HBO, "Game of Thrones" apologize for using severed George W. Bush head on a stake

(CBS News) HBO has apologized for a scene in its popular series "Game of Thrones" that featured heads on a spike, one of which the show's producers said in the DVD commentary belonged to former President George W. Bush, according to reports.

In a DVD commentary for episode 10 of season one, the show's creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss explained that one of the decapitated heads was actually a George W. Bush replica, reports tech website io9.

"The last head on the left is George Bush," explained the creators in the commentary. "George Bush's 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 head we had around."

HBO said in a statement: "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. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production."

The show's producers made a joint statement as well: "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. 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."

See a photo of the head here.