Some UK viewers who caught the BBC’s airing of the classic hit 1970s musical Grease over Christmas were aghast at its content, slamming the John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John-starring musical as an affront to their sensibilities.
Forty-two years after its cinema release, the movie was met with damning critiques from some calling it “misogynistic,” “rapey,” and encouraging “slut-shaming” amongst a host of other putdowns.
The film, set in an American high school in 1959, was one of the highest-grossing films of the 1970s and has had a sequel and hit Broadway and West End show created in its honor, but that didn’t stop some taking it to task.
For some criticis, even the simple premise of boy meets girl at high school was too much to bear, calling the entire plot sexist, racist and homophobic.
Elsewhere one viewer wrote: “Hey, there’s one non-white couple at the dance! One! #Grease”
“I caught the end of Grease, the movie, and noticed there were no black actors or pupils at the high school,” added another, while a third penned: “Watched Grease on the BBC, surprised they let it go, full of white people.”
Watch below:
The film has a PG rating with a warning of “frequent mild sex references and mild language.”
This is not the first time a Hollywood classic has been attacked in the years since its original release.
In the UK alone, some 16 films including Aliens, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Flash Gordon, The Jungle Book, and Lawrence of Arabia have been given trigger warnings for their “outdated attitudes” by Comcast-owned Sky, as Breitbart London reported.
Even more recent remakes have had the same treatment:
A straight historical recitation of the facts can be enough to arouse woke critics.
The 2017 release Matilda from director Aleksey Uchitel covered an affair between the eponymous ballerina and Tsar Nicholas II, who was ultimately executed after the Bolshevik Revolution.
The project encountered angry resistance from “nationalist extremists” on release, as the Hollywood Reporter put it, because Nicholas II was designated a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000.
Also, 2017 was the one-hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
“Although only trailers of the film have so far been released, theaters that plan to show the film have been attacked, and last month Molotov cocktails were lobbed through the windows of Uchitel’s St Petersburg office. No one was injured,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote at the time.
Matilda was also banned in the Muslim-dominated areas of Russia, including Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia.
Chechen minister Jambulat Umarov told Reuters the movie would pointlessly “stir up hatred” and “stir up rage,” adding historical films should strive for strict accuracy and “not lead the viewer into the boudoir.”