Mild Disney+ Censorship ‘Hides a Much Bigger Problem’

There’s a scene in the 1984 Tom Hanks movie Splash “showing a brief glimpse of a naked butt…” notes the Verge, “but people watching the movie on Disney Plus are greeted with an entirely different version of the scene.” And the Verge sees a larger issue: Disney used CGI hair to cover actress Daryl Hannah’s body. A Disney representative confirmed to The Verge that a “few scenes” from Splash were “slighted edited to remove nudity,” but they did not specify when the edits were made… Splash has found itself in the middle of an ongoing debate over media being altered in digital spaces. It’s a debate that’s raged for decades; fans were upset when George Lucas edited A New Hope, making it so Greedo shot first instead of Han. People bemoaned Lucas and 20th Century Fox for not releasing the original version of the film anywhere, either. The only legal versions of A New Hope that exist for people to buy, download, or stream today feature Greedo shooting first. It wasn’t just that Lucas and Fox replaced the original scene with a slightly altered one, but the original also wasn’t available to purchase when reprints were made… “As physical media gives way to streaming, large corporations have greater and greater control over what we can and cannot see,” Slate’s Isaac Butler wrote on the issue. “This gives them unprecedented power to disappear bothersome work. “Whether we agree with a particular instance of memory-holing or not, this practice is deeply troubling, its history even more so.”