Watching it now and very curious. It is almost like soft core porn.

Thoughts, Comments, Reactions?

Different times, different standards.

Yup look up a movie called Coach...sometime. PG also

What Groucho said. Barbarella is nothing w/ the rating. Poltergeist is a movie that's a bigger deal. Spielberg made a hell of a horror film.

Barbarella was released before the PG rating was even created.

So I would guess that whatever year after that when it was rated with the later standard and got that PG rating, it must have seemed tame compared to the then new stuff coming out.

Up until the late 80s, the ratings board was wildly inconsistent in how they treated various subject matters. After the PG-13 rating was created, things changed.

Planet of the Apes is G ... despite hells and damns and Charlton Heston's bare ass.

When I worked for Hollywood Video we had standards for what we could play in the store ... those standards were based on ratings. To make a point (mockery) of how flawed that system is, we would routinely search for those movies that make you wonder "how the hell is this rated G/PG?!"

One day I had an employee pop in "It" (Stephen King's). I shrugged ... "eh, it ran on TV. Fits our guidelines."

I wish I could remember some of the other ones we would pop in ... my boss always had a cow and there was nothing she could do about it.

Jenny Agutter show her boobs in Logan's Run. It's only for a brief moment but my god she wore the skimpiest outfit I ever saw in cinema. Yeah, it was also PG rating.

Airplane was also rated PG and there was sexual content (primarily innuendo) throughout.

What changed?! PG-13 muddied the waters even more!

My favorite example is Titanic and Small Soldiers. Both were released the same week, both were rated PG-13. Small Soldiers received the rating because of cartoon violence and a scene where a kid is shot in the leg with a corn-on-the-cob holder. Titanic received the rating for language, full frontal nudity, violence, dead bodies floating in the water ... yeah, those are comparable.

This may be a little over the top, but I pulled it from one of those parent-advocate websites (and I had to laugh -- the ads at the top were for a cocktail mix and for suntan lotion with a very curvy model silhouetted) ...

Pushing the limits of the PG-13 rating, Titanic includes multiple views of a woman’s naked breasts (as she poses for an artist), a sexual encounter between an unmarried teen couple (some activity shown), a sexual expletive along with other mild and moderate profanities, and glamorization of gambling, drinking and smoking. As well, suicide is contemplated and violent threats against life are made. The peril and trauma of the passengers on board the fated ship may also be disturbing to some viewers.

That was one!

In the other direction, "Midnight Cowboy" was rated X on its first release.

"All the Presidents Men" is PG and has very much R-rated language.

^That nudity (Including the skinny-dipping trio) was even able to slide on a Disney-channel showing back in the mid-90's.
Regarding Apes ratings, my favorite still belongs to the trailer for Beneath The Planet of the Apes:


Can't find that certain trailer on youtube, but it can be seen on "Behind The Planet of the Apes".

The original Clash of the Titans was PG and that showed us some lovely early 80s titties.

Beetlejuice has the f-bomb in it, with him grabbing his balls. That's also PG.

A better time to be alive.

The film pre-dates ratings altogether. Originally intended for general audiences like any other film from the time.

Beastmaster!

The Omega Man is very violent, also: boobies. PG.

Jaws - full-frontal swimming nudity, and a bunch of severed heads and limbs and stuff.

I saw BARBARELLA when it came out. It was released in the U.S. just weeks (or days) before the ratings system became official. The tag on the ads read "Suggested for Mature Audiences," which predated the "M" or "Mature" rating, which later became GP and then PG.

Thank you for asking.

Boobs alone don't qualify as full frontal nudity. But they were still surprising for PG-13.

It was originally rated "M" for mature audiences. Ratings back when it came out was G, M, R, X. The ratings system was in its early stages. Theaters complained that the "M" rating sounded too harsh (and was originally meant to). To appease the theaters they came up with GP. Then families complained that GP sounded too soft (generally thought to mean General Public instead of parental guidance suggested), so it was switched to PG.

I still remember being in the car as my parents took me to the drive in to see it. I was a small kid but wanted to see all sci-fi. The movie started while we were in a long line of cars to get in. My mom looks at the screen and sees miss Fonda floating around in space taking off her clothes and says to my dad, "what kind of movie is this?" I'll never forget that moment.

At the start of the portrait scene, Kate is standing at the doorway wearing a see-through gown. Look close and you can see kate bush.

That's nothing compared to Walkabout. A completely naked Agutter in a PG rated film. The reason behind the PG is the context of the nudity in relation to nature.

Yeah, but the fact that it has a PG rating means it was eventually submitted to the ratings board some years after its theatrical release. A film that has not been submitted to the board is called "Unrated" because it's illegal to just slap a PG on a film without the board being involved (the MPAA trademarked all of its ratings with the exception of the X rating).

So my question is: what year was Barbarella submitted to the ratings board? If it was in the late '70s to early '80s, the board was getting a lot more permissive on what constituted an R vs. PG by then, so I would guess it was in those years before the addition of the PG-13 rating in 1984 (that permissiveness is basically what lead to the creation of that new rating in between).