There were also a few dark and scary scenes in The Brave Little Toaster. Most of the movie was pretty dark, actually…
Heh—the Nightmare Fuel entry on TV tropes actually has a lot of these scenes listed, already. (Including Fantasia, oddly enough.)
I’ll gleefully confirm the Unico; Return to Oz, and Brave Little Toaster* scenes mentioned therin.
And a lot of those are still my favorite movies. Guess I was just a weird kid.
*(Evil clown: “(hissss) RUN!” Remember that?)
They gloss over a lot of the NIMH stuff in the movie, replacing it with some weird mysticism. I recently watched the movie and read the book again as an adult and was horrified by how much the movie deviated from the book. I really don’t remember noticing a big difference as a kid.
But the bottom line is still that these animals’ intelligence is a result of medical experimentation…
'Never could figure out why the Shrew was wearing clothing and walked with a cane, in that case, though. (Maybe the Shrews of the Division of Mental Hygiene were like the “alpha test” project.)
I was probably six or so when I saw The Secret of NIMH. I remember finding the scene with the stone they were trying to move to be upsetting, but it didn’t last.
Like a lot of guys, my brother recounts having been completely tramatized by The Transformer movie. It didn’t seem so rough to me, but kids who followed the show knew exactly who it was that was brought down by the decepticons. Apparently a lot of little boys cried during the infamous flight scene.
I’m glad I didn’t see Animusic as a child. It creeps me the hell out now!
This was always my problem with the whole thing. All of the mammals in the movie appeared to be intelligent and civilized, even those who didn’t escape from NIMH. The shrew, Mrs. Brisby herself, etc. Sure, the rats of NIMH had better technology, but that seems more like an education advantage than an intelligence one.
The owl I’m not sure of. IMDB says it had a voice actor, but I only remember it as a kind of menacing adversary.
Something Wicked This Way Comes… Ray Bradbury creepiness… delivered by Disney.
The scene that stayed with me most was Mr. Dark offering Will’s father his youth again in the library… “By the Pricking of my thumbs, Something Wicked this way comes…” Jonathan Price is easy to buy as the incarnation of sin and evil. ;>
In the book, at least, Jonathan Frisby had been able to teach his children to read (presumably genetic heirs to the experiments) but his wife, who wasn’t experimented upon, could never catch on. So all the animals can talk to other animals but only some are super-smart - the ones from NIMH.
I remember the owl scared the crap out of me as a child. The book is awesome. There’s at least one sequel that AIRC isn’t as good.
Just a few years ago, I went to see Lemony Snickett in the inema, and there’s this bit with the sudden appearance of a big pyton, dubbed “the worlds fiercest creature”, or something. it just BANG hisses out of nowhere, and I dont mind telling you; I pure straight shit in my trousers. How a kid dealt with that scene, I couldnt say.
(bolding mine) well, that would be the natural next step…
How could I have forgotten the “Come for me Mork!” scene in The Neverending Story?
Also, I know a couple kid’s who didn’t see the humour in Rodents of Unusual Size (Princess Bride) .
Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for me, two scenes specifically.
First when the witch is in the basement, she passes a cell where a skeleton is prone on the floor, reaching through the bars for a water pot just out of reach. She cackles, “Thirsty?” and kicks the pot sending it and bones flying. My little mind (I must have been about six) instantly flashed on some poor guy straining, and straining, and slowly fading as he dies of thirst. Shudder.
The second was the witch’s demise. She gets blasted from a pinnacle by a lightning bolt, plunging into an abyss. Two vultures on a dead tree branch nod at each other, jump up and soar, slowly circling down into the clouds hiding the floor of the abyss. I mean, yeah, she’s the villain but who deserves to be picked at by vultures?
*Snow White * the movie was scary enough, but the Disney RIDE was terrifying when I was a half-grown kid of 14 or so.
But to add to the Disney child-scarring (in my case aided by youth ministers and the like telling me this is what happens to you when you play with (insert church lady voice here) “Satan!”) … does anyone remember The Watcher In The Woods ? Nerak is really Karen spelled backwards AHHHH!!!
That would be “a beautiful woman, or a black cat” in the end they both die. At one point the crew is shrunk to the size of mice, and they are hiding from the black cat. I hope this calls forth the episode I mean more clearly.
That seems right. It aired for a special “kids matinee” held for Christmas one year. It would have been quite a few years after it’s release, obviously.
I remember the trailers (on VHS, I guess) for Watcher in the Woods—I don’t think I ever saw the movie all the way through till I was twelve. I particularly remember the bit with the hall of mirrors effect, showing dozens of identical figures of a blindfolded girl (from the context, little Ran guessed that she was a ghost…but I also had the eerie suspicion that the blindfold meant that she was actually blind, too. Very possibly with her eyeballs torn out of her ectoplasmic skull, or something.), reaching out for someone, and calling out in an unnaturally muted, distorted voice.
Ah, here we go…the trailers
:eek: Yow. I think we can safely say what warped and twisted me the most as a child.
There’s that scene in Labyrinth, when the heroine wakes up in her bedroom, where everything looks fine and normal, the bedside lamp is on and everything, so she assumes the whole labyrinth is just a dream - before drawing back her bedroom curtains to find she is just in a facsimile of her bedroom, submerged in a dark and hellish rubbish tip…
Like the Freddy films, that inability to leave a nightmare scared me as a child.
Wizard of Oz:
The scene where the Lion is so scared about ( meeting the Wizard?) he jumps right out the window. Imagine being so scared of something you’d rather jump through a window than face your fear.
Scared the crap out of me and pretty much still does.
Flying Monkey’s, though, were the bomb.
Catspaw.