Clearplay DVD

Times are tough for parents these days. Working 9 to 5, cooking meals, driving the kids to soccer practice... It's so much that the idea of parenting your kids yourself is just to much.

Fear not parents, because Clearplay is here to take those pesky parenting duties away for you!

The internet has whispered for years that Blockbuster has edited the movies they rent to take out questionable content. Whether or not that's true, I can't say. But now, you have the power to edit the movies your self, on the fly! All you do is plug your handy dandy little memory stick into the computer, download a pre-made editing filter from their extensive database, plug it into the player, and you and the kiddies will be all set for an evening of wholesome fun watching "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" with all the gore, violence and swear words edited out!

Anybody else see the absurdity in that?

Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but I myself think a far simpler solution to keeping your kids from seeing inappropriate content on a DVD is to flat out tell them, "No." All in all it's pretty simple, and the invention of a high dollar electronic device to do the job for you is frankly, rather insulting. Let's not forget either how easy this going to be to circumvent for the little kiddies. With the advent of "Webkinz", my eight year old daughter knows her way around a computer better than many adults I know. She can type in urls, she can download files, she can type in passwords. It really isn't that far fetched that her, or any number of kids these days, will be able to figure out how to sneak the memory stick out of mom and dad's sock drawer to unlock the filters.

This is all moot though as we don't know fully how the tech works.

What we can look at though is the absurdity of the movies they have filters for by taking a peek at their online database. Currently, there are 126 R rated horror movies in their filters list. Such titles as the aforementioned "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", "Evil Dead", "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer", "The Thing", the list goes on.

At which point do you as a parent sit down and think "Wow, it sure would be swell if I could watch "The Thing" with my 7 year old!"

There's two problems here; one, if you think this would be a good thing to show a kid period, you've got issues beyond censoring what the kids are watching. Two, if you're an adult and decide to watch "The Thing" but you're not really keen on the scary parts, what's the point?

Soon we're devolving past the parenting issues in this flawed system moving to another interesting complaint; where does the Clearplay company decide that they are better qualified to change the artistic output of any given director? Many of these filmmakers put a lot of blood, sweat, tears and money into their feature film career. Many of them pride themselves on their output despite whether we enjoy them or not. Now we have a two bit company deciding that despite their never being to film school, they're fully qualified to edit a movie to make it a better family experience.

Seriously. Who the hell wants to watch "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" with the blood and guts edited out? It'll be a five minute short at best.

So here you go folks, the next step in censorship in our free speech loving country. Do you agree or disagree? Share your thoughts in the comments below!