I like the Michael webcomic on Vice. The main character Michael is a young, single adult man who has moved back in with his parents after some financial reverses and is now living in their basement. He is quite attached (obsessively in some cases) to various anime, Manga, Pokémon, figurines of his favorite characters and a host of other things you might associate with slightly nerdish teenagers.
Anyway, this weeks panel linked above is him, and some fellow adult men attending kids theatre for well… read the panel. Do men who do this really exist as a subculture? It’s difficult to tell these days if your leg is being pulled or not.
Oh, I wasn’t worried. I’ll cheerfully cop to watching animated superhero cartoons and such which could easily be judged as children’s fare, though I’m disinclined to see one in theatre. Yappy adults at the movies are bad enough already, I’m sure yappy kids are worse.
Last such film I saw in theatre was the Minions movie, though it was in the dollar cinema, well after its initial release.
Needing childlike reassurances that I am special, though, as depicted in the webcomic… that seems alien to me.
Men (like, I guess, “Bronies” …maybe) or possibly women who go to kid’s theatre performance in order to have a kid like experience of being unconditionally loved and protected. Does the specific subculture portrayed in the comic actually exist?
Twice I have borrowed young children to go see Disney movies. There was my cousin’s kid I took to see The Little Mermaid and a nephew to see Brave. I wanted to see the films but would have felt like a perv walking in alone. I paid the way for the kid’s and their parents got some “me” time!
I agree. I enjoy a lot of children’s and family entertainment, but I enjoy it as an adult, not to make believe I’m a child again.
Just as I can enjoy watching Sesame Street sketches teaching numbers or the alphabet without pretending that I’m learning my numbers or letters from them now, I can enjoy watching kiddie-show “positive messages” without pretending that I’m a child or reacting to those messages the way a child would.
I don’t remember ever experiencing a feeling of unconditional love and protection from going to the movies even when I was a small child.
I’m not familiar with most modern children’s entertainment, but the movie in that comic strip looks like a parody of the TV series Barney & Friends (friendly T-Rex main character who sings sappy songs), and to the best of my knowledge Barney never had a significant adult following. Maybe the comic strip is supposed to be a joke about what Barney fans would be like once they grew up? The show premiered in the early '90s, so people who were small children then would be in their late 20s/early 30s now.