real6
05-05-2009, 05:17 PM
This list is just too fucking ridiculus.
Just one of those things you read like 'Are you fucking serious?'
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BannedInChina
Banned In China
Moral panics aside, it is unusual for media to be banned outright anywhere. Sometimes, however, it happens that authoritarian or totalitarian regimes prohibit the sale of games which subject matter is not to their liking.
A general rule of thumb is that, if the fighting/political action takes place in that country, or against its government (even when it's clearly not the actual one or even a thinly veiled substitute), they're not going to like it.
This situation also occurs when a game is higher than the highest allowed rating. Thus it is "unrated" and no store will sell it.
Please note that currently, according to Website Pulse, TV Tropes.org is not currently banned in China. Not that we should be actively working on that front, but it's hard not to be kinda disappointed, you know?
Compare New Media Are Evil, No Swastikas, Media Watchdogs
Examples
Australia
* What started as a rumour turned out to be entirely true: it was originally refused to be given a rating, so Fallout 3 was banned in Australia before it even came out. It has since, however, been rated and is set for release sometime soon.
o Apparently, it was the depiction of a static image of morphine as a type of buff-giving item that pissed the OFLC off so much. This Troper will allow Kotaku Australia to elaborate.
* Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude was unrated due to its suggestive... well everything. It's an adorable loser trying to get laid in college. According to series creator Al Lowe, the game is quite inferior to his own works, with the subtle mockery and satire found in the Lowe titles replaced by fart jokes and a lousy sense of comedy, so perhaps being banned isn't such a bad thing...
* Some gamers are pretty angry at Australia since the highest rating for video games is for age 15. So there are no "adult" video games allowed.
o You can blame the South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson for that.
o Silent Hill Homecoming went unrated because of this, and was thusly banned. A major Australian online news site contracted Ben Croshaw to write about why it was stupid. (Article here.)
o Well, some people are happy that BMX XXX never made it over. If you don't know the game, it's a motorcycle racer with topless women, and reportedly is absolute garbage.
+ But it did make it over - the Australian release simply removed the topless women and left the awful bicycle racing!
Brazil
* Counter Strike was banned from Brazil since January of 2008 because of a popular map mod called Rio. The authorities stated that in the game "your objective is to kill the military police of Rio for points as Drug Dealers from the Favelas and keeping members of the UN hostage for execution". They only forget you can play either side, the drug dealers are supposed to be international terrorists and the "military police" is a non-specific counter-terrorist initiative, that this is only one unofficial map that was made by modders and thus the game itself has no responsibility over it; and pretty much none of this non-sense is actually spelled in the game, being all freely interpreted (fabricated) by the authorities to ban this game because of a few incidents in the US with the game... among other things.
* Banned at the same time as Counter-Strike was Everquest because "the player can make morally ambiguous decisions, and thus the game is harmful to the consumer's mental health". Figures how struggling with morality is harmful to anyone instead of developing the awareness of actions and consequences.
o It should noted that the bans were pretty much ignored anyway. This goes to the old Brazilian saying: some laws catch on, other don't.
o It should also be noted that those weren't laws - rather, they were judicial orders. Since said judicial orders were a "home run" of impossible to enforce, unconstitutional, and of limited jurisdiction...
o I'd say living in or around abject fucking poverty, dealing with high crime rates and with a (more than usual) corrupt government doing their thing is harmful to mental health.
Burma
* Burma banned Rambo. Rebel factions then started watching Rambo. Funny how these things turn out.
Canada
* For a while, "Banned in Canada" was a meme associated with lolicon, after a man was arrested there for possessing it.
o Well, among other things, Canada's notoriously strict child pornography law makes it illegal to even look at a representation of a teenager having sex or in an explicitly sexual situation (except when the works in question have "artistic merit," which probably doesn't cover most mangas...), which makes it really bizarre that there aren't more mangas banned in Canada. This troper remembers seeing copies of the Tenjou Tenge manga (in a major Canadian university library, of all places) and wondering WTH, since it's pretty heavy on ecchi and includes explicit sex scenes. Heck, in a famous case, books have been seized at the Canadian border as "obscene" for depicting gay or lesbian sex or simply relationships, which makes one wonder about double standards.
+ It should be noted that the owner of the Little Sisters eventually won her case and has since been awarded an honorary law degree by Simon Fraser University. (This Troper was present at the ceremony)
+ This troper worked at a major Canadian university library that has a substantial collection of erotic art books, most of them Japanese (the collection was kept out of sight not for censorship reasons, but to prevent images from being cut out of the books. Art books are expensive).
+ I read an article in Maclean's about a retardedly large library of erotica (for educational purposes, of course) at the University of Toronto.
+ Anime must have a hard time getting distributed, given that characters often look younger than they are. And I don't imagine a censor having much care for things like context involving depictions of kids (like Chika's comedic nudity).
+ As a Canadian Troper, it's not as bad as it sounds. The bookstores around here still have sizable manga depictions including things that, by the letter of the law, probably could be banned.
+ The main problem is that import enforcement is notoriously inconsistent and sometimes downright stupid. In one case, a set of the collected Xxxenophile was ordered from the US and one of the volumes was confiscated, with the helpful note left that it was because of the immoral content. The kicker? The edition was printed in Ontario.
+ On the other hand, many characters, especially female, look older than they are. Sure, many female anime characters have baby faces, but many an anime or manga fourteen-year-old (or even younger!) girl has the body of a very shapely twenty-something woman -actually, a body that most real-life adult women could not even dream of having (And let's not get into the twenty- or thirtysomethings who look like they're twelve). This makes the whole debate all the more complex and subjective.
+ Once, when I took the first volume of Inu Yasha from the library, there was a page where Kagome was naked. The book was suspiciously stuck at that page. I haven't seen it since. Yet tons of other series go by unnoticed...
China
* China, as one of the most authoritarian major countries, often does this.
o They banned the strategy game Hearts of Iron and its sequel for depicting China as a fragmented nation split into various warlord factions in the main campaign, which begins on New Year's Day 1936. Also, Tibet is depicted as an independent state. Ironically, this gave the games considerable free publicity. Considering that almost all video games played in China are pirated, the ban probably did not entail any significant loss in sales.
+ Looking at the historical facts, in 1936 China was split into various warlord factions and Tibet was an independent state. So they ban every history book?
+ Yes.
o China also bans depictions of human skeletons, so many Magic The Gathering cards have their art altered for release there.
+ Then what do they do for anatomy textbooks?
+ I'm pretty sure those are exempt.
o Command And Conquer: Generals — Zero Hour has also been banned, allegedly for smearing the image of China and its military, which is shown in the games as being somewhat sympathetic, if a little brutal, nuke-happy, Geneva-prohibited-incendiary-weapons-happy, propaganda-happy, and land-mines-happy, though not suicide-happy and anthrax-happy like the GLA. And even though they save the day after the Americans are beaten... Though it may also have to do with the depiction of a GLA nuclear attack in Tianamen Square in the beginning of the Chinese Campaign in the original game.
o I.G.I.-2: Covert Strike has been banned for "defamation of a national character". In other words, having an evil Chinese general as a boss monster.
o Having the North Koreans as bad guys in the FPS Crysis seems like a transparent attempt to avoid being banned in China. Set in the year 2020, they have landed on an island in the South China sea, and possess gear more advanced than they would be likely to have, like a large guided missile cruiser and nanotech suits for their elite guard. Their presence in the region and their capabilities would seem much more plausible if they were Chinese.
o The opera Turandot was banned for many years for depicting Chinese culture unfavourably. The ban was repealed in the late 1990s and the opera has been since been performed on a Chinese stage on at least one occasion.
+ There is a particularly good DVD of it being performed in the Forbidden City with a large Chinese ensemble, suggesting that they have thoroughly gotten over the ban.
o The movie Temptress Moon was promoted in the United States as "A Seductive New Film So Provocative It Was Banned In Its Own Country." As a writer to Roger Ebert's Movie Answer Man column pointed out, "Considering that its own country is China, that's not such a big deal."
o The Chinese government continues to ban media discussing or depicting the Tiananmen Square massacre.
+ It never happened. Just ask any Chinese living there.
o A persistent Urban Legend says that Warcraft's famed "Pandaren" characters won't make an appearance in World Of Warcraft because it's illegal to put pandas in danger in China.
+ On another World Of Warcraft note, the Chinese version of the game has some character models changed(presumably to make the game acceptable to the Chinese government), notably the playable race of zombies (the Forsaken) have their exposed elbow and knee bones covered by skin that doesn't match the rest of their body.
+ And since skeletons are banned in China, the Chinese version of the game replaces the skeletons characters become after dying with tombstones.
+ The second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, has yet to be released in China for this reason - it focuses mostly on the undead Scourge, so there are a ton of bones visible in one way or another.
o China celebrated Ang Lee's winning of an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain as a triumph for Chinese people. Brokeback Mountain is banned in China. Ang Lee's from Taiwan (Ah, but that's another discussion). Ta-daaa.
o Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End can only be shown in China if they take out scenes with Sao Feng in them. Apparently, he is a "negative portrayal" of the Chinese (although honestly, it would not make that much of a difference on the film's plot).
* Batman Begins was banned (in spite of the fact the movie makes China look amazing) due to having one set of bad guys based in China.
o Death Note was banned in China. Apparently people were making their own death notes and writing people's names down. This was deemed as harmful. Also, Death Note was thought to incite anarchy and insubordination.
+ Surely it's less harmful than letting off steam in a way that actually hurts people in the real world?
+ You and your crazy western science.
+ This troper noticed that the English translation of the spinoff novel (Another Note: The Las Angeles BB Murder Cases) was printed in China. Considering the series is banned, that is a funny irony.
o Alice In Wonderland was banned because of the talking animals and apparently putting them on the same level as humans. Given the fact the Chinese already have a story featuring such things the decision is questionable.
o Code Geass was banned in China for its themes of rebellion and the dignity of oppressed minorities. There is a rumour that, partly as backlash against this, several agitators in the western areas have taken to calling themselves "Zero" (see also the Rambo and Voltes V examples).
+ The fact that the second season portrays China as a nation of starving citizens oppressed by a group of power hungry eunuchs using the twelve year-old heir to the throne as their puppet before a bunch of Japanese guys lead by a white guy incite a revolution and overthrow them probably doesn't help either.
o Guns N Roses have an album coming up entitled Chinese Democracy. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why this will be banned, does it?
+ Or, Chinese Democracy has been banned in China. Oh yeah, and the Guns N Roses album, too.
+ Patrick: "Booooo!"
+ From what this troper has heard off the album, the Chinese might be getting the better end of that deal.
o China automatically bans all non-Chinese movies, only giving special permits for a fixed number of foreign films to be shown per year. As a result, China has one of the world's largest pirated movie markets.
+ Considering that until recently China had no intellectual property or copyright laws at all (and by Western standards still doesn't), also not surprising.
o Chinese censorship extends so far that all internet access from the country goes through a "Great Firewall" that blocks out "subversive" or "objectionable" sites. You know, like Wikipedia.
+ Unbanned in 2008, with a friendly visit by Jimmy Wales to China probably helping.
* Mulan was banned despite being fairly faithful to the original poem and the time period.
* Surprising aversion: Kung Fu Panda was praised and even made Chinese wonder why they couldn't make a movie like this (it's that rebellion thing: Po rebels against his father, which is unthinkable in a place that puts a very high price on filial piety).
* Another aversion 1984, since the rebellion by Winston ended in failure it proves to be a useful propaganda showpiece for the population to know just how horribly futile it is to stop the government.
France
* The manga and anime Kinnikuman was banned in France because of the character of Brocken Jr. A heroic character despite his obvious affiliation with the Nazi party. This was considered too great a contradiction for France to accept.
Germany
* Germany is somewhat touchy about the fact that its democratically elected Government committed genocide, sponsored eugenics programs and attempted to conquer the continent not all that long ago. As a result, several games, such as Wolfenstein 3 D and Mortyr, that prominently depict Nazi symbols or famous members of the party are banned under a paragraph prohibiting the display of the symbols of unconstitutional organisations. For more information, see No Swastikas.
o Team Fortress Classic, the German version, was virtually unplayable: Every class model was replaced by the generic deathmatch "Robot" model so you couldn't tell enemy classes apart.
+ On the other hand, the German version of Team Fortress 2 uses the silly gibs from Party Mode permanently.
o A well-known example is Turok, in which human opponents were replaced by robots that "bled" green liquid.
o A side effect of this tendency is that Austrian onlineshops are far more successful than they are to be expected.
o Resident Evil 4 was so badly chopped up on its German release that German gamers took to importing copies from other countries just to get around it. Ironically, at least one scene ended up with even more disturbing implications as a result of having its end replaced with a fadeout.
o Volkswagen is sufficiently sensitive about the fact that the company was founded in part by Hitler that they still object to Volkswagens being depicted as weapons of war, hence the live-action film incarnation of Bumblebee being a Camaro, rather than a Beetle like his G1 counterpart. General Motors wrote a big check to complete the change to a Camaro.
+ The "no Beetle" issue first arose even earlier; Hasbro wanted to make a new version of Bumblebee for the Alternators toyline, which consisted of robots that transformed into accurate (and licensed) 1:24 scale replicas of current cars. Naturally, they approached Volkswagen to negotiate for the rights to use the Beetle for Bumblebee's transformation; alas, no dice.
o Annoyingly, Paradox of Hearts of Iron 2 fame, despite refusing to bow to Chinese revisionism, have let German censorship walk all over them: Nazi Germany instead displays the Imperial Tricolour (think the Red Baron's plane), which the Nazis actually banned.
o Bionic Commando Rearmed is an interesting aversion/subversion. The game is not banned in Germany because it has no Nazi imagery. However, the main villain is obviously supposed to be Adolf Hitler, even though he's never referred to as such by name. In the English version, he's known simply as "The Leader". The German translation refers to him as "Der Fuhrer", which makes it even more obvious. (While "Fuhrer" is a generic German title meaning "Leader", it has fallen into disfavor following WWII due to the obvious Unfortunate Implications, and thus is currently more or less synonymous with Hitler.)
o The entire Nimdok section of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was removed in the German release due to it being set in a concentration camp, thus making the game unwinnable, as the final part of the game requires all four characters.
o The German versions of Command and Conquer: Tiberian Dawn and Command and Conquer: Red Alert had to tooltip refer to infantry units as "Cyborgs". When they died, the sound would resemble that of power going down and there was no blood. Being younger, I just got a sense of schizo-tech (particularly in Red Alert when it's supposed to be the 1940s; in this case, it can be justified by the Alternate History of the Red Alert series.) but shrugged it away. Than I got my hands on the English versions of those games and the censorship of the German version became apparent in the first minutes of the game. Some shots from the cutscenes were also cut, leaving bits with gruesome deaths (such as Stavros killing Stalin) somewhat disjointed. I didn't get the rest of the Command and Conquer games in German but I think they still do the "Cyborg" thing.
+ They did, up to the point of Cyborgifying the Generals in Cn C Generals even though they are never present on the field. However, under EA things have changed for the better. Tiberium Wars had two versions for the European market, one with censorship and an uncut, 16+ version.
* Along the lines of the swastika thing, the show Hogans Heroes was actually rather popular in Germany either despite or because of the way it depicted the Nazis as outright buffoons. However, many shots are slightly altered to remove the swastikas.
* In Wing Commander IV, the scene where Seether slits Captain Paulson's throat has two versions, with and without gushing blood. The latter is the one found on the German release of the game.
India
* India threatened to ban the Microsoft Windows operating system because their time zone map showed the India/Pakistan border according to the U.N. maps instead of their own propaganda maps.
* Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is set in India. The Indian government requested so many changes due to "offensive" portrayal of Indian customs and traditions (whether their claims are valid or not depends on personal opinion), Spielberg, Lucas and co decided to film it in Sri Lanka, which A: is very close to India and looks similar-ish anyway, and B: wasn't about to censor the use of the word "Maharajah".
Iran
* The film 300, where the Persians portrayed as slavering, inhuman monsters, if by an Unreliable Narrator, was banned in Iran.
Ireland
* In the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "The High Ground", Data mentions that Ireland was reunited in 2024 after a successful "terrorist" campaign. This would have seemed so controversial to both sides in The Troubles that it wasn't until 2006 that the full version was broadcast.
o Linked to the Irish government's broadcasting ban on the IRA which ran from the 1970s and 1994, and a similar ban which applied to all terrorist organisations in the UK between 1988 and 1994.
* REM's "Losing My Religion" was banned at the time of its release as Irish censors believed it contains depictions of homoeroticism among biblical-style characters. It wasn't until two years after "Losing My Religion" that homosexuality was decriminalised in the Irish Republic.
Japan
* An odd subversion was the unexpected popularity of the game Medal Of Honor: Rising Sun in Japan, which would essentially entail players shooting at virtual representations of their own ancestors.
o The subversion dates back a long while: Capcom, a Japanese company, made the arcade game 1942, a shoot-em-up set in the Battle of Midway, a turning point in World War II... and a crushing defeat for Japan. 1942 was for a while the most popular arcade game in Japan, and is still very fondly remembered there, with the (so far) last in the series having been produced in 2002. As this troper recalls one review of the original game, "it's a game by a Japanese developer where you get to shoot down Japanese. And apparently WWII was fought with spaceships."
+ It was then followed up by 1943 and 1944: The Loop Master. (They also made 1941: Counter Attack and 19XX: The War Against Destiny, but those were set in Europe with German antagonists and set around the world with a wide variety of international bosses, so they don't really conut.)
o Similarly, the visual representation of Japan in the first Advance Wars game suffers the most humiliating defeats possible. Not to mention the emperor is portrayed as a complete moron...
+ And yet, the episode of The Simpsons where Homer wrestles the Japanese emperor was not shown in Japan. Apparently, while everyone can openly mock the Japanese, only the Japanese can make fun of the Japanese imperial family.
Kazakhstan
* Borat was banned in Kazakhstan for its depiction of the country as backward and anti-Semitic. It's kind of missing the point, but it also makes sense at some level. (This also gives a whole new meaning to Borat's comment "Watch my movie, or I be execute!")
Malaysia
* Most Christian movies featuring prophets in it, being a mainly Muslim country. However, the ban was lifted with the release of The Passion Of The Christ, though these movies are limited to non-Muslims only.
* Jerry Springer is yanked off the air after only one episode.
* Zoolander, due to the fact that one of the main plot points is the assassination of the country's fictional prime minister. Also banned in Singapore, but was lifted 5 years later.
* Concerts from Gwen Stefani and Avril Lavigne nearly got banned due to, ahem, SKIMPY OUTFITS and BAD INFLUENCE TO THE YOUTH respectively. C'mon, do these Muslim youth organisations even know these artists? Thankfully, the concerts went on without a hitch.
* Linkin Park was not allowed to wear short pants during their concert.
* Madonna, due to her really risque resume, was banned from performing in the country, period.
* In his autobiography, Meat Loaf lamented how hard it was to perform his "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" number in Muslim countries, since he was not allowed to touch any of his female back up singers on stage. Also, the female back up singers had to cover their shoulders and midriffs. (I'm sure Meat loved telling his daughter that.)
* Steven Spielberg infamously refused to let Malaysia screen the edited version of his movie Schindlers List, since its Zionist theme is the main plot point. The movie was only released on DVD recently. Munich also suffered the same fate.
* Borat, Brokeback Mountain and the last three (and counting?) Saw movies never saw the light of day in the country.
* Bruce Almighty was nearly banned due to the movie's plot about a guy who becomes God for a day. While most Muslim sectors considered this movie offensive, non-Muslims stated that the movie is not offensive to any religion whatsover. Thank god the movie was finally screened, unedited.
o Ironic, considering how popular the movie is with Muslim Americans. In fact, Muslim Americans make up its single largest demographic.
o Evan Almighty, the spin-off about Steve Carrell making Noah's Ark, also suffered the same problem.
* Non-media example: Yoga is banned for Muslims.
o It was banned because of chanting. Muslims can practice yoga if they don't chant.
* Two of LOCAL filmmaker Amir Muhammad's documentaries never saw the light of day in the country.
* Why the hell Pussycat Dolls managed to be allowed to perform in the country is beyond our imaginations. The organisers paid the fine and the Cats wore less skimpier outfits when they returned to the country for the 2008 MTV Asia Awards.
* On the topic of skimpy outfits, Beyonce switched her concert venue from KL to Jakarta due to this rule, despite the fact that Indonesia has more Muslims than Malaysia.
* South Park never made it to Malaysian television, but was released on home video. Hmmmm....
* All of Quentin Tarantino's movies, with the exception of Jackie Brown, never made it to the country. Kill Bill Vol 2 was also allowed to be screened, causing continuity problems.
* Sin City.
* Daredevil was banned for trivial reasons, but was released on home video recently.
* The second Austin Powers movie.
* The American Pie trilogy.
* The 40-Year Old Virgin.
Mexico
* The Last Temptation of Christ was premiered in the USA in 1988, and was banned in Mexico until 2005. Partly because the ruling government back then had a huge influence on what was allowed and what wasn't, but mostly because the Media Watchdogs were really into fundamentalist Christianity and they certainly wouldn't let the "superstitious people" see Jesus married with Mary Magdalene.
* Several right-wing groups have tried to ban Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 in some parts of Mexico because the bad guys depicted are Mexican even though they are rebels against the Mexican government and the players end up teaming with Mexican loyalists. Ditto goes for Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
o But... there aren't any Mexicans in Call of Duty 4...
+ He's talking about the Russian Ultranationalists.
New Zealand
* Puni Puni Poemy was deemed to have the tendency of being sexually exploitative to minors and thus was banned.
Philippines
* Ferdinand Marcos' Filipino regime banned the Super Robot show Voltes V, officially because of excessive violence, but really because the heroes were rebels fighting against a brutal dictator. This resulted in Voltes V being adopted as a mascot by rebel factions.
Russia
* Porn. All of it. In any medium, literature included. Seriously. However, no one actually cares, it's only enforced on the 'charge prostitutes for loitering/drug dealers for tax evasion' plan to put nuisances behind bars, and individual pornos are innocent until proven guilty. Hence, Anal Gangbang #27 only becomes a porno once a judge says it's a porno. After its own individual trial. Subverted?
Saudi Arabia
* Saudi Arabia banned Pokemon because someone in the government came up with a little theory that Pokemon is part of a Jewish conspiracy to brainwash the world's youth and "promoting Zionism" by depicting six-pointed stars (the colourless energy in the card game) and gambling. Yet another way the Saudi government is like your elementary school principal.
* It also banned Jalila and Aya because the government considered the heroines'costumes◊ 'indecent'.
o Their ultraconservative Moral Guardians probably consider any woman with outfits more revealing than X Men's Dust to be indecent.
* In another truly bizarre move, Barbie dolls are banned. They are referred to by the government as "Jewish Dolls" or "Zionist Dolls" and are seen as "symbols of the perversion and decadence of the West." So there you go.
o One can only imagine what they'd make of Bratz dolls.
Singapore
* During the time period of the Hot Coffee debacle, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was banned in Singapore, probably one of the first few video games to be banned on this sunny island.
* The authorities overreacted upon seeing a short cutscene depicting a lesbian sex scene in Mass Effect. It was actually between a human female and an asexual blue-skinned, tentacle-haired alien with feminine features, and the scene's most gratuitous moment of nudity was 1 second of blue butt. The game was banned for somewhere around 2 days before being unbanned and given an M18 rating.
* The Chinese example of Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End was subverted in Singapore with huge posters of Sao Feng with the slogan "Welcome to Singapore" being put up around some of the country's more touristy districts.
South Korea
* South Korea is said to ban the sale of any game depicting fictional wars between North and South Korea. This includes Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.
o South Korea also doesn't really like M*A*S*H, because South Koreans are depicted as living in poverty.
+ Considering the show was set in the 1950s, you'd think the government would like that. "Look where we were then, and where we are now. Didn't we do a good job?"
o South Korea has recently lifted its ban on the Ghost Recon series as a way of promoting freedom of speech.
* South Korea also has a restriction on red blood, meaning all those Starcraft videos with the really-amazing high-speed clickers have Black Blood on Space Marines.
Thailand
* The Thai government has banned nearly every rendition of The King And I ever made because it dislikes the depiction of the King of Siam, who is culturally seen as a divine being, as a flawed human.
o The song "One Night in Bangkok" from the musical Chess is also banned, probably due to its description of Bangkok as a "crowded, polluted, stinking town" that's only good for sex tourism. Despite this, it gets frequent play there.
+ Aaaah, I LOVE that song!
Turkey
* Various websites, such as Blogger.com, WordPress, Richard Dawkins' website, Little Green Footballs, and The Jawa Report have all been banned in Turkey at one time or another. For pretty much the same reasons, at base. Dawkins has a banner on his site marking this as a point of pride. He's not Completely Missing The Point, he's throwing it back in the Moral Guardians' faces.
United Arab Emirates
* Maddox is proud to have his website, The Best Page in the Universe, banned in the United Arab Emirates.
o Except it isn't. Another person wrote in to say it's only blocked by one specific DSL proxy. Maddox was disappointed.
United Kingdom
* The United Kingdom recently banned Manhunt 2, the first such ban for a game in over a decade, until the courts overturned the decision.
o Strictly speaking it wasn't banned, the BBFC refused to give it a rating, which retailers require to sell such items. In theory at least, there are ways round the BBFC such as Private Members Venues - this editor doesn't know of such an infrastructure which exists for gaming - or a local council order overruling the BBFC - almost unheard of a local council un-banning or lowering ratings made by the BBFC, usually go in the upward direction. See: The Life of Brian.
* The Church of England criticised the PlayStation game Resistance: Fall of Man, which included a gunfight in Manchester Cathedral.
o Amusingly, when the Church demanded that Insomniac change the game to not depict Manchester Cathedral, Insomniac reportedly laughed at them, and began pointing out the numerous other things that the Church did not have a problem with, including the violent depictions of murder. The Church was, sadly, not suitably chastised. Also funny: the Church's argument was—at least in part—that Insomniac didn't get their permission, which made the whole thing look more like a copyright dispute than a case of moral outrage. (Needless to say, having been built in 1215, Manchester Cathedral isn't subject to copyright of any kind.)
+ Wait, the Church of England didn't exist in 1215—ohhhhh, I get it.
* The phrase 'video nasty' comes from a particularly censorship-happy time during the 1980's, where the BBFC banned pretty much every horror movie that came out. Some of these movies are still banned today. Granted, some of them (Cannibal Holocaust is usually trotted out as the best example) deserved it. As did most of the early Nazi torture porn movies, but... The Evil Dead? Really?
o The uncut version of the first Evil Dead film (the only one to have been banned, or rather only allowed in a cut version) was unbanned in 2001.
* The above-mentioned Life of Brian is banned in Aberystwyth, a small town in mid-Wales. No really. Especially egregious as the current mayor was in it.
o It was unbanned recently.
United States
* Several Haitian-American groups complained enough about a line in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City ("Let's kill these Haitians!") to get it dropped from later printings.
o Amusingly is that the main thing groups latched onto was apparently a mission objective titled "Kill the Haitians", which there actually wasn't. In fact there are only about five negative references to Haitians, most of them being variations of "take them down". All of these being uttered by Cubans gangsters who more or less meant a Haitian gang than Haitians in general. Rockstar's reissuing of the game managed to also be political correct by removing the Haitian "hate" dialogue and also removing the reverse Cuban "hate" dialogue uttered by a Haitian character. The fix also made the game saves incompatible with earlier games and vice-versa.
* Back in the early '90s, Warner Brothers wanted to release all of the Bugs Bunny cartoons on videotape, and later Laserdisc. Among those was a cartoon called "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips." The cartoon made it to VHS, but then Japanese-American rights groups and speakers (including, this troper seems to recall, George Takei) protested, and Warner Brothers removed the cartoon from later VHS and all LD pressings.
o This happened again when Cartoon Network (owned by Time Warner) had plans of playing every Bugs Bunny Cartoon in chronological order as a celebration of Bugs' 60th anniversary in 2001. Numerous cartoons were vetoed by Time Warner, including the unmentionable one above, another one called All This and Rabbit Stew (which had Unfortunate Implications concerning African-Americans) and Herr meets Hare (in which Bugs matches wits with Hermann Goering). CN even tried to pull them out of chronoligical order and play them late at night with comprehensive disclaimers before the cartoons, but were still vetoed. Herr meets Hare WAS later played in its entirety on CN during a special devoted to Wartime Cartoons, and has found a space on the latest Looney Tunes DVD set.
+ Finally, Time Warner has inherited a list from other owners of the Warner Brother animation catalogue, the Censored Eleven - 11 cartoons, all racially offensive, that they will refuse to play or release to this day.
* For a time in the early 2000s, Charlie Chan movies (and the lesser-known Mr. Moto films starring Peter Lorre) were taken out of circulation on Fox Classic Movies and TCM due to Asian-American concerns about the main character being a Caucasian in essentially "yellowface." After some discussions and an agreement to put round-table discussions with prominent Asian-Americans discussing the impact of the films before the first few showings, the films returned and have been released on DVD.
* In the late 19th and early 20th century, the Watch and Ward Society, an anti-obscenity group in Boston, made use of censorship laws and the bully pulpit to maintain a tight grip over what could be published, broadcast, or performed onstage in New England. Had this article been written in that era, it might well have been called "Banned In Boston".
o Boston was the worst, but not the only one. To this day, internet porn is illegal in Tennessee, and some website operators have been arrested in other states and extradited to Tennessee to face trial when postal inspectors were able to access the websites from within the states. That's why on many porn site TO Ses, they explicitly state that the customer agrees and declares that he is not within Tennessee... Or So I Heard...
* The ESRB refused to allow The Witcher to be sold in the United States until the developers created a regionalized version with all the nudity removed. Apparently they consider allowing players to sleep with most of the female characters and many random streetwalkers to be acceptable, but not to portray them as having nipples.
o Untrue. However, for the game to be sold uncensored, it would've had to have an Adults Only rating, which is commercial suicide because few stores carry A-O games. They could've gone without a rating, but the consequences would have been roughly the same.
* The MPAA, of course, has its own rating system. Very few theaters take a movie that has been rated NC-17 (formerly X), and they treat movies that haven't been rated as though they were rated NC-17.
Venezuela
* The sequel to Mercenaries has not been banned, but has already come under fire from the Venezuelan government, which apparently considers it a propaganda piece directed against the Hugo Chavez administration.
o Chavez also ordered The Simpsons to be taken off the air, due to it being "unsuitable for children" despite not being intended for them. Even more oddly, the timeslot it was in was given to Baywatch
Just one of those things you read like 'Are you fucking serious?'
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BannedInChina
Banned In China
Moral panics aside, it is unusual for media to be banned outright anywhere. Sometimes, however, it happens that authoritarian or totalitarian regimes prohibit the sale of games which subject matter is not to their liking.
A general rule of thumb is that, if the fighting/political action takes place in that country, or against its government (even when it's clearly not the actual one or even a thinly veiled substitute), they're not going to like it.
This situation also occurs when a game is higher than the highest allowed rating. Thus it is "unrated" and no store will sell it.
Please note that currently, according to Website Pulse, TV Tropes.org is not currently banned in China. Not that we should be actively working on that front, but it's hard not to be kinda disappointed, you know?
Compare New Media Are Evil, No Swastikas, Media Watchdogs
Examples
Australia
* What started as a rumour turned out to be entirely true: it was originally refused to be given a rating, so Fallout 3 was banned in Australia before it even came out. It has since, however, been rated and is set for release sometime soon.
o Apparently, it was the depiction of a static image of morphine as a type of buff-giving item that pissed the OFLC off so much. This Troper will allow Kotaku Australia to elaborate.
* Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude was unrated due to its suggestive... well everything. It's an adorable loser trying to get laid in college. According to series creator Al Lowe, the game is quite inferior to his own works, with the subtle mockery and satire found in the Lowe titles replaced by fart jokes and a lousy sense of comedy, so perhaps being banned isn't such a bad thing...
* Some gamers are pretty angry at Australia since the highest rating for video games is for age 15. So there are no "adult" video games allowed.
o You can blame the South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson for that.
o Silent Hill Homecoming went unrated because of this, and was thusly banned. A major Australian online news site contracted Ben Croshaw to write about why it was stupid. (Article here.)
o Well, some people are happy that BMX XXX never made it over. If you don't know the game, it's a motorcycle racer with topless women, and reportedly is absolute garbage.
+ But it did make it over - the Australian release simply removed the topless women and left the awful bicycle racing!
Brazil
* Counter Strike was banned from Brazil since January of 2008 because of a popular map mod called Rio. The authorities stated that in the game "your objective is to kill the military police of Rio for points as Drug Dealers from the Favelas and keeping members of the UN hostage for execution". They only forget you can play either side, the drug dealers are supposed to be international terrorists and the "military police" is a non-specific counter-terrorist initiative, that this is only one unofficial map that was made by modders and thus the game itself has no responsibility over it; and pretty much none of this non-sense is actually spelled in the game, being all freely interpreted (fabricated) by the authorities to ban this game because of a few incidents in the US with the game... among other things.
* Banned at the same time as Counter-Strike was Everquest because "the player can make morally ambiguous decisions, and thus the game is harmful to the consumer's mental health". Figures how struggling with morality is harmful to anyone instead of developing the awareness of actions and consequences.
o It should noted that the bans were pretty much ignored anyway. This goes to the old Brazilian saying: some laws catch on, other don't.
o It should also be noted that those weren't laws - rather, they were judicial orders. Since said judicial orders were a "home run" of impossible to enforce, unconstitutional, and of limited jurisdiction...
o I'd say living in or around abject fucking poverty, dealing with high crime rates and with a (more than usual) corrupt government doing their thing is harmful to mental health.
Burma
* Burma banned Rambo. Rebel factions then started watching Rambo. Funny how these things turn out.
Canada
* For a while, "Banned in Canada" was a meme associated with lolicon, after a man was arrested there for possessing it.
o Well, among other things, Canada's notoriously strict child pornography law makes it illegal to even look at a representation of a teenager having sex or in an explicitly sexual situation (except when the works in question have "artistic merit," which probably doesn't cover most mangas...), which makes it really bizarre that there aren't more mangas banned in Canada. This troper remembers seeing copies of the Tenjou Tenge manga (in a major Canadian university library, of all places) and wondering WTH, since it's pretty heavy on ecchi and includes explicit sex scenes. Heck, in a famous case, books have been seized at the Canadian border as "obscene" for depicting gay or lesbian sex or simply relationships, which makes one wonder about double standards.
+ It should be noted that the owner of the Little Sisters eventually won her case and has since been awarded an honorary law degree by Simon Fraser University. (This Troper was present at the ceremony)
+ This troper worked at a major Canadian university library that has a substantial collection of erotic art books, most of them Japanese (the collection was kept out of sight not for censorship reasons, but to prevent images from being cut out of the books. Art books are expensive).
+ I read an article in Maclean's about a retardedly large library of erotica (for educational purposes, of course) at the University of Toronto.
+ Anime must have a hard time getting distributed, given that characters often look younger than they are. And I don't imagine a censor having much care for things like context involving depictions of kids (like Chika's comedic nudity).
+ As a Canadian Troper, it's not as bad as it sounds. The bookstores around here still have sizable manga depictions including things that, by the letter of the law, probably could be banned.
+ The main problem is that import enforcement is notoriously inconsistent and sometimes downright stupid. In one case, a set of the collected Xxxenophile was ordered from the US and one of the volumes was confiscated, with the helpful note left that it was because of the immoral content. The kicker? The edition was printed in Ontario.
+ On the other hand, many characters, especially female, look older than they are. Sure, many female anime characters have baby faces, but many an anime or manga fourteen-year-old (or even younger!) girl has the body of a very shapely twenty-something woman -actually, a body that most real-life adult women could not even dream of having (And let's not get into the twenty- or thirtysomethings who look like they're twelve). This makes the whole debate all the more complex and subjective.
+ Once, when I took the first volume of Inu Yasha from the library, there was a page where Kagome was naked. The book was suspiciously stuck at that page. I haven't seen it since. Yet tons of other series go by unnoticed...
China
* China, as one of the most authoritarian major countries, often does this.
o They banned the strategy game Hearts of Iron and its sequel for depicting China as a fragmented nation split into various warlord factions in the main campaign, which begins on New Year's Day 1936. Also, Tibet is depicted as an independent state. Ironically, this gave the games considerable free publicity. Considering that almost all video games played in China are pirated, the ban probably did not entail any significant loss in sales.
+ Looking at the historical facts, in 1936 China was split into various warlord factions and Tibet was an independent state. So they ban every history book?
+ Yes.
o China also bans depictions of human skeletons, so many Magic The Gathering cards have their art altered for release there.
+ Then what do they do for anatomy textbooks?
+ I'm pretty sure those are exempt.
o Command And Conquer: Generals — Zero Hour has also been banned, allegedly for smearing the image of China and its military, which is shown in the games as being somewhat sympathetic, if a little brutal, nuke-happy, Geneva-prohibited-incendiary-weapons-happy, propaganda-happy, and land-mines-happy, though not suicide-happy and anthrax-happy like the GLA. And even though they save the day after the Americans are beaten... Though it may also have to do with the depiction of a GLA nuclear attack in Tianamen Square in the beginning of the Chinese Campaign in the original game.
o I.G.I.-2: Covert Strike has been banned for "defamation of a national character". In other words, having an evil Chinese general as a boss monster.
o Having the North Koreans as bad guys in the FPS Crysis seems like a transparent attempt to avoid being banned in China. Set in the year 2020, they have landed on an island in the South China sea, and possess gear more advanced than they would be likely to have, like a large guided missile cruiser and nanotech suits for their elite guard. Their presence in the region and their capabilities would seem much more plausible if they were Chinese.
o The opera Turandot was banned for many years for depicting Chinese culture unfavourably. The ban was repealed in the late 1990s and the opera has been since been performed on a Chinese stage on at least one occasion.
+ There is a particularly good DVD of it being performed in the Forbidden City with a large Chinese ensemble, suggesting that they have thoroughly gotten over the ban.
o The movie Temptress Moon was promoted in the United States as "A Seductive New Film So Provocative It Was Banned In Its Own Country." As a writer to Roger Ebert's Movie Answer Man column pointed out, "Considering that its own country is China, that's not such a big deal."
o The Chinese government continues to ban media discussing or depicting the Tiananmen Square massacre.
+ It never happened. Just ask any Chinese living there.
o A persistent Urban Legend says that Warcraft's famed "Pandaren" characters won't make an appearance in World Of Warcraft because it's illegal to put pandas in danger in China.
+ On another World Of Warcraft note, the Chinese version of the game has some character models changed(presumably to make the game acceptable to the Chinese government), notably the playable race of zombies (the Forsaken) have their exposed elbow and knee bones covered by skin that doesn't match the rest of their body.
+ And since skeletons are banned in China, the Chinese version of the game replaces the skeletons characters become after dying with tombstones.
+ The second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, has yet to be released in China for this reason - it focuses mostly on the undead Scourge, so there are a ton of bones visible in one way or another.
o China celebrated Ang Lee's winning of an Oscar for Brokeback Mountain as a triumph for Chinese people. Brokeback Mountain is banned in China. Ang Lee's from Taiwan (Ah, but that's another discussion). Ta-daaa.
o Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End can only be shown in China if they take out scenes with Sao Feng in them. Apparently, he is a "negative portrayal" of the Chinese (although honestly, it would not make that much of a difference on the film's plot).
* Batman Begins was banned (in spite of the fact the movie makes China look amazing) due to having one set of bad guys based in China.
o Death Note was banned in China. Apparently people were making their own death notes and writing people's names down. This was deemed as harmful. Also, Death Note was thought to incite anarchy and insubordination.
+ Surely it's less harmful than letting off steam in a way that actually hurts people in the real world?
+ You and your crazy western science.
+ This troper noticed that the English translation of the spinoff novel (Another Note: The Las Angeles BB Murder Cases) was printed in China. Considering the series is banned, that is a funny irony.
o Alice In Wonderland was banned because of the talking animals and apparently putting them on the same level as humans. Given the fact the Chinese already have a story featuring such things the decision is questionable.
o Code Geass was banned in China for its themes of rebellion and the dignity of oppressed minorities. There is a rumour that, partly as backlash against this, several agitators in the western areas have taken to calling themselves "Zero" (see also the Rambo and Voltes V examples).
+ The fact that the second season portrays China as a nation of starving citizens oppressed by a group of power hungry eunuchs using the twelve year-old heir to the throne as their puppet before a bunch of Japanese guys lead by a white guy incite a revolution and overthrow them probably doesn't help either.
o Guns N Roses have an album coming up entitled Chinese Democracy. It doesn't take a genius to figure out why this will be banned, does it?
+ Or, Chinese Democracy has been banned in China. Oh yeah, and the Guns N Roses album, too.
+ Patrick: "Booooo!"
+ From what this troper has heard off the album, the Chinese might be getting the better end of that deal.
o China automatically bans all non-Chinese movies, only giving special permits for a fixed number of foreign films to be shown per year. As a result, China has one of the world's largest pirated movie markets.
+ Considering that until recently China had no intellectual property or copyright laws at all (and by Western standards still doesn't), also not surprising.
o Chinese censorship extends so far that all internet access from the country goes through a "Great Firewall" that blocks out "subversive" or "objectionable" sites. You know, like Wikipedia.
+ Unbanned in 2008, with a friendly visit by Jimmy Wales to China probably helping.
* Mulan was banned despite being fairly faithful to the original poem and the time period.
* Surprising aversion: Kung Fu Panda was praised and even made Chinese wonder why they couldn't make a movie like this (it's that rebellion thing: Po rebels against his father, which is unthinkable in a place that puts a very high price on filial piety).
* Another aversion 1984, since the rebellion by Winston ended in failure it proves to be a useful propaganda showpiece for the population to know just how horribly futile it is to stop the government.
France
* The manga and anime Kinnikuman was banned in France because of the character of Brocken Jr. A heroic character despite his obvious affiliation with the Nazi party. This was considered too great a contradiction for France to accept.
Germany
* Germany is somewhat touchy about the fact that its democratically elected Government committed genocide, sponsored eugenics programs and attempted to conquer the continent not all that long ago. As a result, several games, such as Wolfenstein 3 D and Mortyr, that prominently depict Nazi symbols or famous members of the party are banned under a paragraph prohibiting the display of the symbols of unconstitutional organisations. For more information, see No Swastikas.
o Team Fortress Classic, the German version, was virtually unplayable: Every class model was replaced by the generic deathmatch "Robot" model so you couldn't tell enemy classes apart.
+ On the other hand, the German version of Team Fortress 2 uses the silly gibs from Party Mode permanently.
o A well-known example is Turok, in which human opponents were replaced by robots that "bled" green liquid.
o A side effect of this tendency is that Austrian onlineshops are far more successful than they are to be expected.
o Resident Evil 4 was so badly chopped up on its German release that German gamers took to importing copies from other countries just to get around it. Ironically, at least one scene ended up with even more disturbing implications as a result of having its end replaced with a fadeout.
o Volkswagen is sufficiently sensitive about the fact that the company was founded in part by Hitler that they still object to Volkswagens being depicted as weapons of war, hence the live-action film incarnation of Bumblebee being a Camaro, rather than a Beetle like his G1 counterpart. General Motors wrote a big check to complete the change to a Camaro.
+ The "no Beetle" issue first arose even earlier; Hasbro wanted to make a new version of Bumblebee for the Alternators toyline, which consisted of robots that transformed into accurate (and licensed) 1:24 scale replicas of current cars. Naturally, they approached Volkswagen to negotiate for the rights to use the Beetle for Bumblebee's transformation; alas, no dice.
o Annoyingly, Paradox of Hearts of Iron 2 fame, despite refusing to bow to Chinese revisionism, have let German censorship walk all over them: Nazi Germany instead displays the Imperial Tricolour (think the Red Baron's plane), which the Nazis actually banned.
o Bionic Commando Rearmed is an interesting aversion/subversion. The game is not banned in Germany because it has no Nazi imagery. However, the main villain is obviously supposed to be Adolf Hitler, even though he's never referred to as such by name. In the English version, he's known simply as "The Leader". The German translation refers to him as "Der Fuhrer", which makes it even more obvious. (While "Fuhrer" is a generic German title meaning "Leader", it has fallen into disfavor following WWII due to the obvious Unfortunate Implications, and thus is currently more or less synonymous with Hitler.)
o The entire Nimdok section of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was removed in the German release due to it being set in a concentration camp, thus making the game unwinnable, as the final part of the game requires all four characters.
o The German versions of Command and Conquer: Tiberian Dawn and Command and Conquer: Red Alert had to tooltip refer to infantry units as "Cyborgs". When they died, the sound would resemble that of power going down and there was no blood. Being younger, I just got a sense of schizo-tech (particularly in Red Alert when it's supposed to be the 1940s; in this case, it can be justified by the Alternate History of the Red Alert series.) but shrugged it away. Than I got my hands on the English versions of those games and the censorship of the German version became apparent in the first minutes of the game. Some shots from the cutscenes were also cut, leaving bits with gruesome deaths (such as Stavros killing Stalin) somewhat disjointed. I didn't get the rest of the Command and Conquer games in German but I think they still do the "Cyborg" thing.
+ They did, up to the point of Cyborgifying the Generals in Cn C Generals even though they are never present on the field. However, under EA things have changed for the better. Tiberium Wars had two versions for the European market, one with censorship and an uncut, 16+ version.
* Along the lines of the swastika thing, the show Hogans Heroes was actually rather popular in Germany either despite or because of the way it depicted the Nazis as outright buffoons. However, many shots are slightly altered to remove the swastikas.
* In Wing Commander IV, the scene where Seether slits Captain Paulson's throat has two versions, with and without gushing blood. The latter is the one found on the German release of the game.
India
* India threatened to ban the Microsoft Windows operating system because their time zone map showed the India/Pakistan border according to the U.N. maps instead of their own propaganda maps.
* Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is set in India. The Indian government requested so many changes due to "offensive" portrayal of Indian customs and traditions (whether their claims are valid or not depends on personal opinion), Spielberg, Lucas and co decided to film it in Sri Lanka, which A: is very close to India and looks similar-ish anyway, and B: wasn't about to censor the use of the word "Maharajah".
Iran
* The film 300, where the Persians portrayed as slavering, inhuman monsters, if by an Unreliable Narrator, was banned in Iran.
Ireland
* In the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "The High Ground", Data mentions that Ireland was reunited in 2024 after a successful "terrorist" campaign. This would have seemed so controversial to both sides in The Troubles that it wasn't until 2006 that the full version was broadcast.
o Linked to the Irish government's broadcasting ban on the IRA which ran from the 1970s and 1994, and a similar ban which applied to all terrorist organisations in the UK between 1988 and 1994.
* REM's "Losing My Religion" was banned at the time of its release as Irish censors believed it contains depictions of homoeroticism among biblical-style characters. It wasn't until two years after "Losing My Religion" that homosexuality was decriminalised in the Irish Republic.
Japan
* An odd subversion was the unexpected popularity of the game Medal Of Honor: Rising Sun in Japan, which would essentially entail players shooting at virtual representations of their own ancestors.
o The subversion dates back a long while: Capcom, a Japanese company, made the arcade game 1942, a shoot-em-up set in the Battle of Midway, a turning point in World War II... and a crushing defeat for Japan. 1942 was for a while the most popular arcade game in Japan, and is still very fondly remembered there, with the (so far) last in the series having been produced in 2002. As this troper recalls one review of the original game, "it's a game by a Japanese developer where you get to shoot down Japanese. And apparently WWII was fought with spaceships."
+ It was then followed up by 1943 and 1944: The Loop Master. (They also made 1941: Counter Attack and 19XX: The War Against Destiny, but those were set in Europe with German antagonists and set around the world with a wide variety of international bosses, so they don't really conut.)
o Similarly, the visual representation of Japan in the first Advance Wars game suffers the most humiliating defeats possible. Not to mention the emperor is portrayed as a complete moron...
+ And yet, the episode of The Simpsons where Homer wrestles the Japanese emperor was not shown in Japan. Apparently, while everyone can openly mock the Japanese, only the Japanese can make fun of the Japanese imperial family.
Kazakhstan
* Borat was banned in Kazakhstan for its depiction of the country as backward and anti-Semitic. It's kind of missing the point, but it also makes sense at some level. (This also gives a whole new meaning to Borat's comment "Watch my movie, or I be execute!")
Malaysia
* Most Christian movies featuring prophets in it, being a mainly Muslim country. However, the ban was lifted with the release of The Passion Of The Christ, though these movies are limited to non-Muslims only.
* Jerry Springer is yanked off the air after only one episode.
* Zoolander, due to the fact that one of the main plot points is the assassination of the country's fictional prime minister. Also banned in Singapore, but was lifted 5 years later.
* Concerts from Gwen Stefani and Avril Lavigne nearly got banned due to, ahem, SKIMPY OUTFITS and BAD INFLUENCE TO THE YOUTH respectively. C'mon, do these Muslim youth organisations even know these artists? Thankfully, the concerts went on without a hitch.
* Linkin Park was not allowed to wear short pants during their concert.
* Madonna, due to her really risque resume, was banned from performing in the country, period.
* In his autobiography, Meat Loaf lamented how hard it was to perform his "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" number in Muslim countries, since he was not allowed to touch any of his female back up singers on stage. Also, the female back up singers had to cover their shoulders and midriffs. (I'm sure Meat loved telling his daughter that.)
* Steven Spielberg infamously refused to let Malaysia screen the edited version of his movie Schindlers List, since its Zionist theme is the main plot point. The movie was only released on DVD recently. Munich also suffered the same fate.
* Borat, Brokeback Mountain and the last three (and counting?) Saw movies never saw the light of day in the country.
* Bruce Almighty was nearly banned due to the movie's plot about a guy who becomes God for a day. While most Muslim sectors considered this movie offensive, non-Muslims stated that the movie is not offensive to any religion whatsover. Thank god the movie was finally screened, unedited.
o Ironic, considering how popular the movie is with Muslim Americans. In fact, Muslim Americans make up its single largest demographic.
o Evan Almighty, the spin-off about Steve Carrell making Noah's Ark, also suffered the same problem.
* Non-media example: Yoga is banned for Muslims.
o It was banned because of chanting. Muslims can practice yoga if they don't chant.
* Two of LOCAL filmmaker Amir Muhammad's documentaries never saw the light of day in the country.
* Why the hell Pussycat Dolls managed to be allowed to perform in the country is beyond our imaginations. The organisers paid the fine and the Cats wore less skimpier outfits when they returned to the country for the 2008 MTV Asia Awards.
* On the topic of skimpy outfits, Beyonce switched her concert venue from KL to Jakarta due to this rule, despite the fact that Indonesia has more Muslims than Malaysia.
* South Park never made it to Malaysian television, but was released on home video. Hmmmm....
* All of Quentin Tarantino's movies, with the exception of Jackie Brown, never made it to the country. Kill Bill Vol 2 was also allowed to be screened, causing continuity problems.
* Sin City.
* Daredevil was banned for trivial reasons, but was released on home video recently.
* The second Austin Powers movie.
* The American Pie trilogy.
* The 40-Year Old Virgin.
Mexico
* The Last Temptation of Christ was premiered in the USA in 1988, and was banned in Mexico until 2005. Partly because the ruling government back then had a huge influence on what was allowed and what wasn't, but mostly because the Media Watchdogs were really into fundamentalist Christianity and they certainly wouldn't let the "superstitious people" see Jesus married with Mary Magdalene.
* Several right-wing groups have tried to ban Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 in some parts of Mexico because the bad guys depicted are Mexican even though they are rebels against the Mexican government and the players end up teaming with Mexican loyalists. Ditto goes for Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
o But... there aren't any Mexicans in Call of Duty 4...
+ He's talking about the Russian Ultranationalists.
New Zealand
* Puni Puni Poemy was deemed to have the tendency of being sexually exploitative to minors and thus was banned.
Philippines
* Ferdinand Marcos' Filipino regime banned the Super Robot show Voltes V, officially because of excessive violence, but really because the heroes were rebels fighting against a brutal dictator. This resulted in Voltes V being adopted as a mascot by rebel factions.
Russia
* Porn. All of it. In any medium, literature included. Seriously. However, no one actually cares, it's only enforced on the 'charge prostitutes for loitering/drug dealers for tax evasion' plan to put nuisances behind bars, and individual pornos are innocent until proven guilty. Hence, Anal Gangbang #27 only becomes a porno once a judge says it's a porno. After its own individual trial. Subverted?
Saudi Arabia
* Saudi Arabia banned Pokemon because someone in the government came up with a little theory that Pokemon is part of a Jewish conspiracy to brainwash the world's youth and "promoting Zionism" by depicting six-pointed stars (the colourless energy in the card game) and gambling. Yet another way the Saudi government is like your elementary school principal.
* It also banned Jalila and Aya because the government considered the heroines'costumes◊ 'indecent'.
o Their ultraconservative Moral Guardians probably consider any woman with outfits more revealing than X Men's Dust to be indecent.
* In another truly bizarre move, Barbie dolls are banned. They are referred to by the government as "Jewish Dolls" or "Zionist Dolls" and are seen as "symbols of the perversion and decadence of the West." So there you go.
o One can only imagine what they'd make of Bratz dolls.
Singapore
* During the time period of the Hot Coffee debacle, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was banned in Singapore, probably one of the first few video games to be banned on this sunny island.
* The authorities overreacted upon seeing a short cutscene depicting a lesbian sex scene in Mass Effect. It was actually between a human female and an asexual blue-skinned, tentacle-haired alien with feminine features, and the scene's most gratuitous moment of nudity was 1 second of blue butt. The game was banned for somewhere around 2 days before being unbanned and given an M18 rating.
* The Chinese example of Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End was subverted in Singapore with huge posters of Sao Feng with the slogan "Welcome to Singapore" being put up around some of the country's more touristy districts.
South Korea
* South Korea is said to ban the sale of any game depicting fictional wars between North and South Korea. This includes Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.
o South Korea also doesn't really like M*A*S*H, because South Koreans are depicted as living in poverty.
+ Considering the show was set in the 1950s, you'd think the government would like that. "Look where we were then, and where we are now. Didn't we do a good job?"
o South Korea has recently lifted its ban on the Ghost Recon series as a way of promoting freedom of speech.
* South Korea also has a restriction on red blood, meaning all those Starcraft videos with the really-amazing high-speed clickers have Black Blood on Space Marines.
Thailand
* The Thai government has banned nearly every rendition of The King And I ever made because it dislikes the depiction of the King of Siam, who is culturally seen as a divine being, as a flawed human.
o The song "One Night in Bangkok" from the musical Chess is also banned, probably due to its description of Bangkok as a "crowded, polluted, stinking town" that's only good for sex tourism. Despite this, it gets frequent play there.
+ Aaaah, I LOVE that song!
Turkey
* Various websites, such as Blogger.com, WordPress, Richard Dawkins' website, Little Green Footballs, and The Jawa Report have all been banned in Turkey at one time or another. For pretty much the same reasons, at base. Dawkins has a banner on his site marking this as a point of pride. He's not Completely Missing The Point, he's throwing it back in the Moral Guardians' faces.
United Arab Emirates
* Maddox is proud to have his website, The Best Page in the Universe, banned in the United Arab Emirates.
o Except it isn't. Another person wrote in to say it's only blocked by one specific DSL proxy. Maddox was disappointed.
United Kingdom
* The United Kingdom recently banned Manhunt 2, the first such ban for a game in over a decade, until the courts overturned the decision.
o Strictly speaking it wasn't banned, the BBFC refused to give it a rating, which retailers require to sell such items. In theory at least, there are ways round the BBFC such as Private Members Venues - this editor doesn't know of such an infrastructure which exists for gaming - or a local council order overruling the BBFC - almost unheard of a local council un-banning or lowering ratings made by the BBFC, usually go in the upward direction. See: The Life of Brian.
* The Church of England criticised the PlayStation game Resistance: Fall of Man, which included a gunfight in Manchester Cathedral.
o Amusingly, when the Church demanded that Insomniac change the game to not depict Manchester Cathedral, Insomniac reportedly laughed at them, and began pointing out the numerous other things that the Church did not have a problem with, including the violent depictions of murder. The Church was, sadly, not suitably chastised. Also funny: the Church's argument was—at least in part—that Insomniac didn't get their permission, which made the whole thing look more like a copyright dispute than a case of moral outrage. (Needless to say, having been built in 1215, Manchester Cathedral isn't subject to copyright of any kind.)
+ Wait, the Church of England didn't exist in 1215—ohhhhh, I get it.
* The phrase 'video nasty' comes from a particularly censorship-happy time during the 1980's, where the BBFC banned pretty much every horror movie that came out. Some of these movies are still banned today. Granted, some of them (Cannibal Holocaust is usually trotted out as the best example) deserved it. As did most of the early Nazi torture porn movies, but... The Evil Dead? Really?
o The uncut version of the first Evil Dead film (the only one to have been banned, or rather only allowed in a cut version) was unbanned in 2001.
* The above-mentioned Life of Brian is banned in Aberystwyth, a small town in mid-Wales. No really. Especially egregious as the current mayor was in it.
o It was unbanned recently.
United States
* Several Haitian-American groups complained enough about a line in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City ("Let's kill these Haitians!") to get it dropped from later printings.
o Amusingly is that the main thing groups latched onto was apparently a mission objective titled "Kill the Haitians", which there actually wasn't. In fact there are only about five negative references to Haitians, most of them being variations of "take them down". All of these being uttered by Cubans gangsters who more or less meant a Haitian gang than Haitians in general. Rockstar's reissuing of the game managed to also be political correct by removing the Haitian "hate" dialogue and also removing the reverse Cuban "hate" dialogue uttered by a Haitian character. The fix also made the game saves incompatible with earlier games and vice-versa.
* Back in the early '90s, Warner Brothers wanted to release all of the Bugs Bunny cartoons on videotape, and later Laserdisc. Among those was a cartoon called "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips." The cartoon made it to VHS, but then Japanese-American rights groups and speakers (including, this troper seems to recall, George Takei) protested, and Warner Brothers removed the cartoon from later VHS and all LD pressings.
o This happened again when Cartoon Network (owned by Time Warner) had plans of playing every Bugs Bunny Cartoon in chronological order as a celebration of Bugs' 60th anniversary in 2001. Numerous cartoons were vetoed by Time Warner, including the unmentionable one above, another one called All This and Rabbit Stew (which had Unfortunate Implications concerning African-Americans) and Herr meets Hare (in which Bugs matches wits with Hermann Goering). CN even tried to pull them out of chronoligical order and play them late at night with comprehensive disclaimers before the cartoons, but were still vetoed. Herr meets Hare WAS later played in its entirety on CN during a special devoted to Wartime Cartoons, and has found a space on the latest Looney Tunes DVD set.
+ Finally, Time Warner has inherited a list from other owners of the Warner Brother animation catalogue, the Censored Eleven - 11 cartoons, all racially offensive, that they will refuse to play or release to this day.
* For a time in the early 2000s, Charlie Chan movies (and the lesser-known Mr. Moto films starring Peter Lorre) were taken out of circulation on Fox Classic Movies and TCM due to Asian-American concerns about the main character being a Caucasian in essentially "yellowface." After some discussions and an agreement to put round-table discussions with prominent Asian-Americans discussing the impact of the films before the first few showings, the films returned and have been released on DVD.
* In the late 19th and early 20th century, the Watch and Ward Society, an anti-obscenity group in Boston, made use of censorship laws and the bully pulpit to maintain a tight grip over what could be published, broadcast, or performed onstage in New England. Had this article been written in that era, it might well have been called "Banned In Boston".
o Boston was the worst, but not the only one. To this day, internet porn is illegal in Tennessee, and some website operators have been arrested in other states and extradited to Tennessee to face trial when postal inspectors were able to access the websites from within the states. That's why on many porn site TO Ses, they explicitly state that the customer agrees and declares that he is not within Tennessee... Or So I Heard...
* The ESRB refused to allow The Witcher to be sold in the United States until the developers created a regionalized version with all the nudity removed. Apparently they consider allowing players to sleep with most of the female characters and many random streetwalkers to be acceptable, but not to portray them as having nipples.
o Untrue. However, for the game to be sold uncensored, it would've had to have an Adults Only rating, which is commercial suicide because few stores carry A-O games. They could've gone without a rating, but the consequences would have been roughly the same.
* The MPAA, of course, has its own rating system. Very few theaters take a movie that has been rated NC-17 (formerly X), and they treat movies that haven't been rated as though they were rated NC-17.
Venezuela
* The sequel to Mercenaries has not been banned, but has already come under fire from the Venezuelan government, which apparently considers it a propaganda piece directed against the Hugo Chavez administration.
o Chavez also ordered The Simpsons to be taken off the air, due to it being "unsuitable for children" despite not being intended for them. Even more oddly, the timeslot it was in was given to Baywatch