Then there’s the Dick VanDyke episode where Laura is so proud of a black sweater she bought she, commissioned a struggling artist to paint a portrait of her wearing it for $25. Thing was, using his imagination he painted the portrait without the sweater (or anything else) on her. She was so mortified she fled without taking the painting.
Years later he’s made it big time and the Laura nude is included in a big art show in Manhattan. Rob demands he take it down but the artist refuses, saying he had two potential buyers for about $5,000, one in New York and the other in Brazil. Rob points out the painting had been sold to Laura and the artist had no right to resell it. “I’m not gonna hand you my painting and watch you destroy it!”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that; it’s too good and I wouldn’t want to deprive you of the money. But you know that guy on a mountain top in Brazil…”
First of all, it is indeed the customary and polite standard practice on this board, when posting a link, to include a brief summary of the content of the link. Sure, clicking a link might not be much effort, but it’s even less effort for one person (who’s already followed that link anyway) to give a summary than for all of the readers to view it.
Second, your response here to this social norm is way more heated than it needs to be. Cool it, right now. I recommend that you take a step away from this thread for a day or two, if that will help you keep your temper.
Sick over the last couple of days and was bingeing NCIS.
Went through almost all of the first 2 seasons. In every episode, Tony does something that would get him called in to HR, if not outright fired for inappropriate behavior.
Get Smart: the two-parter at the end of Season Four, where a bunch of CONTROL agents (including Max and the Chief) are prisoners in a secret KAOS POW camp (it’s supposed to be a spoof of Hogan’s Heroes and The Great Escape.) At one point, Max has a plan to try to climb the electric fence surrounding the camp. The Chief rebuts this idea, pointing at an African-American man standing a few feet away and saying that he tried that plan last week.
There were many episodes of Gilligan’s Island where Ginger, or occasionally Mary Ann, would act sexually suggestively to one of the unmarried men (Gilligan, the Skipper or the Professor). The man would become uncomfortable and find an excuse to flee the situation. Today that type of scenario would only be used if the male character were gay.
How about the “Maude” episode where she found herself pregnant in her late 40s, and had an abortion? None of that would fly nowadays either, not on a sitcom anyway.
His name was John Aristotle Phillips, and he wrote a book about the experience, called Mushroom: The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid.
I met him at a conference once, where he was representing a software company he later founded. Nice guy, and we had a couple of good laughs quoting some of the lines from the book.
It reminds me of an episode of Leave it to Beaver I saw recently, where all his friends have convinced the Beav that Ward is going to beat him when he gets home. Obviously, Ward doesn’t beat the Beaver, illustrating what a magnanimous, even tempered, wise, modern dad he was.
I think of that when I watch The Honeymooners. I figure, in a world where domestic violence is extremely common (and as others have mentioned above, in this time period movies where a man spanks his wife were frequent and applauded by both sexes), the fact that Ralph just talks about it, and never actually lays a finger on Alice, shows what a big lovable galoot he is. All bark and no bite.
For the 1950s, that was fairly progressive. It’s not hard to find contemporary media where men are shown to be weak and/or cowardly for not committing violence on women and children. It’s good for them, don’t you know? Builds character. Really, you are withholding important life lessons by not beating them. So beat your wife and kids, for their sake. Brought to you by Winston. Tastes good, like a cigarette should.
You’d have to ask the poster who referenced it originally. I don’t know that the OP said it wouldn’t fly, just that he/she was surprised it made it passed the censors.
Probably getting stuff wrong, but I recall an episode where they all had to go to sexual harassment training (?). Anyway, they kept asking ‘hypothetical’ questions about their behavior, and kept getting shot down by the instructor. I remember Abby looking horrified that she wasn’t supposed to be hugging people at work.
NuBSG washed both the main African-American characters from the Original.
Also at some point… while resisting their occupiers who follow a different religion… the humans resort to suicide bombing while vaguely middle-eastern music plays.
I don’t think the above is by default bad…but I’m sure some HuffPo and AV Club writers would have something to say.
There are lots of old cartoon episodes with blatant racism that wouldn’t fly today, but an episode of The Flintstones seemed to have slipped in a dirty joke not meant for everyone to get:
I can’t see how that could refer to anything innocent. No one would try to get away with slipping something like that into a kid’s show in the internet age. Sure, a lot of the jokes were meant for adults to get, but nothing that pushed the envelope and it was probably mostly watched by kids.
