A underrated moral panic is the UK government's deep and enduring hatred of ninjitsu. From the days of video nastys banning nunchucks and shuriken from the media but not touching depictions of any type of weapon people actually have or use to Keir Starmer promising to ban ninja swords to solve knife crime, famously committed primarily with replica Japanese swords, forever. There are still presumably people with ASBOs for pretending to be Naruto in 2004, when Tony Blair executed a raid on the servers hosting Real Ultimate Power and declared once and for all that Britain will not stand for dishonorable stealth combat no matter how many shadow warriors are sent by Brussels
I grew up with teenage mutant hero turtles on the TV because they didn't want to say the n word on television aimed at kids
Okay, never expected to see someone say "the n word" and mean ninja, but with Britain everything is possible
People are going "really" and. Yeah
Not only did they change the title for the UK, but it censored the American show too, bc they got tired of having to cut out scenes of Michelangelo using nunchucks & replaced them with a grappling hook in later seasons.
The fact that this cover censors nunchucks, and the word "ninja", but is perfectly fine with the kid's comics heroes using KNIVES AND SWORDS paints a interesting picture of the priorities here. There was, specifically, a widespread moral panic against nunchucks, which ran so deep they cut a scene from TMNT II where someone spun sausages in a way too akin to nunchucks. Love how that article can't even explain why they were obsessed with ninja weapons, since nobody actually knew how common they were at the time. They just leapt to banning this sick filth in the proud British tradition
It should be noted this isn't the permanent UK name, it was just the name in the 80s/90s. Mutant Mayhem came out over there are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, not "Hero"
Okay so I was trying to find out more about why nunchucks. A relatively obscure weapon that's hard to use and more likely to hurt some random kid using it than anyone else
Apparently the ban was just something they did pre-emptively after Enter the Dragon came out, and it was enforced by a censor named James Ferman. Who cracked down harshly on weapons like nunchucks and shuriken, but did nothing to touch, like, normal knives and swords and guns
I thought cutting someone twirling sausages like nunchucks was absurd, but apparently he was so fanatical about it he demanded they cut a shot from the Dragnet movie...bc you could see nunchucks in the background on a Enter the Dragon poster
That piece quotes a writer named Justin Wren who points out the elephant in the room: they were fanatically banning...what was probably the least violent weapon in the cast, versus the big stick, the literal sword, and sai, which I have been corrected are pronged metal batons you can stab people with and not knives. Apparently by the time the film came out everyone on the British Board of Film Classification besides Ferman agreed: that focusing on them over more dangerous weapons made no sense
Apparently he wanted to prove nunchucks were super dangerous, actually, so he pulled some out at a meeting and swung them around and promptly managed to nearly strangle himself. When told no one had used nunchucks in a crime in years, he attributed this to his own ban on them in a movie about turtles
So there you have it: it was all the result of one film censor who imposed his ridiculous crusades on British film as a whole. Who couldn't tell the difference between a sausage and nunchucks and thought kids couldn't either. Who...released David Cronenberg's Crash with zero cuts or censorship???
Remembering the British film censor who despised nunchucks to such a degree he would shred scenes to pieces to cover up a image of them on a poster in the background. It literally wasn't even prompted by anything. He wasn't even worried about kids hurting themselves trying them out, like he did, he just thought Britain was due for a massive wave of ninja crime and he heroically stopped it
very interesting things the british are doing lol
also a sai isnt really like a baton you can stab people with i mean you can stab people with it but its a melee weapon designed specifically to break swords and or disarm sword users thats why another common name for them is sword breakers its closet relative is probably the ranseur
youd think maybe a polearm with billhook because theyre much more similar in design but billhooks were more used for pulling riders off horses whereas the ranseur was similar to the sai used specifically to assist in deflecting and disarming people with swords
sais are typically more affective at this task however because the space between the prongs is shorter and because they are short range instead of long range weapons giving you much more ability to quickly turn the handle with a sword caught in between and snap that thang in half
also you should basically never hold a sai like raphael is doing with his right hand because the hooks are designed to funnel the sword right into the space where his fingers are which while cool looking is a good way to lose a finger and a bad way to try and stab someone because it limits the flexibility of your wrist significantly
Okay that's why I was mistaken on the nature of the sai (bc of Raphael's improper form)
