'Game of Thrones’ creators apologize for putting Bush’s fake head on spike as traitor

“Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, along with HBO, have apologized for putting on spike a prosthetic head that had a striking resemblance with former U.S. President George W. Bush. The creators said that the low budget caused them to buy the heads in bulk and the one that resembled the president was an accident.

On Wednesday, "Game of Thrones" creators found themselves in hot waters when the fantasy series creators revealed during a DVD commentary of the first season that "People may not have noticed this but back up ... the last head on the left is George Bush,” noting that the same head appears in a couple of beheading scenes. "It's not a choice; it's not a political statement. We just had to use whatever heads we had lying around." The revelation, however, was not so funny for some.

"Whether you like him or dislike him, whether you're of the same political persuasion or not, we still have to respect the office of the presidency and all of those who hold that presidency," Craig Eaton, chairman of the Brooklyn Republican Party, said on E! News, according to a report by Christian Post.

Mounting criticism forced the channel as well as the series creators to apologize for the mistake and give the much needed explanation. "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," the creators said later in a public statement regarding the issue. They also apologized for pointing out the fact that resulted in giving a false impression that the former president is not respected anymore.

HBO, which airs the series, later on issued its own apology statement, promising that the George W. Bush head scenes would be removed from any further DVD production and the producers would be careful not to repeat the blunder. "We 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.”