When I’m King of the Universe, it will be a law that all home video releases of films must include the option of watching the edited-for-broadcast version wherever one exists. I first began to lean toward this policy when, stoned as fuck, I caught The Breakfast Club late at night on a local UHF station (yeah, I’m kind of old.…) and found myself howling with laughter at some of the preposterous dialogue substitutions—for example, the immortal “hot beef injection” line was bowdlerized into “some hot wild affection,” as if the original line wasn’t a euphemism in the first place. But the need for such a law was confirmed to me when, one Christmas, my then-girlfriend gifted me a boxed set of the 1983 Al Pacino remake of Scarface.

It merits mentioning, so I may as well mention it here: Scarface isn’t nearly as good a movie as its reputation would suggest. Which is not to say that it’s bad. It’s not. It’s just not a great movie. If you’re in the mood for astoundingly over-the-top tough-guy posturing and GIANT FUCKING MAYHEM, it’s one of the single most badass films in history, but as a narrative work in the immigrant crime drama genre, it’s far eclipsed by plenty of films you could name, a fair few of which also star Al Pacino. And of course, it distinguished itself in its day as one of the most unabashedly profanity-laden mainstream films ever released, almost in a class all it’s own before the f-bomb-a-thon The Big Lebowski emerged as a challenger. And one of the DVD extras in that boxed set was a montage comparing the original dialogue to the censored scenes in the movie’s broadcast TV version. It’s some pretty entertaining shit. I honestly would have thought it couldn’t be done, and really, I was kinda right.
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Scarface School Play
‘Say hello to my little friend’: Behind-the-scenes of ‘Scarface’