'Game of Thrones' Showrunners Were Thrifty, Not Anti-Bush
With a speedy apology following a half-day blog uproar, you can bet that the folks running HBO's of Game of Thrones totally regret impaling the 43rd president's head on a spike. Or at least, regret saying it was him on a DVD commentary track. "We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc. We can't afford to have these all made from scratch... so we rent them in bulk. After the scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W. Bush," showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss said in an apology statement picked up by The Hollywood Reporter's Lesley Goldberg. "We meant no disrespect to the former President and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise." HBO added:
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 apologized immediately for this inadvertent careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production.
Their apologies come after science fiction fan site io9 picked up on DVD commentary by the show's creators revealing that one of the treasonous impaled heads shown in the first season resembled George W. Bush. Of course in this day and age, you can't go around pointing out that prosthetic head looks like the Republican most Americans still blame for ruining the economy without people in the conservative blogosphere acting like you really did decapitate the former president. Not to mention that Benioff's father, Stephen Friedman, worked under George W.'s National Economic Council, and that some people were already ticked off at HBO for perceived anti-Republican bias in the recent election 2008 docudrama Game Change.
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Here's a clip that shows what Benioff and Weiss are apologizing for (starts around 1:10):
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