The Kids are Alright

As an adult, the one thing I miss most about childhood is the wide-eyed naivety. Those were the days when the only difference between boys and girls were cooties, which could be cured with a simple “circle, circle, dot, dot” simulated vaccination. When “Mike Hunt” was merely the name of some kid in class that the older kids occasionally mocked. When Disney’s The Little Mermaid, didn’t have a penis on the cover; it had King Triton’s magical underwater palace.

Recently, however, I have discovered the dissatisfying task of re-watching the children’s movies of my youth through my overly-critical adult eyes. For example, at the time of its release, I could not understand why Roger Ebert insisted that Fred Savage’s Little Monsters was unsuitable for children. I loved Howie Mandel’s portrayal of the free-spirited monster, Maurice. Sure, the scene where Maurice pees in the school bully’s juice box turned me off of apple juice for the majority of my pre-adolescent life. But it just seemed like good, wholesome fun. Until, that is, I re-watched the pervey dark comedy that is Little Monsters.

As if the premise alone isn’t enough to prompt immediate discomfort (adults sneaking into kids bedrooms at night and luring them away to a dark basement with promises of candy and endless streams of pizza), the actual interactions between Mandel and Savage raised my adult eyebrows. I understand that it was the 1980s and kids were prone to wearing neon shorty-shorts. I have all too many photo albums proving this to be true. However, when a grown man poorly emulating Beetlejuice throws a kid wearing said shorty-shorts onto his bed, then jumps on top of him and repeatedly bounces his straddling body over the boy, I feel like we’ve crossed some sort of unseen barrier of human decency. Now, I’m no Puritan, but luring kids to my underground paradise, that seems a bit too Jean Benet for my taste.

Which brings me to Shaquille O’Neal’s seminal masterpiece, Kazaam. This movie teaches the valuable lesson that, if you’re a mom who leaves her bratty kid to his own devises with no parental guidance whatsoever, he’s bound to end up waking up in bed next to a 9-foot-tall black man, screaming for his life. No, really. That happens. But rest assured, O’Neal promptly smothers the boy’s screams with the 12-inch palm of his hand and shushes him into submission. While I’m sure no foul play was intended, it did seem like something out of the Victor Salva guidebook.

While Kazaam and Little Monsters were blatantly inappropriate, some children’s features have a more subdued sense of discomfort embedded in the children’s relationships with adults. For example, in Disney’s Blank Check, the main character Preston forms an unrequited crush on a significantly older character, the bank teller/FBI agent Shay Stanley. After unintentionally conning $1 million, Preston attempts to wine and dine Shay, who leads him on in an egregiously flirtatious manner. This culminates in a kiss at the end of the movie and Shay promising (however tongue in cheek) to wait until Preston gets older than his mere 10 years. While slightly unnerving, I soon realized the double-standard that would result from reversed gender roles; Disney never would have released a movie showing a 30-year-old man kissing a 10-year-old girl.

While discomfort would scarcely weigh on a naive audience of youthful viewers, adult audiences are capable of seeing the unsettling narrative unfold. We, who have been tainted by the often disturbing realities of this world, are perhaps clouding the innocence with our cynical eyes, placing “sex” in the clouds above The Lion King’s Simba when all we should really see are the stars settling into the sky. These movies, after all, are not made for our eyes.

Tags: Blank Check, Disney, Kazaam, Lion King, Little Mermaid, Little Monsters, Mike Hunt, Pedarasty, Pedophilia, Penis, Victor Salva