Current Events > Why was the word "ninja" considered offensive in Europe again?

(+) Yeah! (+)

People are weird.

Remember when mikey had to change his weapon to that lame grappling hook

We have to go back to the 70s when video recorders were introduced in UK.
It existed no regulations, the British Board of Film Censors was supposed to censor "too violent" stuff and put out age ratings but a loophole allowed videos to be released without being reviewed by them. The bigger media companies were afraid of piracy so they barely released anything and the market was flooded by cheap splatter movies. Since that was what existed, that was what children watched, which upset parent groups that demanded the Government to do something about these Video Nasties.
The Government decided to let the police do raids to remove these video nasties from the street. They didnt always knew what to look for, one raid famously netting a copy of the Dolly Parton musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas under the mistaken belief it was pornographic.
This "think of the children" idea continued a bit into the 90s, which is why the word Ninja, which means assassin, was seen too violent for a childrens show.

Foppe posted...

We have to go back to the 70s when video recorders were introduced in UK.
It existed no regulations, the British Board of Film Censors was supposed to censor "too violent" stuff and put out age ratings but a loophole allowed videos to be released without being reviewed by them. The bigger media companies were afraid of piracy so they barely released anything and the market was flooded by cheap splatter movies. Since that was what existed, that was what children watched, which upset parent groups that demanded the Government to do something about these Video Nasties.
The Government decided to let the police do raids to remove these video nasties from the street. They didnt always knew what to look for, one raid famously netting a copy of the Dolly Parton musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas under the mistaken belief it was pornographic.
This "think of the children" idea continued a bit into the 90s, which is why the word Ninja, which means assassin, was seen too violent for a childrens show.

I barely understood any of this

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

And they going gorillas

In the mid 1300s, the black plague killed millions of people in Europe. While some historians will claim it was a literal disease, others claim that it was a metaphor for when ninjas would come out of the mountains and slaughter people by the hundreds under the cover of night. To this day UKians are afraid to say the word, lest they summon their ancient foe.