Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Animated Version of "Animal Farm" With Altered Ending Among Films Produced by the CIA
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 Orwell’s “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 Orwell’s 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.
Some other notable films in the CIA’s library:
Brainwashing
Spying for Uncle Sam, Part I
Why Man Creates
How Free Should the Press Be?
CBS Reports: UFO: Friend, Foe or Fancy?
Mickey Mouse Cartoon-Squatter’s Rights
I Am a Soldier
Holograms — The First True 3-D Picture
Man and the Sea
Unidentified Flying Objects
Eye in the Sky
It Works, and That’s the Key
Operation Underground Network
He is a Mad Man
Rise of Labor Unions/Employee/Management
Hovercraft
Our Election Day Illusion/The Best Majority
Kidnap Executive Style
