I was watching The Breakfast ...
Question: I was watching The Breakfast Club on AMC and noticed scenes that aren't on my commercial tape of the movie. Were these lost scenes that were added in, or were they specially made for television? I've had a similar experience with Billy Madison and always wondered what the deal was.
Answer: The deal is that movies are often aired on broadcast and basic cable television in versions that differ to some degree from the theatrical versions. The two big reasons are standards and practices, and length. Because television programming goes into so many households for free or for a minimal basic-cable fee, the programming assumption is that it has to be held to a different standard than material that people have to actively seek out. You have to buy a ticket and go to a theater or pay a steep monthly fee to subscribe to a premium cable channel like HBO or pay to buy a movie on video or DVD, so the assumption is that before you put up your money you'll find out a little bit about what you're buying and not be shocked when it turns out to be foulmouthed or have raunchy or very violent content. TV content just appears when you turn on the box, so the TV versions tend to be trimmed of content that might offend a broad segment of viewers. And sometimes when the trimming is done, you've lost 10 or 15 minutes of footage: One way of dealing is to put in scenes that were taken out of the original release version. They aren't bad scenes and they weren't lost, they're just scenes the filmmakers took out for one reason or another — and often the reason was time.
The other reason is making a desirable title like The Breakfast Club (1985) or Billy Madison (1995) fit into a longer time slot than its theatrical length would appear to warrant. Remember, when you see a movie listed in a two-hour broadcast or basic-cable time slot, that doesn't mean you're seeing two hours worth of movie: There are a whole lot of commercials crammed in there, too. Broadcasters don't want to cut too much of the movie's running time, but they also don't want to limit the amount of commercial time they can sell. One way of reconciling the two is to see if you can add some deleted scenes — the same kind of deleted scenes that now show up on DVD — back in and fit what was a 97-minute movie into a two-and-a-half-hour slot. In addition, filmmakers sometimes shoot alternate versions of violent or sexy scenes, a stronger one for the theatrical and DVD release and a softer one for broadcast. And sometimes whole chunks of dialogue are redubbed for TV: If you look at the Scarface (1983) DVD, there's a very funny segment comparing several scenes with their original dialogue and with the less profane dialogue dubbed in for broadcast TV. The great thing about TV versions is that sometimes you'll see a scene in its proper place in the film, like the fabled giant-squid encounter from The Goonies (1985). The scene is on the DVD, but just as an extra, not integrated into the continuity.
