For many of us, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a great excuse to discover or revisit classic movies. Chances are you’ll be using a streaming service to access these timeless favourites, which means you may be watching a version that’s been altered from the one that first appeared in theatres. Disney+ is arguably the biggest culprit in this regard.

Disney’s video-on-demand platform first came under fire late last year, after Star Wars fans discovered the original trilogy of films wasn’t available to stream as released. Instead, only the markedly different, highly controversial Special Edition re-releases of A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were on offer, complete with all-new changes that everyone agrees are just the worst.

But I’m not here to talk about Star Wars (or at least, not entirely). Instead, I want to talk about the news this week that Disney tinkered with 1984 fantasy/romcom Splash before adding it to Disney+, removing a few shots of (very) mild nudity. Why focus on this? Because there are bigger issues with Disney’s decision to censor Splash than simply how clunkily it’s been done – not all of which are immediately obvious.

People (and mermaids) shouldn’t be ashamed of their bodies

Directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah, Splash is as charming a family feature as you’re likely to encounter. Indeed, it’s hardly a movie you’d expect to need retroactive censorship. Yet the powers that be at the House of Mouse weren’t comfortable with the prospect of kiddies witnessing a few brief shots that feature mermaid Madison’s bare bottom.

Their solution? Have Disney’s in-house production team digitally tweak the offending scenes to remove any nudity (and curtail any potential complaints from outraged parents). The resulting CGI – which at its worst, extends Hannah’s hair to cover her exposed rear, making it look like her butt is covered in wavy blonde fur – is laughably bad. However, that’s only scratching the surface of why this was a bad move on Disney’s part.

Now, on the face of it, Disney’s decision to expunge Daryl Hannah’s derriere from Disney+ is far from shocking. After all, Disney+ is billed as a “family-oriented” platform, which automatically rules out any nudity whatsoever. This is an overly simplistic stance for Disney to take, though, and it even verges on being irresponsible. We can all agree bombarding children with images of naked bodies that are sexually charged or overtly erotic is a bad idea – except the nudity in Splash is neither of these things. They’re not protecting kids from anything.

Instead, by sanitising a movie that’s already perfectly harmless, Disney has (intentionally or not) perpetuated the persistent, harmful idea that all nudity is inherently bad, and that, on some level, we should all be ashamed of our bodies. Is the average 6-year-old sitting down to watch a movie about a guy falling in love with a mermaid thinking about any of this stuff? Absolutely not. Yet the choice to downplay an instance of innocent, body-positive nudity feels less like Disney acting in children’s best interests, and more like catering to their irate, conservative parents.

So just on that ground alone, censoring Splash was a bad call – and it’s not even the most compelling argument for leaving the movie exactly the way it was.

Changing movies post re-release is a risky business

No, the bigger takeaway here is that Disney shouldn’t be messing around with artists’ work, even if they own the work itself. For starters, it’s disrespectful to the artists affected. As with every other element of Splash within his control, Ron Howard intentionally included those fleeting glimpses of Hannah in the buff, not because he’s a shameless perv, but because he wanted to elicit a specific intellectual and emotional response from the audience.

What’s more, tweaking movies after their release doesn’t just alter the director’s vision – it changes the way we, as viewers, connect with the movie itself. Right now, you might be thinking “It’s just a butt, dude (and a mermaid butt, at that)!” And that’s a fair point. But I’d argue that it’s a mermaid butt the director wanted us to see (at least partially), and the fact we now can’t see it detracts on some level from the wider viewing experience.

When you get right down to it, a movie is just a collection of details; some big and some small. If you change any of these details – even if something as seemingly trivial as obscuring the partly visible buttocks of a human/fish hybrid creature – you’re changing the entire film. And when you’re talking about altering a hit film that critics and audiences alike overwhelmingly agreed was just fine the first time around, odds are you’ll wind up with a movie that’s less satisfying for viewers, no matter how many times they’ve seen it before.

This even extends to post-release revisions made with the input of the filmmakers themselves. Remember the heavily altered Star Wars: Special Editions I mentioned earlier? Those were overseen by series creator George Lucas himself, and fans near-unanimously hate them – especially since Lucas spent years actively suppressing access to the original incarnations. So, if the actual people responsible can’t get away with making post-release revisions to their movies, what chance does a random in-house crew at Disney+ have of getting it right?

Disney+ needs better parental controls

What’s the solution, then? It’s simple: Disney needs to stop changing movies and start developing better parental controls for Disney+.

Sure, the platform is targeted at families, but that doesn’t mean its existing catalogue of content is appropriate for the entire family, especially families comprised of both teens and pre-teens. To continue the Star Wars example, it’s okay for the average six-year-old and 16 year-old to see a brief shot of a severed limb in A New Hope, but both of them watching Anakin Skywalker burnt to a crisp in Revenge of the Sith? Not so much. Yet that’s a scenario that could easily happen thanks to the undercooked parental lock system in place on Disney+ right now.

This doesn’t mean that Disney should go down the same route it did with Splash and edit Revenge of the Sith to remove or obscure its more graphic content (lord knows, the fans don’t deserve more changes), or any other family-oriented movie for that matter. On the contrary, they should upload these films as they are, and invest a little bit more time and money into properly fleshing out the current suite of Disney+ parental controls. This would ensure that potentially controversial movies (like Splash) and outright inappropriate flicks (like the aforementioned Revenge of the Sith) don’t wind up in front of kids who aren’t old enough to enjoy them yet.

Not only would this future-proof Disney+ for the day when it inevitably morphs into a less family-oriented service, but it’ll also keep more puritanical parents off Disney’s back without resorting to retroactive edits. The upshot? The rest of us will finally be free to enjoy movies as they were initially conceived – mermaid butts and all.

Update: since this article was published, Disney has announced the launch of a new Disney+ content hub, Star, targeted at older viewers and accompanied by the introduction of more comprehensive parental controls.

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