Thursdays Question of the Day 8.22.13 (Late!!!!)

A day late.. Do'h!!!   I really need to put a reminder on my phone, lol. Thanks to the person who PM'd me a reminder today! LOL

Lets see.. QotD.. A lot on my mind lately, but a conversation did pop up recently that has gotten me thinking.. movies made for children, watched as adults. How horrifying some of these movies really were!

For example:

Brave Little Toaster.. killing other creatures, and even a death song?!

Dumbo: drinking too much allows you to see pink elephants??

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory  (the original with Gene).. the man takes pleasure in watching kids suffer!

even Who Framed Rodger Rabbit.. the villian gets run over by a steam roller and turns into a cartoon with scary eyes (THAT freaked me out!!)

Even nursery rhymes.. Three Blind Mice (poor mice!), or Pockets Full of Posies represents the plague!

Granted.. many of these scenes are not understood by children, but by adults.

So.. what children's movies have you seen recently that horrified you?

Can I say Who framed Roger Rabbit too ?

I'm not sure Roger Rabbit was meant for children. . .we just weren't used to adult animation yet, so all the parents let their kids watch it . It should have been rated PG-13, but the rating was new and the movie got misjudged. I would definitely NOT recommend anyone let an elementary-school-aged child watch it! The worst part of that one for me was him melting the little paint critters in the turpentine . That gave me nightmares.

I always found the Willy Wonka movie disturbing as well (but the book is also somewhat disturbing---Roald Dahl was a real character). But if you watch ANY of the old cartoons (Tom & Jerry, Bugs Bunny, etc.), they're all pretty horrifying when you realize they're geared toward children! All the old Disney movies, too.

Oh, and Watership Down. I couldn't finish that movie.

The book Watership Down was made into an animated movie, it's about rabbits. Rabbits that have a lot of bad stuff to cope with and blood.

This novel was amazing but as a kid the movie terrified me lol.

When my older kids were 15 and 13, they let their little brother, who was only 6 at the time, watch the South Park movie!!

The Harry Potter movies are pretty scary.

But you're asking someone who, at the age of six, used to close her eyes and put her finger in her ears during Lassie

Draco said:

Brave Little Toaster.. killing other creatures, and even a death song?!

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory  (the original with Gene).. the man takes pleasure in watching kids suffer!

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Hum.  I haven't through of these in a long time.  I guess I better revisit them before I let my kids watch them!  I've never "done" animal movies or shows.  I think I'm still horrified at The Fox and the Hound!!

I was thinking about the nursery rhyme thing because I heard one the other day with the words changed.  I can't think of the title now but the one with "4 and 20 blackbirds were baked in a pie."  So they were baked alive; but not enough to kill them?  All to entertain the king?  Even Rock-a-bye Baby is kind of off; who puts a baby up a tree? 

MoochNNoodles said:

Hum.  I haven't through of these in a long time.  I guess I better revisit them before I let my kids watch them!  I've never "done" animal movies or shows.  I think I'm still horrified at The Fox and the Hound!!

I was thinking about the nursery rhyme thing because I heard one the other day with the words changed.  I can't think of the title now but the one with "4 and 20 blackbirds were baked in a pie."  So they were baked alive; but not enough to kill them?  All to entertain the king?  Even Rock-a-bye Baby is kind of off; who puts a baby up a tree? 

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They used to put birds in pies hundreds of years ago.. (not baked.. just for the 'effect) so that they flew out.  Sounds like the type of thing you'd do for a king. 

Lots of those nursery rhymes have interesting histories, although quite often the interpretation differs.

  Many nursery rhymes are just silly words put together, and people tried to give them more meaning later on. There's actually no evidence that "Ring Around the Rosie" is about flowers and smells during the Black Plague; more likely it was written 5 centuries later. Some of the fairy tales and nursery rhymes were allegories about the times, and many can be traced to real events. Back then, you could get in a lot of trouble talking about the crazy Queen Mary I (who burned 3 noblemen at the stake for no reason other than they opposed her), but it was relatively safe to spread the news of her actions by singing about the butcher's wife killing 3 blind mice.

I never had a problem with fairy tales or nursery rhymes, I think I read them all. I felt comforted when I was a child to find out that sometimes it's tough for other kids, too, that I wasn't alone.

Ditto on Watership Down.

Oh my goodness, saw it as a kid, of course thinking you know...it was appropriate for children. So.Much.Violence.And.Blood. Bunnies dying, kiling each other, killed by dogs, killed by other things. Weird imagery.

I also didn't fare well with Lassie or Old Yeller. I would just cry and cry

I would also like to add, that many nursery thymes were actually also a way to teach lessons to young children. Beware of certain scary things out of the world and prevent, teach the reality of life such as death and hardship, disease or bad luck prevention, beware of certain behaviours or else they would have dire consequences. Many of them are meant to be on the scarier side for that reason, not to just entertain or to sound cute. Especially during times were illiteracy was the norm, amongst other many reasons. And of course, it wasn't until recently that many became written down.
 

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MoochNNoodles said:

  Even Rock-a-bye Baby is kind of off; who puts a baby up a tree? 

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One of the main theories is that it is purely a symbolic story, based on the history of James II/VII of England and Scotland, whose son was alleged to have been a secretly smuggled baby from somewhere and someone else, in order to secure the succession with a male Catholic heir in desperation. The Wind is described as the protestant threat, and the Cradle is the House of Stuart. It's in representation of the Revolution going on at the time. William of Orange eventually did overcome King James.

 

Altogether, it sort of reflects and of threat, fleetingness and ambition of power.

Again, this is one interpretation, there are others that are different as we all know. Depending to whom you talk to in the scholarly, historical, folkore world etc, this one is considered the closest legit (or "legit") one.