it's mugato season (shoot to kill, shoot to kill, shoot to kill)!

Discussion in 'Star Trek - The Original & Animated Series' started by gratone, Jul 13, 2022.

  1. mb22

    mb22 Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    May 11, 2009
    Sometime during the 70s the G rating became identified with innocuous kiddie fare from Disney (and a few others) instead of just 'material that could shown on TV during the day' like the Apes movies. Likewise, X became synonymous with hardcore porn instead of serious films like A Clockwork Orange or Midnight Cowboy. It is indeed surprising that the transporter malfunction in TMP didn't earn a PG -- perhaps a few more seconds of pained screaming might have done it.

    I wonder what ratings Snow White, Pinocchio and Fantasia (and the live action Wizard of Oz) would get today if they were new films. There are scarier scenes in them than some monster movies.
     
  2. hbquikcomjamesl

    hbquikcomjamesl Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Oct 6, 2006
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    Orange County, CA
    Yes.
    Jack Valenti created the rating system as a replacement for the Hays Code, which he (and nearly everybody else in Hollywood) detested (and which had become a major obstacle to keeping theatrical films competitive with TV).

    His 1968 design (originally G, M, R, and the non-copyrighted X; M became GP in 1970, then PG in 1972) was uninformative by design: the only qualification for being on the ratings board was that one had to be a parent, the sole criterion for the rating was suitability for children, and the rating said nothing about whether sex, violence, horror/shock, or something else entirely was the primary reason, in order to avoid spoilers.

    And it worked. At first. (And yes, as a matter of fact, I am deliberately quoting "Patterns of Force") The original Airport got a G, and nobody mistook it for kiddie material. And A Clockwork Orange got an X, even though, from what little I know of it, you'd have to be pretty sick to get horny from watching it.

    There is no doubt in my mind that Valenti assumed that nobody would deliberately seek a more restrictive rating, and that most films would be released with a G rating, most of the rest with an M/GP/PG rating, and that only those films for which content essential for telling the story demanded an R or an X would be released with those ratings. He almost certainly didn't envision low-budget films intended for very young, minimally-supervised children (and far too saccharine for anybody else) to take over the G rating, and he certainly didn't envision hardcore pornography ever making it out of the back rooms of adult book shops.

    The very first time I was even aware that the rating system was starting to break down was back in the 1970s, a line in a TV sitcom (I think it was Maude, and I think it was Maude's grandson talking to his mother), voicing an objection to "some dumb movie rated G for kids"). Although by then, I'd already been surprised by the PG rating given to The Sting; I'd enjoyed "A Piece of the Action," and always liked ragtime music; it looked like it would be interesting (ironically, I still haven't bothered to see it all the way through). And years later, I was surprised by SW and CE3K both getting PGs, and later on by Spielberg apparently including the phrase, "penis breath" in ET, apparently purely to avoid any possibility of a G rating.

    In the interest of full disclosure, the very first movie I saw in a walk-in theatre was Disney's The Million-Dollar Duck, on a double-bill with The Barefoot Executive. And the next time I saw a movie in a walk-in theatre, it was the MGM retrospective, That's Entertainment.
     
  3. mb22

    mb22 Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    May 11, 2009
    And when the DE of TMP came out 22 years later, the rating was changed to PG for no good reason I can think of.