First use of "suck" in films?

“That sucks!” is a fairly common phrase today which, along with many variations, has permeated through our language. But it was a far more startling word a few decades ago and would never have been used in many settings. When did it first appear in a mainstream film?

The first time I can recall, and it was seen, not spoken, is in the opening scene from “Getting Straight”, 1970. As the credits appear, a ball is seen bouncing through the campus. It gets tossed, bumped and dropped all over the place. The camera follows its every move.

As the credits stop, the camera zooms in on the ball and we can see it has the Earth painted on it, an inflated globe. The ball turns around and we read: “There is no gravity, the Earth just sucks”.

And I think the only reason it flew then was because of the clever double entendre.

But I led a sheltered life and it may have appeared much earlier.

Dennis

I guess the joke answer would be Deep Throat, but as for the real answer…
I haven’t a clue.

Deep Throat was 1972. The language in the movie was quite tame and and the word “suck” was probably not spoken in the film.

Dennis

I was thinking Love at First Bite aka “Dracula Sucks” could be a contender (1979), but I remember the line about gravity from before that.

It certainly wasn’t common on TV before; I remember the uproar in an episode of “Uncle Buck” with Kevin Meaney when a kid said the word suck (“You suck!” or “That sucks!” or something), and that was the mid-to-late 80s.

But in movies? I can’t say.

I actually found the script for Deep Throat. “Suck” appears only 3 times as regular dialogue and once as an example of sexual words.

Unless you are old enough, people might not realize that before some time (late 1960s?) “suck” in conversation did not have the derogatory meaning it does today. I graduated from high school in 1964. We never said that.

“Suck it and see” is an old British adage meaning to try something and see how it turns out. One slang dictionary describes it as a “quaint” expression, I guess it derives from the mother/infant connection.

Somewhere around here I have a book on racing Ford 4 cylinder engines titled “Tuning Ford Engines” written in the 1960s. The author uses “suck it and see” fairly often when the only way to see if changing a carburetor jet was successful, for example. There is no way it would have been published if it was a sexual reference.

Dennis

I don’t know, but another question is what was the first use of “suck” not to be altered to “stink” for the TV version.

I think Saturday Night Live might have been the first to use the word that way on network television, in its January 22, 1977 episode: http://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76lstreisand.phtml The word got a HUGE laugh from the audience like they couldn’t believe the show got away with it.

The 1966 movie El Dorado has the sentence, “I’ll be a suck-egg mule!”

There may be earlier uses of the phrase “Go suck an egg”.

I remember the first time I heard it in a kids cartoon it was cartoon networks ed edd and eddie and then disneys cartoon channel had a cartoon called "ying yang yo " and they used it like 3 times a short

although I might of heard it in animianics too

Actually, it comes from an early 1960’s advert for lozenges.

There’s also “yah booh sucks for you”, which is a derogatory-but-not-obscene insult of my dad’s childhood ('50s). Entirely the sort of thing one could say in front of one’s grandmother.

Eg, in Prince Caspian, where Edmund is arguing that he, not Peter, should duel Trumpkin. “It’ll be more of a sucks for him if I win, less of a letdown for us all if I lose”

Of course that’s a book, not a movie. And it’s definitely a different derivation from the modern ‘sucks’ which I would never ever have said in front of my grandmother - although the distinction is subtle, “sucks for you” is vastly different to “you suck”

The earliest I’ve heard – and it sticks out in my mind beacuse it is a pretty early use – is in Billy Jack from 1971. There’s a scene in which the characters are facing authority figures and an adolescent girl says “This court sucks!” or something along those lines, but “sucks” is definitely there.

From the dope itself

On the etymology of “sucks”

Interested cite for sure, although it doesn’t mention the advertisement using that term.

Dennis

It was 1990.

I actually got in (minor) trouble in school for saying sucks one time in the 80’s. Sheesh, I heard a lot worse than that on the school bus.

There’s a very old expression, “Teach your grandmother to suck eggs!”, with a meaning similar to “I’ve forgotten more about that than you’ll ever know.” Burl Ives used it in the 1958 movie The Big Country when Gregory Peck offered to show him how to load a dueling pistol, but it’s probably hundreds of years old.