To be fair, when record executives all got together to declare Tuesday the official music release day in the late ’80s, it was largely due to variations in shipping times that meant a store might not receive their product until after they opened on Monday, losing them sales. It was just an added bonus that they didn’t have to pay the extra employees who didn’t want to come in over the weekend anyway to make sure the shelves were all stocked and shiny.
The rest of the media landscape just kind of followed suit, although in 1992, Sega also promoted the new Sonic the Hedgehog game by declaring its release date “Sonic 2sday,” so if the video game industry’s hands were previously at large, they were subsequently solidly tied. There was still a problem, though: Because different countries used different release days (the U.K., which continued releasing new music on Mondays, apparently has no problem with the Sunday shift), international customers could leak new releases to the internet before they were available in the U.S., leading the music industry to agree to global New Music Fridays in 2015.
The MPAA Needed A Whole New Rating Because Of Porn
For as long as you can remember—hell, probably for as long as your parents can remember—the term “X-rated” has been synonymous with “obscene,” right? For about 20 years following the creation of the rating in 1968, though, such respectable films as Midnight Cowboy and Last Tango in Paris carried the same rating as Thirsty Prison Sluts 23. An X rating simply meant the movie in question was decidedly not for kids, even big ones with driver’s licenses and acne scars.
Then porn happened, to put it mildly. It would be more accurate to say that, in the ’70s and ’80s, the porn industry exploded all over America’s face. No longer relegated to magazines sold inside paper bags and rickety basement projectors, pornographic movies were openly screened in theaters indistinguishable from the ones where you saw the latest blockbuster save for the fine layer of flop sweat coating every surface. But porn peddlers have morals, too, so to warn off any unsuspecting families of missionaries who misread the title of Goldfingerer, they needed a rating for their films. And the MPAA had neglected to copyright their X.
By the end of the ’80s, the X rating had become so firmly associated with porn that no respectable media outlet or movie theater wanted to advertise or screen an X-rated movie, no matter how prestigious. The last straw was Henry & June, a 1990 biopic of the extremely horny Henry Miller whose studio didn’t appreciate being categorized as porn. That year, the MPAA created (and copyrighted) the NC-17 rating to differentiate films that were graphically mature but not like that, which is why you can continue to insist that Showgirls is high art.
Top image: Warner Bros.