2009-12-03
"A Girl's Got To Have Her Standards"
From the Edward Copeland on Film Blog
Article by Odienator


When first released, Real Genius was marketed as a teenage sex comedy "from the writers of Police Academy and Bachelor Party." This was to draw teenagers familiar with those R-rated comedies to the theater. However, most teenagers looked in the lower left hand corner of the poster and realized Tri-Star pictures was trying to pull a fast one: This was rated PG. With the fresh paint still drying on the new PG-13 rating, teens knew PG was the kiss of death. You might see some kissing, and you might see some death. What you weren't going to see was what happened after the kissing, or the gory details of the death. After all, raunchy begins with R. So does Revenge of the Nerds.

Tri-Star next marketed the film as the revenge of one nerd. "When he gets mad, he doesn't get even...he gets creative" says the tag line on this poster. The he in question is Val Kilmer, and though many may have found him cute or even amusing with his bunny slippers and the alien headgear that was ubiquitous back in 1985, he still was smiling on a poster for a PG-rated teenage sex comedy. Teenagers stayed away in droves, opting instead to see The Breakfast Club, an R-rated John Hughes movie. I'll bet they were surprised to discover there's more sex in Real Genius; Hughes' R was for language.


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