I was reminded of the time a few years ago when I was leading a Strat-O-Matic baseball summer camp at my school. We would take breaks during the day to watch baseball themed films and I decided to show the kids The Bad News Bears. However, I wasn't sure if it was fully appropriate for young kids. It had been a long time since I had seen it and I couldn't remember. So I e-mailed Hot Tub Eric for advice. Unfortunately, I decided to start it before I heard back from him.
And the film was not even remotely okay to show eight-year-old kids that aren't mine. Not only is Walter Matthau drunk all the time, but the kids spend half their time talking about getting high, discussing birth control pills, cursing, looking at issues of Playboy, or driving the team van while drunk.
When the famous line "All we got on this team are a bunch of jews, spicks, niggers, pansies, and a booger eating moron," was uttered, I turned the movie off and inquired, "Who wants to watch Angels in the Outfield? And with that, I extricated myself from a dicey situation. Fortunately, no parents complained.
But, holy shit, what the hell was going on in the 70's? It's like our society had reached such a level of sophistication/ hedonism that even the movies for kids were chockful of debauchery. The aforementioned quote from The Bad News Bears is a classic line, but would never be allowed in a mainstream movie today, let alone a children's film.
When did this shift happen? By the time I was ten years old, movies for kids consisted of safe schlock like Goonies. Don't get me wrong I like that movie, but it couldn't be more test-marketed and inoffensive.
What was going on in the 70's when you could deal with such touchy subject matter in a children's film and still get away with it?
Fuck you old man, it's the 70's!
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19 comments:
First of all, Goonies sucks/ed
You should be shamed for not knowing the classicness of Bad News Bears. No wonder you loved Kumar Bashed Gays at the Whitecastle! Bad News Bears and Slap Shot are the two best sports movies of all time, for large part for their heaping dose of raw 70's pre politically correct dialogue. You should let the kids watch, think how healthier they'd be.
Your story reminds me of the time Mr. Bain, my Spanish teacher, left town for a couple of weeks and left the sub w/ some movies to show. We had read Borges' short story, "El Muerto," and among the videos he'd left was a film version of that. Turned out to be almost a soft-core porno . . . it was fun watching the substitute teacher squirm. I can't remember if she turned it off half way through or if she just put her head in a book and pretended that there weren't naked boobies on the screen every ten minutes.
dn
A similar thing happened in my 7th grade lit class: the teacher rented what she thought was Romeo & Juliet; turned out to be Romeo & Julia and pure porn.
re: Willy Wonka. Have you watched the Chocolate River Tunnel Scene lately? It is really scary. Not really kid-appropriate either. Maybe twat has multiple meanings and the one known today has been recently acquired - like well, I was trying to think of a good example, but can't...maybe jackass or something like that... - Michelle
jeremy says:
first of all, i'm pretty sure she says "twerps" not "twats" and it's just her british accent getting in the way. but secondly, i agree wholeheartedly with your take on 70s kids films. i remember watching g rated freaky friday with our campers years back and being shocked at what passed in a g rated film back then. sexual innuendo and drug references. glorious reality instead of hardcore cartoonish buffonery. the inanity of modern kids films is much more disturbing and damaging but i understand being on the teacher side and not wanting bad feedback from freaked out overprotective parents.
one thing i love about willy wonka specifically is its real sense of menace. like the lord of the rings trilogy, there's a palpable scariness that exists in the world of children and adults alike and it makes these fantastical films all the more affecting. slugworth is truly creepy, when willy wonka yells at charlile at the end he's really cruel and hurtful, and the punishments for the bad kids are swift and appropriate. also, the plight of poor charlie bucket (grandparents all sleeping in one bed, mother using an oar to mix the laundry) is as desperate and hopeless as any lars von trier heroine. all hail 70s grittiness!
hater larry,
excuse me if i hadn't memorized every fucking line of bad news bears.
and it is a good thing that i turned it off as you will see from a future entry about how parents have been giving me a hard time about some of the things i've bee showing my class this year.
goonies is not very good but i like it in a nostalgic kind of way.
and my overall point is that movies were much more honest than they are know. i agree, kids would be better off if they could watch those kinds of films. but i'm not prepared to get slaughtered by parents who don't agree with me. and i can guarantee you the administration wouldn't back me up either. i can't wait to see how brave you are once your ass is on the line.
dave,
i love mr. bain. that sounds like something he would have done. he was one of my favorite teachers in h.s.
mrs. richardson showed us romeo and juliet and all us 9th grade boys got pretty excited by all the juliet nakedness.
jeremy,
i feel much better that she said twerps.
Good use of "hater"
Remember "Foxes" with Jodie Foster and Tatum o'neil wasn't that a kids film
That was really bad
The golden rule here is that the presence of children in a film does not a kid movie make. Cf Jodie Foster in "Taxi Driver." Although in 1976, who knows? Maybe they showed it after "Schoolhouse Rock".
Indeed, BBC Digital Radio recently broadcast a show by the English comedian Mark Steel in which he pointed out that the showing of Charlie Chaplin films in the morning or afternoon around kids' programming (a common move back in England) would have been as incomprehensible to a 1920s audience as showing Scorsese films around "Sesame Street" would be to us.
I feel your pain; we are having movie day next week and it looks as if I'll be sitting through "Ella Enchanted" trying to look interested. At least give us something like "Return to Witch Mountain"....
Hey Weasel and W. Mondale: Aside from the twerps vs. twats interpretation of the actual comment in the movie, don't people in England use "twat" to mean the equivalent of "jerk" or "moron" rather than the equivalent of "vagina"?
The issue with children's entertainment today -- and this becomes painfully and sadly apparent to me every time I visit my sister and her two young kids -- is that it's all top-down, meaning that what ends up in theaters and on TV is the result of executives of big corporations deciding to go ahead with a movie or TV series for kids only if they can see it generating corresponding sources of revenue: dolls/action figures, trading cards, video games, Hillary Duff albums, etc. The 70s were much more (though not exclusively) an era of bottom-up entertainment, where ideas mattered more than all-out marketing assaults.
Jim, we do indeed. Mind you, we use every curse normally associated with sexual or toilet functions as damning slurs, for eg:
"That Tony Blair is a right shitting piss-arse twat"
I always thought she was saying "twit," but that may be the Roald Dahl influencing my hearing.
And obviously I sympathize with the parent issue.
You are shocked about the word 'twat'? Your tolerance for language must be fairly low then.
huh?
The question is ... was Bad News Bears INTENDED primarily as a kids' film? I'd say no, even tho under-14s were obv gonna be a large part of the audience. Michael Ritchie, the director, was primarily a satirist (Smile, The Candidate, Semi-Tough, etc).
As for the "Jews, spics, n*ggers" line, I heard all those words in the schoolyards in the '70s. The culture was clearly less hypocritical about what could be seen and heard then.
-Bill W.
...or society was much less sensitive (or didn't care) how damaging those slurs were to both the target and the bile-spitter.
Making fun of adolescent me because I have red hair (i.e. calling me duracell or orang utan): not damaging and actually sort of fun to have that level of easy notoriety. Making fun of kids due to ethnicity- wicked lame rather than a reflection of a more simple, less hypocritical time. The only thing I miss is that in these litigious, zero-tolerance times is that the objects of the "jews, spics, nigger, and pansies" slurs cannot pull back and slug the bastards with impunity anymore.
first of all, church- up yours.
second of all, bill w? who are you? do i know you? if i do, i apologize.
thirdly, weasel- obviously those words are mean but that doesn't mean they aren't said. i feel like bad new bears is inherently more real than most of the crap posing as kids films now. however, another argument could be made that if it is in a movie, it validates and supports the behavior. i don't know.
I was just thinking about Veruca Salt's remark because I was watching George Carlin's bit from around the same time where 'twat' is included as one of the 7 words you cannot say on television. Do not think I caught VS's remark the first time around, but a few years ago they were playing willy wonka on the new haven green and I nearly spit out my beer. i was hanging out with a brit at the time and he called everyone 'twats' and 'cunts.' i wondered how they got away with that in WW. Not that I think it is such a bad word, but it was basically a movie for kids that came out when there was a lot of censorship, and it was played on television.
"...where 'twat' is included as one of the 7 words you cannot say on television."
You are wrong, Ron.
The George Carlin bit listed the 7 dirty words you can't say on television as "shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits".
my mistake, "twat" was not one of the original 7 words but was one of 3 added to the words you cannot say on television in "Filthy Words."
First of all both Goonies and Bad News Bears are fantastic, but I think you aren't remembering goonies correctly. They cursed up a storm in that movie. There was drug talk, dick jokes and about 75 shits.
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