Yeah, I deleted. But it’s a great topic for its own thread.
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Richard Pryor was one of the screenwriters.
Governor William J. Le Petomane reminds me of someone.
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Think about “I Love Lucy”. On several occasions Ricky put Lucy over his knee and gave her a spanking. Granted she did some crazy things to him but that would be spousal abuse today. Lucy was always making fun of Ricky’s English pronunciation. That would be cultural insensitivity. Both Lucy and Ricky smoked in the apartment with Little Ricky in his bedroom. That would be child endangerment today.
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I think movies like The Legend of Bagger Vance are no more.
As an aside on Animal House, one of my favorite movies is A Stupid and Futile Gesture about Doug Kenney and Henry Beard*, the two Harvard Lampoon writers who created National Lampoon. Kenney wrote Animal House and Caddy Shack. The telling of their story is egregious in its own right as the movie pulls no punches depicting the behavior at both Lampoons and Kenney’s struggle with self-esteem and drugs, but the movie is a perfect depiction of its time and gives insight into how a movie like Animal House came to be.
*Will Forte and Domhnall Gleeson are marvelous, and Martin Mull does a great job with the on-screen narration.
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As an aside, Donald Sutherland made a HUGE mistake when negotiating his compensation for Animal House.
Saturday Night Fever. I rewatched it a couple years ago, and I definitely did not remember the awful storyline with the female friend. H & I were appalled that we clearly must not have questioned it when we originally saw the movie.
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I don’t watch a lot of movies anyway and choose those that meet my sensibilities of course but “never could be made now” is way over the top for a free society. I hope that any movie could still be made. Now whether it would make money is another question of course. But I’m sure we all know of “sleeper movies” that don’t do well at first but gain traction in another time frame.
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H.O.T.S.
if you know you know
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Mel Brooks movies
The Producers
Blazing Saddles
Peter Sellars in The Pink Panther (Kate…my little XXXX friend)
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I watched Blazing Saddles last week, after hearing it highly recommended it multiple contexts. I didn’t enjoy it. The problem wasn’t that I found the movie offensive. It was more I didn’t find it particularly funny. Maybe I prefer a different style of humor or I’m missing a good portion of the many decades dated references?
However, I’ve really enjoyed other westerns that had a similar or greater degree of offensive language and potentially offensive events. An example is Django Unchained, which has far more offensive language than Blazing Saddles and depicts far more offensive events… Perhaps the difference is more the tone and the types of jokes the director expects the viewer to find funny. Django Unchained depicts some truly horrid events and has extraordinarily offensive language, but it expects the audience to find those events offensive, including having a White character the audience is expected to associate with be increasingly offended over the course of the movie’s events, ultimately leading to his death.
The movie also has some more goofy, light hearted humor, like the light heartedness of Blazing Saddles. For example, I enjoyed the scene in Django Unchained where the KKK members clan masks (bags with eye holes cut in) didn’t fit correctly and related discussion. I thought that was quite funny.
However, I did not find the scene in Blazing Saddles funny, in which the townspeople were unpleasantly surprised to learn that their sheriff was Black, which apparently the audience is expected to find humorous. Blazing Saddles doesn’t expect or lead the audience to be offended in the same way as Django Unchained.
It’s a similar idea for other events in Blazing Saddles. I don’t think the problem is that the movie could not be made today because it is too offensive or not PC enough. There are plenty of more offensive and less PC movies that get made. I think the problem is instead that the movie would not be approved and funded because producers would not expect it to be highly profitable. Today’s audience is quite different from the audience in the 1970s and different types of movies achieve box office success.
I have ALWAYS thought that movie shouldn’t have been made, ever. I have never been able to watch it. It’s absolutely horrible.
Airplane. Haven’t seen it in years, but it was pretty offensive then, even it was funny at the time.
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IMO, the men sitting around the campfire, eating beans and then farting scene in Blazing Saddles is one of the flat out funniest scenes in movie history for me.
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Considering the political activity today with the Bud Light and Target protests, I doubt the Rocky Horror Picture Show could be made today.
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American Beauty. Just stop and think about the movie and its cast. Yeah….you would never make that movie again.
Just a different time. The Barbie movie with everyone dressing up and making it an “event” is very much the same. Maybe not in politics but definitely a cultural thing.
In and Out with Kevin Kline. It’s on one of my streaming networks and I started to watch it but it made me cringe with the gay stereotyping. Made in the 80’s?
Better Off Dead
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One that’s always made me cringe is Pretty Woman. Street walkers are not glamorous and none have ever married a billionaire and lived happily ever after. To put these ideas into the minds of young girls is gross.
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I watched this movie at least a dozen times as a kid.
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