Thursday, May 15, 2008

Content question

I was feeling a little soppy and sentimental on the plane on the way home the other day so tuned in to watch BoyTown on thr inflight entertainment. It's an Australian film about the revivial of a boyband some many years after their original successes, and about their making it to the top again, and then not, and then again. But the bit I wanted to watch was the ending, where they are on a plane on their way to the US when they are invited into the cockpit and one of them (in a move set up throughout the film) asks "what does this button do" as he presses it and the plane plummets to the ground, killing them all. Well, that was what I remembered happening - but that certainly wasn't the ending I saw this time. The button press, plane crash, and funeral/s (complete with their angelic accompaniament) were cut. Of course, when I thought about it, sitting in a plane at 40,000 ft, the edit made a little sense but it did get me wondering about what other entertainment censorship is practised by the airlines ... did they edit out the plane crash at the start of Castaway and, if they did, how did they explain Tom Hanks'character's arrival on the island? And what about films that are set on a plane eg Snakes on a Plane? Might go for a little wander on some websites and see what I can find out.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I remember watching "Rain Man" on an airplane once. The whole airport scene ("Qantas never crashes") was completely removed. If you'd never seen the film before, the plot-line was completely unclear as to why they wound up driving across the country instead of flying.