HBO Apologizes For 'Game Of Thrones' Putting Bush's Head On A Spike

Season one of HBO's runaway hit series, Game of Thrones, emerged on DVD back in February, and maybe it's the ability to watch all those episodes over and over again that made viewers take notice of one of the decapitated heads on a spike near Ned Stark's (Sean Bean) that bore a suspicious resemblance to that of former President of the United States George W. Bush.

Or maybe it was the DVD commentary, where Game of Thrones creators and head producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss actually reveal the identity of the familiar Bush head, according to Entertainment Weekly. "The last head on the left is George Bush," they said during one gruesome scene showing the severed heads of traitors to Kings Landing. "It's not a choice," they clarified. "It's not a political statement. We just had to use whatever head we had around."

Still, HBO is choosing to distance itself from the potentially bad publicity. "We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste," the station said in a statement. "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."

Weiss and Benioff also released their own, slightly less impassioned, statement. "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, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, 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. In the DVD commentary, we mentioned this, though we should not have. We meant no disrespect to the former President and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise."

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