No Sex And Death Allowed On Cartoon Network

[lazypadawan]

Bryan at BigShinyRobot went to Friday's Clone Wars Season Three bash at Lucasfilm HQ, where the first two episodes of CW's new season were shown. Bryan had already seen them in a screener--lucky duck--so he noticed something missing from one of the episodes.

Avert your eyes if you don't want to know what happens next.

In the original screener, there was a scene where kinky bad girl Asajj Ventress--who is taking part in an attack on Kamino--fatally impales a clone with her lightsaber and kisses him before she turns it off and lets him fall to the ground. Let your head spin a moment with all of the symbolism that entails! Bryan thought it was a pretty rad scene and therefore he was a tad surprised to see it missing from the version shown at Lucasfilm. He asked Joel Aron and Dave Filoni about it and they told him Cartoon Network's censors insisted the scene be cut; it will be on the DVD/Blu-Ray set instead. They found out about it while they were at Celebration V and they were pretty disappointed since they liked the scene too.

You can read more here:

http://www.bigshinyrobot.com/reviews/archives/16255

Here's my take. I'm 41 and I have no kids. Stuff like this doesn't bother me personally and I think it's so Ventress to do something like that. I'm sure I'd find it awesome had I seen it myself. But it is something you'd see in a PG-13 rated movie, not so much in a t.v. show that is very popular with 6-7-year-olds. Sure, there's violence going on all of the time on the show but like in the movies that spawned it, it's rather antiseptic. There have been a few kissing scenes and suggestive dialogue, but nothing that would offend anyone who has let his or her kids see all of the Star Wars movies. I don't think the Ventress scene sounds like anything way over the line--if your 8 or 9-year-old routinely watches PG-13 fare. It's a tough line to walk. Adult SW fans like to see stuff that's hardcore and pushes the envelope but sometimes we forget we share this universe with children, and that's always been the case.

I think that perhaps instead of cutting the scene out entirely, Cartoon Network could have run a PG version during its usual airing time and re-run it uncut at 10 or during the Adult Swim block. It'll be interesting to see if Teletoon or Sky Movies in the UK runs it uncut, or if uncut versions will be available on iTunes.