Also, I truly don’t get why people think Blazing Saddles or Airplane! couldn’t be made today. The only really out-of-pocket bit is Mel Brooks in redface, which is satirizing a thing Hollywood used to do decades ago, so the gag would be confusing in 2024.
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Again the movie could be made, but in a studio system unless Brooks was at his peak like he was then, they’d ask for script trims.
The question is whether a major studio would make a Brooks movie like those today, and I’d argue they’d make him pay for it. Everything Brooks does is parody and satire, so bigotry is always a part of it.
Airplane! would never get greenlit today only because the genre of airplane/boat disaster movies it’s satirizing went out of style before I was even born.
What we should probably be thinking is “could a shot for shot remake” be made today. Almost any of the movies talked about could be remade today with the problematic stuff trimmed out. Where you start running into problems is where the whole premise of the movie a bit outré… Stuff like Porky’s or any of the teensplotation movies where the whole plot revolves around guys tricking women into having sex if not outright date raping them. Tons of war movies would be difficult to remake because they revolve around dehumanizing the enemy which is a hard to do in a woke manner.
Same with Convoy, when is the last time you thought about truckers?
This is closer to the spirit of the thread. It’s also about how you would get around this stuff. Netflix will not touch certain subject matter. Other studios embrace it. Some will hack the script to shreds. All of these movies could be made but they would look very different depending on the studio. All would be hell for the writer in development fighting over what gets kept.
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2001: A Space Odyssey
Anything pre-1970ish has already gone through what we’re talking about
Pretty confident a guy like Panos Cosmatos could make a movie like that in 2024.
the office (US version) could not be made today. the so-called likable protagonist relentlessly bullies his autistic coworker for 9 seasons. real nice. i hope they’re proud of themselves. and then he goes off and starts killing people for the CIA. the series is barely over and i started seeing ads on amazon prime with jim shooting guns at people. i’m like “jim what are you doing?? stop it! pam’s at home with the kids! go to her”
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That’s a good example because the first season of that show was straight up mean and the 2nd wasnt much better. I thought it became better when those elelements got dialed back by season 5 but many would probably disagree. The first season had many over the top offensive gags in it and I hated it when I did work for it.
I think one issue is edgy humour when the edge shifts.
I.e. a lot of edgie humour is part “I’m making fun to criticise the stereotype / problem” and part “the stereo-type is funny too”
That humour only works within very narrow confines because the criticism has to be substantial enough to counteract the problematic parts.
As the edge moves, the criticism becomes less interesting and the problematic becomes more problematic.
For example. Rewatching early spooks, a lot of the slight humour is a commentary on sexism and stereotyping of women. But these days it really doesn’t land at all and just seems sexist
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Don’t worry, he gets his comeuppance when the super-hearing aliens take over the planet.
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That’s the problem with Married…with Children. At the beginning it was a great commentary on sexism and misogyny because of the Steve and Marcy characters, even though they were played as dweebs. By the midpoint it was just sexist and misogynist. There was no counter anymore. How that edge is treated makes all the difference.
That’s the All in the Family paradox. If Archie is a straight hero instead of being mercilessly dunked on it doesn’t work. When you constantly reward or make that character the hero you’ve crossed too far.
The audience has to think the chararacter is an a-hole or you’ve created a surrogate for all the wrong reasons. It doesn’t prevent activist groups from complaining even when on the right side, but how well you toe the line is what keeps you from being cancelled. Good Times had a real problem with this when it went from Black to white writers. It became 90 percent stereotype, and is why the cartoon has been ripped to shreds.
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It’s often a problem with the audience (or the network’s perception of what the audience wants). Al started off as the butt of most jokes and the anti-hero, but over time, it was decided that the audience loved him (and not ironically), so they fully leaned into his misogyny.
It’s the same with stuff like Cartman from South Park, the writing shifts from “let’s laugh at this jerk” to “let’s laugh along with this jerk.” People with poor media literacy start unironically cheering for Al Bundy’s shtick.
Better-written comedies like All in the Family, King of the Hill, It’s Always Sunny, even The Office manage to hit that sweet spot where the conservative guy gets dunked on but is still kind of likeable.
It works best when the ones in the audience who identify with Archie say ‘hey wait a minute am I an a-hole?’
It works worst when they surrogate and feel persecuted (this is a straight line to MAGA). O’Connor got this intimately but he liked being a star too. You have to be an expert actor like Ed O’Neill to pull it off. Shatner couldnt do it in the show he was in.
Yes, this was specific to that show. Amanda Bearse was a main writer in the early seasons and she said she constantly fought that battle at the beginning. They wanted it to be what it was later at the start, and the real turn was when the Steve character left. He was an absolute expert at clowning a-holes in parts he’d previously played and it was a huge loss.
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This also kind of describes The Mick. When it goes from laughing at to laughing with you’ve got a problem. Watch this if you like Sunny.
In a drama it’s Billy Bob in season 1 of Fargo. It was hard not to laugh with him because the other characters were bad too. So they put the unnecessary dog killing in to remind you stop laughing with him.
watching Once Upon A Time In America (1984) and you definitely don’t see protagonists played by big movie stars forcibly rape multiple women in modern films. audiences will generally forgive a thief or a liar but a violent rapist hmm not really sure why that’s even part of the movie tbh. also it seemed unnecessary to show an infant’s genitals twice, all you needed was the reaction from the police chief father like, “hey that’s not a boy, that’s not my baby!” modern films would simply not show an infant’s genitals as an on screen close up