Censor Decoy

On the left was what they couldn't show on TV. On the right was their "Backup Plan".^[1]

"We purposely left in stuff that you don't even want in the scene. Because you have to give them something to cut so they feel like they've pissed on it, somewhat. So we left the sex scene, just...basically, we put in every second of footage we could. A four minute, like, sex scene, it's just ridiculous. It is not the way it should have been cut, you know, it was bad, it was not even, like, good for the movie, and we ended up shooting, like, extra shots, that we didn't even want to put in there that we just put in there. Um, you push the line way back so maybe they only cut to here...."

—Matt Stone on Team America: World Police, interviewed in This Film Is Not Yet Rated

Censors generally feel an obligation to do their job. When they see something that they know they should be screening for indecent content, they're liable to toss something out, just so that everyone knows they're on the lookout. An overly permissive censor board would sort of defeat the whole purpose. Anything that's the least bit edgy need to be shaved down at least a little.

Some wily filmmakers realize this and make a simple deduction. If we assume that the censors are going to cut out X amount of scenes no matter what's in the product, then the censors can be distracted by Crossing the Line Twice, heck, maybe three times. Because that Double Entendre about pencils looks pretty darn innocent compared to a ten-minute action-sequence involving a demon made of crap.

That's how the Censor Decoy should work in theory—it's something so offensive that it's the only thing the censors are supposed to pay attention to. If the gamble succeeds, we have to take the word of the creators that this is actually going on. The entire point of the decoy is so that we never have to see it.

Of course, sometimes the censors somehow inexplicably miss a gag which is quite clearly about masturbation and, well, guys? It's going in the final product. Other times, they catch both the decoy and the naughty bits it was supposed to conceal, resulting in business as usual.

A form of Getting Crap Past the Radar and Refuge in Audacity (especially if the over-the-top scene is chosen over the toned-down scene or if the writers use the Censor Decoy often to get whatever they want past the censors and the censors still fall for it).

Examples of Censor Decoy include:

Comic Books

Don Rosa filled his comics with tiny Hidden Mickeys and other extra things like that to distract the censors from cutting D.U.C.K.s and actual plot points.
The Jedi character Soon Bayts was created as a minor character for the Star Wars Expanded Universe by an author tired of his editor making every Jedi be addressed as "Master ___". The editor in question didn't work on Bayts's debut and so the name went to print.

Film

In the film Citizen Kane, Orson Welles originally had his "There Is A Man" musical sequence take place inside a brothel, but it was cut due to the Hays Code. He was hoping that it would distract from the many references to William Randolf Hearst.
- Unfortunately for Welles' future career, while it may have distracted the censors, it failed to distract Hearst himself.
In Casino, the infamous "head in a vice" scene was added to draw the censor's attention away from the record breaking swearing and copious violence. To Scorsese's surprise, the scene was passed through.
- Speaking of Martin Scorsese, The Last Temptation of Christ is an example of an unintentional subversion. The movie was extremely controversial with fundamentalist religious groups... because of a brief sex scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, that ends up being revealed to be part of a hallucination sent by Satan to tempt him. The interesting thing about this is that in all of the hubbub over this one scene, they forgot to criticize the part of the movie that was actually sacrilegious: the film's portrayal of Judas as a man who was following Christ's orders when he turned him in to the Romans. Double Standard much?
In Animal House, the writers figured that the ratings board would object to implying sex with a 17-year-old, so they did the scene with her claiming to be 13, expecting to have to go back and "correct" the scene. They were surprised when the scene was not considered objectionable.
- The censors probably thought it crossed the line twice.
The 1954 biopic Deep In My Heart includes a pas de deux between Cyd Charisse and James Mitchell, set to the song "One Alone", that is obviously a sex scene (it features extremely suggestive partnering moves and concludes with the man in a state of postcoital exhaustion). Charisse, Mitchell, and director Stanley Donen all later admitted to being shocked that the censors failed to realize what was happening; Charisse speculated that they were all too hung up on the high cut of her skirt to notice the actual steps.
This it's how Mae West's bawdy one-liners got past the Hays Code in the first place. She threw so many that at least some of them managed to remain in the final cut of her films.
Parker and Stone have said that their original cut of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut was rated NC-17, then they retooled it by taking out the "offensive" stuff and putting in things that "were five times worse". The new cut was rated R.
- Here is a memo written by Matt Stone detailing what he thinks should replace the scenes the Censor Board noted as too far.
The same pair later included explicit puppet sex in Team America: World Police as a more traditional attempt at this. It worked perfectly - the original cut got the NC-17 for just this scene. With the alterations, they resubmitted it for an R. As a bonus, the "uncut" version gained more notoriety than it ever would have otherwise. Parker and Stone confirmed that this was a deliberate Censor Decoy on-camera in the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated. The final version was less than half of the originally filmed sex scene. Reportedly, the original was so filthy that some of the puppeteers refused to show up for work that day.
In Spain, during Franco's oppressive fascist regime, one trick that filmmakers used to get crap past the radar is they would write the script they wanted to make, then submit a different script for approval, knowing it would get marked for change. When they submitted the original script, the censors would see that everything marked for change had been and approve the script, letting the filmmakers do almost whatever they wanted.
- That trick was infamously pulled by Luis Buñuel when filming Viridiana, up to showing the Spanish Censorship a cut of the film right down to their specs. When the Board decided that the censored version was too racy to be shown as Spain' official representative on the famous Cannes Film Festival but still allowed it to be premiered there as a "independent" participant, Buñuel and the film's star Silvia Pinal smuggled the uncensored version into France, and that was the one shown in the festival, to great acclaim. The stunt costed Buñuel his Spanish nationality and any chances of working on his birth country again.
When famous Soviet comedy director Leonid Gaidai presented his new film, The Diamond Arm, to the censors, he added a nuclear explosion footage into the epilogue - and argued furiously to keep it. This allowed him to sneak in some "controversial" (by that time's standards) material such as striptease, drunken debauchery and references to prostitution.

Literature

Dashiell Hammett was so annoyed with editors cutting innocent but dodgy-sounding slang terms from his stories that he made a test of their obliviousness using the word "gunsel". The editors, assuming it meant "gunman", let it through. The actual meaning is, roughly, "catamite." And it made it into the magazine. (Read more here).
Lampshaded in Randy Alcorn's Dominion, in which columnist Clarence Abernathy puts several Censor Decoys in his column for his politically correct editor.

Live-Action TV

The Gong Show regularly offered acts they knew would outrage the censors, so as to get other stuff through. The trick infamously backfired when The Popsicle Twins—two cute girls who sat on stage sucking on popsicles in the most blatantly suggestive way imaginable—actually made it onto the air. (See it here.) The two girls' performance made the live Eastern/Central broadcast, but higher-ups wised up before the Mountain/Pacific showing was due to go on, cutting it from the tape. The incident later made the Gong Show Movie.
The Wild Wild West: Due to a particularly virulent Media Watchdog situation concerning TV violence, the creators admitted to staging two versions of a number of fight scenes, one unnecessarily brutal, and the one they actually wanted to show on air, submitting the first one to network censors so they would accept the "compromise" of the second one.
The Weird Al Show would occasionally try this to get past the insane Executive Meddling the show was put under, only to find that the censors would usually not have any problems with them. This included a clip from Al's "Jurassic Park" music video where Barney the Dinosaur is gruesomely decapitated, and Harvey the hamster crawling out of Al's mouth.
Star Trek: The Original Series. In "A Private Little War" Captain Kirk comes across native girl Nona bathing naked in the river, and we see a brief glimpse of the side of her body as she wraps a robe about herself. The creators included a breast shot knowing the censors would cut it down to the tantalising glimpse they actually wanted.
- A variant was done for the filming of "Plato's Stepchildren". The script called for Uhura and Kirk to kiss (the first scripted, onscreen, interracial kiss on TV at the time), but the network called for the scene to be filmed with and without the kiss, to decide later which to use. William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols deliberately screwed up every take of the non-kiss scene, making the version with the kiss the best option.
Supernatural writer Sera Gamble outright admitted they over-do the gore and violence in order to get their desired scenes in instead.
Growing Pains: Ever wondered how Boner got his name? This trope is to blame.

Music

The Police's first song "Roxanne" was banned by the BBC for being about prostitution, so they tried to publicise that to sell "Can't Stand Losing You". The BBC sidestepped them by banning it due to its cover (Stewart Copeland with a noose standing on a block of ice), not even bothering to look at the lyrics.

Newspaper Comics

An unintentional version of this occurred early in the comic strip Baby Blues. The creators had thought of a joke in which dad Daryl asks for milk in his coffee and mom Wanda provides it (offscreen) by squirting her breast milk directly into the cup, accompanied with a shout of "Bullseye!", prompting Daryl to remark he was really going to miss it when she stopped breastfeeding. The comic's creators knew this wouldn't be allowed, but sent it to their editor anyway to give her a laugh. What they didn't realize until it was too late was that their editor wasn't in the office that week and her substitute merely waved the strip on through.
Garfield had this happen unintentionally as well. Jim Davis submitted a strip where Garfield takes catnip and wakes up the next morning in Atlantic City with a Barbie doll and his editor approved it.
Dilbert creator Scott Adams once submitted a strip featuring a cop firing his gun at some suspects. It didn't pass muster. So he submitted a new version where the panel of the gun actually firing just contained the text "BANG BANG BANG". Still too violent, as the strip still showed a cop holding a gun. So as a joke he did a version that was the same as the first one except the cop fired actual bullets from a donut. He did this to point out that it was the firing, not the gun itself that was violent, and that therefore the second one should be acceptable. Joke's on him, it was published donut and all^{[dead link]}.
- An in universe example had Wally intentionally turn in a document in the wrong font. The idea being that the boss always finds something stupid to change, so he made something that was obvious but easy to change.
Frank Cho's Liberty Meadows website basically only shows the strips that were deemed unfit to print (and thus are unavailable for sale) many of which push this trope (and a few even Lampshade it by Cho's Author Avatar showing up in the last panel and lamenting that his editor will never let this get published.)
FoxTrot in-universe example: Jason and Marcus ask for money to rent "Big Slashing Mommas with Chainsaw Daughters", which is shot down immediately. Jason then says they'll just rent Scarface, which works.

Western Animation

Futurama: The episode "Bendin' in the Wind" featured the crew checking out a 1,000-years-old VW hippie van expected to have all kinds of 30th century technology. Farnsworth asks, "Where is the device to speed up or slow down time?" Fry holds up a bong. The commentary track reveals that the script referred to the bong as a "weird bottle" and that they couldn't believe Fox allowed it to stay in.
- The Futurama writers also use the scene of Fry, Leela, and Amy naked in the same steam room from "Why Must I Be A Crustacean in Love" as an example of how the censors let them get away with that scene in comparison to what's being put on the chopping block. Usually, this argument will result in whatever scene the censors want removed to be left in.
Courtesy of Rocko's Modern Life: Yes, that's right. The No-Tell Motel. Sadly, that got cut in reruns.
One of the most famous accidental slip-throughs courtesy of the Looney Tunes Termite Terrace studio was in the Book Revue (a parody of the "Bookstore at night" toon that effectively killed the plot) -- notice the lack of background in that line.

Daffy: (in fake Russian Accent, while pantomiming a woman's figure) La Cucharacha, so round, so firm, so fully packed, so easy on the draw.

- It probably got past because he's quoting the slogan used in Lucky Strike commercials of the period, which everyone at that time would've recognized. It's the hand gestures that change the meaning....
In another one, when Elmer Fudd's dog is being bitten in the butt by a flea he runs his butt across the carpet yelping in pain. After a while he pauses and pants heavily and says, "I think we'd better cut this out or I might get to like it."
Batman: The Animated Series:
- Harley Quinn slowly emerging from a gigantic pastry, singing a Marilyn Monroe-esque Happy Anniversary song to The Joker (during which, she flicks a big cherry at him with her toe), and inviting him to "try some of [her] pie". Uh, sure.
  - It gets worse. Joker kicks her out and dogs start licking her, while she's on all fours.
- Don't forget her asking Mr. J if he wanted to "rev up his Harley". Though this apparently was the censored version! (As opposed to "Ride On".)
  - The "ride your Harley" joke appears in the "Mad Love" Comic Book that the episode was adapted from.
- In one episode, Joker said to Harley and Ivy, "haven't you been busy little beavers"; this actually made it in, but the team chickened out at the last second and changed the word to "bees."
- In the commentary for one of the episodes, Timm and Dini are chatting and one outright admits that they routinely planted Censor Decoys in their show... only for the other to shush him and tell him not to reveal trade secrets.
It was never stated, but this has to be the reason the line "Can I WHAM! my Oingo Boingo into your Velvet Underground?" in an episode of Family Guy was originally "I would eat your poo" (which was actually used on the Adult Swim version and the uncensored DVD). Even for Family Guy, there's no way the latter would be considered acceptable by the censors OR funny by the audience. Though with use of actual poop-eating in the 150th episode, one begins to wonder...
A split-second of the Moral Orel episode "God's Chef", featuring a claymation shot of the underage protagonist's erect penis has been confirmed to be one of these (and the reason why Adult Swim had to hold off in airing the episode until near the end of season one, besides the fact that the episode was about Orel using his sperm to impregnate the women in town after learning that masturbation is a sin that's considered tantamount to murder. Considering how the finished episode remains one of the filthiest things ever put on television, it must've been needed.
Adventure Time has quickly become notorious with what they've been capable of sneaking past the censors. Pictured above was what was revealed by the creators themselves what was censored at one point; when Finn was supposed to appear naked with a Beaver covering his...beaver. Their back up plan was using a giant piece of wood. Somehow giant wood is even more subtle.
- They failed this one with the title card to "The Enchiridion!" The version they wanted had Jake on a table and Finn holding a knife over him (and a Shout-Out to an old pulp horror comic cover), so to get it the creators made an even worse version that showed Finn actively disembowling Jake in great detail. However, the "safer" version was rejected as well, resulting in the final title card, in which Finn has a baguette instead of a knife.
The original outfits worn by Azula and Ty Lee in Avatar: The Last Airbender were a lot more revealing. When the censors shot down the original designs, the new designs would seem a lot less, well, exciting by comparison.
- Fans are still wondering just what sort of Censor Decoy helped the creators sneak the Ready for Lovemaking scene past standards. Or whether it was one they missed.
In an episode of Kim Possible, Shego tells Junior "I don't do cakes, okay? I don't bake 'em, and I don't jump out of 'em!" The writers claim they were actually surprised the censors let that one through.
Animaniacs creators admitted that not only they were doing it - they were also fighting to make censors keep scenes that clearly has no right to be there, just to distract them further from what they really wanted to sneak out.

Real Life

William L. Shirer gave broadcasts from Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1940. He used this technique against the censor board and it worked exactly as intended.

↑ It's a 'beaver' and 'wood'.

[1] It's a 'beaver' and 'wood'.

[1]