Hotstar has jumped on the self-censorship bandwagon. The Disney-owned streaming service has cut out jokes that poked fun at its corporate overlord from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, HBO's Emmy-winning half-hour news satire talk show. (Most HBO programming is available on Hotstar in India, owing to a long-term deal between the two.) In Hotstar's case, this is somewhat ironic, considering this comes from the same company that launched a marketing campaign built around the fact that it would never censor Game of Thrones. Gadgets 360 has reached out to Hotstar, Disney, and HBO, and we will update this story when we hear back from any of them.
Reddit[1] users were the first to take note of Hotstar's[2] new self-censoring ways, and Gadgets 360 has since confirmed that the jokes involving Disney[3] had been chopped off from the sixth season finale — “The Census” — of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which aired Sunday in the US. There are at least two such instances, which also involve zooming in to remove any on-screen mention of the joke. What makes this weird is that the latest Last Week Tonight episode wasn't an exposé of Disney or anything. Oliver simply used the phrase “Disney fact” to poke fun at a variety of things, which stemmed from Micky Mouse's participation in a 1980 advertisement for the US Census Bureau.
If you haven't seen the episode in question and are still confused, here's how it started. The aforementioned ad — watch the above video from the start for context — features people asking, “Can we count on you?” as wordplay on the census count, before Mickey Mouse shows up at the end to repeat the question. In response, Oliver...