20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
15. George Lucas Deliberately Avoided A "G" Rating
It isn't often that you hear about filmmakers deliberately attempting to avoid a more permissive content rating, but that's exactly what happened with George Lucas on Star Wars.
At one stage in time A New Hope was seemingly destined for a "G" rating, but because this connoted a movie that was squeaky-clean and wholly sanitised for young children, Lucas allegedly added some mild language to the script to boost it to a "PG" rating.
The words "hell" and "damn" were added to get the film away from the stereotypes associated with the G rating.
Other apocryphal reports also suggest Ponda Baba's hand being cut off may have been part of an effort to secure the PG rating, while some claim the filmmakers simply went back to the MPAA and asked them to raise the rating to a PG.
Given that some of Star Wars' biggest fans are very small children, that's pretty hilarious.