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Just as when you board an airplane and aren’t allowed to bring certain items like liquids and guns on board, the Apollo astronauts flying to the moon were restricted on what items they could bring as well. Well just like that extra large tube of toothpaste, 40 years ago a few of the Apollo crew brought some contraband as well.
Worden, now 79, and his Apollo 15 crewmates David Scott and James Irwin suffered stinging NASA reprimands for bringing with them into space about 400 unauthorized postage-stamped envelopes (called first-day covers) with the intention of selling them later as souvenirs.
“It wasn’t as bad as people thought. We didn’t violate any regulations, we broke no rules,” Worden said Tuesday from his home in Vero Beach, Florida.
An investigation into the incident revealed that previous Apollo astronauts had carried unauthorized memorabilia on board. But Worden and his fellow crew members bore the brunt of the backlash.
If you’re looking to ramp up for Halloween by watching some horror flicks, you could go the typical route of Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street marathons, but if you’re really looking for a spooky movie fest, why not go the extra mile. The films on this list are all so violent and so offensive that they have been subject to protests, boycotts or censorship and many have even been banned in a few countries. While many of these are lesser known and hard to find, some of the big name controversial movies may surprise you. Because offensiveness and scariness are so subjective, these are presented in order of release date.
Warning: this post contains video clips that may be disturbing to some viewers, as they are from intentionally disturbing films.
Video link
This movie was the directorial debut of Wes Craven and depicted two teenage girls who are kidnapped by escaped convicts on their way to a rock concert. They are then sadistically tortured, raped and eventually murdered. By using a grainy, hand-held 16 mm camera, Craven’s picture seemed all too real to many movie viewers. He tried to defend the violence by saying it was “a reaction on my part to the violence around us, specifically to the Vietnam War.”
Craven’s excuses didn’t do much to quell the controversy and the movie was censored in many countries, particularly the U.K., where it was banned for seventeen years and remained subject to censorship until 2008.
Video link
You probably already know this is a darn creepy movie, but you may not know that it was so shocking to movie goers that many viewers were subject to nausea, convulsions, fainting and shocking displays of anger –one viewer in San Francisco attacked the movie screen, attempting to kill the demon. Paramedics began to be called to the screenings and it wasn’t long before picketers started showing up at the theaters. The film was even banned on video for 14 years in the U.K.
After the film was released, there was a major increase in requests for priests to perform exorcisms and a drastic rise in alleged spiritual possessions and psychoses by people claiming to be possessed. Taking advantage of the hysteria, Reverend Billy Graham claimed he “felt the power of evil buried within the celluloid of the film itself.”
Proving the maxim that nothing succeeds like controversy – or at least attract free press like one, CBS’ online mash up of Frosty (with sound bites from the TV series "How I Met Your Mother" and "Two and a Half Men") is now generating some heat.
Is it bad? Judge for yourself (warning NFSW audio):
[YouTube Clip] – more at CBS Eyelab’s Channel
Web Designer Depot has a good round-up of the most controversial magazine covers that have graced the newstands.
While some controversial covers have worked and sold more magazines, or won awards for the editors who made the decision to go to press with them, others were embarrassments that the publication had to either apologize for, or fire an editor over.
A few memorable ones came to mind when I started reading, and sure enough, they were there.
Roman Charity by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (mostly), c. 1767, with apologies
Two days ago, when Neatorama author named Alex was looking for an interesting story to post on the blog, he went to the Internet to research news articles. That’s where he stumbled across a New Idea magazine article about how a woman helped her father fight colon cancer by giving him breastmilk.
Alex titled his post "Daughter Helps Dad Fight Cancer … By Breastfeeding Him!" – a sensationalistic and misleading title that led Neatorama readers to believe that the woman in question had actually let her father suckle on her breast (like Pero in the Roman Charity, as pointed out by fellow reader TwoDragons) – rather than giving him breastmilk that she had pumped earlier in the day.
The reaction to the post was immediate. One commenter known as BlessedBlogger remarked:
First, I want to say that the title is misleading and obviously meant to shock us. I’m not very happy about that as even the implication of incestuous behavior turns my stomach. She isn’t breastfeeding him, she’s donating breast milk to him.
A flurry of other readers posted comments concurring with BlessedBlogger. PJ wrote "the title is grossed out. why’d neatorama wanna have a decent story titled like a cheap eveninger?" A quick search on the Internet revealed that "eveninger" is defined as "a newspaper that is released in the evening unlike a morning newspaper" (Source: Dictionary of Indian English), which immediately added gravitas to PJ’s opinion because, well, a person with a moniker of "PJ" would surely know a thing or two about a cheap eveninger.
But not everyone was offended. Kalel, with his trademark wit remarked:
Keeping abreast of the latest medical breakthroughs is of express interest, but perhaps they could have arranged a sort of tit-for-tat exchange with another mother.
Not to be outdone, Garys added:
This article “sucks”! I really should do a better job in regards to keeping “abreast” of the latest medical findings. Guess there is no fault in a little “tit” for tat amongst relatives.
Perhaps Garys didn’t get the memo about "unnecessary " quotation marks but we digress.
Support to the beleagured author was scant, but the one was loud and proud. Neatorama reader Byrd Brain let the author know how his super title writing skill was appreciated:
So, if you were to write an article about me putting rash cream on my baby son’s tender parts, Alex, you could come up with a headline like “Father Fondles Son’s Genitals”! You are just SUPER at this headline thing! A great day for accuracy in news reporting!
That was good, but Alex, who has years of experience writing sensationalistic title would surely have written "Father Helps Baby Fight Diaper Rash … By Fondling His Genitals with Cream!"
Throughout all these firestorm of comments, Alex remains silent – and the fact did not go unnoticed by Anon, who bemoaned "Although I guess no matter how much I pour my heart out here, Alex doesn’t give a shit." When privately approached, the besieged author could only mutter, "That’s udderly not true. Of course I care. Sensationalistic titles are very hard to think of …"
In the early 90s, Old Milwaukee decided to compete with the imports by inventing the Old Milwaukee Swedish Bikini Team. The ad features a bunch of guys out fishing and being manly men and they think that it just can’t get any better. And then, of course, the Swedish Bikini Team shows up wearing spandex, cans and six-packs of Old Milwaukee parachute in, and the camera pans in on lots of jiggling boobs.
The ad triggered a sexual harassment suit by five members of the Stroh Brewery who said that the ads perpetuated an environment of verbal and physical abuse that had been going on since the mid 80s anyway. You can tell it really scared the company – shortly thereafter, the “bikini team” was featured in Playboy For your viewing pleasure…
In 1989, Miller ruffled more than a few feathers with a 16-page pamphlet distributed in 55 college newspapers across the country. Called “Beachin’ Times,” it instructed college students on how to get drunk and pick up babes. One such gem includes a piece on “Lite Beer Pro Beach Volleyball” which asked readers to “Name something you can dink, bump, and poke. Hint – it’s not a babe.” You can tell it was 1989 because the pamphlet is liberally peppered with “babe” references – another section was called “Four Sure-Fire Ways to Scam Babes.” I don’t know about you guys, but I’m totally hearing Jeff Spicoli in my head. Even college students were offended – groups of students at two universities organized protests and threatened to boycott Miller, which was enough to scare the company into an apology. They sent letters with the headline “We Blew It” to all 55 student newspapers the pamphlet had appeared in. It didn’t impress some people, though – the University of Iowa’s Daily Iowan ran an opinion column that compared the apology to after-the-fact birth control – “It might make you feel better, but it doesn’t do a damn bit of good.”
Looks pretty tame, right? But when this ad was first published, complaints rolled in by the barrel-ful. The look on the girl in the barley’s face was apparently much too suggestive for the liking of the general public, because the Minneapolis Brewing Company received so many letters that they recalled the posters as so not to offend any more potential customers. Photo from Land of Amber Waters by Doug Hoverson.
This is actually not a controversial ad, but Rolling Rock wanted you to think it was. I watched the You Tube video and wondered what people found so offensive about it – girls in bikinis? Because there’s much more scantily-clad women on Rock of Love every week (trust me, as an avid viewer, I know). But that was all just part of the scam. A little more digging revealed that Rolling Rock actually released “Beer Ape” as a viral Internet campaign. They put up billboards and other ads, apologizing to anyone who was “offended” by the campaign… the campaign that never actually aired anywhere except YouTube. Of course, this resulted in people flocking to YouTube to see what this offensive commercial was all about. Kind of genius… kind of underhanded and sneaky. Check it out for yourself:
Photo from World News’ 25 Most Controversial Ads
If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember Miller Lite’s “Catfight” ad. It ran in 2002 and showed two women getting in an out-and-out down-and-dirty catfight over whether Miller Lite tasted great or was less filling… you know the schtick. They end up tearing off each other’s clothes, wrestling into a public fountain and eventually tear it up in a pool of cement. At the end of the ad, we see that the whole thing was really just the fantasy of two guys sitting at a bar.
Miller contends that they were mocking the stereotypical male mentality, but that didn’t really hold water with the hundreds of people who called or wrote to complain. Miller made it a point of pointing out that the majority of people who complained were women over the age of 40 who had children… I find the fact that they pointed this out more offensive than the actual commercial, personally. Here it is in all its racy glory:
