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Region 4 DVD Censorship List

Censuring The Censors


Rod W coordinates and maintains these entries. He also maintains The Chopping List, a comprehensive guide to movies which have been censored in Australia.



Star Wars-Episode I: The Phantom Menace

The version of the film on this disc is uncensored. More to the point, it contains several pieces of added footage to the pod race and the landing on Coruscant, which lengthen film by about six or seven minutes, and allow some parts of the story to make a little more sense. There is still a significant amount of footage that was left on the cutting room floor, Ewan McGregor's Apocolypse Now-style emergence from a Gungan swamp being the most referenced example in the extras, but it is nice to have any additional footage.

There has been some screaming that the extras on this two-disc set were censored at the behest of the BBFC. Specifically, the documentary entitled The Beginning: Making Episode I has had some swearing omitted. The source of this swearing is not Ewan McGregor or even Samuel L. Jackson but producer Rick McCallum! Essentially, during the sequence in this documentary where the producer is surveying the damage to the pods that resulted from the previous night's sandstorm, Rick lets a string of expletives go. In spite of them being bleeped out, the BBFC demanded that this footage be removed, or that something be put in its place. The word is that Lucasfilm and Fox chose the latter option, with both the expletives and the bleeps removed. While it is rather irritating that we've had another arbitrary BBFC decision forced upon us without being able to have any say in the matter, the effect that the loss of five bleeps has on the documentary overall is not that great in my view. How you feel about it may be different, but importing the R1 disc simply because of expletives that are censored there anyway would seem ill-advised to me.