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The Following Preview has been approved…

  • byJoe Siegler
  • Posted on March 28, 2008April 20, 2011
  • 2 minute read
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If you spend any time watching movies, then you’ve seen the graphic below. It’s the Film Ratings Board’s image that shows up in front of all trailers. That’s why I’m writing. See the text there? “The following preview has been approved for all audiences by the Motion Pictures Association of America”. I have a few points to raise about that.

1) The implication of this rating is that there are trailers they would NOT approve for all audiences. When was the last time you saw one of those? Do they have a “red” screen they put up there for those? Is there an actual ratings system for movie trailers on their own? And if you did get a trailer that was not approved for audiences, would we ever actually see one in the theaters? Oh no, Little Jimmy can’t see this, let’s run out of the theatre in 3 seconds so he won’t see anything. I’m sure my “Little Jimmy” remark is why we don’t see anything else in theatres, but are there really trailers that are not approved for everyone?

2) I submit that a lot of the stuff in trailers is NOT valid material for “all audiences”. Now granted, I know trailers tend to be skewed towards the movie they’re in front of. You’re not about to see a Blue’s Clues movie trailer in front of say “American Zombie”. Likewise you won’t see a trailer for Rambo in front of “Horton Hears a Who”. Still, there are a lot of things in these trailers that are not valid material for all ages, thank you very much. There’s a current trailer for a movie called “Boarding Gate” that oepned last week. The trailer is marked with the “approved for everyone” green thing. It does say the movie is “R”, but the TRAILER itself is approved for “all audiences”. Now it’s fairly tame as these things go, but there is still a decent amount of things in there I don’t want my kid seeing. Something that really bugs me are trailers like “Diary of the Dead“, whose trailers are marked for “all audiences”, but are totally NOT for “all audiences”. I’m not against the movie itself, just the marking of the trailers.

I wonder which Soccer Mom will eventually raise a stink about “Little Johnny” seeing a trailer for Diary of Dead and making a big enough stink to get the concept of “for all audiences” addressed on trailers. It bugs me, but I’m not the crusader. I just like to complain about things sometimes. :)
It does seem odd/wrong/whatever though. Anyone ever seen a trailer without that “for all audiences”, or some other wording saying the trailer IS NOT for all?

Join the Conversation
  1. Alan Jobb says:
    March 28, 2008 at 3:43 pm

    In my youth I worked at a movie theatre in every possible capacity from usher, to projectionist to manager. They DO make a preview screen that is RED and is only allowed to go in front of R rated movies, but they are rare, we had 100-1 ratio of green trailers to red ones and I have not seen once since I worked there (almost 20 years ago now)
    We did have to be careful and aware of the previews we put in front of kids movies, and on more than one occasion the wrong thing got put in from and I as manager got chewed out my parents.
    Now that I AM a parent (of four) I understand why and would be annoyed if it happened.
    I am equally annoyed when there are movie and/or TV previews that are highly inappropriate on prime time sports I am watching with my kids.

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