This TV gadget censors bad words with 1980's tech

Think of the children!
Links 'n' stuff:
That Teletext video I mentioned:
• The Rise and Fall of T...
The Teletext Archive
archive.teletextarchaeologist...
(lots of cool information there as well)
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[@TechnologyConnections]

I realized in the edit that the Guardian is actually muting audio the instant a bad word is detected - the audio gets muted slightly

[@jaredwilliams8621]

My wife had one of these growing up. Their family gave up on it once they tried to watch Toy Story with it on and it decided to censor "Woody" and her parents didn't want to explain why that would be censored...

[@brick6347]

My college used to aggressively block the most obscure words, one of them was "virgin", which downsized the USA by two states, blocked an airline, and most Catholic websites. I asked why, I was told to prevent pornography. I tried pointing out that not many virgins work in that particular industry, but to no avail.

[@geegnomes]

My mom bought one of these when I was a teenager. We had years long running jokes about turning f-bombs into wow, sex into hugs, and the Finding Nemo line that went from "he touched the butt" to "he touched the tail." This device did more to push me toward being fine with swearing than anything else in my life.

[@gabejudkins]

My parents totally had this while I was growing up! It was so annoying, and it would mute "sex" and replace it with "hugs", regardless of the context 😂

[@genatzwale]

So if you reverse input with output, does it start adding more profanity?

[@jasonm.7358]

A friend of mine had one of these. As mentioned elsewhere, replacing sex with hugs was pretty bad, but the worst example of it he saw was, he was watching Sesame Street with his toddler one morning, scene change, a muppet rooster walks across the screen, stops, turns to the camera, the audio mutes, and the captioning reads “clown-a-doodle-doo!” I still laugh thinking about it.

[@rnightyaubs]

this thing just unlocked a memory! it's what introduced my entire 7th grade class in Christian school to the term "puss" as profanity--watching Shrek 2 when Puss in Boots' appears and says his name...it got censored. not many of us would've known about that otherwise so we asked our teacher what it meant 😭 classic.

[@HelmutCrisis]

I knew a girl in high school from a conservative family who had one of these things. I’d never heard of such a thing before. I saw it in action while watching ‘Finding Nemo’ of all things where I believe it cut out the word “butt” and replaced it with “tail”.

[@LGR]

Ohh jeez, THIS thing. Totally had one in our household and friend's households in the late 90s/early aughts 😄 It had the unintended side effect of putting increased emphasis on language, so my buddies and I constantly found ourselves more focused on deciphering what was actually being said anytime it muted. We learned all KINDS of colorful new language as a result that otherwise may have passed by without much thought. Thanks TV Guardian,

[@fairlyodd922]

My parents absolutely had one of these on our TV when I was a kid and I had almost completely forgotten about it until this moment. What a weird nostalgic feeling!

[@clairetravis1321]

My mom got one of those when I was a kid, dad got so fed up with it that he threw it out in the back yard and destroyed it with a hammer.

[@Demorid]

Man, this actually brought back repressed memories of my childhood of watching movies created for kids being wrongly censored by this strange box.

[@grandetaco4416]

There was an article I read in the 90s about a kids word learning program that had a typing section to allow kids to type their own sentences and have the computer read the sentence back to the child via the sound card. The code for this would censor bad words from being typed in or read aloud by the computer. Apparently the company that produced software didn't QA very well because if kids typed too many normal words into the note pad program it would over load the programs buffered memory and instead of stopping phrases from being spoken it read the list of bad words in its memory out loud for all to hear. One woman described it as the George Carlin's list of bad words you are not allowed to say on TV. Apparently this thing would angrily read all the naughty words on the list very quickly.

[@calsavestheworld]

"overscan" was code for "the boss is paying attention" at the tv station where I used to work. It means, "look like you care".

[@jessstrap2088]

My psychology teacher in highschool (inner city Catholic, class of 07) used this to show us relevant movies with "objectionable language" (things like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, or A Beautiful Mind). We knew what was being said. He knew we knew. We knew he knew we knew. The administration knew he..... But, it served it's true purpose as: to be a fig leaf/plausible deniability and allow us to get a better, more contextualized, more empathetic education.

[@acidhelm]

Given the cheapness of the device, I'd bet that the bad words are stored in plain text. Send it to Adrian's Digital Basement and ask him to dump the ROMs. :D

[@sd4830]

Holy cow, I have something to add to this! Our family was friends with another family, and their family came over to watch Saving Private Ryan with us. They made us use this device for the movie, and it was the most unintentionally hilarious thing. "Fu** Hit**r" became "Wow Hit**r". I'm so glad this device saved our innocent ears while watching people mowed down by machine guns for 3 hours.

[@human_shaped]

It'd be fun to reverse engineer and pull out the list of words and/or rules. If I could find one I might give it a whirl.

[@willb.nimble6749]

You know what's fascinating to me? The fact that I just learned that KZbin is ALSO censoring expletive's and this video was the first thing that came to mind. There's no way for the user to stop it, we're all just stuck behind a TV Guardian, and must suffer.