From Think Progress:
[The original] ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. … The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell’s pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to “Animal Farm” from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.Some other notable films in the CIA’s library:
Brainwashing
Spying for Uncle Sam, Part I
Why Man Creates
How Free Should the Press Be?
CBS Reports: UFO: Friend, Foe or Fancy?
Mickey Mouse Cartoon-Squatter’s Rights
I Am a Soldier
Holograms — The First True 3-D Picture
Man and the Sea
Unidentified Flying Objects
Eye in the Sky
It Works, and That’s the Key
Operation Underground Network
He is a Mad Man
Rise of Labor Unions/Employee/Management
Hovercraft
Our Election Day Illusion/The Best Majority
Kidnap Executive Style
Interesting to say the least. It reminds me of a little noticed incident from the mid ninties.
Fox TV aired Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and altered the ending. Heavily influenced by Orwell’s 1984, Brazil concludes with a false ending.
The final scendario: The hero is being tortured by his former best friend, but a rescue is mounted, and our hero dramticially escapes, with the girl, to a happy ending, to live out his days in a house surrounded by a white picket fence. Alas, we soon realize that the escape and the house and the happy ending are all a figment of our hero’s mind as he sits dying in the torture chair, spiritually and physically destroyed, but for his dreams.
Fox TV actually cut this final scene out of the film, editing the movie to end on the white picket fence and house. Protests at the time met with a reply from Fox that the film was edited because of “time constraints”, but of course, everyone understands that edits can be made to preserve the true ending of a film.
And, so it goes…
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