Lynnette, I would pray for his soul, and even submit his name to the temple, but I’m afraid my year supply of little pencils has run dry. After this past election I didn’t think we would still be here this long.

I’m rather surprised that you would consider these immoral things “banal.” In fact, I think they’re rather exciting immoral things. In fact, I suggest that using the KiM ratings, we can find out how exciting a movie is by multiplying its three individual scores. So a movie scoring 10-10-10 would score a 1000, the maximum possible, on the excitement scale. Isn’t that a little interesting?

In any case, I hope you stick around to find more things to be appalled at, even if I don’t get around to figuring out premortal ranks for everyone.

Its difficult for me to know the answer to that question. Since I have not been in TV for a great length of time, I’m a post super and I’ve delivered only about 90 episodes of network and cable shows. I don’t know what it was like 10 or more years ago.

What I will say is that the networks respond to what they see and hear in the cuts we deliver to them. It’s not like decisions regarding how raunchy or daring content will be are directly made at the network level for all shows before they go into production. The networks just want to please their audiences.

So it’s complicated, some shows challenge FCC and internal standards in significant ways and others don’t in both cases there are many conversations and a lot of back and forth. In all cases network S&P folks are always thinking about who might be offended, who might get mad, what the implications of a certain joke or bit of content are, etc.

Some cable channels do like to push the limits but if anything is going to have a shelf life in syndication then clean versions of the show are created. This is true even of show that have reputations for hard language and violence. Sometimes the studio will create a syndication master as part of posting the series. Sometimes they will do a re-pack after the face.

Regardless, those of us who work in post are dealing with these issues on a daily basis.

For instance, from your list, Babe, Pig in the City, has the same maximum as Besieged and Beyond Rangoon, and a higher maximum than Beyond Silence. Chicken Little and 102 Dalmatians have the same maximum as Beyond Silence. These are certainly anomalies, but they’re interesting because they suggest that a film can possibly earn a lower rating than it arguably deserves simply by (a) packaging itself as a kid’s film and (b) being distributed by Disney….

I don’t doubt that you’re right that the ultimate effect of the creation of PG-13 has been the wider availability of some content that would have been considered R rated before. But at least at the time, I think that PG-13 was seen as making a new place for the “harder” PGs rather than the “softer” Rs.

But I’m certainly not an expert in the history of movie ratings; I could have this wrong. What would be really interesting is if the KiM raters would go back and rate movies from before the (1984-ish?) introduction of the PG-13 rating so we could compare PGs and Rs from before with PGs, PG-13s, and Rs since.