The PG version was released in theaters! I'm old enough to remember that when the soundtrack became a huge hit -- a bigger hit than the movie -- the studio did the PG cut and re-released the movie in early 1978 with a whole new TV ad campaign focused on the fact that it was PG now, so you could take your kids.

I was only eight when the film came out, but I remember both of my sisters, who would have been like 18 and 20, being very upset by the rape scene in particular and the misogyny of the characters in general.

Because Travolta became a teen idol on a family-oriented TV series and Grease was comparatively light and frothy -- and because the soundtrack was immediately seen as so camp -- I think people forget what a dark and scuzzy little film Saturday Night Fever was. It's closer to Taxi Driver than The Muppets Take Manhattan.

My favorite aspect of the film: it was based on a magazine article by the great British rock critic Nik Cohn called "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night." Cohn admitted decades later that although he went to a lot of outer-borough discos to do early research for the article, the people he met there were so vapid and boring that he made up the entire article, writing about his own group of friends, 1960s London Mods who used to go dancing in soul clubs, transplanted to Brooklyn discos a decade later. Also, no one is raped in his story.