The Drawings That Nearly Killed a Movie

How 186 Penis Sketches Rewired the Teen Comedy Brain

Seth Rogen spent his high school years drawing dicks. Not as a joke. Not as performance art. Just because that’s what teenage boys do when they’re bored in class. Hundreds of them. Different shapes, different sizes, different contexts. It was compulsive, pointless, and completely real.

When he and Evan Goldberg wrote Superbad, they put that detail in the script. Because the whole point was to show high school as it actually was, not as Hollywood pretended it was. And high school, for a lot of boys, involves drawing a lot of dicks.

The MPAA almost killed the movie over it.

The Weirdest Art Portfolio in Hollywood History

The prop department needed hundreds of distinct penis drawings for the film. They couldn’t just use the same sketch over and over—audiences would notice. Each one had to be unique, specific, believable as something a bored seventeen-year-old would doodle in the margins of his notebook.

So they hired Evan Goldberg’s brother. And he spent weeks creating what became “the weirdest art portfolio in Hollywood history.” Hundreds of carefully crafted phalluses. Different angles. Different artistic styles. Some crude, some surprisingly detailed. All of them absurd.

Think about that job for a second. Your resume now includes “penis sketch artist for major motion picture.” That’s your contribution to cinema. That’s what you tell people at parties.

But here’s the thing: those drawings mattered. Not because they were funny—though they were. But because they were true. They were the kind of stupid, juvenile thing that actual teenagers actually do. And in a genre built on lies, that truth was dangerous.

The MPAA’s Moral Panic

The Motion Picture Association of America looked at Superbad and saw a threat. Not to children. Not to decency. To control.

They wanted to give it an NC-17 rating. That’s a death sentence for a comedy. No major theater chain will show it. No marketing campaign can save it. An NC-17 means the film is over before it starts.

Their objections? “The drawings” and “the fluids.”

Not the language—though the movie uses “fuck” 186 times. Not the sexual content—though there’s plenty. Not the underage drinking or the drug use or any of the other things parents might actually worry about.

The drawings. Cartoon penises in a notebook. That’s what crossed the line.

The editors had to go through the film frame-by-frame, cutting milliseconds here and there, reducing the number of visible drawings until the MPAA was satisfied. They had to negotiate over how many dicks were acceptable. How long each one could be on screen. Whether certain angles were more offensive than others.

It was absurd. But it was also revealing. Because the MPAA wasn’t protecting audiences from obscenity. They were protecting the industry from honesty.

The Psychology of the Dick Drawing

Here’s what nobody wants to talk about: the drawings aren’t random. They’re not just a gross-out gag. They’re a window into Seth’s psychology.

He’s seventeen, insecure, obsessed with sex in the abstract but terrified of it in reality. He talks constantly about getting laid, but he’s never actually done it. He projects confidence, but he’s drowning in anxiety about college, about losing his best friend, about becoming an adult when he still feels like a kid.

And he deals with all of that by drawing dicks. Hundreds of them. Because it’s safe. It’s controllable. It’s a way to engage with sexuality without actually having to be vulnerable. It’s performance without risk.

The drawings are a defense mechanism. A way to seem like he’s comfortable with sex when he’s actually terrified of it. A way to fit in with the crude, hyper-masculine culture of high school without actually having to prove anything.

That’s why they matter. Not because they’re shocking. Because they’re sad. They reveal a kid who’s so uncomfortable in his own skin that he’s built an entire persona around juvenile humor. And that persona is the only thing protecting him from having to admit how scared he actually is.

The Teen Comedy That Told the Truth

Before Superbad, teen comedies were aspirational. They showed you the version of high school you wished you had. The parties were cooler, the girls were hotter, the protagonists were funnier and braver and more confident than any actual teenager has ever been.

Even the “loser” characters in those movies were secretly cool. They just needed a makeover or a pep talk or one big moment to prove themselves. The message was always the same: high school is hard, but if you’re brave enough, you can win.

Superbad said: no, you can’t. High school is awkward and confusing and you’re going to spend most of it feeling like an idiot. You’re going to do stupid things. You’re going to embarrass yourself. You’re going to draw hundreds of dicks in your notebook because you don’t know what else to do with all the anxiety and confusion and hormones.

And that’s okay. That’s normal. That’s what being seventeen actually looks like.

The drawings were the perfect symbol for that honesty. They were juvenile, pointless, and completely real. They were the thing every studio executive wanted to cut because they made the movie “too gross.” But they were also the thing that made the movie true.

How Superbad Rewired the Genre

After Superbad, teen comedies changed. Not all of them—plenty of movies still chased the polished, aspirational version. But the ones that mattered, the ones that connected, started telling the truth.

They stopped pretending teenagers were miniature adults with better skin. They started showing the awkwardness, the confusion, the desperate attempts to seem cooler than you are. They stopped being afraid of the gross, uncomfortable reality of adolescence.

Superbad proved you could build a movie around the things other films cut out. The crude jokes. The bodily fluids. The obsessive dick drawings. All the stuff that studios called “too weird” or “too real.” Audiences didn’t just tolerate it—they loved it. Because it was the first time they’d seen themselves on screen.

The movie made $170 million. It became a cultural touchstone. It’s quoted more than any sanitized teen comedy from that era. And it did all of that while fighting the MPAA frame-by-frame over cartoon penises.

The Cost of Honesty

But here’s what that success cost: the next generation of filmmakers learned the wrong lesson. They saw the dick drawings and the F-bombs and thought, “We need to be more shocking.” They missed the point entirely.

The drawings weren’t shocking for shock’s sake. They were honest. They were the thing Seth Rogen actually did in high school, translated directly to screen. They worked because they were true, not because they were crude.

But Hollywood doesn’t know how to sell truth. It knows how to sell shock. So we got a decade of teen comedies that were gross without being real. That pushed boundaries without understanding why those boundaries mattered. That mistook vulgarity for authenticity.

Superbad almost got killed by the MPAA over drawings that were based on real teenage behavior. The ratings board looked at something true and called it obscene. They tried to cut it, censor it, control it until it fit their idea of what a teen comedy should be.

The movie survived. But the lesson stuck. Today, filmmakers know that honesty is risky. That showing teenagers as they actually are will get you an NC-17 threat. That the system rewards the polished lie over the uncomfortable truth.

Seth Rogen drew hundreds of dicks in high school because he was bored and anxious and didn’t know what else to do. Twenty years later, those drawings almost killed a movie. And in saving the movie, they changed the genre forever.

But they also revealed something darker: the system doesn’t want truth. It wants control. And it will fight, frame-by-frame, to keep the truth from getting out.

The drawings that nearly killed Superbad weren’t obscene. They were just honest. And honesty, in the end, is the one thing Hollywood can’t afford to show.