Disney Edited Obi-Wan Kenobi In Response To Texas School Shooting
They had to change it.
The premiere of Disney+’s Obi-Wan Kenobi has been edited in the wake of the horrific school shooting from early last week. However, so far the actual content of the series has not been changed. Instead, Disney has changed what you see when you go to play the premiere episode. Warning, SPOILERS follow for the premiere episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
As The Hollywood Reporter notes, in the “details” section of the launch page for the first episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi, it’s been edited to say “Although this fictional series is a continuation of the story from Star Wars movies filmed many years ago, some scenes may be upsetting to viewers in light of the recent tragic events. Warning: Contains violence involving children.” Strangely, however, THR says that the warning does not appear for all Disney+ accounts.
Unlike most of the episode, the opening scene of the new Star Wars series doesn’t take place on Tattooine or the doomed world of Alderaan. Instead, it it opens on Coruscant, after the implementation of Order 66 begins. A young Jedi who had been instructing a class of younglings when the clone troopers stormed into the Jedi temple fights her way through the carnage in the hopes of leading her class to safety. She ultimately dies fighting the clones. We never see any of the younglings hurt, but to anyone who has seen Revenge of the Sith or otherwise knows the fate of the Jedi, their future isn’t hopeful. All things considered, the fact that Obi-Wan Kenobi‘s details section was edited doesn’t seem surprising, and it feels more than appropriate.
THR notes that Obi-Wan Kenobi isn’t the only streaming series edited in the wake of the shooting. The fourth season of Netflix’s Stranger Things was changed so that before the recap comes the message, “We filmed this season of Stranger Things a year ago. But given the recent tragic shooting at a school in Texas, viewers may find the opening scene of episode 1 distressing. We are deeply saddened by this unspeakable violence, and our hearts go out to every family mourning a loved one.” Likewise, the episode’s description on Netflix includes “Warning: Contains graphic violence involving children.”
CBS went further than just about anyone and actually chose to not air the season finale of FBI because the episode includes the heroes racing to stop a fictional school shooting from happening. Instead, the network aired a rerun of the season’s 12th episode. Sadly, such shootings have become frequent enough that this kind of action by the networks is nothing new. Back in 1999, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Earshot” — in which the eponymous hero temporarily develops the ability to read minds, which allows her to stop a teen suicide which she thinks is a plot for a school shooting — was postponed because of the shootings at Columbine.
It would not be surprising if future episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi are similarly edited because of the events in Uvalde. We may be in store for more flashbacks to Order 66. It’s the second time since Disney+ started streaming live-action original Star Wars content that it’s depicted the massacre. We likewise got a brief glimpse of Grogu’s memories of the event in The Book of Boba Fett.
