Why are some programs designed for kids so unpleasant, or even disturbing for them? I’m not talking about material made for adults that kids end up watching, like some old fairy tales. A couple of examples I can think of are the “Land of Make Believe” on Mr. Rodgers (did anyone actually find that fun?) and “I’m Really Rosie” (characters died for crying out loud!). There even have been segments of Sesame Street that really scared me as a kid, and ones that now disturb my own kids. Is this just a matter of taste?
If it affects you in a strongly negative manner it might be a matter of taste. If it affects your kids…and by inference…all the kids in the neighborhood that way, I’d be about changing the channel right quick instead of asking questions.
They might be using negative reinforcement to teach a lesson. Or it might be a totally individual reaction.
Mr. Rogers is a liar and full of shit. The show has a lack of consideration for others, by this I mean not everyone agrees with what the show tries to teach. Because not everyone one grows up with the Mr. Rogers Pseudo-Life.
In my house we were actually forbidden to watch Mr. Rogers. I silently thank my mother for that every day I’m alive.
Jeez…I have no idea what this thread is about! I haven’t seen Sesame Street or Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in many years, but i don’t remember ever seeing child sacrifices or how-to-beat-nuns lessons! I didn’t care for the shows as they were drab and boring…but apparantly i’ve missed some good stuff. Can anyone enlighten me as to why Elmo or Mister Rogers is the manifestation of Satan? Even though I don’t understand why these shows are evil, I still want to join in on bashing them…um…DAMN them for saying the show is brought to me by the letter Q!
I liked Fraggle Rock. The characters were colorful and funny. The Trash Heap was cool and her two rats were funny. Then Disney bought the rights and Fraggle Rock seems to have vanished, perhaps forever.
When I was a kid, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory gave me nightmares. It’s supposed to be a kid’s movie, but there was just something about it that bugged the shit out of me. There was something very sinister about Gene Wilder, and this day I don’t like to watch anything he’s in. The creepy 70’s colors bothered me, the flavored wallpaper bothered me, and the girl who turned into a blueberry bothered me. Did any children actually like that movie?
Rose
You know, this thread has me thinking. All my (current) friends were (at the time) really disturbed by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, both the books and the movies, and yet we also really enjoyed them (I personally was spooked by the blueberry girl and the whole three-mile-island aesthetic of Mike Teavey’s doom in the big TV camera.)
I remember something talking about how while adults love Winnie-the-Pooh, kids tend to hate the book because they find something existentially horrifying in the idea of a peaceful utopia where nothing ever happens. The author of the essay I read contrasted WtP with Where the Wild Things Are, which he felt fit the pattern of a classic children’s book in that it had monsters, but it also had an escape hatch in the form of a boat.
I can’t remember anything too spooky about Sesame Street (except for one of Ernie’s rants about spiders,) I liked Mr. Roger’s magic kingdom, and didn’t find it disturbing. In fact, I’m hard pressed to think of any scary kid’s movies at this time of night, even though normally I’m something of a maven of them. I do remember a book of truly disturbing horror stories for kids, though- the big story I remember was about a patchwork monkey which the old witch woman gave to a kid. It chased him and the babysitter around until the parents came home, but unfortunately it had scratched the little boy with its needle claws during the chase and had thereby started him slowly turning into a patchwork monkey.
Come to think of it, I also remember being scared by a show about kids who build a rocketship-shaped playhouse and ended up being lost in space or something. I think it was a segment of Vegetable Soup, and all the characters were puppets with one arm (due to the limitations of the puppetry they were using.) I remember an episode which frightened me a great deal, where they went to a planet full of living hardware and were chased by an army of marching nails. It sounds idiotic when I describe it, but at the time I found it to be deeply frightening, perhaps because I tended to get creeped out by the idea that everyday objects could take on a life of their own. (When I was about 7 or so I had a nightmare about shoes walking around on their own. In the end of the dream, it turned out that it was just a prank perpetrated by Luke, Leia, and Han, whom the cops carted off just before I woke up.)
Anyway, to get back to the OP, I would wonder whether horrifying children’s entertainment is a result of either:
a.) in a weird sort of way, kids like it.
b.) the things that scare kids seem entirely innocuous to most adults. The guy who thought of the fascist nails probably was aiming to make the show exciting rather than horrifying, but kids see things a little differently.
Has anyone here heard of a story called “The New Mother”? Now that is a truly inappropriate children’s story.
-Ben
I did, but I guess you could figure that out from my sig. I read the book as well, and the sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. I think the sequel was a bit more disturbing, if either of them were, since they went to the moon and actually met a vermiciuos knid(or however the heck you spell it, been many years).
I remember being a kid and WANTING to be terrified. It gave me a rush, my friends were the same. We sat up late and told ghost stories. Maybe because being terrified is still a relatively new experience, and when you are very frightened, and the adrenlin starts pumping, it can be exhilerating. IMHO
I do remember one story though, and I can’t remember the title, or even what it was about. Some Native American Bird Woman, who lived in the forrest. She was so ugly, and I think she was supposed to be some kind of ghost. But it was scary.
I also think the little hand puppets on Mr. Rogers can be very disturbing.
kids are completely dumb and irrational and can be scared by anything. You cannot make anything that will not scare or disgust some kid. The fault is with the dumb kid not with the program. And the sooner he learns to adapt to the world the better because the world sure ain’t gonna adapt to him.
I never got anything sinister out of Fred Rogers…I thought he was kind of a cornball, but in an innocuous kind of way.
Kids’ programming in the late 60s and early 70s seems to me to have been a lot more benign than most current kids’ programs. The vast majority of them now are nothing but commercials for their action figures/costumes/collector cards/etc.
I thought Mr. Rogers was great stuff, back then. Yeah, the puppets were ugly, but they seldom did close-ups, and they were always behind a wall anyway, so I knew they couldn’t come any closer to me. And I took my cue from the humans’ behavior, and they always seemed to be enjoying themselves, whether in the LoMB or in the Neighborhood.
And as a bashful kid myself, Daniel Striped Tiger was very dear to me.
What did you find scary about Sesame Street? The only thing REMOTELY scary on Sesame Street was Maria. She always seemed to be angry, even when she wasn’t. Oscar the Grouch was all an act.
Willy Wonka (the movie) scared me to death! The way Gene Wilder (one of my favorite actors) seemed so nonchalant about the fate of the nasty kids was chilling. I’ve since read that he played it that way on purpose, so no one would know what Mr. Wonka was up to. Now, of course, I figure the little brats (especially Veruca Salt) got what they deserved. I think they aired it on Monstervision during the height of the Beanie Baby craze, and the parallels were too weird…
The letter Q stands for the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, who is of course a minion of Satan. I thought everybody knew the folks who produce Sesame Street are Satanist. Oh, yeah, and Communists, too.
One thing about “Willy Wonka” many folks fail to pick up on: Willy Wonka pretty much hates children. Having a rather warped sense of humor, I enjoyed the flick, but I first saw it when I was already grown-up. I don’t know how I might have reacted if I’d seen it when I was really young.
Probably the scariest TV show I remember was “Gigglesnort Hotel,” a show featuring a man named B.J. and a lot of really ugly, really weird puppets. There was an angry dragon who exhaled real smoke and there was a large lump of clay on a pedestal called “Blob,” and every week B.J. would sculpt his face to a different look (which seemed to please Blob). Weird show; I don’t remember a lot about it now. But B.J. was cool.
“Willy Wonka” should be understood in the the context of Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey”. Charlie is on a journey of self-discovery during which he experiences episodes of great wonder and great fear. In the end he faces great temptation: He could have betrayed Willy by handing the everlasting gobbstopper over to the evil Gobb Slugworth in exchange for a pile of cash. But out of complete selflesness and sincerity he gives it back, thus earning truly great riches as it was all a test, an initiation.
I didn’t get that he hated kids.
He hated people, period.
But he especially detested adults.
He was a control freak, and he simply couldn’t control adults.
But kids…well…some kids - like Charley…he could manipulate and - to put it charitably - mold them.
I only noticed this when I rewatched the movie a few months ago, but it became quite clear then. Willy Wonka’s a manipulative control freak. And Charley is his victim. I was always distracted by the surreal happenings as a kid, and the blatant moralizing of the Oompa Loompas as a grownup.
Hmm as a kid I liked the book and most of the other Dahl books (thinking back, I adored Dahl books), but never really got into the movie. I don’t recall finding any of it scary. As to Mr. Roger’s, hey, I liked that as a kid and found none of it scary. In my child development class I learned the Mr. Roger’s was a child psychologist who decided to use those principles to make a show that might actually be good for kids. I respect that. I think it is very hard to figure out what will disturb a kid. I loved reading fairy tales, the older the better. I was 7 or 8 and I knew that Cinderella’s sisters got their eyes pecked out by birds and had cut off part of their feet. But I never found that scary. On the other hand, I wouldn’t watch horror movies, because they terrified me. I think I had fewer problems with horror that was put into a moral context.