MPAA To Moviegoing Public: You're The Freaks, Not Us
Roughly every five years since primitive man first scrawled a scene on his cave wall depicting his pets brutalizing each other with household items, a "new" study arrives at the same, inevitable, ACME-explosive conclusion: Cartoons are too violent and/or too dirty. But don't blame the MPAA, says president Dan Glickman. Blame yourselves! Blame society!
As pop culture mimics today's permissive social values, violence and veiled sexual references have crept into the seemingly innocent cartoon landscape, giving parents new reason to do research beyond the ratings.
It's not that the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board has become more permissive, said MPAA president Dan Glickman: "It's bound to be a reflection of society." [...]So the octopus-armed alien robots in Chicken Little, who shred a cornfield and use their laser-gaze to zap away the town's animal citizens, are just typical cartoon characters. The film's allusion to Girls Gone Wild is just another cultural reference. The melons held chest-high by the heroine in Wallace & Gromit are just large pieces of fruit.
Glickman should be ashamed of himself for dismissing the ratings board's obvious easing into the glory hole of immorality as "a reflection of society." His predecessor, the venerated pelvic-thrust-tabulator Jack Valenti, would have decried those same melons as "infernal orbs pulsing with the juice of Sin, a clear invitiation for our innocent children to partake in Lucifer's accurs'd cornucopia." Sometimes we wonder if Glickman's ever going to get the hang of this job.
