Very interesting, thank you. So in Australia it was really seen as a product for children (or kids) at least in the re-runs.
Was TNG considered a "family tv show" at the time? And anyway, what does "family tv show" mean?
- Thread starter Skipper
- Start date
It's not uncommon for a production aimed at an older audience in one country to be aimed at kids in another country, due to different expectations or standards. For instance, a lot of US imports of anime series cut out the violence, nudity, drinking, etc. to make them more child-friendly, since Americans have traditionally assumed animation has to be for children while other countries don't share that prejudice -- and even children's shows in Japan are more overt about things like death, blood, and drinking than American children's shows.
Actually, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood has discussed things like death, and war, and even child molestation.
As to ST not being "a family show" simply because it wasn't specifically intended as a family show, or because of the constant battles with network censors, well, THAT is CERTAINLY a case of "moving the goal posts." The thread title does, after all, say "considered," not "intended."
Granted, I first encountered Star Trek in strip syndication, almost exactly a decade after its network run, when I was in high school, and so the goal posts of "family fare" had already been moving on their own for a decade. So I can't honestly say what the general public opinion of its suitability for children was, when I was eight years old, and moving from Rocket Robin Hood cartoons (now there was a lot of gratuitous violence!) to the "live-action cartoon" that was William Dozier's vision of Batman.
Just because it wasn't intended for children doesn't mean that it wasn't generally regarded as suitable for families to watch together. Was Get Smart specifically intended as a "family show?" The Beverly Hillbillies? Green Acres? Dragnet? Gunsmoke? Any of the dozens of game shows from that era? (I remember watching The Newlywed Game, arguably one of the worst cases of tasteless sexual humor on television, when I was of a single-digit age, and nobody gave it a second thought!)
Star Trek (TOS) may not have been Lost in Space or Batman, but it certainly wasn't Peyton Place. Nor was TNG Dallas or Falcon Crest. And unlike a number of series from only a few years later, nobody saw any need to preface the show with any sort of "viewer discretion" advisory (as I recall, the first episode of All in the Family, and possibly the first few episodes, did carry such an advisory, and until its premise became widely known, that was probably for the best, even though Norman Lear toned it down considerably from Till Death Us Do Part, apparently because Carroll O'Connor wanted Archie Bunker to be a deeper, more nuanced, less malicious character than the original Alf Garnett). ST may have fought with network censors, but it got on the air, and it got on the air at times when even small children would be up. And that became even more true in strip syndication, with 6:00 PM was quite possibly its most common time slot.
And yes, granted, TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT failed to even so much as acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ humans. But (1) that could be attributed to simply assuming that in the 23rd century, sexual identity and orientation would be no more important than skin color or planet of origin, and (2) these series certainly dealt with the issue allegorically on occasion (aside from cases where some entirely nonsexual characteristic served as a surrogate for sexual orientation and/or identity, I distinctly recall there being an episode that postulated a society where "bi" was the norm, and identifying exclusively as a single gender was heavily stigmatized, and then, of course, we have Dr. Crusher's shocked reaction to finding that Odan's new host was female.)
So? One example does not prove a universal pattern. There have been countless kids' TV shows in America where the words "kill," "dead," and "death" could not even be spoken, where nobody ever died on camera, where showing blood or direct violence against people was forbidden. That's why the original Teen Titans cartoon had to call Deathstroke "Slade," why Spider-Man in the '90s cartoon wasn't allowed to punch anything but robots, etc. Then there are things like anime and tokusatsu dubs having characters drink juice or "medicine" instead of sake.
Really, Mister Rogers is a completely invalid comparison, because that's an educational show discussing those topics sensitively, which is worlds apart from an action show depicting them for entertainment. Also, PBS broadcast standards and commercial TV broadcast standards are two entirely separate matters. For example, PBS was able to show the explicit nude scenes in Brideshead Revisited and other shows when they would've had to be censored or cut entirely on commercial TV.
A conversation can be about more than one aspect of an issue. The difference between how the creators of a show intended it to be received and the way audiences, critics, or broadcasters interpreted it is absolutely relevant to an informed understanding of the topic. The only "right" answer is a thorough one -- not taking one side, but considering the facts on every side of the issue.
And facts are what are at issue here. Your attempt to redefine the topic as one of token or negative depictions of gay guest characters vs. full inclusion of regular characters is ignoring the fact that the Berman-era Trek shows did neither of those things, but aggressively avoided the issue altogether. It's changing the subject because it's comparing the baseline of 1980s-90s shows to modern shows, instead of the actual question on the table, which is how TNG compared to the 1980s-90s baseline.
What were their time slots? As I've been saying over and over again, you can tell these things pretty well by when the shows were scheduled for -- the later in prime time, the more adult the show was usually intended to be. It's pointless to bring rerun syndication into the question, because then all bets are off. But keep in mind that children were presumed to be in school for most of the weekday, so daytime programming was often free to be comparatively adult on the assumption that the audience was mostly housewives (it's the past, remember).
And I have acknowledged exactly that mutliple times over the course of this thread, that it was in between those two extremes. It is artificial and gratuitous to try to dumb everything down to a black-and-white, all-or-nothing choice. Life is not that simplistic.
Honestly, just go back and REREAD THE THREAD. All of this has been argued and re-argued dozens of times over the past two months, and it's ridiculous that we're going around in circles over the same points. Don't we have better things to do?
The showrunners acknowledged heavy network interference on the Tara/Willow relationship, which led to some creative ways of showing their relationship. So, not everyone was "ready." At least, not at the networks.Ah, in 2001 the first regular lesbian couple appeared on TV in Buffy. Which was broadcast on UPN. The same network that Enterprise was broadcast on.
So, we can stop saying "that it was too early", "Audience was not ready", "TPTB didn't want it!" and at least assume that it was a specific choice by Berman who was actively committed to preventing any LBGT representation in Star Trek? Can we at least agree on this, regardless of why he did it?
But TNG was syndicated, which should've made it easier. Again, all this has been covered earlier in the thread -- I gave examples of syndicated shows that were able to be racier and more daring than network shows because there was one less layer of approval to go through.
And yes, naturally the culture war was still ongoing, with some pushing for more inclusion and others resisting, but the same went for including nonwhite characters back in TOS's day. And TOS was on the vanguard of that fight, or nearly so. But the Berman-era shows sat out the battle altogether for 18 years, a few token allegories aside.
True. But really Star Trek didn't manage to find a compromise between "regular homosexual couple" and "GAYS DON'T EXIST!!! WE CURED THEM!!! EVEN ON OTHER PLANETS!"?
@Therin of Andor while I was googling about Star Trek in Australia, I found this one!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Five
How it was?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Five
How it was?
No, it was seen as a show that struggled in prime time during ratings periods, but by a fluke, the Seven Network discovered that many SF series did extremely well in daytimes, especially on weekends if sporting events were cancelled. So those 40 "G" rated Trek episodes got a work out once the Nine Network let its option lapse!
@Therin of Andor while I was googling about Star Trek in Australia, I found this one!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Five
How it was?
Sadly, I missed watching that. We got terrible reception on Channel Two, our national public broadcaster, in the 60s.
It's star, Mike Dorsey, moved into our very racy prime time soap opera, "Number 96", in the 70s, playing a pompous, local government official. In real life, he was also Tour Manager for "The Rolling Stones".
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Look what I found!
Watched the first 5 minutes. I know it's not enough for giving a fair judgment, but I'm quite sure that their target demographic wasn't the same of Star Trek TOS...
To use something I heard in a sermon yesterday morning, from a United Methodist Pastor who happens to also be very much a fan of ST in general, and SNW in particular,
I will also preface my attempt to de-escalate the rather heated argument by noting that I misspoke, when I said that I'd first encountered TOS "almost exactly a decade after its network run, when I was in high school." I was in fifth grade, concurrently with the 1972-73 TV season, and so I was quite a bit closer to the social mores of the time. (I even remember my first encounters with TOS: the first partial episodes I saw were the end of "A Taste of Armageddon" and the beginning of "Space Seed." And the first complete episodes I saw were "The Devil in the Dark" and "Operation: Annihilate."
I will now make my points:
1. A television show (or any other form of entertainment) does not have to be specifically intended for a family audience, or for unsupervised school-age children, or even unsupervised preschool-age chidren, in order to be suitable for those audiences. Jeopardy! is not a children's show by design, and yet it's entirely suitable for children. Ditto for Evening at Pops. Or a broadcast of a figure skating competion, or a baseball game.
2. Just because a television show (or a movie, or a book) is specifically intended for a family audience, or even for an audience primarily consisting of unsupervised children, does not mean it is not of interest to adults. I grew up on Captain Kangaroo, from years before the original "Treasure House" set gave way to "The Captain's Place" (and I have distinct memories of well-known ragtime pianists making guest appearances on one episode, and of Apollo mission coverage actually being incorporated into another episode), and I would put the storytelling, and the comedy, and the music, and the occasional educational content, as being at least as good as most primetime television. I didn't grow up on Mister Rogers Neighborhood (I'd barely even heard of it while I was growing up), and wasn't exposed to it until I was a junior in high school, but I recognized the quality of the series immediately, and I still watch it regularly, at nearly age 62.
3. Just because a series is generally unlikely to traumatize children doesn't preclude the occasional exception. I was in 5th grade, the first time I saw "The Man Trap." I was in my 40s or 50s the second time. It severely traumatized me as a 5th grader, and if I hadn't already seen beautiful episodes like "The Devil in the Dark" first, I might have given up on ST. The idea of a hungry predator, with an appearance that is utterly hideous by all Human standards, stalking the crew, luring them to a particularly excruciating and gruesome death by mimicking their most trusted friends (or in Uhura's case, mimicking a fantasy), was made all the more traumatizing by the simple fact that the Salt Vampire's "Young Nancy" guise bore a more than passing resemblance to the music teacher who serviced my elementary school at the time. And it didn't exactly help matters that Courage wrote an exceptionally creepy score for the episode, prominently featuring a crude electronic "organ." By the time I could finally bring myself to see the episode again, I was older and wiser, and realized that a lifeform that metabolized salt, in such a way as to permanently remove it from circulation, was as ludicrous as Doc Smith's notions of iron (literally the most stable element on the whole Periodic Table) as a source of energy, or radium as an appropriate metal for currency or jewelry.
4. Even television shows that are intended for children may still traumatize some. I distinctly recall that Gigantor terrified me. Just seeing the open for the series was enough to drive me to watch something else, anything else.
5. Getting back to TNG specifically, yes, there was quite a bit of sexual content, and not just in the first season. Tasha seducing Data in "The Naked Now." Geordi and Tasha's lines in "Justice," about how the people of that particular crapsaccarine (as it ultimately turned out) society "make love at the drop of a hat . . . any hat." Okona seducing (as I recall) and attractive young transporter engineer. Riker's practical joke of asking Picard to buy what turned out to be a Risan fertility idol, in order to guarantee that he'd be continuously showered with proposition after proposition. But even the worst of it was far more tasteful than, say, Three's Company, which I deem to have been a total waste of the late John Ritter's acting chops, all for the sake of tasteless "cutesy sex" jokes. Nor did I find even the worst of the violence to be any worse than I'd seen in some of the more violent police procedurals, or the William Dozier Batman, or Rocket Robin Hood. All in all, I would not regard any of the sex, violence, or nudity in TNG sufficient to make it unsuitable for family viewing. And evidently neither did my younger cousin, who had no objections to her toddler son becoming a fan of the series.
Now I would not consider DSC (especially the second season, thanks to the Section 31 arc in general, and the "eye-scream" in, if I remember right, "The Red Angel") or PIC to be suitable for pre-high-school-age viewing. And I certainly wouldn't regard most of LD to be suitable for family viewing, either, because of the often-tasteless sexual humor. But certainly all the ST series that have enjoyed a broadcast run could be regarded as such, and so could SNW, given today's social mores.
As to LGBTQ+ in Berman-era ST, he may very well have been homophobic. But on the other hand, unless a character is stereotypically "camp gay," there isn't much opportunity to show a character's sexual orientation without establishing a romantic relationship, and we didn't see all that many strictly heterosexual relationships in Berman-era ST, either. Some, to be sure, but not like what you're seeing today. And back then, it wasn't exactly the norm, in action-adventure storytelling, to delve deeply into even the regular characters' love lives, much less those of on-shot guest characters. Emergency! (which I grew up on, and have on DVD) certainly wasn't anything like Station 19 (which I've seen) or Rescue Me (which I've barely even heard of). That Berman-era ST was way behind the sitcoms in terms of having LGBTQ+ guest characters, and treating them with dignity, is a given, and it's an injustice. But it did occasionally bring up those issues allegorically. Dealing with an issue allegorically is better than not dealing with it at all. And not dealing with it at all is better than dealing with it hatefully.
He spoke of such things both as ways to de-escalate arguments, and as a way to gauge whether somebody is disagreeing just for the sake of being disagreeable, or for the sake of "powning."
I will also preface my attempt to de-escalate the rather heated argument by noting that I misspoke, when I said that I'd first encountered TOS "almost exactly a decade after its network run, when I was in high school." I was in fifth grade, concurrently with the 1972-73 TV season, and so I was quite a bit closer to the social mores of the time. (I even remember my first encounters with TOS: the first partial episodes I saw were the end of "A Taste of Armageddon" and the beginning of "Space Seed." And the first complete episodes I saw were "The Devil in the Dark" and "Operation: Annihilate."
That is actually more-or less my own definition. I might elaborate upon it and say that a "family show" is one that (1) generally lacks content that might traumatize children, or encourage (based on the social mores of the time) unacceptable behavior in them, and (2) contains content that children would find engaging enough that they would not be bored to tears.
I will now make my points:
1. A television show (or any other form of entertainment) does not have to be specifically intended for a family audience, or for unsupervised school-age children, or even unsupervised preschool-age chidren, in order to be suitable for those audiences. Jeopardy! is not a children's show by design, and yet it's entirely suitable for children. Ditto for Evening at Pops. Or a broadcast of a figure skating competion, or a baseball game.
2. Just because a television show (or a movie, or a book) is specifically intended for a family audience, or even for an audience primarily consisting of unsupervised children, does not mean it is not of interest to adults. I grew up on Captain Kangaroo, from years before the original "Treasure House" set gave way to "The Captain's Place" (and I have distinct memories of well-known ragtime pianists making guest appearances on one episode, and of Apollo mission coverage actually being incorporated into another episode), and I would put the storytelling, and the comedy, and the music, and the occasional educational content, as being at least as good as most primetime television. I didn't grow up on Mister Rogers Neighborhood (I'd barely even heard of it while I was growing up), and wasn't exposed to it until I was a junior in high school, but I recognized the quality of the series immediately, and I still watch it regularly, at nearly age 62.
3. Just because a series is generally unlikely to traumatize children doesn't preclude the occasional exception. I was in 5th grade, the first time I saw "The Man Trap." I was in my 40s or 50s the second time. It severely traumatized me as a 5th grader, and if I hadn't already seen beautiful episodes like "The Devil in the Dark" first, I might have given up on ST. The idea of a hungry predator, with an appearance that is utterly hideous by all Human standards, stalking the crew, luring them to a particularly excruciating and gruesome death by mimicking their most trusted friends (or in Uhura's case, mimicking a fantasy), was made all the more traumatizing by the simple fact that the Salt Vampire's "Young Nancy" guise bore a more than passing resemblance to the music teacher who serviced my elementary school at the time. And it didn't exactly help matters that Courage wrote an exceptionally creepy score for the episode, prominently featuring a crude electronic "organ." By the time I could finally bring myself to see the episode again, I was older and wiser, and realized that a lifeform that metabolized salt, in such a way as to permanently remove it from circulation, was as ludicrous as Doc Smith's notions of iron (literally the most stable element on the whole Periodic Table) as a source of energy, or radium as an appropriate metal for currency or jewelry.
4. Even television shows that are intended for children may still traumatize some. I distinctly recall that Gigantor terrified me. Just seeing the open for the series was enough to drive me to watch something else, anything else.
5. Getting back to TNG specifically, yes, there was quite a bit of sexual content, and not just in the first season. Tasha seducing Data in "The Naked Now." Geordi and Tasha's lines in "Justice," about how the people of that particular crapsaccarine (as it ultimately turned out) society "make love at the drop of a hat . . . any hat." Okona seducing (as I recall) and attractive young transporter engineer. Riker's practical joke of asking Picard to buy what turned out to be a Risan fertility idol, in order to guarantee that he'd be continuously showered with proposition after proposition. But even the worst of it was far more tasteful than, say, Three's Company, which I deem to have been a total waste of the late John Ritter's acting chops, all for the sake of tasteless "cutesy sex" jokes. Nor did I find even the worst of the violence to be any worse than I'd seen in some of the more violent police procedurals, or the William Dozier Batman, or Rocket Robin Hood. All in all, I would not regard any of the sex, violence, or nudity in TNG sufficient to make it unsuitable for family viewing. And evidently neither did my younger cousin, who had no objections to her toddler son becoming a fan of the series.
Now I would not consider DSC (especially the second season, thanks to the Section 31 arc in general, and the "eye-scream" in, if I remember right, "The Red Angel") or PIC to be suitable for pre-high-school-age viewing. And I certainly wouldn't regard most of LD to be suitable for family viewing, either, because of the often-tasteless sexual humor. But certainly all the ST series that have enjoyed a broadcast run could be regarded as such, and so could SNW, given today's social mores.
As to LGBTQ+ in Berman-era ST, he may very well have been homophobic. But on the other hand, unless a character is stereotypically "camp gay," there isn't much opportunity to show a character's sexual orientation without establishing a romantic relationship, and we didn't see all that many strictly heterosexual relationships in Berman-era ST, either. Some, to be sure, but not like what you're seeing today. And back then, it wasn't exactly the norm, in action-adventure storytelling, to delve deeply into even the regular characters' love lives, much less those of on-shot guest characters. Emergency! (which I grew up on, and have on DVD) certainly wasn't anything like Station 19 (which I've seen) or Rescue Me (which I've barely even heard of). That Berman-era ST was way behind the sitcoms in terms of having LGBTQ+ guest characters, and treating them with dignity, is a given, and it's an injustice. But it did occasionally bring up those issues allegorically. Dealing with an issue allegorically is better than not dealing with it at all. And not dealing with it at all is better than dealing with it hatefully.
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Season 1 included... "Klingon" breasts. DSC is absolutely not "family TV". Possibly from Season 3 on... DSC stopped trying to so be edgelord by then.
As an aside, I always felt TMP should have been rated PG, not G. I was probably just an oversensitive child (I would’ve been ten) but I remember being rather upset by three things in particular: the transporter accident; that barely-glimpsed guy in a spacesuit over Epsilon Nine who’s trying to flee but (presumably gets engulfed and) collapses; and what I would now call a John Carpenter-ish sense of horror in the Ilia-probe (“it’s sort of her but she’s dead!”, at least until the ending).
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Yeah. I remember now -- even when the film came out in 1979, it seemed odd that it was rated G, which even then was seen as a rating for more kid-friendly fare like Disney movies. True, some earlier genre films had been rated G, including Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain and Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running; but by the late '70s, the "G = children's film" perception had set in, and even Star Wars, a movie deliberately made to appeal to children, was given a PG rating, as were Close Encounters, Flash Gordon, etc. So giving the more mature, intellectual Star Trek a G rating seemed incongruous even then. It seemed to me, and I may have seen the sentiment expressed by others, that the rating was a consequence of the culture's dismissal of science fiction as kid stuff, and that it was an artificial imposition on a movie that was clearly more in the spirit of a PG-rated film -- not only for the reasons you cite, but for the philosophical depth it aspired to and for the sexual aspects that the film was only able to hint at elliptically.
Interesting—I didn’t actually know that G had ever not usually meant “for children, or at least okay for them”. I’m probably an old fuddy-duddy for thinking this, but The Andromeda Strain and Silent Running both feel PG to me too (people dissolving! laser burns! a guy murdering his coworkers!), and I’m surprised they were Gs. Maybe I wouldn’t have been, in the era.
Jack Valenti hated the Hays Code with a passion. And as soon as he had the opportunity to replace it, he did so. The ratings system was intended to only indicate acceptability of the film for underage viewers. Not whether or not it would be of interest to them. Not whether or not it would be of interest to adult viewers. And most definitely not whether the movie was any good. And he chose to err on the side of avoiding even the slightest spoilers, which made the system much less informative than it could have been, given that parents who were conservative-to-reactionary on political, soical, religious, or sexual matters would likely be more concerned about sex, and language while parents who were liberal-to-leftist on those matters would likely be more concerned about violence and racism.
There is to this day exactly one absolute, non-negotiable, requirement for somebody who wishes to serve on the MPAA Ratings Board: they have to be parents.
As originally conceived, there were four ratings: G, M, R, and X, with copyright registration on the G, M, and R ratings banners. X was deliberately left in the Public Domain, under the assumption that nobody would want such a rating. And the assumption was that most mainstream movies would be rated G.
Problems showed up right away. People didn't read the fine print, and thought "M" was more restrictive than "R," not the other way around. So "M" was quickly changed to "GP" -- "General Audiences, Parental guidance Suggested."
People thought "GP" stood for "General Public." So within about a year, it became "PG."
Neither did Valenti expect filmmakers to attempt to jigger the system.
Although a few films that weren't overt porn were released with X ratings (e.g., the initial releases of A Clockwork Orange, and Fritz the Cat, along with Myra Breckenridge, and at least the initial release of Midnight Cowboy), it quickly became a windfall for pornographers, since they could now put movies like The New Erotic Adventures of Casanova into theatres, instead of the back rooms of adult bookshops.
And the G rating similarly got spoiled for the mainstream, both by Disney (which had reached a creative nadir after Sleeping Beauty and before its renaissance, releasing such engineered-for-kids fare as The Million-Dollar Duck and The Barefoot Executive), and by Disney-wannabes who were releasing stuff that made Disney's The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again seem like high art.
And so that left only PG and R for serious moviemaking. And so filmmakers would insert just enough mild profanity into a G movie to turn it into a PG, or they'd clean up an X movie just enough to turn it into an R. And that, of course, came to a head with a number of "hard PG" movies that led to the addition of PG-13, and a number of "hard R" movies that led to the addition of NC17.
*****
On at least one occasion in the past, I did an "Advanced Search" on IMDB, of all the G movies from 1968 through 1980. I do so again.
Back in 1968, movies released with G ratings included The Blood Beast Terror, Attack on the Iron Coast, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Odd Couple, The Green Berets, With Six You Get Eggroll, and plenty of others that were hardly kid-flicks, some of which would likely either traumatize small children or bore them to tears (or both). And it included such children's classics (that are nonetheless good general interest movies) as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
In 1970, the original Airport carried a G rating.
By the early 1970s, G ratings were dominated by kid-flicks, religious films, documentaries, and musicals.
There were 349 G movies released in the 5 years from 1968 through 1972. There were 313 released in the 8 years from 1973 through 1980.
There is to this day exactly one absolute, non-negotiable, requirement for somebody who wishes to serve on the MPAA Ratings Board: they have to be parents.
As originally conceived, there were four ratings: G, M, R, and X, with copyright registration on the G, M, and R ratings banners. X was deliberately left in the Public Domain, under the assumption that nobody would want such a rating. And the assumption was that most mainstream movies would be rated G.
Problems showed up right away. People didn't read the fine print, and thought "M" was more restrictive than "R," not the other way around. So "M" was quickly changed to "GP" -- "General Audiences, Parental guidance Suggested."
People thought "GP" stood for "General Public." So within about a year, it became "PG."
Neither did Valenti expect filmmakers to attempt to jigger the system.
Although a few films that weren't overt porn were released with X ratings (e.g., the initial releases of A Clockwork Orange, and Fritz the Cat, along with Myra Breckenridge, and at least the initial release of Midnight Cowboy), it quickly became a windfall for pornographers, since they could now put movies like The New Erotic Adventures of Casanova into theatres, instead of the back rooms of adult bookshops.
And the G rating similarly got spoiled for the mainstream, both by Disney (which had reached a creative nadir after Sleeping Beauty and before its renaissance, releasing such engineered-for-kids fare as The Million-Dollar Duck and The Barefoot Executive), and by Disney-wannabes who were releasing stuff that made Disney's The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again seem like high art.
And so that left only PG and R for serious moviemaking. And so filmmakers would insert just enough mild profanity into a G movie to turn it into a PG, or they'd clean up an X movie just enough to turn it into an R. And that, of course, came to a head with a number of "hard PG" movies that led to the addition of PG-13, and a number of "hard R" movies that led to the addition of NC17.
*****
On at least one occasion in the past, I did an "Advanced Search" on IMDB, of all the G movies from 1968 through 1980. I do so again.
Back in 1968, movies released with G ratings included The Blood Beast Terror, Attack on the Iron Coast, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Odd Couple, The Green Berets, With Six You Get Eggroll, and plenty of others that were hardly kid-flicks, some of which would likely either traumatize small children or bore them to tears (or both). And it included such children's classics (that are nonetheless good general interest movies) as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
In 1970, the original Airport carried a G rating.
By the early 1970s, G ratings were dominated by kid-flicks, religious films, documentaries, and musicals.
There were 349 G movies released in the 5 years from 1968 through 1972. There were 313 released in the 8 years from 1973 through 1980.
"G" stood for "General Audiences," so it was originally intended to be for everyone, as hb said. Suitable for children, yes, but that pretty much meant they were held to the same standards as broadcast TV, at least outside of later prime time. It was meant to be the default rating for everything that wasn't too intense or adult for it. But I suppose, perhaps, that filmmakers chose to take advantage of the freedom the ratings system gave to go beyond what you could show on TV or could've shown under the Hays Code -- the same way that pay-cable shows took advantage of their freedom from commercial-TV censorship to highlight more adult content. So pretty much everyone except the makers of kids' films put in enough language or violence or sex to get a PG, and thus PG became the default. So the perception of the ratings shifted, and content that the MPAA would initially have considered acceptable for a G rating under the original view of things came to be seen as PG instead. Or so I would conjecture.
And perceptions have drifted even more since then, as filmmakers hardening PG films or softening R films juuuust enough to get a PG-13 have stretched out the boundaries of PG-13 to the point of uselessness and turned PG into the approximate equivalent of what G was in the '70s or '80s.
I think this is an example of Goodhart’s Law: “When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric.” Ratings were introduced to be an objective measure of films' content, but filmmakers try so hard to finesse the system to get the "preferred" rating that it renders the measurement useless. And since the implicit or explicit definitions of the ratings change over time, it makes them useless for comparing the content level of films from different eras.
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