Every movie has to undergo an editing process to refine it down to something that tells a story. Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller famously shot 480 hours of footage that his wife edited down to a 2 hour film. Not every movie has to cut so much, of course, and some edits are done to appease censors and studios rather than to just tighten up a story. That said, every so often a scene has to be removed from a film for a truly perplexing reason and it can either be to the betterment or the detriment of the final product.
10. Tank Girl Deleted a Kangaroo Mutant Sex Scene
You may not remember the 1994 sci-fi/action/comedy Tank Girl, based on a comic book of the same name starring Lori Petty in the title role and Ice-T as a kangaroo man but it was a weird one. The comic was a true underground, punk-inspired trip of a story but the adaptation did not achieve the same aesthetic at all. The vagaries of Hollywood productions got in the way and made something still weird but less appealing to the fan base and non-fans alike. It has a cult following these days but, as is often the case, that’s code for the fact not many people like it.
One of the big hurdles for the movie is the fact that, in the source material, Tank Girl has a sexual relationship with Ice-T’s character and including human with not-quite-human sex is always a risky play in a film. The director wanted to go all in on the comic’s absurd and overt sexuality but the film studio balked and edited the movie behind her back. That means a kangaroo man sex scene was dropped, despite the fact that the production spent a few thousand dollars to make a prosthetic kangaroo penis for the scene.
Arguably, if anyone had read the comics, they would have known all of this stuff would be in the movie. And they probably read the script, too. Maybe just seeing it in the footage proved to be too much.
9. Disney Removed a Scene From “The Program” After Someone Died
Sports movies are usually a niche thing but every year one or two come out that seem to do well. In 1993, Disney was the parent company behind the college football movie The Program. Critics didn’t like it, but audiences seemed to appreciate it more. But storyline aside, the movie is mostly famous these days for one specific scene.
The movie, starring James Caan and Halle Berry, was a dramatic and grim look at college football. The famous scene involved one of the players laying down on a busy highway, reading a magazine right on the centerline as cars speed by him. That sounds stupid, maybe, but innocuous enough for a movie, right? Well,the problem was that kids started doing it in real life. Two teenage boys were badly injured but one ended up dying as a result of trying to recreate the scene.
Disney responded by immediately editing the scene from the film while it was still in theaters, about a month after it premiered. Later releases of the film on DVD, Blu-Ray and on streaming are all devoid of the scene as well, which has been all but stricken from existence.
8. “The Big Bang Theory” Pilot Dropped a Scene For Syndication
Heading to the small screen, the Big Bang Theory was one of the most popular sitcoms of the 2000s and the awkward, ultra nerd characters really struck a chord with some audiences such that it lasted an impressive 12 seasons.
Despite the success, there was one scene that was dropped from the show’s pilot episode on subsequent airings of the show, despite it being available for audiences to view for a short time. The show’s creator Chuck Lorre axed a scene from that first episode in which the characters of Sheldon and Leonard find themselves at a sperm bank.
You can still find the scene online and there’s nothing intrinsically unusual about it compared to the rest of the series, at least not on the surface. But if you’re a fan of the show and hadn’t seen that scene before, it would definitely strike you as out of character for Sheldon to be in a sperm bank. The character that the show turns him into never would have gone to such a place at all, so it made sense to remove the scene after the fact.
7. Ed O’Neil Was Edited From a Movie Because Audiences Laughed at Him
Ed O’Neill rose to fame as Al Bundy on Married… With Children, a role that clearly defined him for a good part of his career. It wasn’t until Modern Family a full 12 years later that he found another major role in film or TV. That wasn’t for lack of trying, either. Al Bundy really ruined his shot at being taken seriously as an actor, a fact which was best displayed on the cutting room floor of the movie Flight of the Intruder.
Flight of the Intruder was a 1991 action film, made at what was arguably the height of O’Neill’s fame as Al Bundy. His role in the movie wasn’t even a big one, just a quick scene he wasn’t even being credited with. But audiences in test screenings laughed when he showed up on scene because, to them, Al Bundy had just appeared out of nowhere. It was such a problem the scene had to be deleted and then reshot with a different actor.
6. FOX Cut Scenes From “The Predator” That Featured a Sex Offender
Shane Black is not the most prolific filmmaker, but he does make a splash with his movies. Black’s first film as director was Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and he went on to direct Iron Man 3 and The Predator, while also writing some beloved classics like The Monster Squad and Lethal Weapon.
Black’s work on The Predator was not particularly well received critically, but the movie did receive press for reasons no one, especially FOX, the studio behind the film, wanted. Black cast an actor in the movie named Steven Wilder Striegel. Previously, Striegel had also been in Black’s Iron Man 3 and The Nice Guys. He never played a major role in the films and he was cast because he and Black were buddies in real life. He was also a sex offender.
In the movie he had a very short scene where he tried to hit on Olivia Munn’s character. It lasted just a minute or two. It was Munn herself who discovered the actor’s history and then told the studio. Striegel, as it turned out, had pleaded guilty to trying to lure a 14-year-old girl on the internet.
Black was aware of Striegel’s past, as he had been when he cast him in those other films, and claimed he was just trying to help out a friend. FOX, for their part, cut ties with Striegel immediately, and deleted his scene.
5. Deleted Frames Make the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” Villain Look Like He Eats a Bug
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark is a hugely popular film that’s still a standout classic even today. One of the more infamous scenes in the film features the villainous Belloq, played by Paul Freeman, talking to Harrison Ford’s Jones. In the scene, a fly lands on Belloq’s lip and then seems to crawl into his mouth. You don’t see it fly out again and it seems like the character, or rather the actor, actually ate the bug.
In reality, a fly did land on Freeman’s face and director Steven Spielberg looked at it as an opportunity. A couple of frames of footage were deleted from the final scene, just enough to hide the fact that the fly flew away and instead make it look like he eats it. The sound team for the movie even included a more noticeable buzzing in the scene as well to really hammer the effect home as something of a joke on the unseemly character.
4. Several Minutes Were Cut From “Rain Man” When it Was Shown on Airplanes
In the movie Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman’s autistic character shares a wealth of random knowledge with his brother in various scenes but one of the more memorable ones includes the two of them at an airport with Hoffman rattling off statistics about airplane crashes as his brother tries to get him on a plane.
The movie would go on to be very popular, one of Tom Cruise’s biggest hits of the 80s and, as was common for any popular movie of the time, it was shown as an in-flight movie sometimes. But no one wants to be on a plane listening to someone explain how often planes crash and kill people, so 15 airlines ended up editing the movie to remove the scene so no one on board would have to get stressed out as they watched.
Not showing them in the airport does alter the narrative to a fairly significant degree since it explains why the characters had to drive and not fly, and the director wasn’t happy about it. A lot of context is loss and later scenes make no sense, but apparently airlines were more worried about keeping passengers docile than fully engaged in plot.
3. “Dr. Strangelove” Was Supposed to End With a Pie Fight
Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove is considered one of the greatest satirical films ever, and is a classic of the black comedy genre. So it’s weird to imagine that there was another ending that went completely slapstick and included a pie fight.
Kubrick shot the ending scene in which everyone on set ended up covered in custard. He even had a photographer on set taking pictures which can still be found online. But the director ended up not liking the scene, feeling it was out of place in the greater picture. It was aired for test audiences right around the time of JFK’s assassination as well, and that seemed to have made the whole thing hit differently. He cut the scene, rewrote the film’s ending, and the pie scene has lived on in infamy, having been aired once in 1999.
2. LaToya Jackson’s Scene in “Bruno” was Cut When Her Brother Died
Sacha Baron Cohen is not a man known for having much tact and subtlety on camera, but we have to remember that’s mostly the characters he plays, not the man himself. Behind the scenes he clearly has a different mindset as witnessed by the scene he deleted from his 2009 movie Bruno.
Bruno is another of Cohen’s characters who, like Borat, blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. In this case, Bruno is an Austrian fashion journalist who is very openly gay and inappropriate most of the time.
There was to be a scene in the film featuring Bruno taking LaToya Jackson’s phone and getting her brother Michael’s phone number. On the day the movie was set to premiere, Michael Jackson died.
In response to the death, the studio cut the scene very quickly and never restored it to subsequent releases though it was available to watch as a special feature on the DVD release.
1. The Reason Yukon Cornelius Licks His Pickaxe Got Cut in 1965
You have probably seen the 1964 stop-motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer movie because they seem to have aired it literally every year since 1964 multiple times on multiple channels. It’s considered a holiday classic and features the story of the eponymous reindeer along with some friends including a fellow named Yukon Cornelius.
Since 1964, audiences have been perplexed by one aspect of the film relating to the prospector character of Cornelius. The man is constantly licking the end of his pickaxe and, in the context of the film, it makes no sense whatsoever. But that’s only because we lost the scene that explains it.
In 1965 there was apparently a write-in campaign from people who had watched the movie when it aired the previous year. They wanted more Misfit Toys. Jules Bass, one of the producers of the film, recalled that they tweaked the movie and that meant the loss of something called “The Peppermint Scene.”
It turns out, in the original broadcast, Yukon Cornelius discovers a peppermint mine. After that, he keeps licking his pickaxe because there’s peppermint on it. But with the loss of the scene he just seems like a bit of a weirdo.