DrCrowTStarwars said:
Tom Hanks first ever acting role on TV was in a movie called Mazes and Monsters. It was all about the evils of D&D and it was about a highschool kid who got so tied up in his D&D game that he lost touch with reality and killed a man. it was part of the huge scare that lasted to when i was a kid where parents were sure D&D brainwashed kids and human sacrifice was part of the game. it was complete BS but that didn't stop the scar from lasting more then a decade and this stupid movie was one of the big thing that spread it. When i was a kid children were still forbidden to talk to any kid who owned a D&D book and kids were kicked out of school for wearing D&D shirts, that is how bad it was.
I laugh now because I think alot of those people are fine with shootings in schools as long as no one is playing an RPG.
I remember the fear of all things RPG was still great enough that I had to sneak my first Final Fantasy game home when i was a kid and all the kids in my town knew better then to let their parents catch them with an RPG video game. These things were seen as a bigger danger then drugs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpH1M7kgmLU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVg8o8BxNQM
Mazes and Monsters was loosely based on a real life disappearance that was blamed on D&D. The truth was far less sensational, (and much more tragic) but Satanic Panic taking was hold in the 70's, and poor journalism didn't help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dallas_Egbert_III
http://ptgptb.org/0006/egbert.html
I happen to like the movie. (It's an early 80's time capsule, and the dungeon monster Tom Hanks thinks he sees is pretty bad ass.) The finale at the World Trade Center is hard to watch today, for obvious reasons.
IIRC, there were a couple tv stations that wouldn't run certain TOS episodes such as Catspaw in syndication in the 70's. Whether the animated episode The Magicks of Megas Tu aired in those not so enlightened areas of the country, I have no idea.