The restricted cat came back

Six years ago, I wrote a short blog post about something I called “the restricted cat”. Since then, more than 2000 people have found my site with searches like (in declining order of popularity): “restricted panther”, “restricted cat”, “restricted cougar”, “restricted movie logo” and so forth.

British Columbians and Ontarians of a certain age will remember this iconic little cat. You saw it on movie posters, in movie listings in the newspaper, and in a series of cute ‘bumpers’ before restricted movies. Here’s one of them:

Coincidentally, we’re working with Consumer Protection BC at the moment on a campaign to relaunch the restricted cougar videos. Part of their work is to classify–that is, assign a rating like ‘General’ or ‘Mature’–all the films shown in BC (and Saskatchewan, as it happens).

To accompany the videos, we helped them make this little timeline in Prezi, a cool presentation tool I use occasionally. The timeline has a ‘path’ to it, so it’s best explored by clicking the arrows in the lower-right corner, or using the arrow keys on your keyboard.

The timeline shows a recent history of movies classified as restricted in BC. I didn’t know this, but in 1997, classification categories were revised and the “18A” rating replaced “Restricted”. So, the R rating now only applies to a rare class of ‘adult’ motion pictures with “artistic, educational, scientific, historic or political merit”. Examples you might know include Requiem for a Dream and Shortbus.