Mean Girls and 10 other films and TV shows edited after their release

As the streaming epidemic of disappearing films and series keeps reminding us, the internet isn’t really forever. Unless you own your favorite show or movie on DVD or some other form of physical media, it’s always liable to blink out of existence forever. In recent weeks, however, a few pieces of media have done something far more unnerving than disappear; they’ve changed. Earlier this month, a viral post revealed that the NFL’s YouTube page had uploaded an edited version of Alicia Keys’ Halftime Show to remove a slight voice crack from the official record, stoking fears around A.I. deepfakes and the preservation of reality.

Now, at least on the surface, it appears to have happened again. In January, Lindsay Lohan expressed her disappointment over a joke in Tina Fey’s new Mean Girls musical that referenced the term “fire crotch,” an offensive nickname for the star from the early-2000s. When the film became available to rent and buy digitally last week, some fans noticed that the line had been removed (via USA Today).

But while retroactive edits of this type may stir up some very reasonable fears about fidelity and documentation, this is actually a fairly common—maybe even increasingly—practice in Hollywood with examples dating back years.

Lilo & Stitch

In 2020, eagle-eyed Disney fans noticed that a scene from appeared differently on Disney+ than what they remembered from their childhoods. Where Lilo had hidden in a dryer in the first version of the movie, she now concealed herself behind a pizza box in a cabinet that had been drawn in next to the washing machine. But while many viewers understandably assumed that the change had been made for streaming, Nani and Lilo actually lost half of their laundry setup much earlier. According to , Disney made the edit soon after the release of Lilo & Stitch’s first edition DVD, to discourage kids from trying it themselves. [Emma Keates]