NEW YORK -- There's a famous line in 1976's ribald Little League comedy the Bad News Bears in which tow-headed tyke Tanner Boyle looks around the dugout and exclaims, "All we got on this team are a buncha Jews, spics, niggers, pansies and a booger-eatin' moron!"

If reading that line made you wince - especially the unfettered use of the n-word - you're not alone. It's one of the best examples of how things that might have been acceptable in the freewheeling '70s would never fly in the '00s, even for director Richard Linklater's relatively faithful remake.

In the kinder, gentler double-oughts - overseen by a less kind and by no means gentle Motion Picture Association of America - Bad News Bears' PG-13 rating in the U.S. meant more than just the startling slurs had to be jettisoned.

"Like in the first movie, (the team's bad-boy star hitter) Kelly Leak had a cigarette in his mouth, he was smoking and stuff," said Linklater. "You can't really do that now. I think the studio could be sued by whoever."

Ditto for drinking, which meant a celebratory scene at the end of the movie had to be altered. In the original Bears, Walter Matthau's Coach Buttermaker rewards the players with bottles of Schlitz. In the 2005 version, Billy Bob Thornton's Buttermaker passes around cans of non-alcoholic beer.

But Linklater doesn't think his remake has been rendered toothless by the ratings board. In fact, he's surprised at some of the things he got away with.

"There were a lot of things I was pretty sure we would have to pull back on, like Lupus serving alcohol. The same way they can't smoke, kids can't be touching alcohol. But somehow they left it in."

He also expected a line from Bears catcher Engelberg (played by Oshawa, Ont., native Brandon Craggs) saying, "You better shut up before I tell someone you touched my pecker!" to be nixed by the censors.

"Kids mentioning genitalia and touching, BZZT! That's an R (rating)," said Linklater. "But there it is in the movie."

Oscar-winner Marcia Gay Harden (Pollock) plays a Martha Stewart-esque lawyer who ropes Buttermaker into coaching the Bears. The character was male in the first film, but switching genders allowed Buttermaker to have a sort of twisted love interest in the movie.

"I think this film is a little riskier and crosses sexual boundaries more than the original," Harden said. "I think the original was a little more racially and politically incorrect, but we wouldn't do those same things today.

"You hear the slurs (in the original) and you kind of go, 'Ugh.' Not only is that going too far, I don't want to go there. We'll go there about the sex jokes, whereas before they went there about the racial jokes."

Ultimately, though, the film still has edge. It couldn't have been done any other way, Harden says, because fans and film critics alike would have formed a torch-wielding mob and come after the cast and crew.

"If we made this one politically correct and sweet and non-PG-13, we'd be killed by you guys!"