Bowdlerization is the process of eliminating portions of someone else's work, and/or substituting inoffensive replacements without affecting the entire story. The word comes from Thomas Bowdler, who altered Shakespeare's works to make them less offensive: Ophelia doesn't commit suicide, 'damned' and 'God' as explicitives are re-rendered in family-friendly ways. His revised collection is called The Family Shakespeare (available via Google Books). If you've ever watched badly-dubbed big-screen movies adapted for television, you've experienced bowdlerization first-hand in every 'gosh' and 'geez' that has been broadcast. I doubt you can apply this term to 'Han shot first' in Star Wars or the walkie-talkie shotgun change in E.T.: those were altered by the original artist, not a third party.
#
No comments at this time.
|