that would have been an excellent ending for the last president of the united states
it reminds me a lot of the us comic and movie codes. like does every villain in a hitchcock movie have to get their comeuppance? ( why, yes, timmy. they literally have to. )
I would have thought the Chinese government would be OK with the authorities coming across as ineffective at stopping the terrorist threat… as long as it was American authorities who dropped the ball instead of Chinese authorities.
They could have let the movie end normally and then just added a note that with the collapse of the American financial system China reigned supreme as an unchallenged superpower for the next ten thousand years.
In current times its well known that Apple will not allow villains to use their products
It sure would be interesting to see what basis Apple would use to sue if a studio just ignored their wishes and had a villain use an iPhone anyway.
Cartoons even “kiddie” cartoons have artists, writers, actors, etc. that build characters that have meaning to them and can send a message they think is important. Robotech might be a bad example of this, it’s a splice work done for commercial reasons, a better example might have been the censorship of gay relationships when Sailor Moon was first brought to US audiences.
I don’t judge the danger of changes to a work by what the original artist intended, but by what the censor chooses to change. In the case of Fight Club we have a censor that is trying to reinforce the idea of the supremacy of their state to the degree that they won’t even allow fictitious depictions of other states being powerless in the face of common people. In the case of Sailor Moon we have a media company that bowed to the pressure of groups that felt just showing kids that people can be gay would undermine the fabric of society. You can decide what you think is worse, but I don’t think either is acceptable.
I look forward to the edited Mr Robot miniseries where the narrator is abruptly institutionalized after throwing himself off a pier. 
It might not be authorized by the studio.
That book is still being written, for better or worse.
America would never exert undue pressure on its entertainment industry for political purposes. That would be unthinkable.
And here I was, thinking that the time travel fix in Superman: The Movie was the most criminally abusive and laziest use of deus ex machina in the history of big cinema. But no.
But that would have meant saying that an “anarchist”* was competent and organised enough to bring down western capitalism. It’s hard to break that 100 year pattern of MLs betraying anarchists because they aren’t doing The Revolution the right way.
* There is no coherent anarchist theory in Fight Club AFAIK and Tyler Durden is an authoritarian, but that hasn’t stopped some people describing him that way because of the bomb-throwing anarchist meme.
I love animation, but I’m not really a Salor Moon or Robotech kinda guy. I’m more into the Venture Brothers, Heavy Metal, Wizards scene.
But what’s worse, a government that has the power to determine what you do and don’t see, or a media company that rolls over anytime some old lady clutches her pearls?
There are an awful lot of low budget films where the car grills just have a blurry spot where the trademarked elements are supposed to be. It looks horrible, especially in HD, but someone’s scared.
I made a Tom Scharpling & Julie Klausner sanctioned short version of Gotti:
Well people similarly criticize the Raymond Burr sequences added to Godzilla.
Those are all good, I never watched much Venture Brothers since for most of it’s run I didn’t have a television to watch it on, and it wasn’t something I was interested in enough to go out of my way to find online. I honestly don’t recommend Robotech, I recall loving it as a kid, but re-watching as an adult I probably only made it 3 episodes in. Almost all of those early dubs were done at such a terrible quality.
My response is simple:
That’s it, not acceptable, period. Playing the game of they are worse so we don’t need to fix our problems is a loosing game, they loose and we loose when we go down that route.
Also the Washington DC Metro subway system rarely appears in movies partly because characters are not allowed to do anything against the rules on the subway. So no eating, littering, or listening to music without headphones.
Back in the day, the Department of Defense would allow Hollywood huge amounts of access to military sites and maneuvers in exchange for the ability to edit anything that the DoD found objectionable out of the movie.
When I was around 10 or maybe as old as 12, my favorite cartoon actually was a Japanese toon…I think it was called …Yamamoto? It was an ocean going battleship that was retrofitted to fly in space had a huge main gun, but the best part was it’s defensive ability to magnetize the hull so it would attract nearby asteroids that would stick to it, acting like armor.
The entire thing sound ridiculous when you say it out loud, but I loved it.
Out of a cannon into the sun!
