HBO pulls episode in wake of Bush head flap
HBO has pulled the finale to Game of Thrones season one from On Demand and HBO Go, as well as ceased production on season one DVDs and Blu-rays in the wake of the George W. Bush-head-on-a-spike “scandal”. So if you are planning on catching up with the series right now, best to wait until the episode re-appears with the offending noggin removed.
UPDATE: The episode is now back online and On Demand, with the head still there, but digitally modified to look less like the former President.
Earlier, HBO apologized for the incident, saying, “We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologized immediately for this inadvertent careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production.”
Showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who pointed out the head in the commentary to episode 10, “Fire and Blood”, said this in a statement, “We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc. We can’t afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk. After the scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W. Bush.
In the DVD commentary, we mentioned this, though we should not have. We meant no disrespect to the former President and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise.”
Winter Is Coming: I had hoped to avoid having to make a post about this, since a) it is old news and b) it is a silly controversy, but I’ve decided to reverse course. For one, the episode being pulled directly affects Thrones fans and also I want to keep discussion about this incident contained in one thread. A word of warning though, I don’t feel like having to moderate a political discussion on a freaking Game of Thrones site, so I’m not even going to bother. This thread will be unmoderated! If you can’t handle the heat, then stay away.
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