ELT Presents: Not Past It

August 23, 2021·28 min·2 clips

A teenager sneaks into Superbad but gets caught and ends up watching Rush Hour 3 instead, questioning which film was truly more appropriate.

Jorge Just, a former Every Little Thing guest host, introduces a cross-posted episode of Not Past It, a Gimlet show that picks a moment from each week in history. Host Simone Polanin opens with a 2007 story of trying to sneak into Superbad and ending up watching Rush Hour 3, which sets up the central question of what movie ratings actually do. She places the PG-13 rating at July 1, 1984 and walks back through the 1934 Hays Code. She lists what the Hays Code banned: nudity, profanity, interracial romance, adultery, homosexuality, even the pain of childbirth, with specific examples like Betty Boop's redesign and the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf fight over the word screw. She introduces Jack Valenti, the Texas ad-exec-turned-DC-insider who became MPAA head in 1966 and replaced the Hays Code with the G, GP, R, X system in 1968. She describes the Hollywood Renaissance this unleashed, from The Godfather to Taxi Driver, and the birth of the blockbuster in Jaws and Star Wars. Journalist and George Lucas fan Jason Rezaian recalls seeing Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in May 1984, including the Mola Ram heart-ripping human sacrifice scene. Polanin connects parental outrage over that scene and over Gremlins in June 1984 to a broader context of Surgeon General reports and congressional hearings on violence in media between 1982 and 1986. Spielberg, behind both films, called Valenti and suggested a new tier, which Valenti resisted before caving and introducing PG-13 on July 1, 1984. Polanin notes that PG-13 films including Titanic, Avatar and the Avengers movies dominate the box office and that Spielberg called it the hot sauce rating. After the break she explains the anonymous CARA board of roughly ten parents who watch two or three films a day. Researcher Chloe Nurick shares findings that cunnilingus scenes get rated NC-17 while the reverse gets R, that male nudity and female orgasms are rated harsher, and that subjectivity lets hegemonic norms slip through. Polanin then examines the ratings system's blind spot on race, using Temple of Doom's chilled monkey brains, Short Round, and pseudo-Hindu villains, and noting that Harriet in 2019 and updated warnings on Gone with the Wind and Dumbo on HBO Max and Disney Plus are recent attempts to correct course.

As heard by us

A brisk pitch that turns the PG-13 origin story into a lively hook.

The episode positions Not Past It as a history show that helps the present read a little more clearly, and it does that through a clean PG-13 origin story.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a history show that turns the PG-13 label into a bigger story about Hollywood, panic, and taste.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Every Little Thing