Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho was groundbreaking in its shock value--and not because of the infamous shower scene. It was the shot immediately prior to the shower scene which gave the movie censors fits and introduced an element so intense that it had never been before depicted on the silver screen. Specifically, the character Marion Crane is shown flushing paper evidence of her recent embezzlement down the toilet. This was the first time that a potty had been featured in a movie, let alone one which was actually flushed. Hitchcock managed, after much argument, to get the scene approved by the censors by maintaining that the flushing of the paper, coupled with a later discovery of an unflushed paper scrap by a private investigator, had to be included in order to advance the plot.
You will recall that the initial magic porcelain seat breakthrough in television occurred three years earlier in Leave it to Beaver, where Wally and Beaver raised a baby alligator in a toilet tank. However, Leave it to Beaver never dared to push the envelope so far as to show the bowl itself or the toilet being flushed.
Unfortunately, bathroom taboos went totally out of the window in 1977, when the director of Fun with Dick and Jane, for no apparent reason, decided to include a scene where Jane Fonda sits on the throne, urinates, and wipes herself.
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