History lesson: PG-13
I was watching Sixteen Candles the other night, cruising along (for the millionth time) through Molly Ringwald’s high school hell, when we got to the scene I always forget about: a long shower shot of Caroline (the excellently named Haviland Morris), naked and lingering in a way most girls wouldn’t in public. I checked the back of the box: it’s rated PG.
Personally, I remember the first PG-13 movie I saw: My Stepmother is an Alien, which I now see has something of an all-star cast. I watched it at a birthday party, and there was sex! Between adults! Scandal! These days, a PG-13 rating is popular–as in Harry Potter popular–but it still loses out to R-rated movies for advertisers and the employed people who pay their revenues. It’s kind of sad, really; without it, all we’d have is graphic violence or Jessica Tandy films.
A few fun facts about everybody’s favorite ambiguous rating:
- The PG-13 rating was created by the mysterious and all-powerful Illuminati MPAA in 1984, prompted by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and, of all things, Gremlins–both movies were called too violent for a PG rating, but a straight-up R rating seemed like overkill.
- The new rating was suggested by Steven Spielberg, who directed Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and produced Gremlins
- The first movie to receive the PG-13 rating was The Flamingo Kid; the first widely-seen movie to be PG-13 was Red Dawn.
- As late as the late 1980s (with Big, Beetlejuice, Spies Like Us and Nothing in Common), the f-word–generally the gold standard for an automatic R rating–appeared in PG movies.
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