LOS ANGELES—The Disney Plus streaming service is barely six months old, and already the “family friendly” online channel is displaying a tendency to erase any hint of the female anatomy that is not covered in clothing, or in some other way. Viewers took to social media last week after noticing an odd bit of digital censorship in an episode of the long-running kids’ series, Wizards of Waverly Place.
The show ran for 106 episodes on the basic cable Disney Channel from 2007 to 2012, and all four seasons are now streamed via the new Disney Plus subscription service. But in a scene featuring series star Maria Canals-Barrera, viewers noticed a slight blur strategically placed over the actress’s chest.
In the shot, Canals-Barrera wears a purple dress with a low-cut, but otherwise tasteful neckline that apparently revealed a hint of her cleavage — until someone at the Disney streaming service saw fit to blot it out with a digital blur. But the move appears to have had the opposite effect from that intended by the censors.
“Keep in mind that they made the show and the scene was fine for broadcast before,” wrote MovieWeb’s Kevin Burwick. “Now, they have put a weird little blur on the screen that brings even more attention to the ‘offending’ imagery of a slight hint of a woman's breasts.”
“It honestly just draws attention to it more than if it wasn’t uncensored,” wrote one viewer on Twitter, as quoted by Yahoo! News.
“This REALLY draws the eye to the so-called ‘offensive’ area,” wrote another. “They should have just left things alone. Completely insane.”
But the incident was nothing new for Disney Plus. In April, fans watching the 1984 film Splash, starring then-newcomer Tom Hanks, with Darryl Hannah as a mermaid who falls in love with him, noticed that in one scene, a fleeting view of Hanna’s exposed derriere was censored by digitally extending her back-length blonde hair to cover her posterior as well — as seen in the video below.
But Disney Plus is not alone in its seemingly petty censorship attempts. Also last month, viewers watching a streaming version of 1989’s Back to the Future II on Netflix noticed that a scene in which star Michael J. Fox flips through a French magazine called “Oh La La,” had been edited to remove the magazine’s slightly racy cover.
In that case, however, the film’s original studio, Universal — not Netflix — took responsibility for the censorship
Photo By Gregory Botha / Pixabay
