WARNING to parents whose young children watch Amazon Prime TV shows

Cafe Society
1

Class action lawsuit, anyone?

There’s a horrendously violent/scary piece of garbage called Let’s Play With FGTeeV that not only is not blocked by Amazon’s parental controls, but Amazon suggests it to kids, right next to suggestions for Caillou or Mr. Rogers. Unbelievable. My seven year old daughter watched several episodes before I cottoned to what was happening. Thanks, Amazon: where can I sign to get my little girl’s innocence back? :mad:

And I’m far from the only angry parent. The reviews are full of livid one star screeds. A sampling:

Indeed, it’s bad enough that my daughter accidentally watched this–but WTF is the father who stars in the videos thinking, subjecting his very young son to this crap? :dubious:

Most disturbing of all, perhaps, is the minority of commenters who defend this show and watch it with their young children:

It’s “clean”, I guess, because they don’t use profanity. :rolleyes:

They do, however: pick up Mickey Mouse’s severed head (complete with X’s in place of his eyes); machine gun a cute cartoon character to death and then stand there and continue filling the body with lead so they can watch it bounce; and get tied up by a super creepy decaying cartoon guy who tells them they are “sheep” to be “sacrificed” to his “lord”. Yup: good clean, wholesome fun.

2

Sounds interesting, I’ll be sure to check it out.

3

It’s a guy playing video games with his kid. The first game they play is Bendy and the Ink Machine, a horror game. I haven’t played it, but it sounds more like a teenager game than a game for 5 year olds.

4

oh my nephew watches this all the time …its a “lets play” they play all sorts of video/pc games and are pretty funny … his favorite “lets play” guy is DANTDM tho

5

Celtling is a huge DanTDM fan. I wouldn’t want her watching this one though, and she’s 10 years old.

6

So I watched Season 1 Episode 1.

That’s 20 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

It appears to be some guy with a child in his lap playing a video game and doing a tedious running commentary on the game. I can’t quite figure out what the objective of the game is. It seems to be just running up and down a bunch of hallways and collecting some random objects.

I guess there is a leaking “ink machine” at the end of one of the corridors.

Every once in a while a two-dimensional cutout of a black cat named “Bendy” appears around a bend in the hallway. The guy yells like he’s about to be killed and scares the child when this happens, but the cat doesn’t do anything. Then they get to a room where a movie projector displays a film called “Expired Twinkies” containing random abstract images and the guy screams like he is getting his head chopped off and scares the child once again, but they just leave the room and nothing happens.

Then the ink machine springs a leak or something and starts a flood and they go to another floor.

I see nothing objectionable to children in this episode other than the utter waste of time.

I’m not going to continue watching this dreck to see if it gets worse. Can someone please point me to a specific episode that will traumatize the children and maybe explain why? I’m not seeing it, but I just watched the first episode.

7

I only watched a few episodes myself, and you’re right: not all of them are particularly objectionable. OTOH from what people are saying in reviews, I haven’t seen the worst of it either. But here are three time markers you can go right to, and if you think it’s okay for 4-8 year old kids to watch this kind of thing, let’s just say that I wouldn’t nominate you for Parent of the Year. It certainly seems like the kind of thing parents are trying to avoid when they set parental controls!

Episode 1.18, at the 8:54 mark (this was what I happened to see which raised alarm bells). Oh look: it’s the severed head of beloved cartoon character Mickey Mouse! And not “detached, but still talking like nothing is wrong”. Severed, as in dead: X’s in the eyes, and tongue lolling out.

From there, I worked backward to see what other potentially objectionable content she had seen. 1.4 is a humdinger. From 5:10-5:35, a first-person crowbar is used to whale away on some cute cartoon animals, and at the end of that stretch there is a horror movie-style jump scare. From 6:26-6:50, the crowbar has been exchanged for a machine gun, and multiple cute critters are dispatched (including one that they keep riddling with bullets even after it’s just a corpse bouncing around, and the dad does a little dance about this). At the end of that sequence the players are killed by one of the cute animals, and a “YOU’RE DEAD” appears on the screen in a sort of “Halloween” font. 7:15-8:00 serves up lots of gross skeleton-zombie creatures (which when injured drag themselves along the floor toward the screen), a jump scare, lots more machine-gunning, and at the end a closeup of the skull and gross bones of one of them.

Then there’s 1.3, “Dad Captured”, from 11:44 to, say, 14:25. There’s some twisted, freaky shit in this sequence of the player being captured and made ready to sacrifice to some sort of demon lord. Plus some freaky black creatures swarming at the camera and so on. And that serial killer guy with the tattered mask? Bravo to whomever designed that look: gave me shivers.

Now, keep in mind that I bought my brother-in-law a copy of “Redneck Rampage” when he was in high school. And I wouldn’t care if my high-school-aged older kids watched these videos, or even when they were a few years younger. But 7 is too young, and the kid IN the video is younger yet! Not cool.

I mean, I Googled this game (known as BATIM for short), and the general consensus seems to be that it should be restricted to 13+. Even on Reddit and other gamer boards, the most I saw was a couple people arguing that maybe you could go down to age ten depending on the kid.

8

By all means, contact your attorney immediately. :rolleyes:
mmm

9

You roll your eyes, but look at the national freakout that happened when Janet Jackson’s nipple was momentarily visible (THINK OF THE CHILDREN!) How is this not far worse?

10

If a parent wants a babysitter, he should hire a trustworthy, living, breathing, human. Twenty years ago when my kids were little I sat watching Barney and Baby Bop with them. It was horrible (for me) but I was able to interact and discuss what they were viewing.

11

My kids dragged me along to the DanTDM live show when it came through here. Now that’s two hours I wouldn’t mind back.

12

@SlackerInc: Why are you letting your young daughter watch television without you monitoring the content? I find your outrage a bit ironic.

I raised four boys; they never watched TV where the content couldn’t be monitored. I was particularly insistent that Ed, Edd, and Eddie not make an appearance. :stuck_out_tongue:

13

If I wasn’t monitoring the contents, I would still be blissfully unaware. But when you have two young children with autism, and other household responsibilities, you cannot look over their shoulders at every moment. Amazon parental controls are supposed to keep anything wildly inappropriate off the screen.

14

My daughter watches YouTube. Sometimes weird shit comes up that is ostensibly for children but causes me to raise an eyebrow. If it’s bad I change it. Sometimes we rely too much on iPad Youtube to babysit her but I still monitor it somewhat. I’m not going to trust “parental control” that relies on algorithms to do it for me.

15

Why? Just curious, I never watched the show.

I’ve noticed kids shows in general can be a lot more intense than they used to be when I was growing up. I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing, but there’s stuff in Steven Universe that after a while of watching I just said, ‘‘Oh, here’s the obligatory existential horror moment.’’ Like that time Steven’s body started growing cats. That was some Cronenberg horror shit right there.

Same with Gravity Falls, and Weirdmageddon. Bill was a legitimately creepy villain. Both excellent shows, but rather disturbing at times, and I’m a grown-up.

Perhaps we’re just living in an era where it’s harder to shock children.

16

That’s a little freaky, but I’m going to assume you didn’t look at the stuff I cited (maybe you don’t have Amazon Prime?). The difference between what you linked and what I pointed to is as big as the difference between *Goosebumps *and Saw.

17

How in Prime do I find a specific season? I wanted to see your examples. I clicked several at random and one where a field full of Bendys were fighting a bunch of cartoon cats. They were using guns and metal pipes. Ended up with a field of dead toons. Didn’t look too bad to me.

18

Funny, that was one of the ones I would not allow. That and Barney are the ones I recall. I decided Barney was not only a terrible show but conditioning the kids to join a cult later in life.

19

Well, I’m not likely to intentionally watch something disturbing. But yes, I have Prime. I’m taking your word for it that it’s disturbing.

20

First go to this page:

Then, just below the fat grey bar at the top, is a little light grey box that says “Season 1” as shown here. Click on the box that says “Season 1” and a drop-down menu will appear. Select the season you want from the drop down menu.