North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un has digitally removed a disgraced actor from a 1990s series as reruns are aired on state TV.
The actor at the centre of the controversial removal is North Korean actor Choe Ung Chol, who starred in Taehongdang Party Secretary between 1998 and 2000.
It is reported that the Pyongyang regime has a particular dislike towards Choe due to his alleged womanising as well as his friendship with Kim Jong-un's uncle Jang Song Thaek, whom he had executed in 2013.
Reruns of the TV series have been aired in North Korea but following advanced video technology, Choe has been scrubbed out while the rest of the show remains untouched.
Taking Choe's place as the main protagonist of the programme is Pak Jong Taek. The show depicts the life of North Korean potato farmers in 1990s amid famine.
Eagled-eyed professor at Korea University in Seoul, and expert in North Korean culture, Tatiana Gabroussenko, was the person to first notice the character change.
She wrote for the NK News website: "When the regime perceives somebody as an enemy, they will relentlessly hunt down and destroy this threat, squashing out any hint that they ever existed.
"North Korea is clearly adept at highly advanced digital editing techniques, creating a sort of deep fake character for a TV series that's a quarter-century old.
"Propagandists have evidently arrived at a suitable solution to the decades-old problem of how to erase problematic figures from an otherwise pro-regime cultural artifact without entirely destroying it."
According to Gabroussenko, it is not uncommon for North Korea to delete records of dissenters against the regime and regularly destroy films involving disgraced stars like Choe.
Choe was "a promiscuous playboy in high political circles in Pyongyang", the expert added, and was an associate of Jang Song Thaek.
Jang supposedly confessed to plotting a coup against his nephew, who replaced his father Kim Jong-il, as well as distributing pornography and failing to clap enthusiastically enough.
Gabroussenko concluded: "The Taehongdang Party Secretary series is likely just the tip of the spear of efforts to entirely realign North Korean films of old with the regime's values and priorities in 2023."
This comes after Kim vowed to see his rivals 'plunge into despair' as he ramped up nuclear attack simulations that involved the detonation of an underwater drone capable of unleashing a "radioactive tsunami" last month.
The state news agency, KCNA, said that the weapon was a "nuclear underwater attack drone" that can be deployed "at any coast and port or towed by a surface ship for operation".
