I have XM radio. One of the lovely things about XM is that you can program in your favorite songs and it will tell you whenever one of them is playing on one of XM's hundreds of channels. My selections are pretty varied. I have the Eels and Radiohead and Sophie B. Hawkins, but also showtunes from Avenue Q and the Judds singing "Rockin' with the Rhythm of the Rain." (I defy you to listen to that song without feeling slightly better about the world.)
And, yes, one of my songs is Bowling for Soup's recent hit High School Never Ends. The weird thing is because XM tells me anytime it is playing anywhere on their network, I hear this song on the adult channels AND the different version that plays on the Disney channel.
So the adult version sings
The whole damn world is just as obsessed
with who's the best dressed and who's having sex
And the Disney version is
The whole wide world is just as obsessed
with who's the best dressed and who can impress
Ok, fair enough.
One of the main ideas of the song is that gossiping about celebrities is just as lame as high school kids gossiping about the popular kids, and what makes one a popular kid in high school and a celebrity are similar shallow qualities. The song makes this point by talking about several celebrities as if they are the popular kids being gossiped about.
A joke about "Katie had a baby so I guess Tom's straight" was taken out in the Disney version. Ok, again, fair enough.
But what really gets me is the adult version sings:
"How did Mary Kate lose all that weight?" which is a crack on Mary Kate Olsen's struggle with anorexia.
The Disney version?
"How does Mary Kate always look so great?"
To me, that's not the message we want to be sending on the Disney channell.
I told TheCSO about this and he pointed out that Mary Kate Olsen is a pretty hot property to Disney and the point of the change is likely not to equate anorexia with looking great, but to change a dig at one of Disney's stars into a compliment.
But still...
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