If The Giving Tree doesn’t scar you for life, the author photo might… 
I definitely have to second this one
That blasted Red Balloon movie. They tortured us with that every year in grade school.
Old Yeller was another one. What lesson was that supposed to teach? I still tear up when I think of it. And then there was Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, a grim reminder of middle school government-sponsored child abuse.
The Wolf Man, with Lon Chaney Jr. I saw it when I was a kid and it gave me nightmares. Larry Talbot was doomed despite being heroic and fighting against his curse.
Steinbeck’s The Red Pony. I read it in 7th grade, when all of my horsey reading consisted of typical girl-loves-horse confection. I was stunned at how dark it was, and was disturbed by passages detailing the vultures gauging out the dead pony’s eyes. Gah.
I hated Steinbeck for years because of that. Now, amusingly, he’s my favorite author. Not a fan of happy endings, that man, but good stuff.
The Fox and the Hound. I vividly remember bawling my eyes out, aged about 6. I’ve never seen it since, and seeing as it’s a Disney movie it probably did have an improbably happy ending. But my inner six year old only remembers the bad bit.
Oh, and I second Bridge To Terebithia.
Bambi and Little Big League both were the ones that “struck” me as having a surprising moment.
LBL might just have been the first sports movie that bucked the cliche for me.
Arguably, The Snowman.
That, and I think the Disney channel used to run the Unico anime movies around the same epoch…I can just remember a sense of grim and otherworldly horror about them, but not the endings. Maybe I blocked them out.
Those of you still traumatized over Bambi might appreciate this video.
Time Bandits. The ending where Kevin warns his parents not to touch, but they do and they blow up, and he’s left there without parents… seemed pretty much a downer to me.
I’ll be third to mention Bridge to Terabithia. I remember running to my parents upset because the book was wrong, it had to be wrong! I must have been somewhere between 2nd and 3rd grade.
Bambi and Old Yeller. Don’t remember which one I saw first.
So many downers, so hard to remember which was first.
I do remember being quite chilled by the ending of Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark”:In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.It’s not like Carroll didn’t telegraph the hell out of it, and the poem as a whole was utter nonsense to begin with, but still, what a thing to happen.
In “The Mad Monster Party?”,most of the characters are destroyed in a massive explosion while the male and female leads escape in a fragile little boat, but then he begins to malfunction. (Surprise! He’s a robot.) Their future certainly looks bleak.
For some reason I read some of Shakespeare’s tragedies at an early age so I never thought every story had to have a happy ending, but I could still be whammied by a downer ending at the end of something that was supposed to be fun and silly.
Snoopy Come Home and A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Strictly speaking, they both have happy endings – Snoopy does come home, and Charlie Brown goes on with his life – but the turning points are so heartbreaking, and the resolutions so short and sudden, I [del]am[/del] was always still in tears during the final credits.
I remember being fascinated and saddened by John Knowles’ A Separate Peace because, as a kid, I didn’t know yet that in literature, perfect people are almost always too good to live.
And then all the damn kids books about dead animals…Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller, The Yearling, etc., etc…I used to re-read the very last paragraph of The Yearling over and over and over again, just to make myself cry even more.
Hell I could probably read it right now and get a little misty.
Oh, and Honorable Mention should go to those children’s books that ultimately end happily, but are so sad throughout the entire book that it almost doesn’t matter.
My personal favorite torture as a kid was Black Beauty.
Man, that horse suffered.
For me, it was a collection of (unabridged) Hans Christian Andersen stories I got when I was 8 or 9. Plenty of downers there, but I think *The Steadfast Tin Soldier *made the biggest impression.
The book scarred me for life, and I mean that in a good way.
“LTC Henry Blake’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan…It spun in…there were no survivors.”
It is possible that was not the first thing but it would have been damn close.
I was probably about four or five. The movie was **The Last Man on Earth **starring Vincent Price. Another possibility from around the same time period is **The Twilight Zone **episode “The Lonely.” The robot woman getting “killed” really rattled me.
Last minute I was watching a show about Disney movies on TCM and they showed a clip of “that scene” in Old Yeller. I can only assume that something got in my eye at the same time.