The Grand Tour

Amazon Censors Parts of The Grand Tour Upon Global Launch

The big announcement today was that The Grand Tour was finally going global, launching in over 200 countries. With that type of global launch, there was bound to be an issue with censorship considering the number of different cultures and customs Jeremy Clarkson is bound to offend. Amazon’s solution – censorship.

According to Reddit user MayGamer96, there was a clear difference in Episode 4 to the point where almost 30 minutes of the film was edited out:

“Something was horribly wrong when I signed up for Prime today in India and then saw this on the app:

View post on imgur.com

If you can’t see what’s wrong, episode 4 apparently lost 30 minutes of video content here in Prime Video India. Half an hour of the footage is not available to us.

This is just terrible. Amazon is forced to literally ruin the episode in India and cut out a huge chunk just because of a cultural difference: Jeremy’s bone car is made of a cow, which is considered sacred in Hinduism.

There has been a rise of vigilantism by people who have assumed protecting cows their life’s priority, and have even resorted to strong violence in some cases. The governments of some states have even tapped into such sentiment by outlawing slaughter or even consumption of beef, punishable by jail and heavy fines. Amazon clearly doesn’t want to get their property damaged or get into trouble with technically troubleseekers, and it is quite a stupid move – specially when you consider more than 99% of this cow vigilante group won’t even know about The Grand Tour or even the basics of cars, let alone follow it and then be offended by cow bones turned into chassis.

The series is quintessentially British and made for a worldwide audience which Amazon should realise, and there is no law in India that censors internet content – people put up highly controversial content on the net and get away without any legal action. It is ridiculous that Amazon is playing the censor board for us when one doesn’t even exist for our country’s internet and if they extend this treatment to TGT’s other episodes too, I don’t see any reason why I should stick to Prime Video and not illegal sites, where I was very content with quality, subtitling and the full episode as is.

Amazon removes more than half of episode 4 in India cuz it insults cows, some people so adverse to cow slaughter so Amazon scared, playing Ofcom when Internet here doesn’t even have censorship”

With so many fans around the world, have any of experienced any censorship?

Let us know in the comments below, so we can continue to update this post.

h/t: Shifting Lanes

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3 Comments

  1. Step one: Complain that your show is “the most pirated in history”
    Step two: Publish a hacked up censored version of the show for foreign markets.
    Step three: See step one.

  2. Why would Amazon intentionally offend thousands of its Hindu customers? Of course they edited the show for local consumption. The good news it was Amazon, not the Government, doing the censoring.

    1. If you edit it, disclaimer it right up front. Then the viewers who know and don’t care can use an easy workaround like a VPN to get the unedited version. And the complainers who couldn’t leave it unseen haven’t got a leg to stand on. “We warned you! You had to go around the warning screen…”

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