First of all, Magnum PI was popular television; it was well-made, light, fun, and absolutely not sophisticated or challenging. It was simply a formula whodunnit in the mold of its CBS sister show, Murder She Wrote, skewed for a younger demographic. It wasn’t meant to be a taut police procedural or a heavy drama (although some of the episodes exploring Magnum’s past were dramatic and well-done).
No, if you wanted a show that was consistently good back then, you watched Hill Street Blues. But that show never earned stellar ratings, just as Buffy or Arrested Development didn’t/don’t now. People in the 80s mostly watched Dallas, The A-Team, and Dynasty, whereas now they mostly watch American Idol, Survivor, The Apprentice or the ghastly CSI and siblings. If that represents any increase in sophistication, I’m damned if I can see it.
The one thing I will grant is that HBO has in fact made a successful niche for itself in producing shows that are more challenging than typical network fare. But those shows are still seen by relatively few people, and HBO could not afford to produce them without the hefty revenue they make from their subscribers.
Nothing to contribute to the boob discussion (I really haven’t been paying attention) but I think you’re right on the “less” boobies. It appears that you’re using “boobies” as a euphemism for “nudity”. You would say “less nudity”, not “fewer nudity”. “Less boobies” doesn’t sound wrong to me.
Do you recall what Clemenceau once said about boobies? He said boobies were too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right. But today, boobies are too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic titillation. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious boobies.
“Less” would apply to the overall quantity of an amorphous mass, as in “less stupidity”. “Fewer” applies to a collection of individual items, i.e. “fewer idiots”. Boobies are generally considered individually (or rather, in braces) but in this case “boobies” is referring to the general overall concept of cinematic mammary display rather than individual pairs of units, so “less boobies” is more a appropriate, if regrettable, term.
Does it disturb anyone else that the trend has been toward artificially inflating the size of breasts to cartoonishly exaggerated sizes while ostensibly concealing them within stretched-tight t-shirts? It’s like some kind of Orwellian plot to subvert the sexual urge into some kind of frenzied destructive force to be channeled by the forces of darkness. Or maybe I’m just have a paranoid and dystopian perspective.
I just read the Summer Movies issue of Entertainment Weekly. A surprising number of movies were described specifically as having lots of nudity in the manner of the older R-rated comedies. Maybe the pendulum is swinging back.
I don’t know whether to vomit or cry. Either way I’m going to make a mess of my desk.
Anyway, a lot of you are overthinking this situation. The answer is that today, people have finally realized that boobs are bad, mammaries are malevolent, tits are terrible, and cleavage is a catastrophe. You need look no futher than the Janet Jackson fiasco to see that people have awakened to the reality that, aside from the fact that they feed children and fill out sweaters and bras, breasts are a moral peril and cannot be shown in a legitimate Hollywood movie.
Yeah, I buy the prudishness explanation. You just can’t do that in a regular movie anymore.
Fortunately, gratuitous sex and nudity are still in evidence in some of them furrin films, like Sex and Lucia or The Dreamers. You might have to read subtitles, but it’s all there, au naturel.
I don’t think you can blame the internet. Boobies began to disappear from our movie screens by the early 90s, before the ascendancy of the internet.
I do know that in the 70s it was assumed that a movie had to have an R rating to be successful, so directors would throw in a gratuitous booby scene just to get the “R.”
The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday was released in 1976 and starred Lee Marvin, Oliver Reed, and Robert Culp and was rated PG. There were several pairs of bared breasts in that movie.
Do we live in the same society? Last time I thought of taking a group of kids out to a movie for a birthday party, we looked through listings for a half-dozen movie theaters showing over 20 movies total, and there wasn’t a single G-rated flick. Not one. Can you really turn on The Sopranos (or even The Simpsons) and say we’re more prudish? For that matter, turn on Law & Order–the sex gets pretty explicit, and they go as far as primetime can go with the nudity. Ditto CSI.
I have notice that there isn’t as much explicit nudity (or even toplessness) in the mainstream movies lately, but the uncut DVD version that follows soon after more than makes up for it. And what about the Matrix movies? Did that orgy scene really contribute anything to the plot? Nope.
I’m not complaining about nudity, mind you, although I’d like to see less gratuitous profanity on TV. I’m just saying that if you compare movies, TV, and radio today with what it was 20 years ago, I can’t see how you could possibly say we’re more prudish today.
G-rated movies have never been big box-office earners. Not in the 70s, not now. Despite the carping of bigmouths like Michael Medved, there is no depraved Hollywood conspiracy to keep out family-friendly entertainment; there simply isn’t enough money in it.
R-rated movies do not make more money than other movies. If they did, studios would make more of them. Simple. As it is, many movie deals require the director to deliver a PG-13 final cut (or better).
Here’s a list of the 100 all-time highest grossing movies. At a cursory glance, maybe half a dozen or so were rated R.
So if she weighs the same as a duck, she’s made of wood…and therefore…she’s a witch!
:rolleyes:
Seriously, there’s a different here between correlation and causation. Movies had been getting progressively more gratutiously violent and sexual since the relaxation of the Hayes Office Production Code starting in the 'Sixties. Starting with portraying protagonists as anti-heros in the early Sixties (James Bond, for instance, in Dr. No kills several men in cold blood) and transvestitism (Some Like It Hot) through the nihilism of Boorman’s Point Blank and Robert Forster’s shocking! frontal male nudity in Haskell Wexler’s groundbreaking Medium Cool, the trend toward more realistic violence and greater exposure of skin had been going on as a reaction to restrictive societal mores of the Fifties (and possibly something of a backlash against the blackballing of film folk during the HUAC period).
While this opened up the door for more gratuitous use of sex in violence in more mindless entertainment-type films, I think it’s really overreaching to claim that studios and producers as a whole were striving for an R rating; rather, they wanted to titillate audiences and needed to keep uping the ante; as a result, any movie that was going to appeal to adults had R-rated elements in it, as a continuation of the trend that progressed through two or more decades.
