A lot of the comedies I grew up loving have scenes that have aged quite poorly. An act of borderline sexual assault is played for laughs in The Breakfast Club. Sixteen Candles has a gross Asian stereotype. And don’t get me started on Revenge of the Nerds.
Of course, I don’t suggest remaking either of those former two films, because reasons. But I could see Seth MacFarlane taking the wheel of Revenge of the Nerds and making it hilarious.
I never liked that film, I saw right off that the only really bad kid, the kid who broke laws (minors ones, sure) was gonna be the “hero”.
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective- Very anti transgender, but that part could easily be changed. In fact a good edit might make it okay.
Love Actually- one of many films and TV shows that depicted stalker-like activities as being “romantic”.
Along those lines all those “romantic” films which showed a man unable to take “NO” for an answer- and… it works!
These piss me off, also.
“If you just try hard enough…” 
Maybe not a full remake, but Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure has an especially jarring use of “fag”. Removing that one particular line would make the film better. That’s the only one I can think of off the top of my head from the late 80s and early 90s, which is the era that most of my favorites come from.
ETA: At least among those movies that are my favorites. I’m sure there are many that I didn’t watch, or only watched once (the aforementioned Revenge of the Nerds among them) that should make this list.
Well, to be fair- too many women were taught to play “hard to get”. But those films generally go way too far.
Perhaps. Way more-so back in the day…
The better version of Revenge of the Nerds is “Real Genius,” where the nerds have a variety of personalities, the sex is consensual, and the revenge is against the people who are actually the problem.
Yeah, Real Genius was the first, and for a long time only, show where the nerd characters actually felt like actual nerds. Exaggerated for comedic effect, of course, but still identifiable as such.
You’re going to entrust…[cough]…Seth MacFarlane…[mrrmh]…with making a [ahem] “woke” comedy?
The movie 8 Days a Week would be hard to remake because the entire premise is creepy. Teenage geek boy is in love with neighborhood hottie Keri Russell. His grandfather assures him the most important thing in the world is sex with women. So he decides to live on her front lawn under her bedroom window 24/7 until she falls in love with him. In the end she gives in and has sex with him.
Cowboy with Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon, Warlock with Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn, etc. etc. All the classic Westerns with implied homoerotic subtext. Remake them out of the closet.
The first one that sprang to mind is “The Fighting Seabees” with John Wayne. He has a line in there that includes “Tojo’s bugeyed monkeys” (referring to Japanese soldiers). Also, the Asian actors in it have buck-toothed prosthetics and thick glasses. Of course, this was a war movie, and those sort of memes were everywhere in that time. Most, like this one, don’t need a remake, as they really weren’t worth watching the first time around.
I don’t know, I think Warlock is pretty much perfect the way it is. You can’t look at it now and believe they didn’t know exactly what they were doing. It’s fascinating to think about the audience at the time failing to perceive the not-even-really-veiled subtext.
Pulp Fiction would be much improved by avoiding use of the N-word by white characters (Jimmy isn’t the only one who says it, Lance the drug dealer also casually tosses the word around). It added nothing to the movie and made Quentin Tarantino look like an asshole. I wouldn’t play a rape scene for laughs either when Harvey Weinstein’s name is all over that movie.
Lethal Weapon has a presumed instance of a woman sleeping with another woman mentioned by Riggs as being “disgusting”.
The ‘man talk’ line from Goldfinger, or, more infamously, the fact that Bond forces himself on Ms Galore and miraculously she is suddenly attracted to him (and men in general presumably). How about, rather than ‘appealing to her maternal instincts’, Bond was still able to persuade Pussy to switch sides, despite her not being attracted to him?
I dunno, I think the implied sex between Mitch and Jordan is more than a little problematic these days because Mitch is a minor at 15 and Jordan is an adult at 19.
And when Sherry Nugil tries to have sex with Mitch, she says she’s been waiting 3 years for this, so that means she’s wanted to have sex with him since he was 12. That’s not a good start. They didn’t have sex, but she’s still a 30-something kissing a 15 year old full on the mouth. I’m guessing that’s a little icky by woke standards.
Also, the beauticians are there just to be sexualized by the horny nerds.
There is also a fair amount of bullying going on on the Pacific Tech campus. They’d have to clean that up.
But I’m sure that they could make a good woke remake so long as they always… no, never forget to check their references.
If it’s the scene I’m remembering (and if I’m remembering it correctly) it was in the second film Bogus Journey.
There are a couple of uses of “fag” in Bogus Journey, but there is also one in Excellent Adventure. When they are in 15h century England, Bill thinks Ted is dead and when he realizes that he’s alive and they hug, they call each other “fag.”
I think the movie shows us through Mitch’s reaction that that was creepy as hell. Mitch and Jordan is easy to fix - just make her 17 (another early admission to college).