I need your opinion on something. Yes, you there with your hand precariously placed on the scroll wheel. Is movie censorship getting tighter or looser? Because to me, it seems like both. See, here’s the issue…

Have you seen Pinocchio lately? Dang, that’s a messed-up (awesome) movie. Kids smoking, drinking, engaging in violence, and using the word “jackass”; children getting kidnapped and transformed into donkeys; and I’m pretty sure the whole Stromboli event was an unwitting metaphor for sex slavery. Yeah, think about that one for a minute.

And yet it’s rated G. I can’t help but wonder: if it was made today, would the censors be okay with that or not?

On one hand, we’re waaay more conservative. Do you remember the naked centaur chicks in Fantasia? Because I remember the naked centaur chicks from Fantasia. And the fairies. And the harpies with fully-rendered nipples. That stuff would NEVER fly today! And you could never say “jackass” in a kid’s movie. And we all probably know at least one parent who would never take their child to a movie about child kidnapping.

Heck, when The Princess and the Frog came out, I read a review from a mom who was furious because the lead guy, Saveen, was a womanizer. No sexual content whatsoever, nothing more than a flirt, but the implications were too much for her. I laughed on The Legend of Korra when the bad guys tried every possible way not to say kill, die, or death because we don’t want children to hear those words. And anyone who saw Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon, or Yu-Gi-Oh know what ridiculous lengths some companies went to to censor things that were okay in Japan.

So from that perspective, it seems like people are way less okay with adult content in movies and TV.

On the other hand, we’re waaay more liberal. MAN, movies are bloody anymore! Every single person who dies has two people’s worth of blood in them and it’s going everywhere. Saw, Hostel, the list goes on. And maybe it’s because the internet made porn essentially free, but people seem to put boobs in thing for no other reason than boobs. In fact, some movies don’t even get the actress naked; they just CGI some boobs on her. Because boobs.

How many times can I say boobs on a Christian site and get away with it?

And of course there’s the rampant f-bombs, drugs everywhere, and content people would never have discussed when movies first came out. Censorship has eroded for better or worse and somehow the letter R seems to stand for “Gratuity.” How’d they do that?

So what’s with the extremes? It seems to be an age thing. Children’s entertainment can’t acknowledge death anymore, can’t be the least bit scary, and can’t show more than a shoulder without parents freaking out. Yet when those kids grow up, they can see content even the most demented of early filmmakers never dreamed of. So children are getting tighter and tighter restrictions every day and yet adults are more and more indulgent.

Kind of like real life. Oooh…

So is this good or bad? You tell me. Do you like hard censorship? No censorship? Somewhere in the middle? Are we better or worse than when films began? The floor is yours!