Movie ratings criteria are really weird. At the start, PG was considered a genuine warning - “parents, use guidance, might be some objectionable stuff here.” And while today the G rating is basically “movies for toddlers,” it truly did mean “general audiences.” I’m looking at the list of G-rated movies in chronological order on IMDb right now starting in 1968, and there are some surprises:
Ice Station Zebra
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave
House of Cards (crime drama)
Bloody Che Contra (violent Che Guevara biopic, apparently)
To Hell in the Pacific (great WWII movie with Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune)
Some Girls Do (1969 faux-Bond spy movie with a sexy girl in a bikini on the poster)
True Grit
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
Tora! Tora! Tora!
Waterloo
In short, plenty of stuff that wasn’t aimed at kids, and/or that most kids wouldn’t be interested in.
It can be kind of frustrating trying to collect these things.
The Blu-ray from VCI of El Vampiro y El Sexo is readily available on Amazon, and VCI has a bunch of other Santo movies that were recently dubbed into English for the first time.
It’s also not difficult to find reasonably-priced DVDs of various luchador movies on Amazon… but the catch is that they’re almost all in Spanish, with no English dubbing or subtitles (no Spanish subtitles either, for that matter.)
Several years ago, I bought a bunch of DVDs from Rise Above Entertainment (including El Tesoro de Dracula) labeled “The Santo Collection,” which have decent English subtitles. Those are the ones to look for, but they’re out of print now.
These movies sometimes pop up on local Spanish-language TV stations (in Spanish, naturally, but with Spanish closed captioning, which is better than nothing).
What happened was that the MPAA did not copyright the ratings. (Why would people in the business of intellectual property even think of it, right?) And so the “adult” industry co-opted the “X”, rendering it instantly useless.
Intriguingly, when they introduced NC-17 in 1990, the damage was already done: Even though they controlled this rating, it was simply perceived by those who would not exhibit or distribute X-ratings as essentially identical to “X”.
Well, it’s all language, right? There’s nothing explicit in there.
These days it would probably be rated R for the smoking and drinking.
I would’ve sworn it was [R] but looking at the poster from the time it says [PG]. And further, I would’ve said it was for violence since somehow I don’t remember full-frontal McGovern…
Censorship is an odd, odd thing. There is a fun (but biased) documentary called “This Movie Is Not Yet Rated” about the oddities of the MPAA system and I would also recommend a book on the late Hays’ Office/early MPAA years by Jack Vizzard called See No Evil.
The interesting thing to me is that we have no less severe censorship rules today (though there are fewer effective avenues for imposing it) than they did 90 years ago (strictly speaking, 88 years ago was when Hays got his teeth), we just censor different things.
I remember some of the Santo movies being kid matinees when I was a child. So, they did play in the US. Back then the theaters would get a cheap movie to show and kids would be dropped off at the theater while parents ran errands. Somehow we lived through it all.
