Let me paint a picture for you. It’s a lazy Saturday, you’re slothing on a couch in Finland, nursing a hangover with your besties. You decide that watching an entire television series in one day is crucial to your Saturday plan. After much discussion, you and your friends unanimously decide on the classic series, LIttle House on the Prairie– based on the classic books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. So you walk down the streets of Helsinki to the nearest video store. You check the childrens’ section. Alas! NOTHING. The TV series section. CURSES! Then you see the back room…you know the one…the one that has the naughty movies. And there it is…on the shelf.
Yes, it’s true. If you want to watch Little House on the Prairie in Finland, you have to find it with the suitable for adult viewing only videos.
Why? Is there something XXX rated that we just never saw? Nope. Well, it’s a long series and checking the videos cost over two bucks per minute. So they decided to bypass that all together. Good plan, guys.
“Long series can get quite expensive to check, and some use this exemption in the law to their advantage,” said Matti Paloheimo, Director at the Finnish Board of Film Classification.
“Such unchecked material should not be shown to children publicly,” he added.
Publicly as in the reruns that the Finns apparently can’t get enough of? According to the Reuters story, the show is still popular in Finland and there are reruns every week on one of the state owned TV stations.
I’m going to refrain from making tasteless jokes about what happens in little houses on the prairie, but I think you get the point.
[Posted by Kathleen]
six words to change the world. 