I'm watching the 2005 Joss Whedon film Serenity right now on TV, and at first I thought they were only cutting out bits that weren't essential parts to storyline.
Then I noticed the pattern. All the bits that got cut out were the ones that contained Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese) words and phrases*. Most of the English curses were still there. But not the Chinese ones.
Does that mean that movies played on US English-language TV will continue to carry a certain amount of English curses but will be completely stripped of all colorful phrases in foreign languages? No German curses, or French or Spanish?
Or is it just those in Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese), the same way that the Chinese troops suddenly became NK troops in the remake of Red Dawn? Nah, that would be crazy conspiracy talk, right? :)
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Or is it because the actors who were uttering these words and phrases weren't exactly fluent in that language? Nah, that can't possibly be the reason, right?
So … why do YOU think the Chinese phrases were edited out of the film for TV viewing, including the ones that weren't curses?
Dan
* And, by the way, NOT all the Chinese phrases in the film were exactly curses either:
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PS. And here I thought that the whole idea of an evil Sino-American Alliance was central to the entire story in the series and in the movie! The great Union of Allied Planets (the Alliance) is supposed to be a political and cultural blend composed of those two main partners.
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