About That Civility Thing…

The U.K. Guardian is reporting today that the HBO cable channel has apologized after Game of Thrones used a prosthetic head of George W Bush on a stake in the series.

The article reports:

“We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste,” the cable channel said in a statement. “We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologised immediately for this inadvertent, careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production.”

How is this inadvertent and careless? Didn’t the producers have any idea what was being shown on the screen? Did they not recognize President Bush? I hate to be cynical (but I seem to be pretty good at it), but my feeling is that they are sorry they got caught–not sorry for what they did.

The article further reports:

HBO’s strong apology followed an earlier statement of contrition by the co-creators of Game of Thrones, David Benioff and DB Weiss. They admitted that the head was Bush’s but said there was no political commentary intended.

“We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc,” the pair said in a statement. “We can’t afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk. … After the [Bush] scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W Bush. … We meant no disrespect to the former president and apologise if anything we said or did suggested otherwise.”

I definitely have a problem with this whole thing–they used George W. Bush’s head at the end of a stake but meant no disrespect? Wow! What would it take to portray disrespect? They simply had an extra head of George W. Bush lying around? Good grief.

 

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