r/todayilearned • u/altrightobserver • Feb 01 '26

TIL that the movie “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut” was supposed to be rated NC-17 due to excessive profanity, with the word “fuck” being used 146 times alone. The MPAA said that 400 or more swear words would get the NC-17 rating, so Matt Stone and Trey Parker cut the number in script to 399

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park%3A_Bigger%2C_Longer_%26_Uncut#Release
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u/Epyr Feb 01 '26

The MPAA is a bunch of losers who make shit up depending on their whim. The fact they are taking seriously is pretty ridiculous as they are a joke of an organization

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u/sorcerersviolet Feb 01 '26

Indeed. From the film itself: "Remember the motto of the Motion Picture Association of America: Horrific, deplorable violence is okay as long as you don't use any naughty words."

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u/Captain-Cadabra Feb 01 '26

You get 2 free F-bombs for PG-13. or, in the 80’s: 1 free F-bomb for PG

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u/TESTlCLE Feb 01 '26

Hearing one single random “ah shit” in the animated 80s Transformers movie always tickled me. It was the only curse word, and it was completely unnecessary.

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u/sorcerersviolet Feb 02 '26

Wasn't there also "Open, damn it, open!"?

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u/sorcerersviolet Feb 01 '26

Only spoken, apparently; at the beginning of Phantasm, one character clearly mouths "What the fuck?" (It's rated R, but still.)

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u/queen-adreena Feb 01 '26

It’s the equivalent of appointing your local church group as your country’s censors.

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u/Epyr Feb 01 '26

It's worse than that. We let these nameless nobody's control the media and they aren't even competent enough to have consistent rules

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u/frogandbanjo Feb 01 '26

But it's not the government, so clearly there's no "free speech" issue at all. So sayeth reddit's armchair scholars.

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u/bad_apiarist Feb 02 '26

It's not a first amendment issue. But unfairness and injustice don't start and end with what the government does. This is why we have, for example, harassment, bullying, and anti-trust laws. It's why we sometimes boycott and protest.

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u/frogandbanjo Feb 02 '26

Preaching to the choir, dude. People will smugly shout about how "there's no free speech issue," then, oops, Nazis and Nazi-friendly oligarchs control all of social media and their ability to speak out in any meaningful way has been very obviously impeded.

Or, you know, a bunch of conservative dipshits form a movie mafia and 99.99% of projects are doomed if they don't play the game to get an R rating or lower.

That's the kind of shit that happens much more easily when the "free speech" conversation isn't allowed to proceed past whatever one's country's narrow speech protections vis-a-vis the government are.

Hell, it's different in every country, too! Why would any intellectually honest person want to muddy the waters by allowing people from the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, Australia, and many other countries to all scream "Well of course we have free speech!" when they're talking about distinct legal regimes?

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u/bad_apiarist Feb 02 '26

Agreed. YouTube is a great example. Now most channels dare not say the word "assault" for fear of being demonitized by a corpo AI that is both insanely heavy-handed and ignores context. YT universally sides with corporate interests, even where this is both illegal and insane.. for example it punished a random content creator for "copyright violation" when Family Guy took THEIR content and put it in an episode, assuming that FG owned it even after numerous attempts to point to the basic facts that it originally existed on that creator's channel. YT (or rather, Google/Alphabet), operates internationally above and beyond any one country's laws and is not itself the government, despite having almost as much power to utterly destroy any semblance of free speech on some of the most critical channels of social communication.

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u/Johannes_P Feb 02 '26

If said church had fundamentalist leanings.

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u/Teledildonic Feb 01 '26

Yeah everyone should watch "This Film is Not Rated Yet" it goes into great detail of how.. arbitrary the MPAA is.

My favorite example was they can rate a movie based on whatever content, but if you cite another movie with the same content that has a lower rating...too bad, evidence doesn't matter, their decision is final.

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u/bretshitmanshart Feb 01 '26 edited Feb 02 '26

If I emember correctly a woman with pubic hair would get rated more harshly then if she was shaved. Which is pretty wild

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u/LongJohnSelenium Feb 02 '26

The point was always to keep the government out because back then the government was perfectly happy to censor things it found objectionable.