The showrunners and producers on HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones feel pretty bad about skewering former president George W. Bush’s head on a spike. But an apology just wasn’t enough, so they worked Photoshop magic on the head to give Dubya a facelift.
In the season 1 finale of Game of Thrones , [ SPOILERS ] pint-sized punk King Joffrey brings his betrothed, Sansa Stark, outside of the castle in order to show her the decapitated head of her father. As the audience, you got to see it too, and if you like the show, you know how emotional the scene was and how you weren’t really paying any attention to any of the other heads. Well, a few blocks down from Ned Stark sits George W. Bush in a surfer wig, according to the DVD commentary. Showdudes David Benioff and D.B. Weiss admitted it on the commentary, and massive controversy followed, according to MTV .
At first, they posed some weak-sauce excuse about how they can only use the heads they have lying around, but come on. How do you just happen to have a decapitated Dubya head lying around the prop room? After that, they apologized profusely, admitting that the highly disrespectful move carried with it no political message, reports NY Daily .
Now, HBO is bending-over-bass-ackwwards to fix the episode, altering the Dubya head so that it’s completely unrecognizable. On June 15th, they announced that they’re pulling the episode from rotation on the network, HBO GO, and iTunes. They also froze DVD shipments until they could fix the image.
So now, instead of George W. Bush, looking closely at the scene will only reveal, in the words of MTV’s Josh Wigler, “a generic, weak-chinned Westerosi, with a sad frown that pretty much epitomizes the unexpectedly dramatic situation.”
Do you think that HBO did the right thing by altering the episode, or is the damage done?
