A Classic ‘80s Comedy Is Being Re-Released Without Its Worst Joke

The ‘80s were a weird time. Shoulder pads were everywhere, you couldn’t eat at McDonald’s without choking on cigarette smoke and Crocodile Dundee was a global sensation.

The original 1986 movie, a fish-out-of-water story about a leathery badass from the Australian Outback visiting New York City, made an absolutely shocking amount of money. Crocodile Dundee was the number two movie at the U.S. box office that year, behind only Top Gun. It made more than $116 million in 1986 dollars, clobbering beloved ‘80s classics like Aliens and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and pulling in more than $174 million worldwide. 

A 4K remastered version of Crocodile Dundee is going to be re-released in Australian theaters this spring, but the release, dubbed the “Encore Cut,” is quite a bit different from the original. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Crocodile Dundee: The Encore Cut begins with text “acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land,” which the paper notes is “appropriately respectful given it depicts Indigenous culture in the Territory.” And a reference to Dundee’s age was removed, possibly so as not to highlight the wide age gap between him and love interest Sue (actress Linda Kozlowski is 19 years younger than star Paul Hogan).

But most consequentially, the movie’s wildly transphobic scene has been completely excised. As we’ve mentioned before, there is a notorious moment in which Crocodile Dundee chats with a trans woman at a bar, only to be told that “she’s a guy.” He responds to this news, by grabbing her by the crotch, causing her to flee, and prompting the entire bar to cheer. This also tees up a later joke in which Dundee similarly sexually assaults the hostess of an upscale party. 

Reportedly, both scenes have been cut out of the movie, which is now two-and-a-half minutes shorter. The changes aren’t just for this one release, the Encore Cut will reportedly “become the standard version for future streaming and TV releases.” And some fans aren’t happy that the film has been effectively censored.

This is a complex issue. On the one hand, altering older movies is generally terrible. On the other, the scenes in question are legitimately repugnant, and the movie is unquestionably more watchable without them. Plus, even Paul Hogan is happy to have the tranasphobic scenes gone. “They pointed out to me and said, ‘This guy is a folk hero around the world. He shouldn’t be groping people,’” Hogan stated. “And I thought, ‘Yeah that’s right, he shouldn’t be,’ so take it out. I mean, he did it in all innocence, in naivety, but it’s better without it.”

So if George Lucas can cram a bunch of goofy CGI aliens into Star Wars, can’t the filmmakers behind Crocodile Dundee remove parts of the film that they feel no longer reflects their values? 

Well, for one thing, it doesn’t seem as though the edits came from anyone directly involved with the film. According to the production company, the changes were made at the request of Paramount Pictures and “other distributors” who found it “offensive” (which, again, it most certainly is). But the bigger problem is that editing out some scenes to better suit modern audiences, implies that the rest of the movie stands the test of time, which it doesn’t. The underlying conceit of Crocodile Dundee is that a sexist, frequently bigoted, leathery white bro is somehow more capable and pure of heart than everyone else.

The Indigenous Australians, who receive a tacit acknowledgement at the beginning of the new cut, are dismissed as “fleas” fighting over a dog when Dundee briefly addresses land rights. And in the sequel, Dundee shares a heart-to-heart with a distraught man on the ledge of a building, but he nearly falls to death after freaking out that the guy turns out to be gay. “The strong implication is that, had he known the man was homosexual, he would never have tried to save him in the first place,” an op-ed in The Guardian noted. 

The same piece also argues that “there is a suggestion the man’s sometimes casual, at other times brusquely direct racism and sexism is acceptable because he doesn’t know any better.” 

We’re constantly being asked to laugh at Dundee saying offensive things, because he doesn’t understand that it’s offensive. Like when Dundee asks Reginald VelJohnson’s character Gus, the first Black American he encounters, which “tribe” he belongs to. This isn’t a case of the people not knowing any better; audiences at the time were well aware that Dundee shouldn’t be doing or saying these things, in fact, that’s the entire joke. But by filtering hacky racist, sexist and homophobic jokes through Crocodile Dundee’s outback naivety, they seemingly became “safe” for mass consumption in the ‘80s.

The new edits to Crocodile Dundee may make the movie less terrible, but they’re also a futile attempt to sanitize a character who will always be deeply regressive. Maybe it's better to just leave that document intact — and question why any of it was desirable in the first place.