Why were nunchucks censored

In Japan, the character wore a thong and her breasts bounced when she won a fight. In the US, she was depicted with a more conservative outfit and her breasts remained stationary in victory. Donatello got to use his bo staff, but Leonardo and Raphael only pulled out their weapons for show, never actually using them in fight scenes.

Parents had concerns about the amount of violence in the first film, so the filmmakers made a conscious effort to reduce it and keep them happy. There's even a scene where Michelangelo fights with sausages instead of his traditional nunchucks. As it turns out, even sausage nunchucks push the limits of decency for the British Board of Film Classification.

The BBFC director James Ferman wanted to cut as much of that scene as possible, arguing the sausages would look like real nunchucks "to any streetwise 8 year old. Not content to just turn the Ninja Turtles turned "Hero Turtles," the United Kingdom's censorship laws also stripped Michelangelo of his signature weapons, his nunchucks.

In England, Ireland, and German-speaking countries, Mikey's nunchucks were replaced with a grappling hook they called the "turtle line. While Mikey's weapon is probably the third most dangerous of the four, but this specific piece of censorship had more to do with Bruce Lee. Allegedly, English gangs in the s started using nunchucks and throwing stars inspired by movies like Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon.

At the time, the British Board of Film Classification censored violent films if they thought the violence was too extreme or could lead to real life consequences. The board placed a blanket ban on nunchucks and throwing stars in TV shows and movies that lasted well into the s.

The episode centered around Baxter Stockman , who had created a clone of himself into which he transferred his consciousness. The visuals of his clone rapidly decomposing into a gory, zombie-like condition were deemed way too intense for kids, and the episode did not air. When asked about the episode, series producer Lloyd Goldfine said :. Upon seeing the episode, [Fox Broadcast Standards and Practices] were said to be 'horrified' and that there was no way they could air the episode.

But as it was approved at every stage, we went full steam ahead. In the end, I was told it was bad judgment on my part It doesn't seem unreasonable for a teacher to ban action figures from their classrooms, those could be distracting.

But sending a kid home for showing up in a Ninja Turtle t-shirt? According to a piece in the LA Times , several California schools put just such a policy in place. Some parents and teachers protested the kids' First Amendment rights, while defenders of the t-shirt ban claimed kids behaved better after TMNT paraphernalia was removed from the classroom.

When the UK picked up the '80s animated version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , they did so under a number of conditions, first and foremost changing the name to Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. After that, and replacing Mikey's nunchucks, censors also cut out as much violence as possible, shortening the series considerably.

In the United States, the first season of the series consisted of five, minute-long episodes. Due to the amount of footage chopped for the UK version, that "season" was condensed down into a single minute made-for-TV movie called How It All Began. In addition to taking away Mikey's nunchucks and removing the word "ninja" from the entire series, British censors also found it necessary to remove phrases like "Let's kick some shell," and "Bummer!

If you're familiar with British slang, however, you might understand this example. That said, "Let's kick some shell," was seemingly removed for the very tepid violence implied by the phrase. Considering the minutes of footage that made up the animated series in the US was cut down into a minute movie called How It All Began in the UK, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise British fans were a little confused about what was going on with these Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles.

Years later when I discovered the original unedited series I was in utter shock. There were a multitude of scenes I hadn't seen before, and a coherent story, and far more entertaining cartoon violence, and Michelangelo actually kicking ass. That movie, Enter the Dragon , introduced many American audiences to Bruce Lee, who translated his early appearances on the American show The Green Hornet , one of the first showcases for martial arts in mainstream Western media, into major success abroad.

The only problem, sadly, was that Lee had died only a month before the release of the film under what remain hazy circumstances.

Lee died knowing he was a star, but only later did he become an icon, the kind of action star that budding filmmakers study. The problem is that the film, successful as it was, was both very violent and naturally appealing to kids—the kind of thing ratings systems are made for. But the interesting thing is that they kept revisiting the film, in part because of real-life hooligan violence that seemed directly inspired by the film.

During the last quarter of the 20th century, Ferman came to have possibly a deeper influence on British popular culture than possibly any other person living in the country at the time. Ferman, acting on the advice of law enforcement, had it taken out of the film entirely, leading to a poster that had replaced the chainstick with a solid stick.

No matter that the film had already been released for more than half a decade by this point and a whole generation of British kids had already seen Lee prominently use the nunchucks. But there were still plenty of horses to keep in the stable. Like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

At the time of the spark, neither Eastman nor fellow co-creator Peter Laird had jobs, and they decided to launch a comic-book company called Mirage Studios. That odd bit of inspiration proved immensely important, however—because within a few years, the comic book series would give way to role-playing board games, to toy figurines, to animated TV shows, to movies.

To think of this another way, Eastman and Laird were the very kind of kids who watched Bruce Lee movies, and rather than generating something aggressively violent, they were inspired to create another work of art that was even more appealing to kids.

It may have aired around breakfast time, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came to dominate the American cartoon scene seemingly overnight. With a mixture of fully formed characters, an unusual concept, and slick packaging, it seemed like nothing else on air at the time—but also perfectly of its era.

It took a few things that were already starting to pick up mainstream cultural interest and combined them into a single show. And it the concept took from seemingly everywhere that an year-old boy might care about—the very creation of the turtles touched on timely environmental issues, while the ninja storylines embraced the growing popularity of kung fu movies, and the turtles loved pizza and were coincidentally named after Renaissance painters—see, fun and learning!

It was like a melting pot of cartoon concepts wrapped up in a single highly marketable half-hour. But it was very much an American mishmash. It reflected all of the concepts it touched on in a not-quite-exact way, turning numerous cultural touchstones into its own. But over time, the approach got away from the action elements that attracted kids in the first place. From a distance, some of that might just seem a part of a general dumbing-down of animated television in the s and s.

See, perhaps without even realizing it, Eastman and Laird had created the perfect target for British censorship in the late s—effectively because what they had created had borrowed so much from Bruce Lee. By the late s, the list was long and diverse:.

Presumably due to its lack of military sanction, if not its legality, the Rambo knife then joined what was a growing list of prohibited weapons on the screen. These now comprised Ninja Death Stars, spiked knuckledusters, metal claws, butterfly knives, lighted aerosols, crossbows, and telescopic catapults.

But what had begun as a reasonable as well as a politically sensible response to actual incidents in which people were harmed, now entered the realms of the surreal. The chainstick got seemingly more attention than anything else, though. The easiest way for me to explain this is to go to the tape. The key things to watch for including to way the logo is used, how Michelangelo uses his nunchucks, and the way the name is sung.

And the logo treatment feels literally tacked on. Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles , while a huge hit in the U. Justin Wren, a writer focused on the Turtles, noted that the censorship of the nunchucks in particular seemed a bit backwards in an article about the series:. But two swords seem a lot more violent than nunchaku. This was a lot to ask of a show that was built around ninjas. Rather than run into an editing disaster with every episode, the entire show began to de-emphasize weapons entirely, starting with the third season.

As the show had long played up comedic elements of the concept, they still had plenty to work with, even if it meant that one of the original draws of the Turtles was scaled back significantly. While the animated show that rocketed the franchise into the mainstream was never under the purview of Ferman, he clearly had influenced the way the show was produced by creating a standard that was then translated to television.

Most of the board agreed that the rule needed to be changed, as it no longer made sense, especially given the fact that there were numerous other seemingly more dangerous weapons in the film. Learn More, Hoser. The sequel , however, made the stance look downright comical. Ferman would not budge on the stupid nunchucks. In an attempt to swerve the Director from his chosen path of non-nunchaku, an examiner now decided that extreme steps had to be taken.

He then started to swing them around above his head but unfortunately the chain immediately got caught around his neck and the examiner nearly strangled himself. Finally, in exasperation, the examiners told him that there was no evidence from the police or the courts that the weapon had been used for years. Ferman was a notably controversial figure, having made many decisions during his time with the BBFC that seemed to be based on personal taste rather than logical sense.

His many obituaries after his passing seemed utterly confused about how to perceive a man who insisted on aggressive cuts to Raiders of the Lost Ark and an overly tough rating on Mrs. His legacy, years later, is a nonsensical one. Censorship has a very strange effect on the way that we create. I compare it to the way that many recent blockbusters have integrated elements of Chinese culture into their films , including plotlines that get added to show the country in a positive light—with a clear financial incentive for doing so.

Some of the pressure of censorship comes from bodies focused on ratings, while some of it is social.