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On Disney+, Not All Butts Are Created Equal

An attempt to understand the puzzling censorship policies of a streamer that covered Daryl Hannah’s bottom with digital hair in Splash, but didn’t touch the nudity in other films.

By Drew Taylor

April 14, 2020

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On Monday morning Twitter lost its collective mind when YouTube host Allison Pregler tweeted that while watching Splash on Disney+, she noticed that Daryl Hannah’s bare butt had been censored using some kind of bizarre digital hair technology. It’s the the kind of thing you could easily miss if you were absentmindedly revisiting the movie while, say, emptying the dishwasher or folding clothes: As Hannah’s mermaid bounds away from Tom Hanks, back into the ocean, the top part of her hair bounces while the new, digital hair seems affixed to her buttocks, even after she makes contact with the water. Out of context, the sequence looks insane—and if you look more closely, you’ll see that it’s but one of several baffling changes made to the movie now that it lives on Disney+.

Other scenes in this version of Splash have effectively been zoomed in as a way to prevent viewers from even glimpsing any offending body part. In one the streaming service blurs out Hannah’s butt crack. And despite these changes, the film as presented on Disney+ has been given a PG-13 rating—even though Splash was given a PG rating when it was originally released in 1984. (Fun fact: The first movie ever released with a PG-13 rating, Red Dawn, was released a few months after Splash, on August 10, 1984.) If this wasn’t confusing enough, a source recently told me that Splash will go through yet another rating change this week, and will soon sport a TV-PG rating.

The Splash controversy illuminates an issue that has plagued this streaming platform since it launched last fall: the mystifying approach to what content Disney+ censors, and why. Disney+, which now has 50 million subscribers worldwide, presents some older titles completely unaltered, even if they contain content modern eyes may classify as objectionable. Others appear in their original form but with a mild disclaimer attached. Still more have been fully edited—as Splash Butt-Gate proves.

So what determines which program gets which treatment? Well, Splash’s biggest sin is nudity—although, Disney+ warns, it also contains some brief language and “tobacco depictions.” But there is actually a fair amount of nudity elsewhere on Disney+—including bare bottoms in Pixar’s Brave, Bart’s penis in The Simpsons Movie, and most of Brendan Fraser’s rump on full display in George of the Jungle. In the “Night on Bald Mountain” section of Fantasia, you even see the bare breasts of some demonic ghouls—nipples and all.

The key here seems to be the context of that nudity. In December a spokesperson from Disney+ told The Ringer that all of the content on the service would be the equivalent of PG-13 or milder, adding: “I’m pretty sure the PG-13 rating dictates no nudity in [a] sexual context.” The nudity in Splash has a romantic angle, rather than being played strictly for laughs (or being part of an 80-year-old symphonic art film). So while there’s still sex in the version of Splash you can watch on Disney+, there are no bare butts.

Sex has famously made Disney+ squeamish. That’s reportedly the reason the service halted the production of a new, more grown-up Lizzie McGuire sequel series; it’s also apparently why High Fidelity and the Love, Simon spin-off, Love, Victor, were both booted from Disney+ and placed instead on the more adult-skewing Hulu. In another snip that made waves online, a casting couch gag was removed from Toy Story 2 following director John Lasseter’s exit from the company amid sexual-misconduct allegations. (Lasseter acknowledged the allegations in a memo, citing “missteps” in his leadership.) The edit happened not long before Disney+ launched the digital HD version of the movie in 2019, and carried through to the streaming service.

But this squeamishness can’t necessarily explain everything. Take 1987’s Adventures in Babysitting—which, like Splash, was originally released through Disney’s more mature Touchstone Pictures label, and will begin appearing on the streaming platform in the U.S. on June 1, 2021. Disney+ users in other regions that already have access to the movie, including Canada, have noted (and we have independently confirmed) that the version that’s streaming is the broadcast TV presentation of the film, which removes the F-word from one of its most famous lines: “Don’t fuck with the babysitter.” But yet another Touchstone favorite, Three Men and a Baby, is available right now unaltered on Disney+—ghost boy and all—despite the presence of a subplot featuring drug dealers and a bag full of heroin.

That’s the most frustrating thing about these Disney+ edits—there’s little consistency as to what is censored and what isn’t. Animated Disney classics like Peter Pan, The Jungle Book, and Dumbo appear on the service in their original form, alongside disclaimers that they “may contain outdated cultural depictions.” (Some groups, including the Middle Eastern North African Arts Advocacy Coalition and American Indians in Film and Television, have argued such a disclaimer should also be attached to more recent animated fare, such as Aladdin and Pocahontas.) Other titles on the service, like The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin—a marginal live-action Western from 1967—and the 1932 animated short Santa’s Workshop, have reportedly been trimmed to remove offensive material. (Bullwhip Griffin, like Splash, is preceded by a note that it has been “edited for content.”)

Other changes are even more head-scratching. On Disney+, a moment in Lilo & Stitch that originally showed Lilo climbing into a dryer was edited so that Lilo instead hides behind a pizza box in an open cabinet, presumably due to fears that children would imitate her onscreen action in real life. (This alteration may lead to even more questions, as one Twitter user remarked: “Great, now it looks like [she’s going into] an oven.”) But several frames from the groundbreaking animated series Gargoyles have been reinstated, returning two bloody frames to the series that had been removed from the original broadcast. And every Star Wars and Marvel Studios movie, along with most of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, are available unmolested on Disney+—amputations, beheadings, and gunshots intact. The MPAA has always been more lenient toward graphic violence while at the same time criminalizing even the mildest sexuality (something explored in Kirby Dick’s terrific 2006 documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated), so Disney+ is falling in line with the industry’s norms. It’s dumb, for sure, but there’s a precedent.

When asked for comment, Disney+ declined to share the specific guidelines it uses to determine what content is permissible to display on the service, and how it decides what to edit and what to leave alone—leaving the process shrouded in mystery. But with new material appearing on the streaming platform every week, spotting these edits and alterations is sure to become a continual game of whack-a-mole for eagle-eyed Disney fanatics. At least it will give us something to do.