'Tom & Jerry' Smoking Scenes to Be Cut

I hate Ted Turner now more then ever which if you have visited this site frequently would really be saying something. Turner Broadcasting recently made the decision to distort history by removing scenes of characters smoking from over 1,500 of their classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons including Tom & Jerry. This after one viewer – that’s right, one solitary viewer – took ‘offense’ to two Tom & Jerry cartoons viewed on the Boomrang channel, a cartoon network owned by Time Warner/Turner Broadcasting, in which characters were seen smoking cigarettes and cigars. This in turn prompted Turner Broadcasting to review their entire classic cartoon catelog. A spokewoman for Turner Broadcasting in Europe assured concerned viewers that the decision to remove scenes of smoking from their cartoons would only cover situations “where smoking could be deemed to be cool or glamorized” but the language is so vague as to be entirely confusing and unidentifiable to the average citizen. Furthermore, what’s to prevent Time Warner or any other movie studio for that matter from making this a stepping-stone and going one step further? How long are classic live-action feature films like Casablanca or Citizen Kane which feature smoking prominently safe from censorship?