabulary is mothafucka and nigga so determining the context of his jokes was too difficult to listen to. Nothing against Katt but it was dumb of Comedy Central to try and push it out during evening time.

There's a version of the Matrix edited for TV where he has some kinda mechanical tracking unit thing sucked out of his stomach and he shouts "Jeepers Creepers! That thing was real!?"

Ce Lo Green's "Forget you" song of course.

Doom censorship, obviously.

I've seen some sites that automatically censor certain combinations of letters (ass, fuck, etc.), so in some cases you can't write things like "assassin" or "butter".

EDIT: A better explanation of what I mean:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

Most censorship I find to be pointless, save for some possible scenarios (such as a news program censoring actual gore).

The worst is definitely porn mosaics and black bars, though. Mmmm, yep.

remember someone talking about how once on a forum they had to use the word c-pit to refer to a vehicle's cockpit, due to an overaggressive censor. the best part is that the forum was about a subject where the word cockpit might come up frequently.

also not a fan of localization censorship (things like what germany censors falls under this banner), but that's a can of worms I'd rather not open here.

Dark Souls 2 had/has an idiotic player name filter where popular character names involving "Knight" would end up as "K***ht" and other various nonsense. I fought a guy named Turtles****, because "shell" has a naughty word in it. Also anything with "ho" gets butchered, so no Thomas.

TraceOfSpades said:

Any kind of censorship is immature to me.

"Wahhhh! They're saying something that's hurting my pwecious wittle feewings! Make 'em stahp! Wahhhh!"

You said it bruh.

Kontra Kommando said:

Censoring nipples seems dumb to me. Why is it permissible to allow men to show their nipples, but not women?

Also, censoring asses is stupid as well. They allow people to see butt-cheeks, as long as there's a barely visible sting between them.

Funnily enough all this has seemed to do is create new fetishes and the term 'strategic covering' or 'convenient censoring' or whatever, which is effectively getting away with nudity (showing entire breasts, buttocks) but censoring the tiny bits that aren't deemed socially acceptable. You're STILL seeing her tits and/or ass, it's amusing.

E: Or what about saying 'The F-word' or 'The N-word' you just put the word nigger and fuck in everybody's heads by saying this, they aren't stupid, so why not be honest about it and take responsibility.

The really poorly edited Americanized Dragonball episodes that attempt to alter Bulma's panties or adds a very out-of-place flower in front of baby Goku's junk. I get why they did it for 9 AM Saturday cartoons but it's entirely pointless and looks so out of place. The US was very sensitive about anything even remotely kinda-sorta sexual for quite a long time.

Pretty much all censorship is annoying, 90% of the time a 'mature content' warning beforehand would suffice, in my opinion. It generally seems preferable to teach kids what things are and how to appropriately cope rather than simply hiding things from them as well. There are exceptions of course, but still.

Obsidian said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4t6zNZ-b0A

Ive heard "monkeyfied" used in a bunch of other censored movies too. Wth?

Zed said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

Anything that triggers this.

A particular bad case was a forum where "anal" had been added to the list of horrible words, resulting in ****ogic, ****gesic, ****ysis, psych****yst, and so on.

The porn censors the good old UK I live in that are most probably coming soon.

The acts censored are not even illegal, not only that but what are they doing it for, it can hardly be a "Somebody think of the children!" action because it is porn for fuck sake.

40oz said:

Ive heard "monkeyfied" used in a bunch of other censored movies too. Wth?

I heard it as Monkey Fighting Snakes ;-;

I once watched a movie that was airing on TV (I belive it was Pineapple Express), where every instance of the word "Asshole" was replaced with "Casserole" and every instance of the word "Motherfucker" was replaced with "Mukka lukka".

Germans censoring Naziship. One day somebody's gotta stop Putin.

People who censor their own dirty words. What's the fucking point?