As it aims to keep its brand squeaky clean, Disney+ has made a very strange CGI edit to the 1984 classic Splash in order to cover up Daryl Hannah’s bare butt.
The streamer really seems to be floundering (marine fauna joke) when it comes to exactly what kind of content belongs on the successful platform. Its current identity crisis has seen shows like the Lizzie McGuire reboot and the High Fidelity TV series leave for not being “family friendly” enough. Meanwhile, The Simpsons, with all its animated sexual suggestiveness and drug ingestion, gets its aspect ratio fixed for a better viewing experience.
Splash is another apparent casualty in this weird internal struggle of appropriateness. Directed by Ron Howard and starring Hannah and Tom Hanks, the version of Splash on Disney+ has a very noticeable attempt at censorship. When we first meet Hannah’s mermaid character, she’s stark naked on the shore, and you can barely see her behind under her hair as she dives into the sea. In an attempt to further cover the offending anatomy, CGI artists have added extra hair to the back shot. But because it doesn’t quite match Hannah’s natural locks or their movement, it ends up looking like someone copy-and-pasted something from Cats onto the footage.
Even in 1984, the original cut of Splash was granted a family-friendly PG rating — mainly because PG-13 didn’t exist until four months after the films release. And again, Hannah’s hair is already covering 80% of her bum in the original version. Still, not only has Disney+ decided to use Microsoft Paint to hide the rest of it, they’ve actually bumped the rating to PG-13.
It’s incredibly silly, and just a small sample of the propriety problem facing Disney+ — especially when you consider the Hulk penis joke and butt shot still very prominently placed at the Thor: Ragnarok midpoint. Watch both the head-scratching Splash update and the original scene (which YouTube deemed perfectly acceptable) below.
Disney+ didn't want butts on their platform so they edited Splash with digital fur technology pic.twitter.com/df8XE0G9om
— Allison Pregler
(@AllisonPregler) April 13, 2020
Disney Plus Subtracts Butt Shot from Splash with Weird CGI Censorship: Watch
Ben Kaye
