Values Dissonance / Live-Action Films

Values Dissonance in live-action movies.

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• 12 Angry Men:
  • At the time the film was written in The '50s, women and non-whites were excluded from jury service in some parts of the country. These days, the script is often produced as 12 Angry Jurors with a more diverse cast. #2 and #11 seem especially popular to cast with women, allowing for some levity as #7’s conversations with them can easily come off as pathetic flirting, plus adding a degree of sexism to #10's condescension to them.
  • Physical abuse is treated more lightly in this movie than it would be today. While most of the jurors seem to disapprove that the boy's father beat him regularly, they don't seem too fazed when Juror #3 defends it against "a kid like that".
  • #3's rift with his son starting because he was ashamed of his son running away from a fight and vowed to "make a man out of him" has lost every ounce of sympathy it may ever have had. Some modern productions change this to his son joining a gang. Thankfully however the real drama is due to their later fight and not this first cause, keeping the character sympathetic.
• 1941 (1979): Modern audiences would cringe at Corporal Stretch's continued pursual of the high school-aged Betty, even coming very close to raping her, with complete impunity (the "director's cut" implies that much of the military has a Viking-like disposition towards women). It doesn't help that he's shown to be utterly horrified when he becomes the object of Maxine's affections.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey was made in 1968. This would explain why the astronauts are all white men and the only women in space are stewardesses. It's jarring to today's viewers, who are used to diverse crews in space.
• In Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, the Big Bad is Ray Finkle, a former football player whose botched field goal kick cost him a Super Bowl win and ultimately his sanity. It is later revealed that the beautiful, no-nonsense, female police lieutenant Lois Einhorn, who dislikes Ace but has some sexual tension with him, is actually Finkle, having assumed the identity of a dead woman and even having partial gender-reassignment surgery to pass as female. The movie is vague about whether Finkle actually is transgender, or if he's so insane he changed genders and became a cop as part of a long-term plan to get back at the Miami Dolphins. Furthermore, when Ace realizes the two are one and the same, he's horrified that he got to second base with a "man" and we see a montage of him washing his mouth out, burning his clothes, and taking a Shower of Angst. With transgender visibility and acceptance in society having come so far since the mid-'90s, what was considered funny in 1994 would be skewered for its transphobia today.
• The Singaporean film series Ah Boys to Men has people being shot and constant profanity and sexual innuendo (such as "whore"). Singaporean kids are okay with this, but an American film with the exact same content would be slapped with at least an R rating.
• In the 1980 Soviet film Air Crew, there is a custody battle. The father has an excellent record as a pilot, a wonderful relationship with his son, and several female family members who can care for the child when he's away. The mother, on the other hand, badmouths her husband so much during the trial that her own mother’s evidence reveals she's told the judge heaps of Blatant Lies. Nevertheless, despite the judge's own preference for the father, the mother gets full custody. What's more, because the mother works full-time and her own mother is ailing, they send the kid to daycare despite him having severe mental problems which they are well aware of, and his condition worsens. Despite all this, the father's colleague has to pull strings in some very high places so the mother is forced to allow her ex-husband visitation. As the father's lawyer explains, it's simply customary to rule in favour of the woman in custody cases.
• Animal House:
  • The Good Angel, Bad Angel scene where Pinto wonders whether he should have sex with the unconscious teenager Clorette has become extremely cringeworthy since rape, both on college campuses and among teenagers, has become a bigger concern. While both parties would be equally mocked in the '70s (the movie was released in 1978), nowadays virtually everyone would sympathize with Clorette and Pinto would be ostracized from society. For some viewers, though, the more serious attitude toward campus rape means the joke now Crosses the Line Twice, and as a result, has become even funnier.
  • After having a relationship (and sex) with the mayor's daughter, Kroger finds out she's just 13. This is played strictly for laughs. Today this would come off as insensitive and thoughtless at best and horrifying at worst.
• Arthur (1981) plays the title character's alcoholism and resultant drunken behavior for laughs; he is even seen drinking while driving at one point. The movie was rated PG, as the PG-13 rating didn't exist until three years after its release; the MPAA's current restrictions on drug content would net it a higher rating now. Not only did the 2011 Russell Brand-led remake get a PG-13, Arthur's binge drinking is more Played for Drama (as in a scene where his nanny Hobson speaks for him at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting he's not taking seriously).
• At the end of Auntie Mame, Agnes finds herself impregnated and accidentally married to a sexual predator who got her drunk and led her to the altar thinking she was a rich noblewoman. This is supposed to be a happy ending because it means she's not, as she feared, an unwed mother. In a later musical version of the play, this part was changed; instead of being married to the guy who knocked her up, Agnes is sent to live in a home for unwed mothers... founded and set up by Aunt Mame herself, specifically to help Agnes (and to annoy the snooty rich family whose property is next door to the future site of the home). In the original book, she falls in love with one of Patrick's college professors, a genuinely good man who reciprocates her love and proposes to her as she's being rushed to the hospital in labor. It's implied that they wind up happily married.
• Many of the toys in Babes in Toyland (1934), like steel-tipped darts launched by a catapult, would not pass government safety regulations (or most parents' standards) today.
• Back to the Future:
  • The DVD Commentary notes that some European audiences were put off by how the "improved" McFly family at the end had become more materialistic, as exemplified by Marty getting the Toyota truck he wanted at the start of the movie. Crispin Glover also objected to this, arguing that it contradicted the message that The Power of Love had improved their lives, not money.
  • Only in the 1980s could a mainstream family movie not only use incest (a teenage boy going back in time and having his teenage mother falling in love with him) as a plot point, but play the whole thing for laughs.
  • The fact that George apparently hires Biff as an employee 30 years after he tried to sexually assault Lorraine; one would think George, Marty and especially Lorraine would take some issue with the man being anywhere near the house after that harrowing encounter, but George and Lorraine strangely regard him with a begrudging affection, almost like he's family.
  • Marty plans to subject Lorraine to staged Attempted Rape to make George look like a hero for saving her. A Deleted Scene shows Marty's objection to the plan comes largely from a fear that the psychological trauma he'll put his mother through... might make him gay (although the joke is that the 1955 Doc doesn't know that the word "gay" has a different meaning by 1985).
  • Modern audiences will find it pretty strange that everyone (except Mr. Strickland) seems generally okay with a teenage boy being friends with an eccentric, reclusive older man. George and Lorraine never even make any acknowledgment of Marty hanging out with Doc Brown.
  • The fact that the Doc was willing to work with terrorists (albeit to rip them off) is treated relatively lightly by comparison to how it almost certainly would have been post-9/11. This is jarring to a 21st-century audience. Whilst it comes with predictably brutal consequences (it gets better thanks to time travel), demonstrating why exactly messing around with terrorists is a bad idea, Marty seems much more shocked that the time machine is nuclear-powered and the Doc had to (illegally) acquire plutonium to power it than the precise details of how.
  • The film also shows George being a peeping tom, when modern films would use that to mark a character as a creepy pervert. For some context, Back to the Future came out in the wake of films like Porky's, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and Revenge of the Nerds. By the standards of your average '80s teen comedy, spying on a girl in her underwear is downright tame!
  • Also to modern audiences, the implication that Chuck Berry, one of the pioneering African American musicians, was inspired to write one of his most famous songs by hearing a white kid play it seems problematic. Although Marty only knew it because Chuck Berry played it because he still wrote the song in the timeline Marty came from and since the film doesn't run on Stable Time Loop, that suggests he would still have come up with it on his own.
  • Despite an apparently anti-racist message in showing Goldie Wilson rise up from being treated as a lowly black laborer to eventually becoming mayor of the town (and impressively standing up for himself when his boss at the diner pooh-poohs the idea of a black mayor), his bug-eyed, exaggerated mannerisms look pretty cringey by today's standards. Similarly, we're meant to sympathize with the black musicians at the dance when a member of Biff's gang refers to one of them as a "spook," but ultimately the musicians are a mere plot device to help Marty.
• Beach Party:
  • The central conflict is set up by Dolores inviting her friends to the beach on what was supposed to be a couple's vacation in order to prevent Frankie from thinking he's about to get some. Frankie gets so pissed that he resorts to Operation: Jealousy and hypocritically gets annoyed at Dolores for doing the same thing. Yet it's Dolores who gets a song literally titled "Treat Him Nicely," and their romance is resolved with a minimum of Frankie admitting he was wrong.
  • Dolores's flirtation with Robert — who's several decades older — is seen as nothing more than mildly unusual. While Dawson Casting is at play — Annette Funicello was 23 — Dolores is no older than her late teens.
  • The boys' prank on Robert — setting his hat on fire - is seen as harmless fun that gets only a stern look from Dolores.
• Bedazzled (2000): The wish that makes Elliot an author makes him brilliant, charming, successful and handsome — only for the joke to make him gay and living with a male partner. In modern eras of increased LGBTQIA+ issues, awareness and representation framing being gay as a joke wouldn't go over well.
• Being There: Chance was apparently isolated from society because his caretakers assumed he would never amount to anything. Nowadays, with a greater understanding of things like autism and learning disabilities, such treatment would be far less acceptable and Chance might have received some kind of special education. Louise, his caretaker, deriding Chance as "dumb as a jackass" would seem downright cruel and despicable by modern standards.
• The Big Store (1941): There's a part of the "Sing While You Sell" musical sequence that pans to a part of the store selling cotton sheets. The attendants are black men in cotton-picking attire, who are carrying decorative cotton plants. There is a cutout in the background that almost looks like a "mammy", and they sing a jolly song about how cotton is harvested, all to the tune of "Old Folks at Home". Given the year this came out, we should count ourselves lucky they got Black actors to play the part instead of white guys in Blackface.
• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and its sequel, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, being movies about American teenagers in the 1980s, have the characters casually use the word "fag" as an insult towards a villain, and in one scene they hug each other only to break the hug and call each other "fags." Nowadays, of course, sympathetic characters would never use such a slur. Thanks to the extremely long Sequel Gap of 29 years, the third film, Bill & Ted Face the Music, completely drops the use of the word.
• Going way back, The Birth of a Nation (and by extension, the novel it was based on, The Clansman by Thomas Dixon) features the Ku Klux Klan as the good guys, complete with a Big Damn Heroes moment towards the end of the story. Although denounced by the NAACP even at the time, it was a huge hit and went on to be so influential that for decades, the director had an honorary award named after him at the Oscars. The film is now rarely seen outside of film classes, thanks to the advancements in race relations making it unwatchable to anyone except film students learning the state of the art in 1915 (and historians who really know what they're talking about will point out that the movie isn't as innovative as its reputation suggests, as the Italians had been making similarly ambitious productions for a few years before WWI).
• In the Soviet Union Blackface and Yellowface were not considered racist, so there were more than a few movies with anti-racist messages that had oppressed Black or Asian people played by white Soviet actors. For example, Soviet adaptations of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stressed the evils of racism and slavery, yet nearly all of them had Jim played by a man in blackface. Of course actual Black people were hard to come by in the Soviet Union, so this would have at least been basic pragmatism.
• The 1917 silent film The Black Stork features eugenicist Dr. Harry Haiselden playing a fictionalized version of himself. The film has a pro-eugenics message with Haiselden's character portrayed as doing the right thing for allowing a "defective" newborn to die (this was based on something Haiselden actually did, by the way). The movie's tagline was, "Kill defectives, save the nation and see The Black Stork." The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures almost banned the film for being too disturbing, and had some of the most lurid images, and some references to God, removed. Depicting an infant being left to die as a good thing, however, was allowed. Both famed defense lawyer Clarence Darrow and Helen Keller (herself often deemed "defective" for being deaf and mute) defended the idea (though Darrow later turned anti-eugenics, while Keller seemed unconcerned that under this standard, she herself could have been allowed to die after becoming disabled). Some of the title cards read like pure Nazi propaganda, with characters preaching the importance of race betterment and lamenting how expensive it is to care for "defectives", and it's no coincidence that the film went out of circulation the year America entered World War II. This similarity is not an accident: the Nazis took many ideas from American and British eugenicists. For instance, the model eugenics law Harry Loughlin wrote inspired Hitler's "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring", which legalized involuntary sterilization of all disabled and mentally ill people under rulings by special "Health Courts". Loughlin even got an honorary degree from a German university in 1935 for his work on the "science" of "racial cleansing". They used the same reasoning for their own "euthanasia" program, Aktion T4.
• Blacula: Many of the comments regarding the two Camp Gay characters in the beginning are definitely a product of a less enlightened era. The fact that the cops dismiss their deaths because they are gay is downright offensive to modern viewers.
• In Black Zoo, Edna runs a 'Chimp Show' where chimpanzees perform for zoo-goers, dressed in human clothes and performing 'tricks' such as lighting and smoking cigarettes. These were a common feature of zoos of the time, and are presented as wholesome family entertainment; especially when compared to Michael's obsession with big cats. To modern audiences, the chimp show is an uncomfortable and degrading experience.
• Deckard's relationship with Rachael in Blade Runner begins with a scene where he physically blocks her from leaving his apartment, pushes her against a wall, and demands that she tell him to kiss her. Even though she'd been crying moments earlier, she immediately complies and initiates sex with him. This is portrayed as Defrosting the Ice Queen and Belligerent Sexual Tension, while today it would be considered abusive.
• Blazing Saddles: Written by Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor, the kings of N-Word Privileges. The whole point of the film is to take every trope of the standard American Western, a dozen more from Hollywood films in general, and nuke them all, particularly the racist parts. It's rated as one of the best comedies of all time, but Brooks fully admits it could never be made today because of the N-bombs, gay jokes, and Jews cast as Native Americans ^note which was done to mock the fact it actually was once standard practice in Hollywood.
• When Blowup was released, the nudity was scandalous, while the hero's contempt for his models and female admirers (he offhandedly refers to the latter as "bitches") was ignored. Today the sex seems incredibly tame, while the hero's misogyny is appalling. The nudity is a gray area: while most people wouldn't bat an eye over it, there are still people who believe nudity is evil and sinful.
• In Braveheart, Prince Edward (Edward II of England) is a homosexual as well as a fashion-obsessed wimp and an incapable ruler. Many of these details are taken from history, and the film never implies that Edward's sexuality is what makes him a wimp, but the portrayal strays close to negative stereotypes of homosexual men and would raise eyebrows in today's political climate. While gay-rights advocates called the movie out in 1995 (particularly for the death of his lover being Played for Laughs), they were mostly ignored.
• Breakfast at Tiffany's:
  • The film features Mickey Rooney as wacky Japanese neighbor Mr. Yunioshi, complete with yellowface, buck teeth and thick glasses that look like they came straight from a WWII propaganda poster. At the time, this was acceptable comic relief. The original author Truman Capote slammed this, finding it offensive even for the time. Mickey Rooney apparently didn't see the problem.
  • Lula Mae's marriage to a middle-aged man when she was only fourteen. While it's implied it was chaste and quickly annulled, there's no way he would be played sympathetically today.
• The Breakfast Club:
  • Brian brings a flare gun to school so he can commit suicide (or at least destroy a shop project he failed). His punishment is a Saturday of detention when it goes off in his locker. In today's zero-tolerance environment, he would likely be expelled and/or slapped with court-ordered psychiatric therapy for the rest of the school year (and maybe beyond if he decides to go to college or the military).
  • Both Bender and Andy use the word "fag/faggot" without being punished or reprimanded. Today, the word is generally considered an extremely offensive homophobic slur, but in The '80s, the term was just seen as rude and did not imply that either of them were gay-bashers.
  • Claire bringing sushi for lunch is meant to serve as a symbol of how wealthy and elitist her family is. Back in the '80s, sushi was a far more exotic and expensive dish, but over the years it's become more affordable and mainstream. It's still out of the ordinary as a school lunch, but not quite to the extent it was when the film was released.
  • Bender's advances on Claire are to show off his jerkass nature, but he gets the girl in the end. Today, such actions would earn the ire of some modern audience members, who would claim it trivializes sexual harassment and in one instance sexual assault.
• The works of John Hughes were generally progressive for their time in their exploration of the emotional lives of teens, significantly teen victims of abusive or neglectful homes in The Breakfast Club, and showing the need for men to be more emotionally open as in The Great Outdoors and Planes, Trains and Automobiles, but the fact remains that sexual harassment, sexual assault, and even rape are frequently played for laughs.
• In the movie Bridget Jones' Diary, which came out in 2001, Bridget gets groped and sexually harassed a lot, from her boss to her Creepy Uncle Geoffrey. Mr. Fitzherbert stares at her tits so much that she calls him "Tits Pervert." Generally, Bridget either takes it or just treats the groping like a tiresome nuisance. In the New Tens, especially with the Me Too movement, this would not fly and she would be expected to call men out on it.
• In the Shirley Temple film Bright Eyes, to cap off the final scene, a bratty girl named Joy (who was mean to Temple's character throughout the film) is slapped in the face by her mother. This happens in a courtroom in front of a judge. While completely acceptable at the time, slapping a child in the face in public would likely not be seen as a positive thing today.
• The 1972 film version of Cabaret has a sequence where Sally suggests that Fritz 'pounce' on Natalia to let her know how she feels about him. When Natalia tells her about this, she claims she was shocked at first, but then realized she liked what was happening. It teeters close to a "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization, but is played somewhat for Cringe Comedy.
• In Calamity Jane, Jane nonchalantly talks about attacking Native Americans. Despite its light-hearted nature, the film still uses the "savage Indian" trope associated with old cowboy films.
• Carrie (1976):
  • Considering Carrie was being bullied, the Gym teacher was right to intervene and report it to the principal. Nowadays, she'd be considered a hero because bullying has gotten deadly, forcing many US states to pass laws against it. The bullies would have faced suspension or expulsion these days, without Carrie having to take matters in her own hands… or rather, mind.^note In the film and book, the teacher does threaten the girls with suspension — but says that the school board was full of men who didn't understand how horrible the shower incident was. Chris does get suspended for refusing to do the punishment detentions.
  • Also, as sex education is now mandatory in many public schools throughout the country (including in Maine, where the film takes place), Carrie would have learned about menstruation well beforehand and likely wouldn't freak out so terribly when it happened... if it wasn't for Margaret White, who would have never allowed her daughter to take such a "dirty" class.
  • The latter two film adaptations leave out the part where Chris gets slapped by a teacher.^note The 2002 TV movie simply has Miss Desjarden push Chris against a locker. These days, a teacher hitting a student would be fired on the spot, no matter how rotten that student is. The novel at least has Chris' father attempt to get the teacher fired, while the principal fires back with in loco parentis (the concept that while the child is at school, the school/administrators act as their temporary parents), and they will counter-sue Chris on Carrie's behalf... which also would not really fly today.
• Carry On:
  • Many of the films showed men groping women without their consent, and the women often getting positive reactions from it.
  • British media in the 1970s was known for having a lot of negative situations with characters that were played for laughs. In Carry On Matron, Cyril Carter is ordered to disguise himself as a nurse to steal contraceptive pills from Finisham Maternity Hospital, and he attracts the attention of the perverted, womanizing Dr. Prodd, who drags him into a room and tries to rape him — pointing out he doesn't need to defend himself because he's a trained boxer. Even if the nurse was female all along, the scene would probably play out the same way.
• In Casablanca, Ilsa refers to Sam, the middle-aged Black pianist at Rick's club, as a "boy", a common mild racial slur at the time. The film is also infamous for Ilsa not ending up with Rick, despite him being her true love. This is simply because Victor was her husband, and in the 1940s, that trumped anything else.
• The Children's Hour:
  • The plot is about a schoolhouse run by two women being shut down over the flimsiest of insinuations that they are lesbians. They also lose a libel lawsuit even though there's no evidence of the rumor's validity. The play is from the '30s (and based on a real incident from a century prior) and the film is from 1960. The plot wouldn't work in films set post-1970s, with the modern gay rights movement beginning a few years after the film came out.
  • The 1930s adaptation, These Three, removes the lesbian themes of the story. Instead, we have a huge public scandal because a little girl (supposedly) caught Martha cheating with Karen's fiancé. They're even put on trial for it. Accusations of infidelity and premarital sex were more serious in The '30s, but in modern times, or even the '60s (where the Truer to the Text adaptation was made), it would be considered a smaller, more personal issue.
• The China Syndrome: Jane Fonda plays a puff-piece reporter who, while doing a puff piece on a nearby nuclear plant, witnesses a near-meltdown of the plant. At a cocktail party soon after the events, she asks the news director to let her do more hard news stories. The director condescendingly replies that she was hired for her looks and her body and not any reporting ability. Nowadays, that would probably get the director fired and justify a huge lawsuit.
• A Christmas Story has several examples, some due to coming out in 1983 and some due to Deliberate Values Dissonance, as it's set in The '40s.
  • When the family is enjoying a Peking Duck Christmas, they're put off by the fact that the duck is served with the head still attached. Seeing their concern, the owner promptly chops the head off and sticks it in his pocket, further shocking the family. The kitchen staff also sings Christmas carols with comically thick accents. The owner, who speaks excellent English, fruitlessly tries to correct their pronunciation but eventually banishes them back to the kitchen in frustration. Such a scene would be considered fairly insensitive by modern standards, but the fact that it's pretty funny and not mean-spirited (and that the staff are at least implied to be deliberately trolling the owner) means it generally gets a pass, and Asian-Americans often enjoy the scene as well.
  • Ralphie is punished for using profanity by having a bar of soap put in his mouth, a common punishment in the 1940s. In 1982, a year before the film was released, the practice was deemed "moderate" compared to spanking and was still an alternative to spanking until around 1996. However, not so today, where such punishment is now deemed abuse. Look at how Mrs. Parker learned a lesson when she tried it on herself.
  • When Ralphie blames Schwartz for a swear word he said, Ralphie's mother calls Schwartz's mother to let her know. We then listen to Schwartz's mother scream at the top of her lungs and begin beating her son over the phone while he pleads "What'd I do?!?" Ralphie's mother is at first shocked when she hears it, but simply hangs up the phone and thinks nothing more of it. If something like that happened these days, Ralphie's mother would have immediately called Child Protection Services.
  • Ralph’s Christmas wish for a BB gun would be somewhat frowned upon in most if not all urban areas; a regional as well as a temporal case of Values Dissonance, though, since many, many parents in small towns and rural areas have absolutely no problem with giving their kids such a gift even today.
• The 1936 film College Holiday, starring comic legends such as Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, would sound like heaven for many a fan of Golden Age (both of Hollywood and Radio)-era comedy... except for the fact the plot involves a Greek-inspired eugenics experiment with a group of students as the unwitting subjects. It would take almost a decade for eugenics to become completely discredited.
• The whole idea of the Cowboy Cop, omnipresent in cop movies of the 1970s-80s, has come under fire (so to speak) since the late '90s. Back in the '70s, rising crime rates and then the "tough on crime" rhetoric of the Reagan era in the '80s made actions like beating up suspects for information, executing helpless criminals if they were evil enough, disregard for warrants, and all-around tons of violence seem not just acceptable for police officers and displays of their badassitude, but necessary for combating crime. This ended after a string of high-profile incidents of Police Brutality and shootings of unarmed suspects, most infamously the Rodney King beating (and the Los Angeles riots that unfolded after those who beat him were acquitted in 1992), and several notable instances in the mid-2010s, which made it clear these actions targeted racial minorities, especially African-Americans, disproportionately. As a result, characters like Dirty Harry and Cobra come across as a lot less sympathetic nowadays. Lower crime rates beginning in the mid-'90s also led to the demise of the "vigilante hero" and "future big city in ruins" subgenres extremely popular in the late '70s through early '90s. In a pretty good illustration of just how far this trope has fallen out of favor with modern audiences, when Eli Roth attempted to reboot the once-popular Death Wish franchise in 2018, it flopped at the box office and was absolutely savaged by critics, many of whom called it a wildly irresponsible piece of filmmaking.
• In Crime Doctor, prison authorities are enthusiastic about prison inmates being given military training and allow them to drill with replica rifles, in a sequence which seems very strange to modern audiences.
• Cry Uncle (1971): This sleazy Troma sex comedy has our Private Detective protagonist, a schlubby sad-sack of a gumshoe, stumble across a naked woman who seems to be passed out. After some self-deprecating wisecracks, he decides to "take advantage of the situation" and has sex with her. The film plays this as a darkly comic act of a pathetic man rather than, you know, a rape. Furthermore, the film seems to think that revealing that the woman has been dead the whole time spares him from wrongdoing and serves as comeuppance. The only ramification for his actions is a mocking coroner telling him to "stick to live ones."
• In the 1955 classic The Dam Busters, the code for a successful hit on the target is the name of the squadron commander's beloved black labrador, who was struck and killed by a motorcar right before the strike was launched. The dog's name? Nigger. This issue was complicated by the fact that the historical dog had that name in real life. It's sometimes, and sometimes not, dubbed on television showings into Trigger. There was a certain amount of "it's PC gone mad" controversy when news of a remake did the rounds in 2009; the producers were planning to call the dog "Nigsy" instead. The remake's still being talked about, and the latest news is that they intend to call him "Digger".
  • Roger Waters has said he now cringes at having included these scenes from the film, with the dog's name clearly audible, in the 1982 film adaptation of The Wall.
• In the original The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951):
  • Helen lets Bobby show Klaatu, as Mr Carpenter, around the city. Today, no parent would ever let a young boy go out into a major city with someone who was basically a stranger.
  • Helen’s boyfriend is pressuring her a bit to marry him and mentions it would be easier to take off if he told his boss he had two dependents. Few women today would even consider a guy who thought of them as a dependent.
• The Doctor... Series, running from 1954 to 1970, has a lot of racist and sexist moments that would simply not fly today:
  • Doctor in the House (1954) has three examples of this:
    • One of the nurses is played by a white actress in Blackface.
    • The mention of dating an Indian girl is met with the comment of being "knee-deep in boiled rice".
    • Mrs. Groaker's advert for a room for rent notes that she doesn't take any Irish gentlemen.
  • Early in Doctor at Sea, Easter does a racist impression of a Chinese man, complete with phony accent and slanted eyes.
  • In Doctor at Large, Joy is looked down upon for trying to become a female doctor, and only taken seriously as she wears fake glasses:
    Examiner: Doctoring and lipstick don't mix together.
  • Doctor in Love:
    • When Sir Lancelot sees a jaundice-stricken Dr. Hare with visibly yellowish skin, he asks him if his father was a Chinaman.
    • Drs. Hare and Burke trick Dawn and Leonora into getting drunk to try and seduce them.
  • Doctor in Trouble: The fact that Satterjee is played by Graham Stark in Brownface is bad enough on its own, but some of the Funny Foreigner gags go too far, such as Dr. Burke calling the Indian music he listens to "Top of the Poppadoms".
• Duck Soup includes a joke by Groucho: "My father was a little headstrong. My mother was a little armstrong! The Headstrongs married the Armstrongs and that's how darkies were born!" This was actually a pop culture reference to the song "That's Why Darkies Were Born", itself an example of this trope.
• The Elite Squad is a mostly accurate depiction of the Vice City that Rio de Janeiro is, with vicious drug dealers ruling in conjunction with Dirty Cops. Brazilians cheered The Unfettered protagonists BOPE who stopped at nothing, including Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique, to fight the scourge. Some audiences were rubbed the wrong way by their actions, seeing them as excessive, but Brazilians almost universally praise Nascimento and BOPE's methods thanks to living a far more brutal reality than any developed country and most underdeveloped ones.
• Meta-example concerning Enemy at the Gates: Western audiences found it a grim retelling of one of history's most brutal battles. Russian audiences thought it was far too lighthearted in its treatment of the darkest chapter in the whole country's history, and the behavior of the characters was really unrealistic/plainly weird. Not one, but two successive Russian Culture Ministers, along with the Russian Military Historical Society, repeatedly called the film a pack of lies, a grave distortion of WWII history and blatant anti-Russian propaganda, to be precise. If you browse through sites like Kinopoisk (Russian version of Rotten Tomatoes), you will see that the majority of people thought that Hollywood outright put the entire Red Army in a bad light with all the "you get ammo without a rifle" scenes. Surviving Russian WWII veterans denounced it.
• The Epic of Everest (1924) is a documentary about that year's unsuccessful attempt to climb Mount Everest. Its intertitles contain several remarks that read oddly 90 years on, especially in the description of the Tibetan town of Phari-Dzong: "Amid dirt and mud and stinking refuse, the people live with their dogs and cattle in these hovels begrimed with the smoke of the argo fires ... And in contrast to all of this, the cold purity of the snows of Chomolhari puts to shame the dirt of Phari."
• In Failure to Launch, Tripp is made out like there's something seriously wrong with him for still living with his parents to the point that girls immediately run away when they find out and his friends act as though it's the most shameful thing an adult can do. There are many cultures where it's not only accepted but expected that children (particularly daughters) live with their parents well into adulthood and, in some cases, even after getting married. Also, post-2008 Great Recession and with skyrocketing housing and education costs in many developed countries, it's become a lot more acceptable in Western cultures for adult children to continue to live with their parents, so long as they work and assist with household bills.
• The Fastest Gun Alive: One of George's nicer neighbors expresses the belief that women can't feel the same sense of dedication and pride about hard work as men.
• In America, many people were surprised that the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey didn't get an NC-17 rating right out of the gate given the source material's notorious sexual content. Other countries did give it their maximum ratings, while some either heavily edited the sexual material or banned the film outright. There was, however, one conspicuous exception: France, where it sailed through with a 12 certificate, roughly equivalent to a PG or a PG-13. Moreover, as John Oliver noted, there was controversy within the National Centre of Cinematography (CNC) over this rating... namely, that some thought it was too high, and that it should've been given the all-ages TP certificate. Apparently, the CNC thought that the sex scenes were tame, not particularly shocking, and even "schmaltzy" compared to the content of France's own erotic films, with only the BDSM themes pushing it out of all-ages territory.
• Un Flic (A Cop) was made in France in 1972. One of Commissioner Coleman's informants is a woman who wears a lot of makeup. He brings her into the station because he's not happy with the quality of her snitching, and she is revealed to be transgender when he tells her (paraphrased) "Get your hair cut and start wearing men's clothes, or I'll charge you with being a transvestite." This is suggestive not just of widely-held prejudices, but widely-held prejudices with the force of law.
• In The Fly (1986), Stathis' stalking of Veronica in the first act was intended to be seen as fairly harmless and funny to audiences in The '80s, but now comes across as creepy. Even in 2005, writer-director David Cronenberg's DVD Commentary has him noting that workplace sexual harassment just wasn't seen as an issue at the time. Ironically, in the final act it turns out Stathis is the hero of the tale, something which would probably not "fly" nowadays.
• In Foxy Brown, the eponymous character repeatedly uses "faggot" as a casual insult. To many modern viewers, this would just make her look like she's uneducated at best, and at worst like she's a disgusting homophobe.
• The Depression-era film Gabriel Over the White House shows the President of the United States essentially setting himself up as a fascist dictator, suspending the Constitution and dissolving Congress when they try to oppose him, creating a paramilitary police force with extra-judicial powers accountable only to him and forcing all other nations to unilaterally disarm and submit to American rule using the threat of superweapons. This is depicted as a good and possibly even divinely-inspired thing, and his totalitarian policies are shown to end crime, introduce huge economic booms, and create world peace. To be fair, the film was controversial even at the time, but its unabashed praise for what would be The Empire in any other story is shocking to modern audiences. It's a sign of the desperate times it was made in more than anything else, when there were some calling for a dictatorial president to seize power and resolve the crippling economic issues and organized crime ravaging the country. Which is a disturbingly similar situation to the state of Germany after World War One...
• Gettysburg, adapted in 1993 from the 1974 novel The Killer Angels, accurately describes the American Civil War as being caused by slavery but downplays the extent of it. Although the main Union protagonists are abolitionists who don't believe in racism, several Confederate characters claim that they're just trying to preserve their individual rights and are portrayed as being indifferent to the whole "peculiar institution", only trying to preserve their homes from what they see as invasion. This whitewashed depiction was criticized at the time, but it has really dated the film since. With a more diverse corps of historians coming up since the original novel, the notion of the Confederates as misguided patriots has been more widely exposed for what it is: "Lost Cause" propaganda designed to both give a Historical Hero Upgrade to Confederate leaders (Lee claimed that following the Emancipation Proclamation would be a Fate Worse than Death) and preserve white supremacy in the South. Moreover, in real life, the Confederate forces invading Pennsylvania kidnapped thousands of freedmen and sent them South in chains on the pretense that they were "escaped slaves". Today, more viewers are liable to agree with Gene Siskel's original assessment of the film as "bloated Southern propaganda."
• Gigi, best known for the 1958 MGM film^note it was written in 1944 and a French film was made in 1949, revolves around a rich man and his teenage mistress-to-be, already carrying some Deliberate Values Dissonance from its Belle Epoque setting, becomes rather unsettling to modern eyes (a 2015 Broadway revival erased the visible age-gap, and Maurice Chevalier's "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" was reassigned to Gigi's grandma).
• Like every other depiction of Native Americans at the time, the "Indians" shown in Go West (1940) did not age well. At best, they're all stoic Hollywood Natives that all dress in Braids, Beads and Buckskins and speak in Hulk Speak (that is when they aren't speaking gibberish passed off as a native language). At worst, they're outright hostile savages that would claim insult at the drop of a hat and scalp you for it.
• Gone with the Wind:
  • The book and film present the end of the pre-Civil War era as something to be mourned, giving a very Rose-Tinted Narrative of slavery, attitudes that widely became taboo post-Civil Rights movement.
    • This is most egregious during the scene where Scarlett walks through Reconstruction Atlanta, passing freed slaves and carpetbaggers promising them 40 acres and a mule. It's clear from the stiff upper lip she's keeping that this is supposed to be a humiliating experience for not just her, but any Southerner. Today it's easy to see that as yet more Lost Cause mythmaking.
  • Scarlett suffers marital rape at the hands of Rhett late in the film, and it's presented as a good thing for their marriage. Scarlett also gives a "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization. The rise of feminism later in the century led to increasingly negative attitudes towards rape.
  • Interestingly, the rise of feminism also led to one inversion of the trope related to GWTW. Some more traditional women criticized the film on its release because it depicted Scarlett as having taken the initiative to save Tara instead of just getting right to marrying Rhett and letting him take care of things like a proper Southern belle. Nowadays audiences think nothing of it — some might even find it admirable.
  • The character Prissy is a shockingly racist caricature — with her high pitched voice, laziness, and general incompetence. Narrowly averted with Mammy — who is highly intelligent in spite of her position, representing a case of Fair for Its Day.
• The Graduate. Twofold:
  • In the second half of the movie, Benjamin goes after Elaine, climaxing in the church on her wedding day. In 1967, Ben's actions were the full-blown rebellion of the youth against adult authority and Elaine even rebels by choosing him over her "husband". People would support him and even cheer at him waving that cross at the opponents. Fast-forward to 1997, Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear accuses the film of romanticizing stalkers.
  • The late Roger Ebert originally thought Mrs. Robinson was "an insufferable creep", but changed that view in the Nineties. Now that time has passed, most are willing to see Mrs. Robinson through sympathetic eyes, given the circumstances.
• Grease:
  • At the time of the film's setting, it was revolutionary to have a "good girl" break away from society's norms and become a greaser chick (even if it meant heartache to her family). Nowadays, Sandy radically changing herself just to get Danny to like her more is both sexist and a perfect example of a harmful "lesson".
  • "Summer Nights", as Dropout brutally parodied:
    "Tell me more, tell me more, was it love at first sight?"
    "Tell me more, tell me more, did she put up a fight?"
• The movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner has a really blatant Flawless Token, portraying the prospective son-in-law as unfailingly perfect and virtuous. The reason was so that his future in-laws (and by extension, the audience) would have nothing to object to in his marrying their daughter other than his race. The irony is that in a modern context the marriage has a lot of red flags totally unrelated to race, but weren't too much of a deal in 1967; Joanna only met John less than two weeks ago and is already prepared to marry him, even though there's a significant gap in both age and life experience (she's fresh out of college, he's a successful doctor who's traveled the world) and shortly after their wedding, he intends to move to a country she's never been to, away from everyone she knows, and where she will not speak the native language. It seems weird that Joanna's parents aren't the least bit concerned about that.
• In an example that might combine this with Deliberate Values Dissonance is the older Albert Finney film Gumshoe. Finney's character acts as if he lives in a Hardboiled Detective story, and he makes a habit of calling the Scary Black Man things like a "spade" or "Mighty Joe Young". While these slurs can be partly attributed to the whole "1930s detective attitude", the film doesn't really seem to treat the protagonist as racist. On the other hand, a modern audience is likely to applaud when he gets sucker-punched by the Scary Black Man for one of these comments.
• Heathers, a film about teens that actually do kill each other, would have a hard time getting greenlit after Columbine and in our 24/7 media age, especially as a comedy. However, even by 1980s standards, it's hard to believe a student firing a revolver at another pair of students while in the school cafeteria wouldn't be looking at an expulsion. Hell, they'd be more than expelled, they could be charged with assault in a criminal court, or sued for it in a civil court. The movie suggests he was merely suspended because they were blanks.^note At close range, blank charges can be just as dangerous as real bullets. It's also a crime to threaten people with a gun that isn't carrying real ones.
• The Happy Ending of His Majesty O Keefe sees the protagonist, a former Evil Colonialist whose machinations got dozens of people killed and nearly destroyed the island of Yap, having a Heel Realization and telling the island's natives to go their own way. Instead, they choose to keep him on as a king, plus he gets the girl.
• Due to the Minstrel Show, the Lincoln's Birthday segment in Holiday Inn is a bit uncomfortable to watch nowadays. The loose remake White Christmas has a Minstrel Show segment too, but at least there's no blackface this time.
• The Japanese film The Homeless Student invokes this with its own Aesop at the end. The neglectful father abandons his children after they're thrown out of their apartment because he had been gambling and hadn't paid the bills. It's presented as a lighthearted "keep up the Masquerade" comedy when the main character, a teenage boy, is reduced to living in a park, but there's little that's lighthearted about his situation. He's starved, rained-on, scrabbles for change under vending machines, stoned by little children and eventually becomes so hungry he eats grass, and then cardboard. His younger sister is nearly molested. At the end of the film, he thanks his father because he realizes he was trying to teach him a lesson in living independently, and that his mother stunted his growth as a person by giving him too much attention.
• Hook: A boy kissing a girl — who he's never met — while she sleeps would not be seen as romantic now, and the fact that it led to them getting married arguably makes it worse.
• Hot Fuzz: One aspect of the film which will probably fly over the heads of an international audience is Danny and Nicholas' hunt for the swan. In most of the world, a vanished swan would be met with a resounding "So what?", not just from the police. However, in the UK raising swans is a royal prerogative and all mute swans not marked as the property of the Worshipful Company of Vintners or the Worshipful Company of Dyers are by default the property of the Crown. This status makes the disappearance of a swan more of a Big Deal than it would be in most places, and while it might not normally require police involvement, Mr. Staker is more than justified in taking measures to not be held responsible for losing Crown property.
• The House I Live In is a 1940s short film where Frank Sinatra (as himself) teaches an anti-bigotry Aesop to a group of boys bullying a Jewish peer. Despite the message, Sinatra still uses the racist term "Jap" when referring to Japanese soldiers. The message of the film is about respecting other Americans no matter the religion or racial heritage. The soldiers, being from Japan, don't count.
• I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang: Helen's line "I'm free, white, and twenty-one." was a common expression during the 1920s, 1930s, and much later when racism was not only socially acceptable but the law in many parts of the country. The use of this line lasted into the sixties and even seventies. Inger Stevens' use of the idiom is lampshaded by Harry Belafonte in 1959's The World The Flesh And The Devil.
• The 1968 British film If ends with the main characters undertaking (perhaps only in their minds) a School Shooting, which is portrayed as heroic and revolutionary.
• In the classic screwball romantic comedy It Happened One Night, Peter Fallow confronts Ellie Andrews' millionaire father, telling him that what his daughter needs most is "a guy that'd take a sock at her once a day, whether it's coming to her or not.". Since the father has previously taken a sock at his daughter himself, he recognizes this as the voice of true love.
• George's utterly horrified reaction in It's a Wonderful Life to his wife being a miserable spinster librarian in the Bad Future can come across as this. Granted, she is clearly unhappy, but George had, in quick succession, learned his first boss is a homeless ex-con, his childhood crush and later friend is an abused stripper, his uncle has been committed to the insane asylum, many of his friends are dirt-poor, his nemesis Mr. Potter has literally bought the entire town, and his younger brother is dead, all because he never existed. That this is what sends him over the line is quite indicative of the values of the day. Frank Capra acknowledged decades later that this didn't age well and wished he gave the character a different fate.
• James Bond:
  • A lot of the Sean Connery Bond movies suffer from this, including Sex–Face Turn, really Disposable Women, and Slap-Slap-Kiss. This dissonance was increased in The Man with the Golden Gun when Roger Moore tries to slap around a woman. They are still toned down from what exists in the books. You only have to read a few other British thrillers of the early 20th Century (something by Dennis Wheatley, say) to realize that Ian Fleming was quite liberal for his time.
    • There are quite a few ethnic stereotypes as well. Even Dr. No, which was fairly advanced for its day in its portrayal of a black man, has a scene where Bond asks Quarrel (who is black) to "fetch my shoes," in a rather presumptuous and condescending manner. In Goldfinger, Goldfinger himself tells Bond that Koreans are the "cruelest people in the world" and are thus perfect for being evil minions. He could be referring to the Communist North Koreans, given the time period in which this story was written, but the ambiguity and generalization of his statement is what really dates it. This is a decided improvement on the book, where Bond and the narrator not only agree with Goldfinger, Bond muses to himself that he thinks Koreans are so savage they must be an entirely different species.
    • Film critic Matt Zoller Seitz discusses his dismay at a 2012 audience's comedic reaction to a screening From Russia with Love, due to the 1963 film's social mores and retro sexuality, arguing that the film needs to be taken in the context it was intended. As a counterpoint, writer John Perch argues the audience's laughter and incredulity was a perfectly natural response, stating basically that society had marched on and to attempt to view the movie as someone from 1963 might have is, essentially, role-playing rather than the genuine moviegoing experience someone from 1963 would have had.
    • Another infamous scene in Goldfinger features Bond forcing a kiss onto henchwoman Pussy Galore, who'd been rebuffing his seduction attempts up to that point. After struggling to push him away, she immediately reciprocates, has sex with him, and turns good. This scene is often criticized as an advocation of the "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization, but it wasn't seen that way at the time.
    • While avoiding the Yellow Peril stereotypes still common at the time, You Only Live Twice has a curious example of this: The Japanese are quite amused at Bond's penchant for drinking and smoking, two things that became more commonplace in Japan after the 1960s while decreasing among Westerners. The scene with Bond disguised as a Japanese and the remark that "In Japan, men come first and women come second" might not sit well with modern viewers.
  • The scene in Live and Let Die where Bond tricks Solitaire into sleeping with him is pretty uncomfortable by modern standards, doubly so because she's one of the few women Bond's bedded to be clearly unhappy afterward (though not because she didn't enjoy the sex, but because she was afraid the Big Bad would kill her for it).
  • The Man with the Golden Gun: The whole idea of MI:6 that Scaramanga was hideously wrong to upend the World's polluting fossil fuel economy by offering to sell clean, efficient solar power is viewed by many today as completely ridiculous and outdated. Solar power is now not only cheaper to produce and maintain than coal, oil, or natural gas, but is seen by a growing number of people as the future of human energy production. Fossil fuels, meanwhile, are often considered dirty, dangerous, environmentally destructive, and outdated. This makes Bond, in the eyes of some viewers, an Unwitting Pawn of the oil industry and big money, and makes Scaramanga an unintentional environmental crusader. Except for that solar-based ray gun, Scaramanga uses to detonate Bond's small plane, and Scaramanga's motive for selling the energy.
• The Jazz Singer features a hero who must escape the confines of his conservative Jewish father to realize his own dream of self-expression... by performing in blackface. The 1980 remake with Neil Diamond in the lead role homaged the older film with an early scene in which he dons Blackface as a disguise; although the character gets in trouble for it, critics were not amused.
• JFK:
  • The film takes a very Pro-Conspiracy Theory view/attitude towards the JFK Assassination. However, in the decades after the film's release, largely as a result of the rise of the Internet, there was a massive rise in disingenuous and completely false conspiracy theories that proved to be incredibly dangerous for the people they are targeting/blaming. And that's without mentioning the infamous 2021 US Capitol Attack, which was fueled by conspiracy theories and led (directly or indirectly) to nine deaths, hundreds of injuries, and more than a thousand individual charges. It goes without saying that the film's messages would not sit well with much of today's audiences.
  • In reality, a lot of the specific ideas presented in the film were initially spread by the KGB in the 1960s as a way to undermine the credibility of the U.S. government. The idea of someone taking a Russian disinformation campaign this seriously plays a lot different now, especially given Stone's personal track record of doing just that in other projects like The Untold History of the United States or The Putin Interviews.
  • From the time of the actual assassination until years after the film was made, the idea of a disturbed young man murdering a target of opportunity for no greater motive than Fame Through Infamy remained a rather unfamiliar, unsettling, and thus unbelievable idea to the general public, underpinning the film's supposition that there must've been more behind Kennedy's death. Modern audiences, however, more than a generation after the Columbine massacre when such self-aggrandizing slayings have become almost mundane, might be more accepting that Oswald could indeed have acted alone.
• In the Stephen Chow film King Of Comedy (1999), one of the running gags is that one of the neighborhood's little boys runs around naked all the time. This is creepy enough to an American audience, but there's one scene where Stephen's character stops what he's doing to play with the boy. A guy who was imitating Stephen's cues while confronting a gangster looks back to see him tickle the boy's penis with a stick and again to see him flick it with his finger ...and then copies both acts. Imagine trying to film that in the States.
• Knightriders: Billy taking a sword into an elementary school and giving it to a student (even as a kind gift like in the film) might have gotten him arrested in the modern age due to policies regarding weapons in school.
• In the Spanish children's film Las Aventuras de Zipi y Zape (1981), there is a stereotyped band of Italian mobsters who, like good Italians, repeat Italian words like "fetuccini", "lasagna", "spaghetti" and "Mama mía ", And in a moment they pretend to be Japanese using Yellowface. There is also the character of an Afro-Cuban maid played by a white actress in Blackface and with a ridiculous accent. None of these things would be allowed in current Spain (except, perhaps, Italian stereotypes)
• The film version of The Little Rascals has ballet teacher Miss Roberts react to Butch/Woim and Alfalfa/Spanky's intrusion upon her ballet school by grabbing their ears and physically shooing them out of the building (she even openly yells at the latter duo to Get Out!). This is Played for Laughs ^note Her treatment of Butch and Woim might have easily passed as a cathartic moment and would've been deemed a fairly acceptable response to unruly kids in the past but (never mind the genders of all concerned parties) playing it off as a joke in a modern family-oriented movie would likely provoke ire since child abuse has become way more hot-topic long after its release year of 1994. Also of note is that in Butch and Woim's case, this act is done in front of various bystanders who look on with indifference. Assuming that either or both pairs of kids told their parents and/or an eyewitness recorded the altercation, Miss Roberts would be fired and likely see the inside of a courtroom for aggressive misconduct towards minors nowadays.
• Live Wire, a 1992 action film, includes a scene where main character and explosives expert Danny O'Neill creates a homemade bomb out of household chemicals, clearly demonstrating exactly how to do so and what raw materials are needed! Good luck making that post-9/11.
• Mandy (1952)'s focus on speech and Reading Lips as the only way for deaf children to communicate has aged badly. At the time it was believed that sign language was only a system of crude gestures that would prevent children from learning "real" language, and so kids were put through hours of speech and lip-reading drills, even though the most proficient lip-reader can only pick up on a fraction of what a hearing person understands, and kids who tried to sign often had their hands tied down or hit with rulers. This meant that deaf children were deprived of language during a critical period in their brains' development, and the hours of drills meant that they missed out on some of the education and play of normal children, meaning that deaf people gained an undeserved reputation for being slow-witted. It is now known that sign languages are as rich and expressive as spoken languages, and it's best for children to be exposed to any kind of language as early as possible.
• Mary Poppins, being set in The Edwardian Era, has some Deliberate Values Dissonance, but also a regular example in that Admiral Boom uses the term "Hottentots", an antiquated slur against the native Khoekhoe of South Africa. This would not fly today for obvious reasons. In the UK, the BBFC re-rated the film to PG in 2024 despite the word becoming a Curse of The Ancients by the 21st century.
• The Mask of Fu Manchu is a Yellow Peril pulp movie from the 1930s and is full of Asian stereotypes and villains, complete with Boris Karloff and Myrna Loy in Yellowface. And of course, the fact that the plot involves Fu Manchu trying to lead all of Asia against the West.
• The ending of McLintock! shows that the main character turning his wife over his knee and spanking her has had a positive effect on their marriage, though admittedly up to that point she'd been a bit of a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing.
• In Mean Girls, Regina George very casually uses the word "retarded" as an insult in various occasions. While the word in question is being said by a villain, the fact that nobody bats an eye when she says it wouldn't be acceptable nowadays since the word is now regarded as an slur towards mentally disabled people.
• Meatballs III (the third installment of the popular Summer Campy series) has this problem in droves:
  • The film shows male nudity from a character who is expressly said to be 14-years-old. Even if the character in question was played by a much-older Patrick Dempsey, the scene comes across as disturbing, especially when he's confronted by a porn star (who comments on his attributes) just after he'd stepped out of the shower.
  • The lead character, Rudy, learns from his Spirit Advisor that "no means yes", and that he should be willing to misrepresent himself if it means getting what he wants. He proceeds to do this several times, at one point being so forceful on a woman that she has to knee him in the groin to stop his advances. Even worse, the ending doubles down on having the same advisor tell Rudy's love interest, Wendy, to do the exact same thing. While it may have been seen as funny at the time, such actions would be outright vilified if a man tried that in the modern age.
  • The "Love Goddess" (played by Shannon Tweed) is subjected to Slut-Shaming by the entire population of the nearby camp, as they're convinced that she's such a Sex God that she requires her "husband" (actually her brother, pretending to act as her husband) to protect her from a horde of suitors knocking down her door. The solution to the protagonist's problem (trying to lose his virginity) involves him throwing a paralyzed potential suitor out of the second-floor window of her home (nearly drowning him in the process), learning from her that she's not a "Love Goddess" at all (she spends all her time studying, despite dressing up in racy clothing), and pretending to have sex with her — which nearly gets the protagonist killed once her brother shows up. This is somehow presented as a funny and generally good thing, even though some/all of these individuals could have been charged with assault or as an accessory.
• Oscar Micheaux's race films, such as Within Our Gates and The Symbol of the Unconquered, are renown for their discussions on race in early 1900s America and for featuring black characters in non-stereotypical roles, but there's also a noticeable colorism in his films. The eloquent, heroic characters are all very light-skinned and are praised for their pale skin tones (though, the actively white passing ones are near always villainous, self-hating individuals). In contrast, darker-skinned characters are uneducated and impoverished.
• In Miracle on 34th Street, everyone is perfectly fine with a little girl being left in the care of the dashing stranger across the hall. To be fair the housekeeper was keeping an eye on them through the windows. The 1994 remake elevated him to the level of Doris's longtime boyfriend who presumably already had a ring in his back pocket.
• My Baby Is Black. The title of the movie and the fact that it is treated as something unbelievably horrible by the narrator says it all. You'd almost think that the trailer was a joke. The movie actually portrays the interracial couple sympathetically and is against racism. Granted the trailer doesn't do a very good job of showing that.
• MST3K ran headlong into another example with the short "Catching Trouble", a 1936 documentary about a hunter who catches animals for zoos. The narration makes it clear that he's a man among men who bends nature to his will; Joel and the Bots, however, just see a cruel bully harassing innocent animals, and cheer for the animals to escape. And that's not even getting into his "loyal Seminole" sidekick...
• In the Soviet movie The New Year Adventures Of Masha And Vitya, one of the two main characters is a 7-year-old girl wearing nothing but a shirt and panties throughout the film. Back in 1975, it didn't raise any eyebrows, but today it most likely would.
• The Night of the Grizzly: It's far less likely a child would be named Gypsy in the modern day, when the word is seen as a racist slur.
• No Kidding:
  • The film follows a very 1960s-centric view on corporal punishment - Tandy hopes to give the Treadgolds a "kick up the khyber", Mr. Rockbottom gives David full permission to hit Lionel and threatens to brain him if he doesn't enjoy himself, Vanilla lies that her aunt gives her thrashings, and David threatens to wallop the children after they steal his car.
  • Catherine is a firm believer that the only figure of authority in any family has to be the male.
• Now, Voyager is quite ahead of its time in its discussions about mental illness in the 1940s, but...
  • After she finishes her treatment, Charlotte returns home to live with her abusive mother — the same woman who caused a lot of her nervous breakdown in the first place. Likewise, it's expected that Tina will return home too, even though her mother Isabelle is abusive. Separating the victims from their abusers is never even mentioned.
  • The biggest obstacle to Charlotte and Jerry being together is that he's already married — to a horrible abuser who makes his and their daughter's life miserable. In the 1940s, divorce could only happen if there was evidence of 'spousal wrongdoing' and couples couldn't divorce freely until the late 60s.
  • While in South America, Jerry and Charlotte are lying next to each other one night. Charlotte has fallen asleep, and Jerry kisses her on the cheek. What was intended as a cute, tender moment comes across as a violation of Charlotte's consent?
• The late '90s movie Office Space is essentially about the main character Peter going into clinical depression over his job, which is shown to be frustrating and demeaning. But in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008 and the long and shaky recovery from it that's been marked by high unemployment rates and a dry job market, Peter comes off as rather unsympathetic for complaining about having a steady job just because he's unhappy with it. It's even worse in The New '20s, as office jobs that weren't gutted by the COVID-19 Pandemic were often switched at least temporarily to work-from-home arrangements that were much safer than "essential" and more poorly-paid jobs like restaurant, hospital, and retail work.
  Peter: What if we're still doing this when we're fifty?
  Samir: It'd be nice to have that kind of job security.
• In the film version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, McMurphy's crime is sleeping with a 15-year-old, which is treated with the same weight as the fights he gets into… which it was, in the 1970s. The modern Pedo Hunt makes the audience lose a lot of sympathy for him right off the bat.
• Claude Berri's 1977 French film One Wild Moment has two divorced men going on vacation to Corsica with their teenage daughters, one of whom seduces her father's friend. While this is a common enough plot in French literature and cinema as not to have raised many eyebrows, so much so that the film was remade without any major plot changes in 2015^note Long after that sort of story would have been radioactive in the English-speaking world, it caused some consternation among American critics in the early 1980s when the film was remade as Blame It on Rio, even though the film tried to excuse it by giving the daughter some psychological issues.^note And even in 2020, after the revelations about writer Gabriel Matzneff, it is starting to look dated, at the very least, in France. What's more, actress Michelle Johnson was under 18 at the time her nude scenes were filmed.
• The central storyline of On the Buses is that the bus company hires female drivers and the male drivers deliberately disrupt their work and make their lives a misery. What makes this questionable is that the male drivers are shown as likable heroes and the women as harpies who deserve to get fired. The unattractive appearance of the women who do traditionally male jobs probably wouldn't happen today either. The film also shows men groping women without their permission but the women finding this humorous rather than being upset or offended by it.
• The Philadelphia Story:
  • Spoiled heiress Tracy Lord is given a major set-down by her father... who cheated on her mother and blames it on Tracy's lack of affection for him. Yes, he effectively tells Tracy her parents' divorce was her fault. And she thanks him for the smackdown in the end.
  • At the beginning of the movie, C. K. Dexter Haven (played by Cary Grant) angrily throws Tracy Lord to the ground. At the time, this was probably considered amusing. Now, not so much. Even worse, is that Haven was drawing his fist back, clearing intending to hit her, until he changes his mind. The scene is only watchable today due to him not doing so (Lord's obnoxiously smug grin, especially once the movie shows just how much of a brat she is, also helps take at least some of the sting out of it).
• The original Pink Panther films run into this with how Inspector Clouseau speaks of his Chinese manservant, e.g., "Cato, my little yellow friend, I'm home!" (On the other hand, Clouseau is portrayed as an arrogant idiot with (among others) Mighty Whitey delusions, so this ignorance may well stem from that.) It's particularly noticeable in the 1978 entry Revenge of the Pink Panther, where Cato gets a bigger role than usual and the final stretch is set in Hong Kong. This is what probably inspired a scene from 2009's The Pink Panther 2 where Clouseau gets in trouble for calling a Japanese man "my little yellow friend".
• Porky's: Balbricker would’ve run the risk of sexual assault charges these days rather than police arrest on Tommy's exhibitionism since he showed his privates to the girls through a peephole, giving Balbricker a reason to attack. As a matter of fact, a teen showing their privates would’ve been grounds for expulsion, even by 1980s standards. Even the act of giving a teenage character a nude scene in a film at all would be a touchy subject.
• The Prince of Tides: Dr. Lowenstein enters into a romantic and sexual relationship with Tom. For a therapist to enter into a romantic and/or sexual relationship with a patient (or a family member of a patient) is massive breach of professional ethics, but the movie presents it as purely romantic. This was noted even at the time the movie was released.
• Raiders of the Lost Ark: The opening scene of Indy stealing the idol is still iconic, but a 21st century audience is a lot more likely to be uncomfortable with the depiction of Indigenous people as violent savages, and the guy who steals their sacred object as a hero.
• Raising the Wind:
  • When the cab driver tells Chesney about his accident with Jill, he remarks that "it's these women drivers, they're all the same".
  • Sir Benjamin uses the word "retarded" to insult a class of students.
• Reality Bites: The film does this to itself in capturing the zeitgeist of twentysomethings in The '90s, where the biggest problem was alienation and discontent due to having no major adversity to struggle against. The main characters complaining about their middle-class suburbanite lives comes off as very unsympathetic to anyone living through the various political and economic upheavals of the early 21st century, and even to older critics when the film was new.
• Rear Window: In 1954, it's a very big deal that Jeff and Lisa, both well into adulthood, take their relationship to a physical level. They have to sneak around behind the back of Jeff's landlord, who won't allow mixed couples to spend the night. When Jeff's old buddy Doyle realizes that Lisa is spending the night with him, Doyle exhibits strong disapproval (and perhaps a little jealousy). Jeff warns him very seriously to not even acknowledge what he's uncovered.
• Revenge of the Nerds:
  • A lot of the pranks the Tri-Lambs pull were terrible even then, and almost anything they did in the first two films didn't age well at all to the point where they are today considered the Designated Hero at best. Even with the things that aren't explicitly illegal—either today, or even back then—there are definitely things they'd never get away with today on any college anywhere in the United States regardless of the legality in that particular jurisdiction.
  • There's a scene so creepy that it's sort of amazing no one at the time apparently thought it was. The hero, Lewis, steals and puts on the costume worn by his Jerk Jock rival to a carnival and wears it while he seduces the jock's girlfriend. Seduces as in has sex with her while pretending to be her boyfriend. He's unmasked halfway through, and the girl instantly forgives him, because he's the best sex she's ever had. It's all okay, you see, because he rapes her into loving him.
  • The nerds secretly rig hidden cameras in the sorority house during a "panty raid", gawk at the residents undressing via video, and disseminate images of one of the Pi ladies topless during their "pie sale". Just how many porn distribution, privacy and stalking statutes did they break, there...?
  • Lamar's depiction as a limp-wristed sissy (even his javelin is limp!) is par for the course of the depiction of gay African-American men in movies from the '80s, and is most definitely made to be a walking punchline. It's extremely difficult to find anything funny about him several decades on.
  • Likewise, Takashi's Japanese ethnicity being treated as a punchline would be seen as racially insensitive today.
  • The nerds showing Harold, who is clearly underage, anything even resembling nudity, let alone full frontal nudity is treated as relatively harmless and even for comedy. In the modern era, thanks to the widespread knowledge of what kids witnessing something unhealthy can do to them and the long lasting impacts it can have, deliberately, or even negligently exposing Harold to this type of content would have guaranteed child endangerment charges.
  • The way nerds are treated as a discriminated class already rings weird now that nerds are no longer considered outcasts, but even considering that it was made in a time where nerds were considered uncool, the way the film goes to the extent of treating them akin to a racial minority, comparing them to the all-black fraternity for their minority status, can feel pretty weird to some viewers.
  • On the same vein, there's how near the ending of the movie, a squad of said all-black fraternity shows up to stand up for Gilbert against the Alpha Betas, having the only black characters other than Lamar being depicted as Scary Black Men whose only role in the film is to show up to help the white protagonist.
  • The Alpha Betas in the second movie dress up as Seminole Native Americans, egregious brownface and all.
• The 1999 Western Ride with the Devil starring Tobey Maguire, was destroyed at the box office thanks to Values Dissonance. The movie portrays an African American fighting on the side of southern guerrillas in the Kansas border skirmishes of the Civil War. Although the character had a historically factual precedent, the idea of a black soldier fighting for the Confederacy, an institution widely associated with white supremacy, was so repugnant that the film was delayed, promotional materials were destroyed, and the release was severely limited (in the actual Confederacy most of the black soldiers were slaves forced into service by their masters though, so it's not as if they were all willing anyway). Even in the film, the character possibly only goes with them because he feels grateful for George freeing him, and suffers from constant racism by the white fighters.
• The Sandlot has a classic scene in which one of the boys gets CPR, and, upon recovery, plays at still being unconscious so that next time his female rescuer goes to use mouth-to-mouth, he can grab her head and kiss her. While he does get in some trouble for this, the gang responds by tipping their hats to him for the next few weeks, and she even becomes interested in and eventually marries him. Even allowing for the facts that he's a kid and the film is set in the 1960s, this doesn't sit so well with newer viewers.
• Scary Movie: You really could not make a character like Officer Doofy in the modern day, due to increased social sensitivity around intellectual disabilities. The fact that Doofy was faking his mental handicap and was the serial killer all along arguably makes it worse. Likewise, with the modern social issue surrounding transgender people in locker rooms and restrooms, Ms. Mann would be seen as a highly transphobic gag if repeated today.
• At one point, The Sea Hawk suffers from a bit of a disconnect due to the passage of time. Errol Flynn's protagonist is a handsome and charming swashbuckler, but when he's in front of The Spanish Inquisition he boasts of pillaging and burning Spanish towns to the ground, proudly confessing to doing more of it than he's being charged with. In the 1930s-40s this made him a badass to kids watching the movie; today, it sounds like he's writing his own indictment to go before the ICC and one can hardly blame the Spanish judge for throwing the book at him and the Spanish government for demanding that the English government pull the plug on their privateers as a result.
• Sgt Kabuki Man NYPD: The premise of the Kabukiman itself is about a character that embodies every Japanese stereotype you could think of and the current iteration is a white guy. Considering this is set in the extended Troma Universe, being filmed in the late eighties, and being released in 1990, no one really bats an eye at it.
• Films like Shaft and Taxi Driver struck a chord with audiences fed up with crime (and police racism in the case of African-Americans) enough to take the law on their own hands. However, as societal views on "mob justice" changed, so did the views around these films. And while the two mentioned films are still widely recognized, one must note that their original messages tend to be brushed away, to the point an attempted revival of Shaft in the late 2010s was mauled for the same reasons as the Death Wish reboot.
• Shivers (1975): As a result of the sex parasites, men start making out with other men and women start making out with other women. Given that it's set in the more conservative 1970s^note Remember, the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s didn't exactly filter through to most layers of society immediately, this was probably intended to be seen as people losing all rational inhibitions. Nowadays, putting homosexuality on the same level as incest or pedophilia would be incredibly insulting.
• Sixteen Candles has many elements that have not aged well with today's audience:
  • The character of Long Duk Dong is essentially a walking embodiment of Southeastern Asian stereotypes, whose appearance is always marked with the sound of an oriental gong. While the gong was actually a last-minute addition that Gedde Watanabe was unfamiliar with, it would make today's viewers cringe. Long at least has a great time during the party at the end, so he's not the worst example of an Ethnic Scrappy.
  • There's also the treatment of geeks, who are seen as social outcasts with strange or crazy obsessions. While this was an almost obligatory staple of teen films until the late 2000s, it would seem strange thereafter as geek culture became very popular during the following decade. One of the geeks (played by Joan Cusack) is a neck-braced girl whose condition is joked about, which would be seen as a very ableist move today.
  • The film features many elements that are unsuitable for a PG-rated movie today (the film came out just before the PG-13 rating was introduced). There are several scenes of casual swearing by the main characters — the word "faggot" and shows up a lot, which is seen today as an offensive slur, and there's also the word "bohunk" (a term to describe lower-class immigrants from Central Europe). At one point, the word "retarded" is used, which is also considered un-PC. There are also many scenes of nudity, such as the shower scene in the first half of the movie.
  • In one scene, Samantha talks with her friend about what she dreamed of getting for her sixteenth birthday, with her friend suggesting a "pink [Pontiac] Trans-Am and a guy." Sam responds, "A black one," to which her friend looks shocked and exclaims, "A black guy?!" Sam immediately clarifies, "A black Trans-Am, a pink guy." Interracial relationships were still seen as a touchy subject at the time, but by today's standards Sam's friend just looks outright racist and Sam herself isn't much better.
  • It has been argued that the film endorses sexual assault. Ted constantly harasses Samantha during the story and nothing is done about this. There's also a scene where Ted and a drunken Caroline have their way (although consented), which would be seen as being akin to date rape today, especially since Ted actually endorsed this earlier on. In addition, intoxicated people in the US legally cannot consent, which makes it even more outdated.
• Soul Man: The protagonist is a white teen who dons blackface to get into Harvard through affirmative action. While the message was supposed to be against racism, it ignited controversy right upon its release, including being publicly condemned by the NAACP, and you certainly could never get away with a premise like that in a mainstream comedy today.
• In the 1950s-era film, So Young, So Bad, the main character (Loretta) has a baby out of wedlock. It's presented as a character flaw that she wants to give the baby up for adoption — despite the fact that she's an unmarried teenager who has no family to support her. Her happy ending is choosing to keep her baby, albeit after graduating from school. This is a holdover from pre-war years, where mothers were discouraged from giving up their children for adoption.
• In Stand by Me, several characters throw around the words "retard" and "faggot" as insults. These were just considered rude, bog standard insults back in the eighties, but nowadays are considered extremely derogatory slurs against the disabled and LGBT people, and are considered absolutely unacceptable to use today.
• There is a short scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan where Admiral Kirk tries to make a pass at Cadet Saavik, but she doesn't get it because she's Vulcan, and McCoy laughs. It's not likely that scene would be written today given that this is a vastly senior officer flirting with a trainee, something that is explicitly verboten in most written codes of conduct because of the inherent power disparity between them.
• In the original version of Superman: The Movie, baby Clark was found stark naked, with "Clark Jr." in plain view. Today, there is usually some editing to that scene. Worth noting though, is that the reboot Man of Steel also had baby Clark naked uncensored, but the shot passes by quick enough that it's easy to not notice it.
• A Taxi Driver: Jae-sik's Squee reaction to the picture of Kim's daughter plays differently in the East and West. To the intended Korean audience, this is partially a Pet the Dog moment for Jae-sik, establishing him as a nice, wholesome guy who likes kids. In the West, however, an adult man taking such intense pleasure in looking at the picture of a child comes across as weird at best and very suspicious at worst.
• One of the things that make the other boys suspect that the protagonist of Tea and Sympathy might be gay is his long hair, and by the standards of 1956, when the film was released,^note or 1953, when the play was first staged, although that's less of an issue, since subsequent stagings can make the actor's hair much longer his hair was on the long side for a high-school-aged boy, in that he did not have a crew cut. For an audience watching the film at pretty much any time from the late sixties onward, his haircut looks quite short and conservative.
• Teen Wolf has a scene where the main character, Scott, is Mistaken for Gay by his friend Stiles. The word "fag" is used no less than three times throughout this bit of dialogue.
• Thelma & Louise — the two women fleeing the crime scene because there was no evidence to suggest Harlan was raping Thelma? Not likely to happen today where rape allegations are taken much more seriously.
• The Three Stooges short The Yoke's On Me features them hunting Japanese-American escapees from a relocation center. The characterizations are about as stereotypical and offensive as they come, but sadly were par for the course in WWII-era films.
• Tomboy centers around a 10-year-old girl masquerading as a boy, and features multiple scenes with her shirtless or even just naked. Despite the fact she doesn't have any breasts yet, the notion of a girl over 5-years-old with her shirt off in public doesn't settle with a lot of people, from country to country.
• In To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, Noxeema gives a brief rundown of different Transgender types, which has become painfully dated since the mid-90s. She explains that a transvestite is someone who crossdresses for kicks, a transsexual is someone trapped in the wrong sex's body and has surgery, and a Drag Queen is a gay man "with way too much fashion sense for one gender." This may be consistent with 90s attitudes, but by the 2010s, transgender people gained mainstream visibility and began deciding for themselves how they wish to be defined, and these terms and definitions have fallen out of favor for various reasons:
  • "Transvestite" due to its negative, sensationalist connotations. Nowadays such a person would be considered a crossdresser (if it's purely a sexual fetish or fashion) or nonbinary (if it's how they identify).
  • "Transsexual" because a trans person's identity isn't dependent upon their physical traits (chest, genitals, hormones, etc). Many are not able or willing to medically transition, but they are still transgender.
  • Drag has long included Kings and transgender performers, both of which have become far more vocal and visible since the film came out.
• In Twice Round the Daffodils, Ian gives Nurses Catty and Beamish Forceful Kisses with no warning as his tuberculosis makes him very horny. While Chris pulls him off the latter, Ian gets no proper punishment for his actions.
• In Twister Jonas is presented as a Hate Sink because he got corporate funding and "doesn't care about the science" — he's apparently just in it for the money. He would come across as a Designated Villain these days but when the film was made in the '90s, "selling out to 'the Man'" was a big deal for some people.
• Up the Down Staircase:
  • Even in an Inner City School, teachers are still concerned about Domestic Abuse at home. The nurse in the film acts nonchalant when students come to her beaten up by their Abusive Parents. This might count as Deliberate Values Dissonance to go with how "bad" the school is, as the Naïve Newcomer protagonist is confused about the nurse not telling authorities.
  • In the 1960s homosexuality was still considered a mental illness. As a result, the school psychologist has it written down that one of the students has "latent homosexuality" caused by his masturbatory habits and his overbearing mother.
• The British film Victim (1961), little remembered today but historically important, is a rare inversion of this trope. Upon its release the British Board of Film Censors gave it an "X", limiting it to adult audiences, despite the lack of extreme sex or violence that such a rating usually entailed, and in the US the Hays Office made the rare decision to refuse its seal of approval, despite recent relaxations to the Production Code. Why? Because the film, the first one in English to use the word "homosexual", not only depicted gay men sympathetically but suggested that there was nothing inherently wrong with them, that society was the one that had the problem.^note One of the BBFC's objections, in fact, was that the film's strongest argument against homosexuality was a rant by one of its villains, raising the possibility "that the views expressed will be discredited". Today, those views are mostly mainstream and unremarkable, and the film actually seems rather chaste in its depiction of same-sex relationships.
• Watch Your Stern:
  • Several of the comments made towards Ranjid by the other dockyard electrician such as the one about his turban and calling his mouth a "curry hole" come across as uncomfortable in the modern day. It also isn't helped that Ranjid is played by Spike Milligan in Brownface.
  • Admiral Pettigrew tries to force himself on Blissworth when he is disguised as Miss Potter and the whole scene is Played for Laughs.
• In What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Edwin's mother chews him out for working for Jane Hudson. She mentions the most awful thing Jane did in the past and says it so that it's worse than seemingly trying to run over her own sister — being found in a hotel room with a man she'd just met. (His reply: "Wasn't that how I was conceived?" shows that she's a hypocrite on top of everything else!)
• What's New Pussycat? is a cheeky ribald romp from the newly-unfettered 1960s — its intent was to be outrageous, and it perhaps got more so with time. It features a quick flashback to a teacher-student affair ("Oh, Michael, this can't work — I'm 34 and you're 12!" Having star Peter O'Toole in schoolboy drag makes it less creepy — or maybe more so), a crazy psychiatrist who sexually assaults a patient repeatedly, and an unstable exotic dancer (named Liz Bien — get it?) who tries committing suicide a few times.
• In The Wild World of Batwoman, the titular heroine initiates a seance in an attempt to find the movie's villain, only to get interrupted by a stereotypical Chinese spirit, complete with "Ching-chang"-type speak.
• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory:
  • Charlie Bucket and his mother being upset by Grandpa Joe's vow to quit tobacco. At the turn of The '70s, cigarette ads had just been banned from American TV and radio and smoking would remain a relatively widespread habit into The '80s. Even in the film, the reason Grandpa Joe is quitting tobacco is the fact that it's an expensive habit for such a poor family. The fact that his health is already so poor he spends all day in bed doesn't come up!
  • Mike Teevee is obsessed with watching westerns on television, dresses like a cowboy, and carries a realistic toy gun that he draws on Willy Wonka while yelling "WHAM! You're dead!" upon first meeting him — which Wonka plays along with as the joke it is. While Mike is supposed to be a particularly obnoxious child, all of this behavior comes across as very archaic now. The "cowboys and Indians" style of dress and play has been virtually stamped out of kid culture due to its violence and offensiveness. Realistic toy guns are now extremely rare due to reasons ranging from kids getting mistakenly shot by police in The '80s to the rise of school shootings at the end of The '90s. Modern adaptations of the story update the character to be interested in violent video games and the like.
• In The Wizard, from 1989, young Haley is able to stop Putnam, the detective who's trying to take the kid heroes back home, from taking away Jimmy at a video arcade by pointing at him and yelling "HE TOUCHED MY BREAST!", which causes Putnam to get hauled out of the building by security and follows him around for the rest of the film. The whole thing is Played for Laughs and Laser-Guided Karma, which raised some eyebrows even at the time, but today, accusing someone of child molestation, truthfully or falsely, would never be written so lightly, let alone portrayed in a children's film.
• The World of Suzie Wong:
  • A scene has Robert getting annoyed with Suzie's taunting, and he rips the dress she's wearing off her (because it was bought by Ben, the man for whom Suzie has become The Mistress) and leaves her sobbing on the bed. We're supposed to sympathize with Robert here — for having to take so much taunting from Suzie — but it makes him look abusive to modern audiences. To his credit, he does apologize later.
  • This is probably Deliberate Values Dissonance as well, but after Suzie is assaulted by a drunk client, she asks Robert to lie and say he hit her. She then brags to her friends that he did so as a sign of how much he loves her.
  • Suzie and her friends have fun going around Robert's room and playing with his things while he's out at dinner. What was a playful comedy bit in the 60s comes across as creepy and stalkerish today.
• In the 1968 film Yours, Mine, and Ours, with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda, generally considered a G-rated, family values classic, there are several "Wait... what?" moments. Part of the children's attempts to sabotage the budding relationship includes trying to get their potential stepmother drunk by spiking her drink — although they're called out for this, it's still uncomfortable. One of the boys is later punished with a prolonged spanking from the lady, something that wouldn't fly today.

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