HBO Sorry For Decapitating Bush, Will Make Things Right With Censorship

Yesterday we learned that the producers of Game of Thrones used a mock-up of George W. Bush's head on a pike in a totally non-symbolic way. In fact, the Earnest Effigy Act of 2007 stipulates that every package containing a rubber head of the man responsible for reducing the greatest country in the world to smoldering ruins of Endless War and Bottomless Debt be stamped with "UTILITARIAN USE ONLY, NOT FOR FUN." So naturally, HBO has apologized for this terrible, artistic oversight. "We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste," reads a statement from the network that airs pornography every night.

We're not going to run the rest of their statement that the Apology Interns worked on all afternoon, but HBO is cutting George W. Bush's head from "future DVD production." How much will this act of censorship cost? Probably tens of thousands of dollars, but way cheaper than developing a time machine and hiring time traveling assassins to go back to 2008 and murder Will Ferrell before he could pitch his HBO special You're Welcome America.

GOT creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss released this statement, telling us what REALLY happened:

What happened was this: we use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc. 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 scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W. Bush.

In the DVD commentary, we mentioned this, though we should not have. We meant no disrespect to the former President and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise.

See? They rent them in bulk, from companies who make thousands of severed heads that look like George W. Bush for people to use in totally coincidental ways.

Anyway, if you want to see a real, non-PR fabricated "coincidence," watch HBO's documentary on the George Bush that didn't completely fuck the country up, which airs tonight for the first time.

[io9]