# They could never make (Insert old movie or show) today! **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [October 27, 2022, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894 "2022-10-27T19:33:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 8
**Author:** ![nightshadea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7ba0ec/32.png) [@nightshadea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nightshadea)\ **Post date:** [October 30, 2022, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/141 "2022-10-30T22:29:27Z")
I can’t remember the name of this movie but it was in the little foxes and the movie above that mentioned the two girls with a bet on who loses their virginity first sub genre of movies … but it was made in the late 70s or early 80s and it concerned an upper-crust boy and a girl that was somewhere between 12 and 14 having a jr high first timeromance and as the finale, they planned and ended up in bed together… they get caught in bed together by both kids parents and the girl’s conservative parents have a total fit and want the boy stoned in public and the single dad who was a 70s swinging guy was all like look this is natural and it happens just calm down… and the girl’s side goes dragging the girl off and as the movie ends the conversation goes something like this : “so you like her that much? yeah she’s pretty neat " id like to hang out with her again” then the dad says "between you and me how was “it” he says it was pretty great and they liked it … "well you know your grounded for a while right? so its going to be a while "… There’s no way they’d make this today without a bunch of heavy-handed morality from either side … ---
**Author:** ![Polerius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/d78d45/32.png) [@Polerius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polerius)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/142 "2022-10-31T03:15:39Z")
> [@UltraVires](#): > > The idea that free speech is important transcends the First Amendment limitations. Top down vs. bottom up is a meaningless distinction. If a person is muzzled, it really doesn’t matter to them who is muzzling them and the speech is suppressed either way. I agree that if you’re muzzled, it often doesn’t matter who does the muzzling, the government or your fellow citizens. However, there are differences. If the government is doing it, you have one target: the law. You can work to change the law, vote the government out of power, etc. If your fellow citizens are doing it, the target of your ire and call to action is more amorphous, and harder to change. Depending on how democratic vs autocratic a government is, changing top-down censorship is usually easier than changing bottom-up censorship. Also there is another aspect: Imagine if the Spanish Inquisition didn’t exist, and instead of them going around and questioning everyone’s faith and torturing those who were not faithful enough, that your neighbors were the ones digging into your life and questioning how faithful you are and torturing you if not faithful enough. Yes, if your nails are being pulled out with pliers because you were deemed unpious, it won’t matter much who is doing it, the Spanish Inquisition or your neighbors. But before you get to the point of being tortured, living in a society where the Spanish Inquisition is doing the persecutions is different than living in a society where your neighbors are doing the persecutions. The former has an easier “target” to (a) avoid and (b) try to weaken or get rid of. The latter is much more insidious. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/143 "2022-10-31T03:23:53Z")
I think it’ll be sooner than 5-10 years, but yeah there’ll definitely be a lot of lockdown-related/pandemic related movies and TV coming soon. ---
**Author:** ![Jay\_Z](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Jay\_Z](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jay_Z)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/144 "2022-10-31T04:05:23Z")
> [@bump](#): > > I think it’ll be sooner than 5-10 years, but yeah there’ll definitely be a lot of lockdown-related/pandemic related movies and TV coming soon. I don’t think there will be. It might be inserted as a plot point. That’s what has been done with this sort of illness in the past. We already have Andromeda Strain/Contagion type media for worse situations. Mostly nothing happened, people sat around. In a way that’s bad, because what’s lost is the sort of social interaction that creates drama and comedy. I don’t need to see media with a bunch of Facetiming and Zoom calls. Maybe a take or two on the impact of isolation. Politically, people will have moved on and Covid issues will already be supplanted by other concerns, why would we want to go back for that? I just see a few ways to make effective use of Covid in media, not a lot. That there will be so few really shows its impact in a way. ---
**Author:** ![Horatius](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/horatius/32/3572_2.png) [@Horatius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Horatius)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/145 "2022-10-31T12:13:48Z")
> [@Saint\_Cad](#): > > If Michael J. Fox were healthy, what about Alex Keaton as a Trumpanista and his kids ultra-progressive like AOC supporter and Bernie Bro? A “Family Ties” Trump-era reboot would actually work really well, probably better than the “All in the Family” one. But I’d make the parents Gen-X moderate types who really believed the whole “End of History” ethos of the mid-1990s, and the kid an incel-type who fell down the incel-to-fascist internet pipeline. I think the incel types have better comedy potential, with less “Oh god he sounds just like my old father!” issues. You could have an episode where the parents insist on re-watching _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ with all the kids. “Come on, remember the Nazis were the _bad guys?_ Remember?!?!” > [@Jay\_Z](#): > > Mostly nothing happened, people sat around. Travelling during the pandemic could have some interesting set-ups for horror movies, or thrillers, or who-dun-its. I did one road trip, and at one point, I was the only vehicle on a major Canadian highway for as far as I could see in either direction. Perfect set-up for a serial killer grabbing a victim with no witnesses. I also had friends who still had to fly commercially for work, who often had the plane almost entirely to themselves. Imagine a hijacking story with only 7 people on the whole plane. Or a Rom-com, come to think of it. Or any comedy. Picture the guy starting to sneeze at 30,000 feet. He keeps insisting, “Sneezing is not a symptom!!”, and everyone else is trying to get the in-flight wifi to work so they can Google that. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 1:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/146 "2022-10-31T13:04:30Z")
Oh, I never meant to imply they’d be thrillers or anything like that. Rather I suspect we’ll get a raft of rom-coms dealing with lockdowns, COVID, masking, and the aftermath of it all. And we’ll probably get some kind of horror movie dealing with the lockdown periods. And probably some weepy dramas about families separated during lockdowns. And maybe a political movie or two, although I suspect the COVID aspect will just be rolled into the inevitable Trump White House movies as one more thing. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 1:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/147 "2022-10-31T13:48:18Z")
> [@Lamoral](#): > > I’ve observed that there’s been very little acknowledgement of COVID in movies and shows that were created during the past two years, and I felt that it might have been a deliberate choice that was made to enhance the feeling of escapism. Often I found myself wondering, “hmmm…I wonder if they’re going to have ANY reference to COVID on this.” In particular, I remember watching the first season of _The White Lotus_ and thinking “everyone’s going to wind up getting COVID…they just HAVE to use that as a plot device…it’s exactly the kind of sobering development that would occur on such a cynically intelligent show.” But no, it didn’t happen. Actually, the show The White Lotus was conceived as one that could be filmed under pandemic restrictions. The entire cast and crew were confined to a real luxury resort that stood in for the fictional one on the show and they were able to maintain the various rules required. I think the show was meant to portray a non-pandemic time. ---
**Author:** ![Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmer_j.fudd/32/1211_2.png) [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/148 "2022-10-31T14:05:16Z")
I haven’t made it past the second episode, but the show **Sprung** appears to rely on the lockdown for most of its premise. ---
**Author:** ![doreen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/858c86/32.png) [@doreen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/doreen)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/149 "2022-10-31T14:07:57Z")
I don’t think so - I think that any wave would have come already. I know I recently saw ads for a lockdown rom-com where two people sent up on an arranged date by their parents end up sheltering together after the lockdown starts - and the movie must have been out in 2021 judging by where I saw the ads. ---
**Author:** ![BlinkingDuck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/eada6e/32.png) [@BlinkingDuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BlinkingDuck)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/150 "2022-10-31T14:26:12Z")
I think you got the message the writers intended. Meathead was ‘better’ than Archie, but he was a bit insufferable and naive. ---
**Author:** ![BlinkingDuck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/eada6e/32.png) [@BlinkingDuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BlinkingDuck)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/151 "2022-10-31T14:37:50Z")
Amen…and it is a HUGE difference. I grew up in a remote, rural area wayyyy back in the day and racism and hobophobia were pretty much the norm there. I like to think that I ‘bucked the trend’ with racism - one of my first memories of this was between 1st and second grade my dad always insisted Hispanics were lazy. My first day of summer vacation I went out at 6 in the morning and roofing was being done everywhere (boom oil town). I looked and many of them were Hispanic. When I saw my dad again I mentioned this and he stuck to his guns…but I actually argued with my dad (first time). He did back off. However, homophobia…yeahhhh that stuck. Until I went to college and met them. They seemed fine to me. They’d go out for beers with the boys, tell bad jokes like the rest of us. Hell, they seemed pretty normal to me. It didn’t take long for me to ‘re-evaluate my opinions’. That is the difference between ignorance and malice. ---
**Author:** ![Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slow_moving_vehicle/32/291_2.png) [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slow_Moving_Vehicle)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/152 "2022-10-31T17:58:05Z")
> [@Horatius](#): > > > [@Jophiel](#): > > > > While a show like All In The Family would need some rewriting just because it’s not fifty years ago any longer, I don’t believe that they would be impossible with a sharp script. > > I suspect a show about an older Trump supporter clashing with his son-in-law Biden voter would work Worked for nine seasons, as a matter of fact: [_Last Man Standing_](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Man_Standing_(American_TV_series)), a Tim Allen sitcom where he was grumpy Republican dad to progressive, feminist daughters. Never saw it, but my parents liked it. ---
**Author:** ![SuntanLotion](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/suntanlotion/32/16165_2.png) [@SuntanLotion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SuntanLotion)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/153 "2022-10-31T19:33:38Z")
I don’t think Pink Flamingos would work today, because people are more jaded and less easily shocked.🦩 ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/154 "2022-10-31T19:49:35Z")
What about Fast Times at Ridgemont High? One of the main characters gets an abortion – that probably wouldn’t fly today, outside of small indie productions. It caused some major controversy when Maude got one back 1972. Several of the main characters are shown partially nude and are meant to be under 18. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/155 "2022-10-31T19:54:53Z")
I doubt the abortion alone would be a reason to condemn the movie. It was set in California, after all, and they’re still legal in that state. Actually, the bigger problem with that movie would probably be the idea of all of the kids working and hanging out in the local mall. ---
**Author:** ![RitterSport](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rittersport/32/6326_2.png) [@RitterSport](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RitterSport)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/156 "2022-10-31T19:57:00Z")
How many mainstream movies and TV shows have a character unapologetically getting an abortion? Hollywood is pretty conservative on that issue. ---
**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/157 "2022-10-31T20:19:53Z")
Today I read that Tom Hanks thinks he could not do Philadelphia today, because he is not gay. I don’t know whether that is true or even if that falls under the premise of the OP, as “they” could probably make Philadelphia with another actor if they so wished. But I thought I could mention it. And yes, the film they could never make again is [Freaks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freaks_(1932_film)), as @ArtBeforeScience wrote. One of the most impressing movies I ever saw. That cast is no longer available. ---
**Author:** ![PastTense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pasttense/32/14550_2.png) [@PastTense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PastTense)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 9:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/158 "2022-10-31T21:51:35Z")
Freaks is available free on Youtube: [![]( " - YouTube") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BALy3U_8sow) ---
**Author:** ![Yookeroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yookeroo/32/323_2.png) [@Yookeroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yookeroo)\ **Post date:** [October 31, 2022, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/159 "2022-10-31T23:09:50Z")
> [@UltraVires](#): > > With racism or another unpopular to the left issue, Racism is popular in conservative circles? ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [November 1, 2022, 1:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/they-could-never-make-insert-old-movie-or-show-today/973894/160 "2022-11-01T01:45:25Z")
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