Wait, What? George W. Bush’s Head Appeared On A Spike In Season 1 Of ‘Game Of Thrones’?

An interesting little Easter Egg has been discover from the first season of HBO’s hit show Game of Thrones.

During a particular scene toward the end of the first season when Joffrey decides to show Sansa some heads on spikes as a message, one of the heads happens to look that of former president George W. Bush.

The hidden egg was somewhat confirmed by show creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who said it was the head of Bush, but that it’s “…not a choice, it’s not a political statement. We just had to use whatever head we had around.”

Read more, including an explanation from the creators and an apology from HBO, below.

To further explain what happened, Benioff and Weiss released a statement saying:

â€œWe use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc. We canâ€™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.â€

So, if you are to believe the showrunners, it’s not even really Bush but just looks a hell of a lot like him. As you can see from the image above, it’s not blatantly used if it is him. If the move were to make a point or take a political stance, you’d think it’d look a lot more like the former president instead of being off on the side and having an impressive head of flowing brown hair.

Still, as you might imagine, the discovery has many in an uproar over the move, but many others saying “relax, people.” The DVD/Blu-ray for the first season came out back in early March, so this has been floating out there for a long while now. And if it was, as the show’s creators claim, “just because” and not symbolic in any way, then there’s no reason to be so angry. It’s not the man’s real head, after all. You can purchase many well-known figures’ decapitated heads every year for Halloween.

HBO also released a statement apologizing for the incident to those who were insulted, saying:

â€œWe were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. 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.â€

What are your thoughts on all of this? Are you insulted or are people overreacting?

[Source: io9, EW]