The best example of this, maybe in history, is the rating given to the animated movie Watership Down. When it came out, it was rated for all audiences, including young children.
It was also marketed as a movie for young children. The original movie poster featured colourful happy bunnies on it.
I loved it as a kid - I mean, it’s a great movie - but many kids were, famously, deeply traumatized.
The movie is in no way appropriate for sensitive viewers - it features rabbits being exterminated, in graphic detail (you see them agonizingly struggle for breath, squirming and clawing each other as they are gassed); rabbits fighting to the death, covered in gore and wounds; implied mass rape (a major plot point is the nasty treatment of female rabbits by a rabbit version of Nazis) … on and on.
The Motion Picture Production Code (The Hays Code) was adopted in 1930 and enforced in 1934 in response to the “scandalous” nature of some Hollywood productions. Look up Pre-Code movies or Forbidden Hollywood you’ll find many movies openly portrayed prostitution, adultery, drugs and usually heavily implied nudity that were far being intended for general audiences.
Adherence and review of films under the Hays Code (like the MPAA code) is voluntary with movies that aren’t approved (or given an MPAA rating) would likely not be accepted for screening by the majority of theaters. The MPAA code was implemented to remove the heavy restrictions of The Hays Code and allow a more diverse range of movies (with age appropriate ratings) to be released to the general public.
Movies that weren’t submitted to the MPAA for review were non-rated or often self X-Rated regardless of actually content (though X-Rated films usually contained heavy adult content). In either case, the majority of movie theaters wouldn’t screen X or non-rated films.
Note that XX and XXX are not official MPAA ratings and came later to designate fully adult content films. The addition of more X’s (there were even self-rated XXXX-rated movies in the 60’s and 70’s) implied more explicit content.
The 60’s and 70’s were more lenient regarding movie nudity. I remember seeing gigantic boobies (hmmm…seems to be a common topic for me today:) ) visible as we drove by the Drive-In theater and there were sometimes R-rated trailers between PG-rated feature films. SIGH Remember when you’d get two movies for a single movie ticket and if it was a kiddie matinee you’d get a couple of shorts (usually The Three Stooges) and cartoons before and between the feature and co-feature!
Airplane! (1980) got a PG rating (PG-13 didn’t yet exist); I went to see it with my parents, at age 15. Between the brief shot of a topless woman shimmying her breasts at the camera when the passengers panic, and Julie Hagerty’s fellatio / re-inflating of the autopilot, I has a few moments where I was pretty embarrassed to be sitting next to my mother.
This Film is not Yet Rated is a terrific look at the foibles of the MPAA rating system and how arbitrary it can be. Highly recommended. I think it might still be available on Netflix.
I couldn’t get into the book, but I did “like” the movie (good plot lines, etc.); it was definitely an allegory of the Soviet takeover of East Germany.
The Monkees movie “Head” was also rated G; were it to be released today, it would definitely have been PG-13. “Silver Streak”, which was very popular when I was a tween but I didn’t see it until a few years ago, was PG but nowadays would probably have been rated R for violence.
My favorite odd rating was for a wonderful documentary called “Thunder Soul”, about a high school band director in Houston who produced award-winning combos in the 1960s and 1970s despite poverty and prejudice (he was black and the school was in a mostly low-income black neighborhood, and the “was” is deliberate because he died during the movie’s filming), and the PG rating is for “historical smoking”. :rolleyes:
The scariest movie ever made, “Darby O’Gill and the Little People,” was G-rated. It should have been rated
“This will terrify and scar the shit outta your children.”
Times have changed a lot. Some episodes of “American Horror Story” would have earned an X not so long ago, much less been on non-premium cable.
MPAA added in smoking as a factor in ratings in 2007, apparently as a result of pressure from anti-smoking groups (who wanted to keep kids from seeing depictions of smoking). There were activists pushing for an automatic R rating for any film that showed smoking, but the MPAA apparently considers “historical smoking” (i.e., smoking that’s depicted as part of a historical situation) to be not as problematic; the 2007 article below (from when MPAA announced the change) gives “Good Night, and Good Luck” as an example of “historical smoking.”
I was going to post about Passion as well. No way should that have received only an R. Any other subject matter and it would not have. The ratings board lost a lot of credibility with that in my opinion.
Rated PG-13 mainly due to a cannabis pipe being shown.
Ebert said it was great for the whole family. The studio put that in their ads. The MPAA had a hissy fit. Only G/PG films could tout being for the whole family.
Can’t let 6 year olds see a movie with an object they probably wouldn’t recognize.
