Age certifications

[derspiess]

In elementary school I used to get annoyed that I was about the only kid who watched Saturday Night Live and nobody knew what I was talking about when I asked if anyone saw any of the funnier skits from the previous show.  Then I realized the opportunity plagiarize some of the SNL jokes and get away with it.  Had to dumb them down a little but it worked.

[Brazen]

In elementary school I used to get annoyed that I was about the only kid who watched Saturday Night Live and nobody knew what I was talking about when I asked if anyone saw any of the funnier skits from the previous show.  Then I realized the opportunity plagiarize some of the SNL jokes and get away with it.  Had to dumb them down a little but it worked.

Same here with Monty Python   

[Duque de Bragança]

I feel sorry for you guys who've been ID'd all your young adult lives. All we had to do to get into X-rated films or buy cider was calculate what year we were supposed to have been born in.

Cider banned, even partially? Brits... LULZ

[viper37]

I figure with what I want to ask here there may be a generation gap.
The question that came to mind for me was how did your parents treat you with regards to age restrictions. For example some parents are known for not given a toss and buying their kids any 18 certificate thing they want whereas on the other end of the scale there are some who won't even let their 11 year old see an obviously OK 12 certificate film.

Considering certification is largely a product of the 1980s and the rise of VHS tapes, and they didn't really come into their own until the 90s or even the 2000s with games and cheap videos, many of us may not have experience with dealing with them as a kid...most of those people however do have experience of dealing with them as parents I would imagine.
So if you wish, then invert the question, how do you treat age certs with your kids.

Poll broken. But hopefully discussion less so.


This question came on after seeing an old documentary about violent video games damaging our yoof and yelling at the screen that all the games they were mentioned are 18 certs...Except of course my parents had no problem letting me play them.

porn was an obvious no-no.  But I was more technically versed than my parents, so for the times we have cable tv, I would record the porn after the beginning of a regular movie, than hide the tape, in case my mom would find it.
But if I was getting caught... it was the usual speech about the sins, the unreality, blah-blah.

Otherwise, regular movies, well, we didn't have cable & a vcr until I was in my early teens, so it wasn't really a problem.  My mom got concerned over the Rambos, after reading some newspaper articles, but she let it go quickly, there was no nudity.

Radio on the other hand...  There was this cool radio show called The Zoo, early morning on weekdays.  At first, my mom didn't mind.  Then she talked with other parents and realized exactly what it was (it was really thrash and pretty often adult oriented), so that got censored at home, and in the schoolbus too