R-Rated movies-now, for kids!

by The Head Ninja
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You know, when I was growing up, I was allowed to see R-Rated movies all the time. It's around Halloween time right now, and this reminds me of when little second-grader me was dressed up as Freddy Krueger, and so was like half of the school.

But let me tell you something, 99% of those kids were fucking posers that never saw the movies.

I did. Conan the Barbarian is my favorite film of all time, and oh man that's gotten me a lot of shit in the film school. Well, fuck you. I like it. I saw it when I was a kid and it holds a lot of nostalgia for me, plus, it RULES. You cannot deny this.

Well, something weird happened with Conan the Barbarian. They decided to market the sequel to kids. Hey, He-Man was huge, why not give them something close to a live-action He-Man(years before it actually happened, which I'll probably review at some point)?

It seems weird. Kids would want to see the first movie after this, right? Well, this was par for the course in the 80s and 90s. Sometimes it would be controversial, but it would happen a lot.

I showed that Police Academy intro in an earlier post, and that was originally an R-Rated movie, until the franchise also went a more all-ages appropriate route. Then, a cartoon was made. Nary a Blue Oyster bar was mentioned.

It had a toy line, and I had a few of the figures. One of the bad guys was pretty awesome- MR. Sleaze. He would raise his hands in a "DON'T SHOOT!" pose when you squeezed his legs, but his necktie would pop up with a gas gun pointing right at your face! His dog also had a disguise to make it look like a respectable poodle instead of an evil mutt.






Makes you feel like a man, doesn't it?

Rambo was really, really violent, but was turned into a cartoon where Rambo teamed with the Force of Freedom, which was basically a GI Joe ripoff. All of the bad guys weren't just the guys in the evil organization SAVAGE, though. No, he fought a lot of commies and guys with mohawks to kind of fit in with the political climate of the era. This had a toy line. The figures were larger, much like 6 inches, and had jointed knees, but their arms wouldn't bend. THIS DROVE ME FUCKING NUTS.

Speaking of Stallone, while Demolition Man didn't have a cartoon series, it did have a line of Demolition Man action figures, which were re-tooled He-Man figures. The ironic thing about this is that Mattel was considering a Conan line before Masters of the Universe came out, but decided against it because it was an R-rated movie.



Robocop also got a cartoon series and toyline. Hey, the cartoon brought ED-209 back as ED-360, who was 51 better than ED-209.

The toys shot caps. This was awesome, until you ran out of caps. Then you had a big fucking stupid lever on everyone's back that didn't do shit.

None of this stuff was really all that successful, because kids couldn't watch the source material, in most cases. I SURE THE FUCK DID.