Is rated PG 13 today as intense as rated R was in the 70's when i a was a teenager?

Would Last House on the Left or The Hills Have Eyes recieve a PG-13 rating today?

i think that impression is formed as ppl get older. the norm for the next gen seems rather shocking. but you can easily decide for yourself: go see some movies! fun research, no? my kids turned out great, btw, and i never worried about such things nor censored their entertainment other than not owning a tv (because i never watch it). it’s good to remember that in the end you’re not raising kids, you’re raising adults. who will absolutely be deciding for themselves. it’s good to let them practice that while they’re young and consequences are more fleeting.

Difficult to say, since the PG-13 rating didn’t exist til the 80s, thanks to Indiana Jones. My guess is no. Once they had a middle ground, they filled it.

PG-13 is a highly prized rating now, because an R rating will (in most cases) automatically drop your take, and a PG rating will deter teens from seeing a movie, thinking it too tame or some such thing. Grated, some do want an R (like when Die Hard 4 came out a while back), but now NC-17 doesn’t exist. I think that the big thing now is either an “Unrated Version” or “Director’s Cut” DVD.

so, no.

@eponymoushipster NC-17 is what exists now (for the absolute worst, usually porn type things). Back in the day it was the X rating (what Scarface had upon release).

@westy81585 sorry, that’s what i meant. but i mean, NC-17 is a death knell for a movie.

@eponymoushipster True…. But I’d like to think you probably have a pretty good idea if that’s where your movie is headed…...It’s gotta be PRETTY bad.

_
PG-13 is much tamer than when the rating first came out.

R movies get it on. PG13 movies don’t get it on.

I don’t know. Sometimes, I suppose. The Groove Tube was rated R and I think it would still be R today. I remember back in the early 70s there was’nt a PG rating because then it was known as GP.

Grove Tube had full frontal male nudity. R rating for sure.

Removed by me.

@filmfann- I don’t remember that. I remember full frontal female nudity. Of course there was that “little guy” with the googly eyes talking about VD.

And the hitchhiker chasing the girl through the woods.
The little guy with the googlie eyes was RIGHT THERE for longer than similar moments in Walk Hard (extended version).

I never went to an R-rated movie until I was in college, and then I discovered that R is too extreme for me, so I can’t really tell you how PG-13 compares.

I do know that when my kids were little it was really hard to find a G rated movie – everything seemed to be PG-13 or R.

Of course, when I was a kid we watched LooneyToons, where characters were frequently blown up, thrown out of windows, shot with shotguns, of “murdalized” in various ways, Popeye (ditto), and the Roadrunner. I would suspect that the amount of violence in those cartoons should be at least PG-13.

Of course, there was never any sex in those things.

The only X rated movie to win the Best Picture Oscar was Midnight Cowboy, which might get a PG-13 today.

je ne comprends pas la question…

I think this is certainly a possibility. I just watched an R rated movie yesterday (not horror or anything, drama) and I think it should have had it’s own seperate rating. It was quite disturbing!

In case anyone wants to know “Revolutionary Road”. I understand it was a social commentary but geez they didn’t have to make their point so gruesomely

@cyndihugs vous habites en france?

Ratings evolve. When I was a child, my favorite movie was The Last Unicorn. It’s animated and in the ‘80s, that was enough to get it a G rating. Now, the raters would look at it, go, “Dude. Cursing. Also sexual innuendo. We’d better go PG on this.” And they would. Similarly, PG-13 and R will evolve as things ameliorate and pejorate. What is acceptable now, may not be so in ten years. What is taboo now maybe fine later.

This is a little off topic but I’m a little confused cause we have different ratings in Australia to you guys, what are your ratings and what order do they go in?

G is for all ages
PG parental guidance (formerly M for Mature or GP)
PG-13 No kids under 13 without an adult
R for restricted. No one under 18 without an adult.
NC-17 No one under 18. (formerly X)

thanks :)
we’ve got:
G all ages
PG parental guidance recommended
M recommended for mature audiences over 15
MA 15+ no one under 15 without an adult
R no one under 18
So with our ratings I think that some movies that used to be R could probably get away with an M these days.

I think the rating system has eased up alot. The original Jaws was R today it would prob get a PG-13.

@gooch The original Jaws was rated M.
R did not exist then.

@filmfann- R definitely existed in 1975. That being said, Jaws was rated PG.
@gooch- Jaws never was rated R.

yeah, there was no middle ground between PG and R, until 1984, when Red Dawn came out.

(via)

This was the first motion picture released with the PG-13 rating, which had been created after difficulty rating some movies in 1984, most notably Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). (The Flamingo Kid (1984) was the first film to be given a PG-13 rating, but sat on the shelves for five months before being released).

Earlier i think i mistakenly said Raiders of the Lost Ark was the first pg-13 to come out. As per the above quote, apparently Temple of Doom caused some issues with ratings. I knew indiana jones had something to do withit. Note however:

(via)

According to the director, when the movie was originally submitted for an MPAA rating, it was given a rating of “R” because of the sight of an exploding head. In order to lower the rating, flames were superimposed over this image. The result was the appearance of a head exploding behind a dense curtain of flames. The rating was lowered to “PG” (at the time, the PG-13 rating did not exist).

I went to the drive-in with my parents to see Jaws when it came out. It was my first R rated movie. My mom made me lay down in the back seat for the begining because she hear it contained nudity. I really would like to see a link claiming something else. If so my first R rated movie would be Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. This is life changing if it was not R. Wow!

@gooch- I have the original (not any re-release) movie poster from Jaws from when I worked at Sacramento Cinemas (it was in storage with other posters behind our largest screen. I wish I’d taken more of them home. They’re worth some $$). It says it’s rated PG.

@astro wow now I must rewrite my life. Seeing an R rated movie for the first time is a big issue. They had boobs and sex on the beach…wow!

@AstroChuck Here is a poster from the movie. See the M on the lower right?

That’s likely the Australian release poster. M was no longer an MPAA rating in 1975. The MPAA changed M to GP in 1970.

Could be. I am finding PG posters also.
Looking at several sites, it appears the M became GP in 1970. I stand corrected.

@marcosthecuban
non, mais je suis francais…. :))) y mexicana :))

To interject a whole new level of complexity to this whole deal, I would suggest that it would be impossible to answer this question. I would guess that some movies that were rated R would be PG-13 or PG today, AND vice versa. Our society has gotten more permissive with what it lets you get away with, but film ratings have always been extremely arbitrary and seem to only get more and more so. For example, the way films are rated is highly inconsistent, it seems to overemphasize placing stricter ratings on depictions and nudity and profanity and lesser on violence that what is really consistent with American culture.

In 2006, Documentary Filmmaker Kirby Dick made a brilliant film about the MPAA called “This Film is Not Yet Rated” in which he demonstrates inconsistencies in rating depending on if a film is an independent film vs. a Hollywood picture, whether the sexual situations depict heterosexual vs. homosexual activity, whether nudity is male or female, etc. He points out that basically this MPAA board is a secret society (he had a private investigator figure out who these people actually are), as is the appeals board, and essentially, points to a lot of it being more political, and designed not for the purposes of “keeping our kids safe” from certain content, but really it’s a tool of the industry to increase profit margins. Essentially it’s always been stated that the board consists of people with school age kids, but their investigation turned up the fact that the vast majority of the board either doesn’t have kids or has kids who have been adults for a very long time, basically our ratings are controlled by a very small group of Hollywood insiders who have no idea what modern sensibilities would dictate. He points out that film raters receive no training and are deliberately chosen because of their lack of expertise in media literacy or child development, and that the raters have required meetings with studio personnel at movie screenings. Basically, the film leaves you with the impression that all our films are rated by a small group of prudish, out of touch individuals who have no idea what they are doing and who are pretty much steered by the heads of movie studios to do whatever will make the studios the most profit. It also shows just how arbitrary the ratings can be, when talking about how people were told they got an NC-17, but could re-submit it and take out 3 “fucks” and 2 “shits”, or shorten that sex scene by 4 seconds.

Bottom line, film ratings are complete, unadulterated bullshit and to be honest, I don’t even pay attention to them, they’re about as useless as a man’s nipples or the Pope’s balls.