‘Game of Thrones’ Bush head episode spiked from HBO

The show will now edit the head from future airings.

As a response to the recent controversy over an episode of the hit show “Games Of Thrones”, the said episode has been pulled from HBO, Go and iTunes, reports cnet.com.

The show will also edit the head from future airings, the network told chicagotribune.com. “We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologised immediately for this careless mistake,” HBO said in a statement. “We condemn it in the strongest possible terms and have halted all future shipments of the DVDs, removed it from our digital platforms and will edit the scene for all future airings on any distribution domestic or international.”

That statement was an update of one issued late Wednesday, in which HBO said the head would not appear in future DVDs. HBO issued the statement after several online outlets reported that on the season 1 DVD of the show, creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss identified one of the show’s many severed heads as belonging to Bush. They said it wasn’t a political statement, and that they simply had to use whatever prosthetic heads were available.

Although they identified the head as Bush’s in the DVD, they said in a subsequent statement that someone only noticed the resemblance to Bush after the scene was shot. It appeared in the season finale. “We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc.” Benioff and Weiss said in the statement Wednesday. “We can’t afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk,” they said.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 18^th, 2012.