"I don't care that Lola Bunny is dressed less sexy in Space Jam 2 but I am unbelievably exhausted by the idea that the way you communicate that a female character is to be taken seriously is by removing her boobs"
— @LuxAltraum, Twitter
Fans of the comics will begin to suspect what’s wrong with Barbarella the moment they see what rating it was given in US release. The M-rating didn’t last very long, but it was 1968’s antecessor to the later GP and PG certificates, and Barbarella has carried the latter rating since its 1977 re-release. Yes, a PG went farther in those days (and an M went a tad farther still), but a faithful adaptation of Forest’s comic strip would have straddled (and I use the term advisedly) the original boundary between R and X. The Barbarella strips I’ve read are shameless, and since a large part of the point is that the whole concept of shame is outmoded in Forest’s vision of the future, a coy and winking adaptation like Vadim’s has to be considered a willful misreading of the source material at best, or an utter failure at worst. It’s a bit difficult to decide which at this late remove, however, because there seems to be little agreement on the extent to which the Barbarella we have today reflects the movie Vadim set out to make. Reports are rampant to the effect that Barbarella was edited extensively for its post-Star Wars reissue, but I have been unable to track down any concrete enumeration of what was supposed to have been removed. Nor can I detect any significant difference between the modern DVD edition, the 80’s-vintage VHS version, or the 35mm print that was screened at B-Fest 2008. The situation is made murkier yet by the existence of a dozen or so production stills depicting a (fully clothed) lesbian scene between Barbarella and the Great Tyrant. These photos apparently ran originally in a 1968 issue of Penthouse which featured an article on the film, but opinion looks more or less evenly divided over whether this scene was actually shot, or merely staged and photographed for promotional purposes. I have yet to see anyone contend that it ever appeared in American or Commonwealth release, but it may have been included in prints struck for exhibition in Continental Europe. Again, nobody seems to know. Note, however, that even the Penthouse pictures are far tamer than the comics, and given the source, it’s hard to believe that the scene, if it ever really existed, got any hotter than those stills. Esquire ran racier pinups in the early 40’s, and Bob Guccione has never exactly been in the restraint business. What little evidence exists suggests that even a hypothetical “hot” European version would have represented only a slight advance upon And God Created Woman.
— Scott "El Santo" Ashlin. 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting
