As Mister Universe declared, you can't stop the signal.

Years ago, you could make a movie or a music video and uh-oh, maybe nobody would ever get to see it. Maybe it'd be banned by the BBC or threatened with copyright lawsuit.

Well, we mock such conventions now, don't we?

Todd Haynes has directed Julianne Moore and Cate Blanchett to Oscar nominated performances. But he made his first splash in 1987 doing Superstar, the docudrama Karen Carpenter story with a Barbie cast. It was dark and moody and weird and truly sad.

Richard Carpenter, less than amused at the whole thing, had the film withdrawn from circulation in 1990 and the movie became a bootleg sensation. Two decades later, hellllllllo YouTube!

Right around the Tainted Love era, Soft Cell released a single based on a splashy tabloid headline. The song was called Sex Dwarf and the video, directed by soon to legendary Tim Pope, was appropriately lurid. Moreso, in fact. It was promptly confiscated by the police as pornography and banned. But Pope has his own website now and he can do whatever the heck he wants, including posting the notorious clip himself. If you're wondering if that makes it NSFW, why yes it does.

As a card carrying genxer, I'll admit I was obsessed with both videos for years. And you know what? They don't disappoint.

And if you never thought you see those creepy, WTF? Calvin Klein ads from the mid nineties, think again. 

Nothing's ever lost, even stuff that doesn't make sense. What "banned" material have you dug up?