The premise of Jay Roach's 2000 hit comedy "Meet the Parents" (a remake of the 1992 indie film) is pure sitcom fodder. The movie follows the travails of Gaylord "Greg" Focker (Ben Stiller) as he is taken home to meet the family of his girlfriend, Pam (Teri Polo). Pam's parents, however, are rather intense. Her father is Jack (Robert De Niro), a former CIA spy who greets Greg with suspicion right away. Jack also seems to be sizing up Greg's masculinity, immediately put off by his name ("Gaylord" was embarrassing to Greg, hence the name change, and "Focker" sounded a lot like ... well, a certain inappropriate word). It's not long before Jack has Greg hooked up to a lie detector, analyzing his intentions with Pam.

"Meet the Parents" was an enormous success, making over $330 million on a $55 million budget. Naturally, a sequel was required. Roach returned to direct "Meet the Fockers" in 2004, and it flipped the script on Jack. This time, Pam and Greg were about to be married, and Jack had to come to Greg's home to meet his parents (as played by Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman). Unlike the tight-laced Jack, the Fockers are wild, free hippies. Comedy ensues. "Meet the Fockers" cost $80 million but raked in $522 million. It was one of the biggest hits of its year.

Of course, titling a movie "Meet the Fockers" was a risky proposition. If a tired film critic didn't have their coffee the morning of their live review, they might slip up and say a cuss word on the air. Indeed, the MPAA (which changed to the MPA in 2019) wanted to give "Meet the Fockers" an R-rating because of all the near-cusses in the film; the movie's characters say the word "Focker" a lot. In an episode of "Hot Ones," Stiller talked about making "Meet the Fockers," and how the film's creatives avoided the R-rating by actually finding a person with the real name of Focker.