The Beverly Hillbillies (1993)
Directed by Penelope Spheeris
No — The Beverly Hillbillies is not woke, scoring 8 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The 1993 film adaptation of The Beverly Hillbillies arrives with the modest ambition of stretching a sitcom premise across ninety minutes, and it achieves this with a shrug.
Consciousness Markers
The villains are greedy bankers and con artists scheming to steal a fortune, offering mild satirical jabs at wealth and finance, but the film ultimately celebrates a billionaire windfall rather than critiquing capitalism.
A woman director and capable female characters such as Jane and Granny drive parts of the plot, but there is no explicit feminist agenda or messaging.
The cast is almost entirely white with no meaningful racial diversity or inclusive casting choices; the film does not engage with representation.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext are present.
No engagement with race, racism, or racial identity; the story is a white hillbilly culture-clash comedy.
Oil is merely a plot device for sudden wealth, not an environmental or climate message.
No body-positive themes or messaging.
No neurodivergent characters or themes.
Not a historical film; it adapts a sitcom premise without revising history.
A broad, lowbrow comedy with no preachy or lecture-like messaging.
Why it received this score
The 1993 film adaptation of The Beverly Hillbillies arrives with the modest ambition of stretching a sitcom premise across ninety minutes, and it achieves this with a shrug. Penelope Spheeris, fresh from Wayne's World, directs a cast that includes Lily Tomlin, Cloris Leachman, and Dolly Parton playing herself. The camera points at them. They perform. Roger Ebert awarded the result half a star, a rating he reserved for genuine occasions of cultural collapse, and the intervening decades have not reopened the case.
For those of us who catalogue the social weather of a picture, this one offers almost nothing to file. The cast is white, the jokes are broad, and the movie has no interest in interrogating either fact. Lily Tomlin's Jane Hathaway pines after Jethro, and while the source series carried a faint unspoken suggestion about her character, the film keeps its affections strictly conventional. There is no racial reckoning, no climate sermon, no body-positive subplot, no neurodivergent arc. Oil is not a metaphor for the ruin of the planet. Oil is a lottery ticket that happens to land in a man's yard.
The closest the film comes to a thesis is its villainy. A pair of bankers and a con artist scheme to funnel a fortune into a Swiss account, and the screenplay permits itself a mild smirk at the expense of finance. The smirk goes nowhere. Jed ends the picture richer than he began and the audience is invited to cheer the windfall. A woman directs, and women turn several of the plot's hinges, though the film never pauses to make a point of it. The picture is a broad comedy with no sermon to deliver and no lesson to impart. It simply wants to be funny, and by the consensus of 1993, it mostly was not.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Mild-mannered dirt-poor hill-dweller Jed Clampett strikes it rich when oil is discovered on his property. At cousin Pearl's insistence, he moves his family to Beverly Hills to better enjoy his newfound wealth.
Questions about The Beverly Hillbillies
Is The Beverly Hillbillies woke?
No — The Beverly Hillbillies is not woke, scoring 8 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Beverly Hillbillies have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Eat the Rich at 15.
How does The Beverly Hillbillies compare to other 1993 movies?
It ranks #37 of the 97 films from 1993 we've scored; their average is 11. The wokest is Bound by Honor (60).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.