Good marketing, or at least that was the case with the US (I can't speak to European markets, although my impression is that protest was more wildly known there), and the fact that much of the serious criticism wasn't well communicated to general audiences.

It should of course be noted that the film was actually a dud initially. Released in 1981 in only a select number of markets, it never found an audience, and it was only in 1984 after 20th Century Fox took up the reins as distributor and decided to take another crack at it that that it became the hit we remember it as, although even then it closed in less than a month in dozens of cities, only building up its reputation slowly, often by word of mouth, and mostly centered in the art-house scene of major cities.

In the first though, the film was not billed as a South African production. The South African film industry overall suffered from boycotts, so they sought a way to avoid this, and even though that was where the funding came from, not to mention Jamie Uys, whose brainchild the film was, it was marketed as Botwanan production with the specific aim of heading off some of the likely criticism that the film would otherwise garner (although many, including some reviewers, didn't bother playing along with that facade, whether supportive or not of the film itself).

Further more, the marketing tried to push it as a very American style of comedy, and the dubbing of the film was mostly done with American accents to try and ease it into the American market. While the original distributor had "sold it as a sexy movie by advertising a scene where the heroine falls into a river and takes off her clothes to dry them", Fox's plan took the slow road, building up art house appeal and then pushing it into wider theater distribution as "as a comedy for the whole family". The strong push as a slapstick comedy was certainly intended, and mostly successful, to undercut accusations of racism.

To be sure, none of this prevented protests entirely, and the film was subjected to outcries of racism, especially from anti-Apartheid forces and academics. And to be sure as well, this wasn't unknown entirely, but it definitely wasn't prominent for the average film-goer, nor present in every review of the film, many of which bought into the marketing of the film as little more than a feel good comedy. Some expressed mixed feelings, but at least as far as mainstream media went, it was hardly full-throated and nevertheless supportive of the film. It must also be remembered that the Divestment Movement was only just starting to gain steam by 1984, and would only really get to full force a few years later, so South Africa, and what engaging with its exports meant, wasn't always on peoples' minds in any case in the early '80s. But in any case, Vincent Canby's New York Time's review is a good example of the mixed feelings expressed over the entire matter of just what the film was:

Watching Jamie Uys's ''Gods Must Be Crazy,'' the hit South African comedy that is currently the longest running movie now in New York first-run, one might suspect that there were no such things as apartheid or the Immorality Act or even South Africa. To be perfectly correct, most of the film takes place not in South Africa but just to the north in Botswana, the independent republic where blacks and whites live on equal terms.

However, ''The Gods Must Be Crazy'' is so genial, so good-natured and, on occasion, so inventive in its almost Tati-like slapstick routines, that it would would seem to deny the existence of any racial problems anywhere. Is it an ingenious piece of South African propaganda, subtly designed to subvert the effect of the impassioned, anti- apartheid literature of Athol Fugard and Nadine Gordimer? Or, perhaps, is it an equally subtle, if light-hearted, attack on what most of the world takes to be the short- sighted, possibly suicidal South African racial policies? I've just seen the film and I'm still not sure, though I've an idea that the movie is not quite as callous as some of its political critics might think.

Even though Canby goes on to end up on Uys' side, he never remains entirely at ease, while nevertheless embracing the film, and of course recognizing is massive public appeal:

I think it's safe to guess that Mr. Uys is certainly neither a racist nor an apologist. Nobody with the sense of humor that he displays in ''The Gods Must Be Crazy'' could be. Nobody who would take the time to choreograph the kind of elaborate sight gags that are the reason to see this film could support the sort of self-interest officially sanctioned by the South African government. Such narrowness of vision is antithetical to the creation of laughter.

Yet there's also something disturbing about the film, perhaps more disturbing to those of us at a distance who know South Africa entirely from the works of Mr. Fugard and Miss Gordimer, among others. Safely isolated in our own comparatively free societies, we tend to feel that any South African work that doesn't actively condemn apartheid has the secondary effect of condoning it, if only through silence.

The film's initial sequences, in which the simple, no- nonsense manners and mores of the bushmen are shown on the screen accompanied by rather coy voice-over narration, are terribly patronizing. The bushmen are seen to be frightfully quaint if not downright cute. The narrator's statement that the bushmen ''must be the most contented people in the world'' may possibly be true, but one doesn't have to be a political scientist-historian to know that that's exactly the sort of thing that Mussolini might have said when he got those trains running on time.

Of course, other reviews lack even that level of nuance. As one might suspect from a rag known for openly defending apartheid, the National Review just blustered right past any negative implications to call out patronizing opponents in a patronizing tone:

The film-made by a canny, likable routinier who has been grinding them out for years with much less success-is neither a bold anti-apartheid statement nor (as some misguided souls would have it) a patronization of black Africa. lt merely embodies Mark Twain's famous creed: "I am not prejudiced against any man because of his race or religion. lt is enough for me to know that he is another human being-and what could be worse than that?" So it views our all too human condition farcically, with simple but infectious fun. Which is just fine.

Without noting the irony a paragraph earlier when noting:

There are the Occidentalized blacks running despotic governments or staging bloody but inept Marxist coups, killing or pursuing one another.

A sharp contrast to the implications of the scene that critics see, such as Gangler who writes how in the wake of Rhodesian collapse:

Guerrillas, of course, as bad Africans. The White minority in Zimbabwe had to accept majority rule after a protracted guerrilla war, but The Gods Must Be Crazy offers reassurance to the holdouts int he South African White laager. Its guerrillas are dangerous and destructive alright, but they are also indolent and inept. In the end, even Kate Thompson gets to disarm one of them. Their leader, Sam Boga, articulates what the film is showing us about African guerrillas: "Why do I have to work with amateurs?" He, in turn, serves to confirm the apartheid credo that Africans would be happy with the White dispensation were it not for foreigners fomenting discontent and making trouble.

While certainly rejecting the implications, it can at least be said the National Review at least stands as evidence the criticism existed, which is more than some reviews offered. In the opinion of the opponents, the image cast was anywhere from infantilized racism to outright apartheid apologia, it and is sequels dipping into larger trends that perpetuate myths about the "Bushman", offering "'primitivist' images of the San taken for granted by audiences of hundreds of millions". It is of course a view with merit, and one that ought to be engaged with, as Canby did to a degree, but it is of course also worth giving voice to the San themselves, as Tomaselli summarizes in discussing their interpretation:

These indigenous interpretations contest the racism that some Western critics assume is seeping from every fram. Very different interpretations have been enunciated by a number of my San informants at Ngwatle and D'Kar in Botswana. The Ju/'hoansi actors themselves undermined Uys's direction in making up subversive dialogue in defiance of the script. As Jean Rouch has argued, acting and making films changes people. Filmmaking empowers them. They take on a sense of identity in the wider world. This power of communication provides access to channels by which to criticize that world.