Ik wens u goedemorgen met een mooi staaltje cold war history…
The Memory Hole has acquired a list of films that were produced or used by the Central Intelligence Agency. Among the films on the list is a 1955 animated version of George Orwells Animal Farm, with its chilling finale in which the farm animals looked back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative human farmers but found it impossible to say which was which.
[The original] ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs.
The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwells pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to Animal Farm from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.
thinkprogress.org
Uiteraard via sargasso.nl.
Miko Flohr, 16/03/2006