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George W. Bush's Decapitated Head Appeared On 'Game Of Thrones'

Words escape us on this one:

During season one of HBO's Games of Thrones series, "one of the many heads on a spike decorating King's Landing belonged to ex-president George Bush," the science and science fiction website io9 reports (fair warning: if you click on that link you'll see what we're talking about, and it's graphic).

HBO says in a statement sent to io9 that "we were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste." The network says it "will have it removed from any future DVD production."

Producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss basically say they were trying to save money and used whatever "prosthetic body parts" were around. They say the "meant no disrespect."

It was a fan's posting on Reddit that revealed all this. As The Hollywood Reporter adds, though, Benioff and Weiss had acknowledged in the DVD commentary that:

"George Bush's head appears in a couple of beheading scenes. It's not a choice, it's not a political statement. We just had to use whatever head we had around."

We're not going to post an image because it's too graphic for this blog.

But we wonder:

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.
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