Supercalifragilispoliticallycorrectcious
Sam Aurelius Milam III
In
December of 2008, I transferred a recording of Mary Poppins from
a videocassette to a DVD. Both the videocassette and the DVD belonged
to a friend. When I transfer shows for myself, I transfer them from
the DVD to the videocassette. I prefer videocassettes because when
I remove a videocassette from the machine and put it back in later, it
automatically remembers where it stopped and it starts there automatically.
A DVD can't do that. Most people might not think that's a very important
deficiency in DVDs. However, I sometimes don't get to watch an entire
show, nonstop. When I began writing this article, I checked and noted
that I had three videocassettes waiting on the top of my television.
For one reason or another, I hadn't finished watching whatever was on them
before I removed them from the machine. Each videocassette had been
sitting there for long enough that, at the time, I didn't remember where
I'd stopped watching any show contained on any of the videocassettes.
In fact, I didn't even remember what shows were on the videocassettes.
However, I wasn't worried. I knew that, when I finally got around
to watching them again, they'd automatically remember where to start.
With DVDs, I don't even bother. If I have to remove a DVD from the
machine before I finish watching the show, then I just put it back on the
shelf and hope that the next time I'll be able to watch the entire show
before something interrupts me.
Now,
I'll get back to my original reason for writing this article. After
the movie, the videocassette had a short documentary called Hollywood
goes to a World Premiere. Since it was about the movie, I included
it in what I transferred from the videocassette to the DVD.
One
of the things shown in the documentary was a performance, taken directly
from the movie, of the song Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
I've heard the song before, so I'm familiar with the lyrics. At one
point, singing about the long word, Mary Poppins sings, "...but better
use it carefully or it could change your life..." The next line is
sung by one of the animated characters. He says, as an aside, "for
example," and then he sings "One night I said it to a girl and now me girl's
me wife!" whereupon his huge wife whops him on the head with a tambourine.
In another hasty aside, he meekly asserts "and a lovely thing she is, too!"
After that, the song continues. Notice that the rhyme and rhythm
require that the second line mentioned above must follow the first line
mentioned above. The lines that follow the second line don't fit
the rhyme and rhythm unless the animated character sings his line.
I
noticed that, in the documentary, the entire sequence including the line
sung by the animated character, his physical abuse by his large wife, and
his assertion that she's a lovely thing, were all omitted. There
was actually a blip in the documentary where the cut had been made.
After that, the song continued exactly as in the movie. Only that
one line and the associated action were omitted. To verify my suspicion,
I went back through the movie until I found the song. For the benefit
of anyone who wants to verify it for himself, it's about 58 minutes from
the beginning of the movie. The deleted sequence is only about five
seconds long. The documentary could have been shortened by many seconds,
if necessary, by eliminating views of the audience. I don't believe
that the sequence was omitted to shorten the documentary. I believe
that some bunch of wild-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth, arm-waving, evangelistic,
PC censors decided that the sequence was offensive to some other group
of sniveling whiners and demanded that it be removed.
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| February 2009 | Frontiersman, c/o 4984 Peach Mountain Drive, Gainesville, Georgia 30507 | Page 1 |
