The film was originally given an R rating in the US to the director's fury because of a brief flash of nudity in the underwater swimming scene. "Four frames of film in which a barely perceptible view of a 12-year-old boy's penis appeared in an underwater sequence gave my movie Visit to a Chiefs Son an R rating until the objectionable subliminal flash was blown up to eliminate it. That my film, from its conception to its final cut an unabashed family, kids-and-animals-in-Africa picture, should have the same rating as The Exorcist is an obscenity symptomatic of our national disease of censorship," Lamont Johnson said in 1974. After re-editing, the film was given a G certificate.