YMMV / "Crocodile" Dundee

• Awesome Music:
  • The music when Mick first arrives in New York City.
  • The main theme.
  • The party scene features Australian rock band Mental As Anything's "Live It Up", which became an international chart hit following the movie's release.
  • "Nice One Skippy," especially the triumphant fanfare at around the two-minute mark that coincides with Mick scaring the kangaroo poachers away, and later reappears at the beginning of the end credits.
  • The third movie ends with one of the most fitting song choices of this trilogy: a remix of Men at Work's "Down Under".
• Best Known for the Fanservice: At the time the first film was released, the scene where Sue is seen wearing a one-piece thong swimsuit caused a minor controversy due to such skimpy swimwear being uncommon in 1986. But by today's standards the scene is pretty tame.
• Fair for Its Day:
  • The scene where Dundee recruits two Japanese tourists who use their ubiquitous cameras and martial arts to take down a thug indulges in outdated stereotypes that wouldn't fly today. However, the tourists are still portrayed as brave and commendable, and the scene isn't laughing at them.
  • Dundee crosses paths with a trans woman and outright grabs her crotch to confirm the fact, which would be treated as incredibly crude today. However, the fact that the fish-out-of-water Dundee simply treats it as another curious aspect of New York culture rather than become disgusted or contemptuous was fairly progressive for the 1980s.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The first two films [Less so for the third film...] are still very popular in the UK, being shown on TV [such as Film 4] on an almost weekly basis.
• Memetic Mutation: "That's not a knoife. That's a knoife".
• Sequelitis: The first movie was a surprise hit and grossed over $175 million in American theaters in 1986 (back when movie ticket prices were barely half of what they are now). While some people think that it hasn't aged well, almost everyone agrees that it is superior to the 1988 sequel Crocodile Dundee II, which did only about half the business of its predecessor. Most people don't even know that there's a 3rd movie in the series, with even defenders of the second film preferring that In Los Angeles be forgotten.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The poaching accusations Mick faces and anything resembling intricacy of character are summarily done away with as soon as he arrives in NYC. What makes it particularly jarring is that it pretty much rendered an entire act moot.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center can be seen in many exterior shots in the American scenes of the first two films. Many of the city-dwellers can also be seen dressing in characteristically '80s fashions. Dundee of course is timeless, much like his character.
  • While sightseeing in the first film, the original sign of the Pan Am building can be seen in the background. Pan Am collapsed later that year and the sign was taken down a year later.
  • The last Checker A11 cab was retired from service in 1999.
  • The rather blasé references to recreational cocaine use and street prostitutes disappeared rather quickly after the first film. Even the first sequel had Sue talk down to a cocaine kingpin.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Sue treats a man doing lines of cocaine in the kitchen of a fancy party as nothing more interesting than if he was doing shots of tequila. Welcome to The '80s. Which makes her insulting of drug dealers in the next movie kind of strange.
  • Mick's treatment of the crossdresser/possible trans woman in the first movie. Grabbing someone's privates to find out what parts they have counts as sexual assault nowadays. It doesn't help that another bar patron refers to them with a gay slur.
  • In-universe between Mick and Sue where Mick notes that there's no law preventing the hunters from shooting kangaroos for fun. At the time kangaroos were considered pests, no different than oversized rats.
  • The scene where Mick walks around the streets of New York with that Bowie knife hanging on his hip not even getting a second look. In today's climate the cops would be all over him before he made it a city block... and that's if he made it through airport security with it in the first place, post 9/11 especially.
  • The fact that Mick is possibly a poacher isn’t taken as a big deal. Or that he kills a King Brown Snake and throws it away like garbage just because he wanted to show off. This is much Harsher in Hindsight after Steve Irwin, who loved and handled incredibly dangerous animals in a manner which would not harm them, was fatally stung in the chest by a stingray in 2006.
  • The second movie opens with Mick doing some blast-fishing. Aside from the ecological damage caused, it's also considered rather inappropriate in The War on Terror age.

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