Monday, June 14, 2010

Censoring Supercross

I am a production technician for a TV station in Cincinnati. During a typical 8-hour shift, I'll be operating a camera or running teleprompter for 2 of them and goofing off for the other 6. The pay for the job isn't exactly all that great, but when you consider that over the last week I was paid livable wages for doing the following:

-Watching copious amounts of baseball
-Honing my talent at throwing styrofoam plates until I got to the level that I could hit a girl in the face over half the time
-Going on a walk through the nice part of town
-Playing Mad Gab
-Playing Life
-Practicing my breakdancing skillz

It's actually pretty fucking phenomenal. Unfortunately, sometimes the job requires you to work odd hours at times when coworkers are too tired or hungover to be particularly sociable, and that means you'll have to resort to watching TV. And because it's during those odd hours such as 8:30 in the morning on Sunday, networks aren't exactly presenting you with their A-game. As a result, sometimes I get the pleasure of watching such well-regarded American cinematic classics as Supercross: The Movie.

Supercross is a shit-soaked 90-minute cinematic tribute to the worst fucking sport in the world. Supercross is a sport where you're on a dirtbike, you're racing a bunch of other people on a track comprised of tight turns and tall mounds of dirt, and the guy who times his jumps right and lands them at the best angle usually wins. I'm sure it's fun to take part in, but as a spectator it ranks somewhere below minor league arena football. The movie follows a positively brilliant plot that we've never seen in movies before. Get this: An amateur has dreams of making it big, he gets his big chance, he makes it big, he alienates his friends because he's changed, man, he resolves his differences, and with the help of his friends, he wins the Big Competition at the end. I don't know where they come up with this shit.

You, the reader, don't give a shit about Supercross and nobody you know does either, so it wouldn't surprise you if I told you that the movie was a box office disaster. On opening weekend it made $820 per theater. It costs a movie studio $2,000 to create and send a film print to a theater. In a movie's first weekend of release, the studio typically gets 75% of the ticket sales. Since the movie opened on 1,621 screens to an opening weekend gross of $1,330,520, Fox made $997,890 yet paid $3,242,000 for prints and distribution. The box office performance of this movie was so shitty that even though Fox paid a great deal of money to produce and market the movie, they would have saved $2.25 million by never showing it in any theaters.

A couple Sunday mornings ago, I didn't have any books with me, none of my favorite websites had any recent updates because it was fucking Sunday morning, and none of my coworkers could be troubled for conversation, so I settled on watching Supercross: The Move on FX. The movie won my attention by default because it was the only thing on TV that wasn't an infomercial or Dragon Ball Z episode dubbed into Spanish. It causes me physical pain to admit to this, but it was actually the second time I've seen parts of it on cable. The first time was because I was flipping through the channels and caught a scene with Sophia Bush, who is so fucking gorgeous that she could convince Kevin Spacey to give chicks a try.

I mention that I've caught Supercross on cable twice because I noticed a subtle difference between both of my viewings. There's a scene where the main character, KC Carlyle, nearly crashes into the bad guy in a race. After they cross the finish line, they get into a fight and this exchange goes down. (I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember the exact dialog and nobody on the internet liked this movie enough to write down lines from it)

Bad guy: Why'd you cut me off?
KC: I'm just racing, bro!
Bad guy: That ain't cool!
(Bad guy rushes at KC and a fight breaks out)
Bad guy: Bitch!
KC: Fag!
Bad guy: Bitch!
KC: Fag!
Bad guy: Bitch!
KC: Fag! Fag!
Bad guy: Bitch! Bitch!

Eventually the fight breaks up and the movie continues to be terrible in different ways. The first time I saw on the movie, which was on a different channel, the constant catcalls of "Fag" were left intact. In the more recent viewing on FX, the word Fag was muted out, and you could only hear the other guy yell "Bitch!" It made for an incredibly bizarre scene where two guys were rolling in the dirt and fighting, while only one voice shouted "Bitch!" over and over.

I wondered why one channel left Fag intact while FX didn't. Odds are it's just simply hypocrisy. A censor decided that repeatedly slurring homosexuals is a no-no, but slurring women just as often is okay. That's probably the case, but I'm a huge fan of FX. I watch literally every single show on that channel and it's my favorite channel on all of television. For that reason I like to think that the geniuses at FX headquarters actually made a conscious decision to improve the movie in ways that never occurred to the morons who made Supercross: The Movie. In my revisionist take on what happened, the suits at FX simply realized that maybe, possibly, having the hero of the movie repeatedly call somebody a fag might make him a tad less likable, so they bleeped him out for creative reasons. Yeah, that's what I'm sticking with.

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