Role reversals/Plots ahead of their time/Plots that would be more controversial now

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I'm quite new here.

I joined various discussions and have thought up new things to talk about re sitcoms or any TV shows.

In a different thread I said that sitcoms have depicted men dressing like women to disguise themselves, or play pranks, etc. The result oftentimes is that men learn what women go through, or experience some other undesired outcome. In The Monkees, Davy , Mickey and Mike have been in drag in different episodes.Davy had to deal with a man attracted to him. In Gilligan's Island Gilligan dressed like a goddess to fool a tribal chief who arrived on the island. In The Partridge Family Rubin was tricked into dressing like a fairy and Keith filmed him and publicized the footage and Rubin got such positive response that he had to sell autographed posters of himself in a fairy costume. This kind of reverse gender-role scenario is an often-used tactic for laughs.Sometimes it just involves a guy having to act like a girl for some other reason. It has a reputation for being funny like saying "pickles" is funny. In Leave It To Beaver, Beaver was pretending with his friend, and Beaver was pretending to drive his dad's car and was pretending to be a dad and he wanted his friend to pretend to be the mother and his friend said "OK, but don't tell the other guys" and he started talking in a high-pitched voice and yelling at the pretend kids in the back seat and said "Stop chocking your sister."
In another episode of Gilligan's Island, Gilligan was accidentally hypnotized by the professor into thinking that he was Ginger.

But what about women characters dressing or pretending to be men so as to disguise themselves, or make fun of men , or just pretend to be men? It actually has been overall , much less portrayed.

In The Monkees' "Some Like It Lukewarm'' the plot automatically involved a female member of an all-female band dressing like a male so as her band may qualify to compete in a music contest that required men and women band members in each group.
In " Family Matters" (which I never watched much) one of the female characters dressed up like a male to fool a male used-car salesman who treated women in a sexist way but then one of the other male characters of the show thought she was having "Identity problems" but when he found out she was trying to fool the salesman, he taught her some male behaviorisms and gestures including making passes at women .
In "Alice, " Alice once dressed like a man because her son broke his leg while staying with Mel and Mel was trying to keep it a secret but Alice suspected it and knew that Mel was having an all-male get together at his home so Alice put on a mustache and man's suit to invite herself and see if her son was in a leg cast.

There was a certain role-reversal plot in The Partridge Family when Lori enrolled in traditionally-boys' classes like car repair and self-defense and Keith enrolled in cooking and other traditionally girls' classes. By the end of the episode Lori physically defended Keith against a bully and Keith felt humiliated at first but eventually came to appreciate what his sister did .

In The Brady Bunch when Marsha decided to apply for Greg's boy scout troop to prove she could tough it out like a boy, and Greg wanted to teach her a lesson that it was silly that she try to act like a man so he alternately intended to apply for Marsha's girl-scout troop to show her how silly that would be, but Marsha actually thought it was a good idea that Greg try for her troop but Greg was too old to apply so Greg got his middle brother to dress like a girl scout (Bobby was too young) and go door to door selling cookies.

However these were mainly individual episodes in which the role reversals were intended for the context of the plot. How about when the role reversal is oddly there without such a role-reversal emphasis, or is ahead of its time or at least in a significant way?
For example When Danny Partridge was told he was too fat by his girlfriend and went to Keith and Ruben to ask them "What do you think of my body?" It seems a female character would more likely say such words and be so self conscious about weight and more likely be told she is fat by her boyfriend and more likely try to lose weight to look good at the swimming pool. This episode was in the mid 70s before there was such a great social and medical acknowledgement of anorexia nervosa: Mainstream knowledge about it progressively came about in the 80s, and it was almost completely associated with being female and only in the 2000s (approximately) did the term "manorexia"come to be used.
In an episode of "Family Affair" one of Buffy's female friends was chubby and had a crush on Jody and Buffy tried to help her lose weight and it involved not eating even when hungry and Buffy's friend said that the diet leaves her hungry all the time and Buffy said, "Good, that means it is working." (That would probably be considered a controversial and outdated idea about dieting today). In contrast Shirley Partridge told Danny that she is putting him on a diet but it does not involve starving.
Shirley even tried to talk Danny out of dieting in the first place telling him "Is it so important for you to lose weight?".
It might be role-reversal with a double standard. In "The Super," a short-lived TV show in the 70s with Richard S Castellano as "Joe," Joe tried to diet but his wife saw that it was making him unhappy so by the end of the episode she had him quitting his diet and eating all he wants even though he was very overweight.
There was an odd plot in the Addams Family when Uncle Fester went on a diet because a female friend of his wrote to him saying that she was going on a diet, but when she finally visited him and heard that he was not eating and trying to lose weight, she told him that her diet is not one of cutting down on food but of eating more than usual.

Role reversals take on other forms.
There was the episode on the Partridge Family "Promise her Anything But Give Her a Punch" (which, BTW in the 70's was a title that did not seem to acknowledge dating violence). The plot involved Danny's 11-year-old girlfriend( the one who told him he was fat), getting a crush on Keith, who was almost twice her age. Lori Partridge was not depicted as having young boys swooning for her during concerts like Keith had young girls screeching for him. Lori did not have to deal with guys at school joining her Home-Ec classes to be near her like Keith had girls joining his auto repair class to be near him. Again, these were the 70s but it seems a bit strange that Lori was not a heart throb for boys.
It is common for preteen females to find teen or older guys "attractive." In TV shows , preteen or teen boys being attracted to older women isn't given the exact same treatment. (Sure, as many of us know, in The Little Rascals, Jack was notoriously "in love" with Ms Crabtree). A younger man did find Shirey Partridge attractive when she went back to school but he eventually wanted to date Lori Partridge. Still Danny had male friends the same age as he who did not come over to see Lori. (That would have been a good plot for an episode). One of Danny's young male friends came over for Shirley Partridge's cookies.

But I guess in reality certain role reversals happen more than others.

One of the more uncommon "age difference" plots was when when Donny Osmond (playing himself on "Here's Lucy") fell in love with Lucie Arnaz' character, "Kim" who was much older than he.
In "Family"(though not really a sitcom) there was a funny role-reversal when a teenage boy fell in love with Sada Thonpson's character, Kate Laurence who was old enough to be the teen's grandmother. She could not convince the boy that she and he were not compatible so she used reverse psychology and told him that she wanted to marry him and have him support her. It worked.The teen guy decided to call off their "relationship."



Additionally I recall a Donny and Marie Show sketch with Chad Evrett and Ruth Buzzy in which Chad Evrett played a worker at an airport who was screening passengers and Ruth Buzzy was a woman trying to board an airplane and complaining about the invasion of privacy with the metal detector but also the sketch depicted how the airplane screeners were so busy telling Ruth Buzzy's character to go back and forth through the metal detector that they did not notice a man with a guitar case coming to board the airplane who apparently had a gun in the guitar case . The interesting part is that the man with the guitar case had an Arab Keffiyeh (headdress) on. Strangely ahead of its time and would be more controversial today.

The train of thought may not be completely uniform in this thread but here can be different issues with any one episode of a TV show.

Anyone know of unusual role-reversal plots?
Anyone know of plots that were ahead of their time, or which were not controversial back when they were produced but which would be controversial today?

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To add to this thread that I created, cartoon characters such as Bugs Bunny, Fred Flinstone, Popeye (etc) really got a lot of mileage from plots involving males in drag. Females disguising like males hasn't been depicted much in cartoons . The only one I can think of is when Wilma and Betty dressed like men to infiltrate Fred and Barney's all-mens club and they ended up in the wrong room for new members and got initiated by being hit with paddles and going through a fraternity hazing type of initiation.

The early Popeye cartoons really relied on very overt male and female stereotypes even though it was not looked at that way until the late 1970s. But when role-reversal happened in an episode it eventually became to be ahead of its time. Olive Oyl once tried to join the police force, which before the 1960's was far more male dominated than now, and Popeye thought Olive couldn't do the job but even though he tried to interfere when she tried to catch burglars, and save people, and even stop a runaway horse, Popeye ended up failing to help and only hurt himself in the process, and Olive Oyl was able to do it herself . That was supposed to be the big joke about it, such an unreal scenario.
Though it was not thought of in the same light before the 1980s Olive was usually depicted as a dumb , fickle, hapless woman who gets mistreated by Bluto while Popeye occasionally does nothing until he "Cant stand it any more." But I recall some 4 other episodes in which she was depicted as physically strong, more intelligent, capable and ends up literally beating Bluto and /or Popeye or getting the better of some female rival who is physically strong. In one episode she was fed up with Bluto and Popeye trying to impress her and were wrecking her home (it was one of the rare episodes in which she did not get roughed up by Bluto).So Olive literally kicked Bluto and Popeye sky high out of her home. In another episode she punched Bluto to the moon because she saw him hit Popeye. In another episode, a female gym instructor flirts with Popeye and slugs Olive , but Olive reaches for Popeye's spinach and then slugs the gym instructor so hard that she hits the ceiling and becomes a chandelier. In one other episode a "Hillbilly" female grabs Popeye and wants to get "Hitched" but Olive eats spinach and saves him by throwing the "Hillbilly" female to the moon, literally.
Dumb cartoons.

Other forms of role reversals and plots ahead of their time or unacceptable for modern times:
I really did not think about it much when I was a kid and watched Popeye, but much later in life I realized that sometimes certain episodes depicted a grown son (Popeye) telling his elderly father what to do for his own good. That was really unheard of in cartoons for children or perhaps any cartoons at all at the time . Naturally it was intended to be funny and not really have a social meaning like cartoons for kids made in the more culturally-sensitive 1980s and 1990s. Popeye taking care of his elderly father and trying to make his father get along with Sweet Pea did not have a meaning about "The sandwich generation" in which grown people care for their aging parents as well as younger children in the family. Also there was once an episode in Popeye in which Bluto and Popeye wanted to take Olive Oyl for a night out but she had to leave her elderly grandma home , so Popeye decided to invite the old lady along and he kindly tried to make her feel welcome and even mildly flirted with her to make her feel young.

As you probably know, the Popeye episode(s) in which Popeye gets lost in the jungle and gets thrown into a huge pot by a bunch of cannibals was not controversial in its time, but by the late 70s it was.