(4/9/99)

It's Friday night, and a lot of families go out to rent a video, to watch with the kids.

There's a device on the market that claims to guarantee that the family video experience will be a clean one, with no foul language. BUT Does it really work?

News Specialist Keith McCord took it on a test drive.

It's called the TV Guardian.

It's just a little box that you hook up to your VCR.

And, when offending words are said on the screen--they get blipped! We decided to put it to a test.

A scene from Gone With the Wind says, "Rhet, where will I go, what will I do?"

The classic scene from "Gone with the Wind." We all know what Rhett Butler says.

But what happens to the famous scene when the TV Guardian is in place?

More on that in a minute.

The device easily hooks onto your TV set and VCR...and it automatically filters out profanity--the company says 95 percent of the time!

Rick Bray invented it. "There're actually a couple of different filter settings. There's a strict setting that monitors for approximately 150 different words and phrases."

And when the offensive words come along, the box mutes them!

We rented a few videos to see how it works.

Here's a scene from "Apollo 13"--things are pretty hairy after the explosion. Tom Hanks is none-too happy!

His expletives are silenced by the black box. And here's "Bullworth" with Warren Beattie. In a scene with a lot of bad words!

As the bad words are muted, the TV Guardian changes the words for the closed captioning.

The bad words, in this scene, are replaced with tamer expletives--like "Jerk" and "Crud!"

Bray says, "It removes foul languages, and if it's needed for the sentence to make sense, it will put a substitute word in its place."

Okay, back to "Gone With the Wind."

With the "TV Guardian" Rhett is silenced!

And if you're reading along--the words change to: "Frankly my Dear, I don't care!"

Just doesn't have the same ring to it!

The company claims this box filters out 95 percent of the words--and we discovered it doesn't work on some older videos--a George Carlin comedy bit came through loud and clear.

And nudity, is another thing entirely!

For questions about T.V. Guardian go to www.familysafemedia.com