Disney+ removes Daryl Hannah’s butt from Splash with bad CGI. Long before audiences knew him as the Oscar-winning star behind such smash hits as Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks kicked his career off with Splash. The at times risqué family comedy hit theaters in 1984 and marked Hanks’ first lead role in a feature film. Starring alongside Daryl Hannah, Hanks played Allen Bauer – a young New Yorker who finds himself in a relationship with a mermaid (Hannah) after she saves him from drowning on two separate occasions.
Aside from a very young Hanks and Hannah, Splash also featured comedy legends John Candy and Eugene Levy. The film was nominated for a best original screenplay Oscar – no small feat for a comedy, especially during the 1980s. Though Splash is fun for everyone, it does have several small scenes that contain nudity. Despite this, Disney has added it to the library of their streaming service, Disney+. But of course, this being Disney, even small scenes of nudity must be weeded out of the family-friendly service.
According to Twitter user Allison Pregler, the Disney+ cut of Splash features alterations to the film, which censor its small amounts of nudity. Unfortunately, in one scene in particular, the efforts to block out the sight of Hannah’s naked butt utilize some pretty bad CGI. The fix is apparently intended to just look like an extension of Hannah’s very long hair, but instead it just ends up looking like a strange fuzzy blur. There’s nothing very subtle about it, and as you can see in the footage below, the end results just end up drawing more attention to Hannah’s backside:
While Hannah is exposed very briefly in the original cut of the film, Disney has always maintained a strong stance on providing family-friendly content. For some, the editing of a film in this way might be seen as a form of butchery, but Disney+ subscribers shouldn’t be surprised by the changes. Other more racy scenes in the film were also altered (mostly through close cropping), but the above scene is by far the most noticeably modified. Upon its original release, Splash belonged to Touchstone Pictures – a branch of Disney that was used to release more mature themed films. Although the content in Splash was acceptable for Touchstone in its day, today Disney has taken the film back, and they clearly wanted it changed.
For purists, it’s easy to get annoyed by Disney’s tinkering with a great comedy. It isn’t so much the editing that will likely grate on people’s nerves, though, it’s the manner in which it was done. As previously mentioned, Disney’s family-friendly position hasn’t changed for decades – in fact, the Mouse House was built on the very foundation of content that’s acceptable to all. At the same time, however, it’s arguable that a line needs to be drawn somewhere. If films that are deemed inappropriate need to be edited before they are streamed on Disney+, then the edits should be tasteful and a proper degree of effort should be put in to rendering them acceptable. If this can’t be done, then Disney should reconsider even bothering to stream content like Splash at all.
Source: Allison Pregler