Hello!


In the 80s and 90s, marketing toys and video games from R rated movies was a thing; regardless of how much swearing, sex, and violence it had.

1) Looking back as adults, do you think it was inappropriate to market these franchises to kids? I'll leave this blank myself, as I keep flip-flopping between different answers.

2) Which one was your favourite? Mine was a Terminator 2 action figure. I used to watch that movie every weekend. I don't really have a favourite game around this subject. I was too much of a scaredy cat to try and play anything horror related.

3) Is there anything outside these questions you would like to add?


"Aliens! Send in the marines!"

I'll be 34 next month, and after all this time I still remember that commercial.

Robocop. First two movies were extremely adult and brutal. Saw two as a kid. That scene where the cop gets cut open while still alive...

"You said you were just going to scare him!"
"He looked pretty scared to me..."

That final battle was the coolest thing ever though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKEIsnmXIRw

Yeah... they turned this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3cruTAKRD0
into a kids franchise.

I remember having a Rambo action figure with a rocket launcher and his combat knife.

Had Robocop toys and game, and T2... also loved the Friday the 13th game. Had a Freddy Glove as a kid too.

Canada is too wimpy and politically correct these days.
Its hard getting R rated toys here.

People portray this as corporate neglect, but honestly as a kid from the 80s I can tell you no one really cared about R-rated movies. Every kid I knew watched them, with his/her parent's blessing. Even stuff like Nightmare on Elm Street. In fact one of my early vivid memories is of watching Nightmare on Elm Street 3 with a friend and his parents when we were like 10 or 12 years old and getting scared by the Freddy worm scene. That said nudity was an exception, boobs were the only no-go for kids, because that's America for you.

Anyway, I can see the issue to some degree but I think we've mostly gone too far the other way now. Every blockbuster has been sanitized for PG-13 with very rare exception, and even today's PG-13 is often more bloodless and sanitized than PG movies in the 80s like Temple of Doom or Gremlins. They still have a lot of violence, sure, but it's bloodless cartoon style violence. Cable TV shows more than most PG-13 movies, and every mainstream game shows a LOT more.

It's a bummer how sanitized movies feel nowadays and I think it hurts their popularity more than the studios and MPAA think.