The 5 Most Hilariously Edited Films to Watch on TV
There’s an art to the “edited for television” movie. A good edit is a thing of precision, like brain surgery. A bad edit is a thing of significantly less precision, like cut-rate brain surgery performed under a bridge. In a good edit, the expletives or “adult” material of the original film are cleaned up so unobtrusively that even if you’ve seen the film before, you don’t notice that a change has been made. If you haven’t seen the film before, a well-edited TV version seems, for all intents and purposes, like the director or screenwriter’s original vision.
These are not those edits.
The TV edits in this list have become somewhat legendary in their awfulness, either because the dubbing is far below the acceptable standard, or because the choice of alternative dialogue is so fanciful and absurd that it completely takes you out of the cinematic experience. This isn’t to say these edits actually make the films less fun to watch—if anything, they add a head-scratching layer of meta comedy that make the films even more memorable.
1. Jackie Brown, 1997
To watch the Jackie Brown TV edit, you’d think that they must have somehow decided to commit to the project without ever having seen the film before. It’s hard enough to fix the dialogue of a film when it’s full of f-bombs, but practically every other word out of Samuel L. Jackson’s mouth in this film isn’t just “fucker” but “motherfucker,” which adds another degree of difficulty. And oh my, how they improvise. Seemingly any combination of two words that begin with “M” and “F” were deemed acceptable: “motor fingers,” “melon farmer,” “melon feeler,” “motor scooters” and plenty of “mother’s fathers.” At times, they almost seem to make sense, as when Jackson says “my mutual fundin’ money” —turns out he’s a conservatively invested gun smuggler! The edit almost makes his character completely incomprehensible, because it screws with the flow of his speech so much that he sounds like one of the “jive talkers” from Airplane.
It’s not just Jackson, either. Everyone gets the bad edit treatment in Jackie Brown, including blaxploitation star Pam Grier, who gets saddled with lots of resigned “mother lovers” and stresses she “isn’t saying another doggone word.”
2. The Matrix, 1999
The funny thing about The Matrix TV edit is that you would initially expect it to somehow be editing for violence, until you realize that, despite all the fists and gunshots, it’s a surprisingly bloodless film. No, the nature of The Matrix edit is largely for language, but unlike Jackie Brown, which you expect to have stripped of all its f-bombs, can you really name anything in advance that would need to be removed from The Matrix? No, right?
Perhaps that’s why it seems so incredibly awkward when exclamations of “Jesus!” are turned into “Jeepers creepers, that thing’s real!?” or “Judas Priest, he’s fast!” Yes, it seems that someone at AMC had a problem with the casual taking of the Lord’s name in vain, so you’ll see this version of the film every time they re-air it, which is often. The rest of the film is littered with other little language and profanity bonuses, all equally awkward. One of the best is when “Mr. Anderson” decides to grow a little backbone and stand up to the agents interrogating him by giving them the finger. Except in the TV edit, he tells them that they’re getting “the flipper,” complete with a digitally removed middle finger. Amazing.
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