HBO announced on Friday it is pulling last year’s first season finale of “Game of Thrones” from both the network, disc retailers, and online VOD outlets like iTunes and HBO Go says The NY Daily News.
The reason? Conservative critics have been outraged this week over learning that George W. Bush’s likeness was used on a victim’s decapitated and impaled head in a scene in the episode.
Said head was donned with a long-haired wig, shot from the side and only on screen for one second as part of a line of severed heads the psychotic teenage King Joffrey Baratheon shows to his reluctant bride-to-be Sansa Stark.
The whole thing would’ve gone by unnoticed except for the show runners mentioning it in the DVD commentary track as an anecdote. Fake body parts used on the show are bought in bulk from suppliers.
Though the DVD set came out months ago, it was only a few days ago that the blogosphere picked up the comment and turned it into a story. Now several Republican politicians and conservative critics have rallied to arms and called for a boycott of the show.
In an official statement on Friday, the network said “We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. We made this clear to the executive producers of the series, who apologized immediately for this careless mistake. We condemn it in the strongest possible terms and have halted all future shipments of the DVDs, removed it from our digital platforms and will edit the scene for all future airings on any distribution domestic or international.”
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