May Contain Peanuts

Made for TV Movies

The other day I found myself laying on the couch channel surfing. Okay, this is not out of the ordinary, especially the laying and the surfing. Anyhow, I stopped upon one of the many runs of "Grandma's Boy" on FX. It's a great movie by the people behind such other classics as Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. The thing is, if I looked 10 degrees below my television, I could see the DVD case of "Grandma's Boy" staring back at me. I own the uncut, much funnier version of this great flick which is at my disposal at any time I choose, yet I decide to watch the cut-for-tv version on basic cable instead.

This wouldn't be much of an issue if I had just watched a segment or two to catch a funny part and then went on to other channels. No, instead I watched about 3/4 of the entire movie before deciding it was enough. Why would I do this? All the swear words are gone, most of the innuendos have been changed to something lame like 'petting the puppy' or some mess and let's not forget, there are freaking commercial breaks. Why would I put up with this when a disc of much better movie goodness is 5 feet in front of me? I can only attribute it to the shear laziness that goes with couch potato-ing.

See, in order to watch said DVD, I would have to 1. get up. 2. turn on dvd player 3. open disc case and put in dvd and 4, most importantly, sit through an entire hour plus of movie. For someone lazing about on a couch in the afternoon, this is far too much effort. Watching a DVD is essentially an hour or so long event that I must participate in. This does not fare well against an option that requires not much more than lifting a finger. Plus, with the TV version, I always have the option of just switching to something else in an instant; not messing with video inputs or pausing.

Sure, I miss a lot of the stuff not suitable for broadcast television, but I can certainly remember what I am missing. Sometimes, that part is kind of fun, seeing what silly words they use to replace actual curse words ('rubber sucker', 'muffin fudger', etc.) and what parts they just blatantly cut out (there's a lot of bong hits in Grandma's boy). Remembering these things is a fun novelty, but why don't I just watch the whole thing as it was intended? That same reason, the DVD takes away my surfing vegetating freedom.

I imagine in the future, my DVD collection will be completely stored on a hard drive or some sort of cloud computing will allow me instant access and this point will no longer hold water. Until then, my poor DVDs continue to sit on the shelf and stare back at me while I watch their bastardized TV counterparts get my viewing pleasure.