Bowdlerise - TV Tropes

"It's my job to protect you, the viewer, from reality."

• A commercial for Air Action Vigorsol gums released in early 2007 showed a squirrel eating the gum and extinguishing a fire in the woods with a freezing fart. After complaints, the commercial was altered so that the squirrel gets ice breath instead, and the final shot (which had the "R" in the Vigorsol logo lifting a leg to let a small fart out) had the fart sound bleeped out. Curiously, they later made a sequel commercial where the squirrel brings some gums to a couple of penguins so that they can escape from the melting ice float they're on with a rocket-boosted fart, which wasn't censored at all.
• Parodied in this cinema commercial for Holsten Export in which the editors attempt to remove all instances of the beer in question from a family film on the grounds it's "too strong" for the target audience, with no regard to story context. The result is, obviously, anything but PG/12A-but the editors don't seem to care as long as all the alcohol's gone.

• The Museum of Reading in England has a replica of The Bayeux Tapestry on display. It was created using a drawing of the original as a guide. However, the drawing put shorts on a figure who was originally naked, so the replica does too.
• That picture of the David statue with the boxer shorts on the main page? It was clearly done in jest, but something like that actually happened. A plaster cast of the statue was made as a gift to Queen Victoria, and since this was one of the more prudish times in history, they felt that male nudity might offend someone, so a plaster fig leaf was made to use during the Queen's visits.
• The nude saints in the Sistine Chapel The Last Judgement had their genitalia painted over with garments after Michelangelo's death, leaving the schmuck who agreed to do it to forever be known as "the breeches maker." After a restoration effort in the 20th century, the fresco survives unbreeched.

• Boonie Bears: In Season 4 episode 1, Logger Vick lets the animals play a game of passing a drink from a wine jar around, but Bramble says drinking is not good and Logger Vick assures them it's filled with juice instead. The English version removes any reference to it being a wine jar, leaving it at just "it's filled with juice".
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf has been a notably example of this trope:
  • Due to the accident that happened in April 6, 2013 on China where a boy accidentally burnt another two of his friends while trying to imitating a scene from the cartoon itself, starting with Paddi the Amazing Chef, ropes were changed into jelly pudding-shaped rope or laser rope (made by Wolffy), the pot that the wolves used to cook the goats lacks the fire (in the later seasons, the pot never appeared again), Wolffy wears the safety hat when get launched into the sky, and Wolnie's uses of frying pan attack has been reduced (also applies in the last two films). In a few scenes, Don't Try This at Home messages were added, although it disappeared in the later seasons.
  • Also applies to Mighty Little Defenders. The National Radio and Television Administration forced Creative Power Entertaining to edit the fighting scenes to make them more suitable for kids. They also forced CPE to change some of the weapons.
  • The official YouTube uploads of episodes 341-380, as well as the Great War in the Bizarre World arc, were edited to make them less violent, including removing violent scenes (including cutting the scenes with Wolnie beats Wolffy with her frying pan repeatedly in episodes) and changing weapons to look less realistic.
    • Notably, in episode 353, the scene where Paddi burns Wolffy's tail outside the Wolf Castle is heavily edited and cut.
  • Official YouTube uploads of Joys of Seasons episodes have a few edits of their own, such as cutting the scenes where Wolnie beats Wolffy with her frying pan repeatedly or changing knives into vegetables.

• The Sunday edition of the August 26 2018 Blondie (1930) strip in which Mr. Dithers dreams of beating the crap out of Dagwood before his wife wakes him up, removed the panels of him pounding Dagwood over the head with both fists and strangling him. This is more of a borderline case, as they were part of the top row of panels - a.k.a. the throwaway panels. Not all newspapers include this row in their formats, so any Sunday strip has to make these panels non-essential in case they're cut.
• A couple of Calvin and Hobbes strips were censored when translated to Swedish. One line about Calvin wanting to grow up to be a "radical terrorist" was changed to "bank robber." Another strip, in which Calvin disproves a commercial's claims that cola improves one's sex appeal by unleashing a large belch, was changed so the cola in the commercial allegedly improves one's health.
• Dilbert:
  • When Scott Adams was told he could not have Satan as a character in one of his strips, he introduced "Phil the Prince of Insufficient Light", who wielded a large spoon and would temporarily "darn" people to "heck" over relatively minor offenses. Adams does admit that this character ended up being funnier than what he had planned for Satan. (And given that it allows for any number of "spooning" jokes, is it really better?)
  • When Adams did a story about a police officer shooting a criminal in the leg, he was told he couldn't depict a gun being fired, so instead the officer shoots the crook with his donut, which makes it funnier.
  • Adams wanted to do a story arc about the "Cubicle Gestapo", but the editors felt the reference to Nazism was gratuitous and might provoke offense, so he changed it to the "Cubicle Secret Police".
  • One strip has Dilbert interview a terrorist. When Dilbert asks the man to confirm that he went to Yale, he responds with "I yust got out last week". Adams' editor feared the strip would be accused of stereotyping Middle Easterners as terrorists, so they asked him to make it clear that the terrorist was supposed to be Scandinavian, to which Adams complied by having Dilbert address him as "Sven".
• Gary Larson often had his Far Side cartoons rejected because they were "too scatological". Often this meant they only contained innuendoes, such as a boy sitting behind an outhouse and playing a tuba.
  • And as Larson relates in his book The Prehistory of The Far Side, an editor once told him he could not use the term "dork" because it meant "penis" (Larson didn't know this, he says, till he looked the word up later).
• The For Better or for Worse comic for June 25, 1994 has John reacting to Michael's girlfriend Rhetta all dolled up with a "BOINGG!" above his head. The rerun of this strip published on June 24, 2023 removes this, likely to avoid the unfortunate implications of a middle-aged man being aroused by a teenage girl.
• The original version of an early FoxTrot strip had Jason leaving a Funny Answering Machine message for the "Satan Hotline". When reprinted in books, it was changed to him singing "A Million Bottles of Beer" instead.
• In an early Garfield strip set on a farm, Garfield said, "Wanna swap sheep jokes?" Although Jim Davis didn't intend it that way, his editor thought that it sounded like a bestiality joke. It became "dirt jokes" as a result.
• In a Finnish translation of The Phantom, of the story introducing the Vultures, one of the members of the gang is shot and "wounded" by the police, so the protagonist investigating the gang gets to take a look at him in a forbidding-looking "hospital", where he lies on a slab. For some reason, he's never interrogated...

• Although Dragon Ball Z Abridged is, by and large, much more adult than the original series by featuring profane dialogue and loads of Black Comedy, it does edit out one thing that was in the original: genitalia. This is likely because YouTube has very strict rules regarding nudity. That said, their abridged version of Dragon Ball Z: Broly – The Legendary Super Saiyan does not remove them.
• Nintendo's tendency to remove blood from its games was referenced in Melee's End episode 5:

  Mario: What do you want, Ganondorf?
  Ganondorf: I have come for your blood.
  Marth: Oh, not my blood!
  Fox: You don't even know what blood is.
  Mario: Guys, this is a Nintendo game. Don't worry.
  Ganondorf: I've coughed up plenty of blood in my day. Nintendo can't save you now!
  Fox: Your blood is green.

• Many Physical Pinball Tables have options to tone down racy or possibly offensive voice clips for certain markets, as a form of Adjustable Censorship. A notable example would be Elvira and the Party Monsters , which not only allowed suppressing the saucier quotes, but also came with a "modesty decal" to cover Elvira's massive knockers on the backglass. Other examples include AC/DC muting swearing in the song lyrics and covering up bare breasts on the dot-matrix display animations, as well as alternate photographs of the models in Stern's Playboy. In both cases, there are three levels: completely uncensored, a Digital Bikini variant with mild swearing left intact, and characters fully clothed and no swearing at all.
• Several of the changes required by Universal for The Big Lebowski include removing Walter's Colt .45 and a marijuana leaf from the playfield art.
• The home version^note  of Bally's Capt. Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy replaces the racy artwork of the original with a family-friendly quasi-psychedelic depiction of Elton John and the Cowboy.
• In Devil's Crush for the TurboGrafx-16, the pentagrams were geometrically altered for the U.S. version, becoming eight-pointed. In the Sega Genesis version, Dragon's Fury, anything star-shaped was changed into a simple five-pointed star.
• Universal also nixed the caged female dancers from the backglass art on Monster Bash.
• NASCAR allowed operators to replace the default backglass art with one that changed the "Miller Lite" logo on Rusty Wallace's car with a "Rusty" logo instead, in case their location was sensitive to alcohol-related advertising.
• The Super Nintendo version of Pinball Dreams removed the crosses in the "Nightmare" table.
• South Park got this twice over.
  • The "G"-rated Adjustable Censorship option changes the software in various ways - all mentions of farting are altered (Terrence and Phillip's "Super Fart Bumpers" become "Super Pop Bumpers", while the Match Sequence changes from them farting numbers to burping them instead), while the famous "Oh my God! They killed Kenny!" "You bastards!" exchange is cut down to "They killed Kenny!" "Rats!" Furthermore, the game also came with decals to cover up potentially offensive playfield art, such as Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo.
  • The original version of the game software included completely uncensored dialogue (the game's highest setting otherwise is "PG-13", which still bleeps out harsher cursing), as well as a removed Video Mode that involved Cartman and Stan trying to be lesbians by engaging in a literal carpet-eating contest. Comedy Central demanded these changes soon after the game's release.
• Gottlieb's Super Mario Bros. Mushroom World reuses the Video Mode from their earlier Super Mario Bros., but replaces the Bullet Bills with Boos instead.
• Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines ships with a gun grip and trigger to launch balls and fire at in-game targets. Operators have the option to replace the grip with a fire/launch button "for sensitive locations".
• Zen Pinball and all its offshoots aim for a blanket E10+ rating, which often means that tables based on more adult subject matter end up censored accordingly. This extends to their recreations of older pinball tables, which alter the artwork to remove cigars, add heavier clothing to scantily-clad women, and relabel beer cans "soda".

• Psycomedia uses Freud as a substitute profanity, to highlight that All Psychology Is Freudian is not true.

• All Elite Wrestling has done this on occasion to unsigned wrestlers working on Dark. Jennacide was, after her first appearance, renamed to Bionic Beast Jenna. Luchador Australian Suicide was renamed to El Australiano^note .
  • When deathmatch icon Nick Gage showed up to work a match with Chris Jericho on Dynamite, very little was toned down to fit network TV. The only thing that did change was the complete lack of swearing, with MJF introducing him with his catchphrase: "Nick. Freakin'. Gage."
• When Big Boss Man is included in WWE video games, the Confederate flag patch on his shirt is replaced with a regular American flag patch.
• CMLL will edit any blood it can out of any of its televised matches or simply not air them if it cannot.
• Around the turn of the century, there was a memo circulated by Turner Broadcasting for CNN that declared that "foreign" stories be referred to as "international" stories. WCW received this memo, which wasn't meant for them. This lead to the term "foreign object" (a weapon that shouldn't be part of the match, e.g. a chair at ringside) being changed to "international object." Back in WWF/E Jim Ross called weapons used in matches "international objects" on at least one broadcast as an in-joke.
  • Also in WCW, when the Insane Clown Posse were working there, the "Violent" in Violent J's name was deemed unacceptable, causing the commentators to refer to him as Jake Jeckel. Sometimes. Other times they called him Violent J. Consistency was not a hallmark in late period WCW.
• When 'asshole' chants first became a thing in professional wrestling, Turner Broadcasting tried very hard at first to figure out a way of censoring the chants. Since there was no way to get the fans to stop and trying to mute the chants without muting whoever was talking was impractical, they gave up after a couple months.
• Colt Cabana's flying asshole is referred to as the "flying apple" in Chikara. Similarly, Delirious's shadows over hell is called "shadows over Hades".
• Indy wrestler Dalton Castle's gimmick includes his being accompanied at all times by two men who form human furniture for him and fan him off during matches. When he made a few appearances in TNA in 2015, they had him accompanied by two women instead, although otherwise they left his gimmick intact.
• WWE's Divas Undressed special. Even though it aired during the graveyard block, they still spent a lot of time cutting away to judge reactions during particularly racy bits.
• In one particularly disappointing example, the heel character of Muhammad Hassan was completely written out of storylines following the London terrorist bombing of the summer of 2005. This despite the character referring to himself as an Arab rather than a Muslim (although his ring entrance did make liberal use of Islamic imagery) and using a garrote made of piano wire as a heel weapon (a more stereotypically Italian way of murdering someone, and in fact Hassan's portrayer, Mark Copani, was partly Italian-American).
• Since action figures are marketed to kids, when Balls Mahoney was working for WWE, his action figure was named on the box as "B. Mahoney."
  • Billy Gunn pops up here again. His finisher was called the Famasser, which might have angered parents. Initially toy boxes listed his finisher as the Fame-er, but eventually settled on Famouser. Interestingly, WWE now spells the move Famouser after the PG switch.
  • A Chris Jericho figure was released sporting his "SHUT THE HELL UP!" shirt, but it was changed to "SHUT THE HECK UP!"
  • In the "Attitude Era" Jeff Jarrett would come to the ring with a guitar painted with "Don't Piss Me Off" but it was sometimes written "Don't P*** Me Off". His action figure's guitar said "Don't Make Me Mad".
• In a confusing case of this, during Kevin Owens "My Son Is A WWE Superstar" minidoc, they identified his mother as Suzanne Steen, rather than Suzanne Benoit, which she introduced herself as. This may be due to her sharing a name with disgraced wrestler and murderer Chris Benoit.
• As a family friendly publication covering something not really family friendly, Pro Wrestling Illustrated would Bowdlerize some wrestler's names. In PWI Balls Mahoney was simply Mahoney, Razor Ramon Hard Gay became "Razor Ramon H.G."^note , and Billy Gunn was never referred to as "Mr. Ass".
• WWE briefly had a show on the CW called Saturday Morning Slam. Because it was in a children's programming block it had to be rated TV-G/TV-Y7. As such, all moves involving the head and neck could not be shown.
• Booker T's promo against Hulk Hogan on the 1997 Spring Stampede ended with "Hulk Hogan, we comin' for you, nigga!" on live pay-per-view. The VHS release changes it to "Hulk Hogan, we comin' for you, sucka!" for obvious reasons. The WWE Network featured the unaltered dialogue, but after the acquisition by Peacock, it was changed to the bowdlerized version again.
• TNA once pulled an on-the-fly edit during a match where Jeff Hardy took a fireball to the face from Cowboy James Storm. In the broadcast version, the picture suddenly froze, but the audience and commentators could be heard reacting in shock to something that just happened; the footage then cut to Jeff on the mat, getting kicked around by Storm. Going to the website to watch the "uncut video" of the moment revealed what'd just happened: Storm had taken a drink from a bottle, and then spat the inevitable fireball at Jeff. The website video even had a slow-motion replay, which was skipped over in the broadcast.
• The full matches uploaded to WWE's official YouTube channel are often subject to this, especially pre-2010 matches. For example, weapon attacks to the head are censored by freeze-framing just before the weapon connects, then resuming the action after the weapon connects. Weapon attacks to the head are no longer allowed in WWE, in order to preserve the health of the talent, maintain a PG rating, and prevent kids from imitating them. But since the weapon shots remain uncensored on the WWE Network, the YouTube censorship is probably done in order to prevent any violations that could lead to demonetization.
• During the early 2000s, UPN forced WWF to rename two of its wrestlers.
  • "Badd Ass" Billy Gunn's name was deemed problematic because of the gun reference. He went by Mr. Ass for a few years. (Yes, "gun" was deemed more offensive than "ass." Weird.)
  • Val Venis' name was deemed unacceptable because it rhymed with penis. One of his nicknames had been 'The Big Valboski', and that briefly became his real name.
• At WrestleMania 22, Mickie James grabbed Trish Stratus' crotch to break a hold. The DVD edited out Mickie licking her fingers afterward since Vince McMahon didn't like it, or because Mickie received a bigger Face reaction than Trish did.

• The Big Finish Doctor Who adaptation of the Doctor Who New Adventures novel Damaged Goods replaced cocaine with a Fantastic Drug called Smile, and doesn't have the Doctor take it. Chris's sex scene with David Daniels is toned down to them just kissing.
• CILQ-FM in Toronto, Canada, cut out parts from The Howard Stern Show when they aired it. For example, on July 14, 2000, removed content included a "comment about blacks and the mentally challenged and property value" at 10:07 AM, along with "Howard imitating [a] mentally challenged [person]" and "more comments about the mentally challenged" at 10:10 AM. However, these edits were not enough to prevent the episode from breaking the rules of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.
• The 1937 Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of A Free Soul resulted in massive revisions to the plot. In the film, Jan throws over her safe, dull boyfriend Dwight and takes up with Ace, a charming mobster. After they have sex without benefit of marriage, Ace becomes violently possessive. Dwight kills Ace after Ace threatens to reveal his affair with Jan and ruin her reputation. Dwight is then acquitted of Ace's murder. A Free Soul was made in 1931, during The Pre Code Era, when movie makers could get away with stuff like that. By 1937, when the movie was adapted for radio, The Hays Code was firmly in place, so the plot was completely rewritten. In the Lux version, Ace is a gambler instead of a mobster. He and Jan get married instead of just having an affair. Further, it's Ace who kills Dwight in the radio show, and by a Gun Struggle instead of with malice aforethought as in the film. Making the murder a Gun Struggle allowed for Ace to be acquitted, since by 1937, guilty parties were no longer allowed to escape punishment in Hollywood productions.
• On Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me:

  Bill: "This guy is such a total pussycat, it's stunning."
  Peter: That was Fox News analyst Ralph Peters, who, by the way, left off the word "cat" in the original quote...

• Ice dancers Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir altered a lift in their Moulin Rouge! program to be more family-friendly at the Olympics. The original lift had Virtue straddling Moir's shoulders with her crotch in his face. That being said, the final results is still a highly sensual program.

• The Digimon Card Game had to censor some card artwork in the sixth booster set: Sistermon Noir was replaced with Sistermon Ciel (something that already happened before in Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth - Hacker's Memory), BaoHuckmon's art was edited to remove Sistermon Noir in the background (Sistermon Ciel was already in the picture in this case) and both Deputymon and Gundramon have the smoke coming out from their gun barrels removed (albeit the latter still keeps the shots coming out from all his other gun barrels).
• Examples from Magic: The Gathering
• In the Red Rising board game, members of the Pink caste are described as "Companions"; the book made it very explicit that they are often sex workers.
• 7 Wonders: The Manneken Pis started as a promotional Wonder whose B side has a single, very expensive stage that gives you all sorts of stuff, including the right to get a well-chilled beer from whoever ends up winning. When it was re-released in the Wonder Pack, the beer reference was removed.
• The German version of Space Crusade, the simplified Warhammer 40,000 offshoot, greatly stressed how humanitarian the Imperium was and rebranded all their ordnance as non-lethal weaponry (giving them nonsensical names in the process) that merely paralyzed or otherwise incapacitated enemies instead of outright killing them. This was done to appease the Moral Guardians who didn't want to see violent content in what was considered a children's game (and who presumably would have gotten a stroke had they read what the setting was actually like). However, it has to be said that if one ignored the part from the manual that didn't refer to the rules and stats, it was otherwise indistinguishable from the normal game.
• This is one of the reasons why sets in the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game get release schedules that get released months later, as the Western card designers needed time to redesign the cards. This is the reason why for a long time in Yu-Gi-Oh! the Official Trading Card game had huge advantages over the Trading Card game because the Official Card game was always one set ahead.
  • From Strike of Neos onwards however it seems averted, because Western card designers decided that they would design cards that will remain TCG exclusive to balance out the problem.
  • Many of the cards that originally portrayed religious symbols, nudity, violent weapons and gore were modified for overseas Trading Card Game and anime. You can see the list on this page with examples like Monster Reborn, which turned the ankh into a stylized crystal, and Destiny Board's message, which was changed from "DEATH" to "FINAL".
    • Similarly, the Dark Magician Girl has her bust reduced by editing out cleavage lines, the pentagram brooch replaced by a red jewel, and a single shot in her first appearance edits a close up of her legs to include a mini-skirt (which is gone in the next shot, and from that point on is never seen again). Then again, you can see why some of the cards imagery was toned down. Check out the original art for cards like Last Day of Witch, Final Flame and Soul of the Pure. ...Oh, and Fiend Comedian.
    • She's just one of many who have their busts reduced for the international release. While most of these edits also involved covering up cleavage, some, such as Lady Ninja Yae and Helios -- The Primordial Sun, are purely for the sake of reducing bust sizes, and Deep Sea Diva doesn't appear to have gotten any smaller but has had her clothing slightly recolored to de-emphasize them. Apparently large breasts are considered Harmful to Minors even if they're fully covered.
    • This phenomenon however only happens with OCG original cards (probably because 4Kids motivates them to do so, they need to feature those cards in their original TCG form on the anime after all). There exist a few very sexual TCG exclusive cards (such as this one, Lady of the Lake), that give a whole new light to the matter.
    • Some artwork also modifies characters' agonizing faces in pain and changes them into looking peaceful/calm, and removing implications that they're dying, like from drowning or having their souls drained out from their bodies. References to black magic don't get a pass either, where the Oujia Board from the Destiny Board card has been removed and changes people who look possessed to have them meditate instead. Guns or references to it are also cut out.
  • The TCG itself gets toned down. In the OCG, it happens quite frequently that decks can heavily OTK. To prevent such very fast aggressive decks being played in the TCG they get banned or limited right before they get a release. A good example of this would be Temple of the Kings, a card that was banned before the structure deck that contained that card was released.
  • There is also a difference between the way the OCG obtains cards and the way the TCG obtains cards. In the OCG it's perfectly possible to buy a set and have the set to turn out to have 9 commons. If you turn out to have such an unlucky set in the TCG it's always due to a printing error, as the TCG sets usually will have 1 rare card. Whilst it is debatable whether or not this is actual bowdlerizing, one can't deny that it makes buying sets look less like gambling.

• Among the Beanie Babies' poems, Runner's stood out for being exceptionally gruesome, describing his obsession with killing every cobra he sees. It was later changed to a "nice" poem about his species being intentionally vague.
• LEGO Dino Attack had two completely different iterations depending on the country it was sold: in North America, Australia, and Japan, the line was called Dino Attack and featured human characters fighting against mutant dinosaurs with armed vehicles, while the rest of the world had Dino 2010, which had near-identical sets but with all the weapons removed and replaced with nets and harpoons, implying that they were capturing the dinosaurs to keep them in a safe place. According to set designer Mark Stafford, Dino Attack was originally intended to be exclusively released in America (with LEGO Vikings as its European counterpart), where focus groups desired a more action-oriented premise (as discussed by writer Greg Farshtey). When LEGO decided to release both Dino Attack and Vikings worldwide, 2010 was bowdlerized from Attack since it was considered too violent for the European audience.
• M.A.S.K. toys suffered from this in Germany. Due to their Old Shame about their involvement in World War II, Germany in the 80's was very sensitive about toys related to combat. Therefore several of the toys are retooled to make them appear less violent. This is mostly done by removing realistic looking weapons or change them to a non-violent object. For example, Rhino's missile is replaced by a "weather satellite", while Switchblade's bomb is completely excluded from the set.

• Chou Dengeki Stryker: The Steam version censors nudity with mist.
• Releases of Doki Doki Literature Club! on Sony platforms have the blood changed from pink to black in the scene where Yuri stabs herself.
• The English language version of Everlasting Summer was initially released uncensored. But a few days later, Steam released an update which removed the option to enable adult content.
• Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind: At one point in the game, you can activate a hidden scene by repeatedly examining Ayumi's chest after she jokes about the implications of you both being teenagers hanging out alone in such a secluded part of the school. In the Japanese version, she immediately becomes uncomfortable and keeps backing away from you, screaming at you to stop and catching the ears of a janitor nearby, leading to you losing all your friends, colleagues, and job due to sexually harassing her. In the Western localization, she's being attacked by a bee rather than the player, and you're fired for doing nothing to help fend off the insect. In both cases, it turns out to be an Imagine Spot your character had while zoning out during the conversation.
• Family Project: Although JAST marketed the game as FULLY UNCENSORED, their English translation had a number of scenes involving the Token Mini-Moe Matsuri.
• Higurashi: When They Cry:
  • Rare example of a game being censored in its own country: in the original PC version, there are shots of a red blood splatter on screen occasionally. When the time came for the PlayStation 2 remake, the color of the blood was censored into blue/dark colors (due to the Japanese rating system undergoing a change at the time, this was done to avoid an 18+ rating). The blood is red again in the DS remakes.
  • The console versions also often cut dialogue, particularly when discussing World War II, which leaves the Watanagashi and Matsuribayashi chapters especially lacking context for certain scenes.censored via Digital Bikini.
• If My Heart Had Wings, despite never receiving an all-ages release in Japan, had its 18+ version hacked up to an ESRB T/PEGI 12 rating by MoeNovel - this included the obvious removal of sex scenes and nudity, which aren't a huge loss for a lot of visual novels...however, a major part of one girl's route involves a friends-with-benefits relationship between her and the protagonist, which is completely removed from the localized MoeNovel version. Not only that, but sexual references, skimpy outfits and open-mouth kissing that T-rated JRPGs get away with on a regular basis were censored.
• Loren: The Amazon Princess: The Steam version censors armor and romance scenes.
• The non-eroge version of Nekopara Vol. 1, which was released on the Nintendo Switch with an M rating from the ESRB for "Sexual Themes", wasn't enough for Sony. The PlayStation 4 version is rated E, the Censor Steam was increased compared to the Steam version, and the breast jiggle feature was removed among other changes.
• The Princess, the Stray Cat, and Matters of the Heart: The console ports for Nintendo Switch, Play Station Vita and the Steam version for PC cut the sex scenes. The PlayStation 4 port goes further and censors swimsuits and other risqué CGs with Lens Flare Censor to the point it almost covers the entire screen.
• Many of the more violent and sexual aspects of Snatcher were toned down in the various ports between platforms, mainly involving instances of blood/gore or female nudity.
• Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius: The Steam version removes two scenes with adult content.
• The PSP port of To Heart 2 is proof that not even facial expressions are safe from Bowdlerisation. And other, more sensical stuff ripe for this trope. The intended non-naughty facial expression may imply something much worse.
• The English localization of True Love Junai Monogatari claims the main character and his various love interests are in college, rather than high school like in the original. This is likely to avoid showing teenagers in sexual situations. What makes this ridiculous, however, is that the main character is 19 and most of his love interests are around the same age, and references to the characters planning to go to university next year weren't removed, which would make no sense if they were already in college.
• Wonderful Everyday: The English release is uncensored except for a picture consisting of a dog raping a bullied girl, which was cut. The scene in question is kept largely intact through the text and was very short anyway.
• The Japan-only Sega Saturn port of YU-NO, released about a year after the original PC-98 version, shortened and toned down the sex scenes. The Windows version, despite being sold as Porn with Plot, blanked out some words in the dialogue to obscure the fact that some of them qualify as Parental Incest. The 2017 remake, the first ever official English release, removes them entirely.

• Duolingo offers an Esperanto course which teaches that Old World countries generally have their names derived from the word for a demonym, followed by the suffix “-io”. While, accordingly, the course teaches the names for such countries as France, China, and Russia as “Francio”, “Ĉinio”, and “Rusio”, respectively, the course teaches the name for Poland as “Pollando”^note  because “polio” is the name of a disease that destroys the spinal cord.
• Encyclopedia Dramatica is oh too overly fond of doing this in the case of many of their articles, and even some of the members of the EDF forum members do this.
  • Chris Marek aka Magnum - his username is a Poor Man's Bastardisation of the classic car brand, the ice cream treat, and the gun of the same name as well as the show Magnum, P.I.
• Google's doodle on December 20, 2012 in honour of the 200th anniversary of the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales. The woodsman pulls Red and Granny out of the wolf and sends it to jail.
• Snaiad: In the project's original incarnation, a major group of predators were known as the Fuckers (because they kill prey by humping it to death with a blade-like projection from their pelvic region). An Orwellian Retcon changed them to the Fututors (Latin for.... guess). The Rape Turtle (an unrelated tortoise-like predator that convergently evolved the same killing method) also was also quietly changed to Brute Turtle.
• Viner Thomas Sanders isn't squeaky clean, but he does clean up the harsher language in several of his Vines, either self-censoring the word or substituting something lighter, sometimes for comedic effect.

  Well, I'm off to lunch, yes I'm in luck // I'm gonna stuff my face and not give a...darn. Eugh...

• Sometimes, when people read kids' books online, they change certain lines they think are too rude for kids:
• Also parodied in The Angry Video Game Nerd's review of Action 52, where they show a clip of the "TV Version" of the review:
• Finlay Christie: TikTok's censorship policy means that he has to occasionally censor or dial down the language in his subtitles when compared to what he's actually saying. For instance, "killed" is often transcribed as "ki1led", and when he says "shit-load" at one point, the subtitles say "bumload".
• French Baguette Intelligence: In The Million Dollar Puzzle – Reflection on Intention, Fuck Cares announces that he had to change his name to 'Faux Cares' to avoid getting demonetised, but that didn't stop him from naming the Judge 'Fucking Goddamn Fucker'.
• David Near: What appears to be the original cut of "Laughing Jack (Story Time)" has Jack greet a girl with, "Well, hey there, sexy..." before he learns said girl is only 11 years old (which repulses him). The official upload cuts out the word "sexy" for understandable reasons.
• Lampshaded in Paw Dugan's Top 9 Composers video, where Paw is Trapped In Game Land. In the Wolfenstein 3-D portion, he comes upon Bowdlerized versions of the Hitler portraits and comments that something's missing. After a quick Fade Out and Fade In, we see a criudely painted toothbrush mustache applied to the painting as Paw comments "Much better!"
• Swearing in Connor's SMPLive highlight videos is censored with a beep.
• Stampy's Lovely World: Some of the first 31 episodes are re-uploaded eight years after their initial release under the title Lovely World Classic, with the swearing edited out after Stampy's channel went family-friendly.
• Parodied by Stevie T's video "Swearing Songs... After Autocorrect!", where Stevie facetiously cleans up songs known for their cluster f bombs by texting the lyrics to himself with his cellphone's autocorrect function on. A sample from Anti-Nowhere League's "So What" ^note :

  Well, I faced a queen

  I furled Bach

  I've even sacked an old man's cork

  So what?

• Stop Skeletons From Fighting: In a special video produced before his review of the 2010 Splatterhouse game, Derek explored the changes made to the original Splatterhouse — including the Bowdlerized elements — in its transition from the arcade to the TurboGrafx-16.
• In The Unlucky Tug's fandub of the TUGS episode "Sunshine", Zorran calls Izzy Gomez a "rusty old piece of scrap metal" instead of a "South American heap of junk".
• This gets parodied mercilessly in the "radio edit" of the Yogscast Christmas song "Carrot For a Cock". The song is renamed "Carrot For a Nose", with the word "cock" being badly replaced by Simon Lane singing "nose" over it, even if the offending word is sung by Sparkles*, who has a different voice and is a better singer. None of the rhymes of the song change to match the censorship, no other bad words such as "dong" or "bellend" are removed, and the rest of the lyrics are exactly the same, meaning that Simon was aiming for the snowman's face and missed, hitting his waist, yet he somehow has a nose anyway.
• Max of Yo Videogames was extremely censor-happy in the Gal*Gun: Double Peace series. Justified because he didn't want his channel banned from Twitch for illicit content.

• Later editions of Don Bluth’s video on how to draw Kimberly from Space Ace removes the scene where he draws her panties as she’s doing a high kick as he talks about it.
• Forumer (a free internet forum provider) decided to update their terms of service to become more child and general audiences friendly. They also decided to run a program that changed all sorts of words on every single Forumer forum to "work safe" alternatives. The change was based around cooking - for example, 'fuck' became 'bake'. But some of them were just bizarre. 'Little' was auto-changed to 'cilantro', 'video' was changed to 'recipe', 'girl' was changed to 'steak'...