Roger Ebert has a pretty scathing review of the video game vehicle The Wizard with Fred Savage, Beau Bridges, and Christian Slater.
He specifically finds that it sends kids a terrible message about running away.
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19891215/REVIEWS/912150304/1023
Yeah…the idea of putting Where the Red Fern Grows on some “banned” (even if it was personal, and not for everyone) list is creepy to me. My parents never controlled anything that I read.
I take it you’re not familiar with Smashy.
Listen to the way they are screaming at each other.
He flat out states that he ‘must keep his feet on the ground’. This is what his father has told him to do. He must disobey his father and scream his mother’s name, in a rather orgasmic fashion.
I thought the point of the Oedipal complex was that you resolve it by NOT killing your father and screwing your mother but by identifying with your father. Or something.
I never said it was resolved the “proper” way.
look at about the 2:50 to 3:00 mark.
So what makes it an Oedipal complex?
When I was a kid I read pretty much all of Dahl’s books with my mother. If I have grown up warped, I don’t think that’s the reason. His stuff is really not scary, it’s just twisted.
I’m sure I cried my eyes out at Where the Red Fern Grows, but I mean, they killed a dog - what other reaction is a kid going to have? 
Pretty much, yeah. Death is not incomprehensible for school-age children. Four and five year olds, maybe not - but at eight or ten? Come on. By that point, the odds are fairly good that one of your grandparents or great grandparents dies, or your family dog or cat, or at least a freaking goldfish.
Yeah. His adult stuff is even twisteder and some of it is a bit scary but I was raised on a steady diet of Dahl and by the time I got to about high school, I was devouring his Tales of the Unexpected.
A lot of these responses make me wonder what books are “appropriate” for kids. Like, are you protective parents going to screen them to make sure they’re not too sad? And if not…what’s the point? I’d rather have cried at Little Ann and Old Dan dying than felt nothing.
The Watcher In the Woods.
A Disney “real people” movie that still freaks me out just a little bit to this day. The special effects are pure cheddar, and the young blonde who plays the lead isn’t the best actress. The rest of the cast is pretty good, especially Bette Davis who plays Mrs. Alewood, whose daughter disappeared twenty years ago under mysterious circumstances. There are several “make-you-jump-out-of-your-skin” moments, and a slow realization that the “circumstances” were supernatural in nature.
I can’t watch it in the dark. And I haven’t ever wanted to go alone into any sort of “woods” since I saw it.
I can’t be the only one.
Uh, Syndrome never promises the masses that he’ll share power with them. It’s only something that he mentions privately as a rationalization for his actions. The fact that you’re having to distort what actually happens in the movie to support your thesis is a strong indication that your thesis is wrong.
I really think it depends upon the particular kid. I am not a parent, but I was kid who read Old Yeller and it did not go well. It’s not that it’s inappropriate for kids, but it was definitely inappropriate for ME at the age when I read it. A little parental discretion would have been desirable.
I also think it was a little cruel that I had to read Where the Red Fern Grows in school (not just for school, but actually in the classroom when I read it) because it was such an emotional experience with lots of crying and snot which becomes even worse when a classroom full of your peers is staring at you.
Around the same period (8 yo?), I read many of these supposedly mistargeted books listed in this thread, like Red Fern, Witches, Jungle Book etc. You know what got me?
There was a novelization of Robin Hood, where later in his life he dies when, under what passed for medical care at the time, a nunnery nurse lets too much blood from him. A hero dying helplessly, not from a battle, or a disease, or a forest fire, or a tragic mistake, but simply from trusting and placing his life to authority figure who killed him out of the pure ignorance of the times.
That screwed me up bad, and I balled my eyes out for months afterward whenever I would think about it.
I’ve heard of pointless death being squicky, but geez!
Heh.
Sometimes I think that reading a lot of books has desensitized me. Like, someone dies, oh well. Someone better will come along. I can’t remember the last time a character’s death in a film, TV show, or book really got to me. Well, okay, there were a couple of Sopranos deaths…but nothing else comes to mind.
Isn’t part of the reason for tragedy in kid’s lit to, if you like, “desensitize” kids? They will after all experience tragedy in real life at some point; learning to deal with it in the safe form of literature may be a good thing.
I think so. I’ve read a lot over the years, and often I’ll encounter people who read a book and talk about being utterly devastated over it, and I’ll kind of feel like…a little bit bad that I was so flippant about it. I actually started another Cafe Society thread about it here.
Bawled! Bawled! Argh, I never do that–but I just did that :smack:
IMO you’d be doing pretty well to get more messed up than the opening scenes of Wall-E. Seriously ? Your protagonist is the last survivor of a dying breed, canabilising the bodies of his dead friends so that he can carry on a doomed Sisyphean task on a dead planet ? And you want Disney to fund this, right ?
I’ll be a dissenter on Gremlins and say that I was not happy as a kid watching it, and felt like I had been sucked in by the little cute mogwai (or whatever it was called). But I was pretty weenie as a kid when it came to movies.
Bridge to Terebithia, however, I absolutely loved (and still do). I think I was much more accepting of awful things happening in books than in movies.