1954 so I would have been four, the first movie I can recall is Gog, an Ivan Tors robot movie. The part I remember, which scared the crap out of me, were the two robots, Gog and Magog being activated by remote control and rolling down the hall to do their dirty work.
This. Of the titles I listed in my O.P., well…they’re not all incense and peppermints. I do believe that Mom, and to a limited extent Dad, were using movies to do more than entertain and give the kids a treat. Hence the morally heavy content now and then.
IMHO what’s traumatizing isn’t so much watching adult content as a child. It’s having material presented as “this is for children, and therefore you shouldn’t find it scary / traumatizing / creepy / whatever” even though it clearly is. The elephants on parade in Dumbo, the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, the talking couch from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and so on are made worse because some adults seem to think that children should like those things, and if they don’t that means there’s something wrong with that child’s tastes.
Treasure Island. Don’t know how old I was at the time, and all I remember about it was The Black Spot. Scared the living daylights out of me, and had nightmares about it for years.
Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Big Adventure had Large Marge for your PTSD-inducing needs.
I could have sworn the talking couch made an appearance in both. But either way, talking inanimate objects, especially those which are supposed to be perceived as friendly despite the fact that they are creepy, are just the sort of thing that I don’t see as being the least “kid friendly”.
First movie was tom thumb, but I don’t remember much of it. Same for my second, Sleeping Beauty.
I do remember seeing Dinosaurus, which scared me, especially the tyrannosaurus. But I got over it and thought it was dumb to be scared by light on a screen, so no movie scared me since. At best, they startle me, which pisses me off.
The first movie I remember strongly as a kid was Dr. Strangelove. I was twelve and thought it was the best movie I’d ever seen (even though I was too young to catch any of the sexual aspects of it).
I’m not sure what movie I would have first seen in the theatre. I would have seen The Fox and the Hound and The Great Muppet Caper circa 1981, but I’m sure I would have seen other kiddy movies before that.
We went to the movies every so often (every month or two), but I definitely watched way more TV as a kid. The vast majority of the movies I would have seen as a kid would have been on TV.
I was born in '66. My parents meant well. I know they did. Having said that, their choice for my first movie was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. They thought I would love it. It freaked me out completely. To my young eyes, all of these kids (bad as they were) were getting eliminated. They were blowing up to enormous size. They were getting sucked into televisions. I didn’t like any of it and felt sorry for them. But none of that compared to Gene Wilder’s deranged boat trip down the psychedelic river. That scared the hell out of me and we left.
Their next choice earned them the “what the hell were you thinking” award. They took me to a little film called The Legend of Boggy Creek. It was a bigfoot movie. In one scene, Bigfoot reaches into a bathroom window and yanks some poor sap off the toilet and out the window, never to be seen again. Making matters worse, our home was surrounded by patches of forest. I was pretty sure Bigfoot was going to yank me out of my bedroom window one night. An epic fail on their part.
They redeemed themselves with the next two films we saw together, although their choices were still questionable - Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. I didn’t get much of the humor, but I still enjoyed them because everyone else in the theater was laughing so much.
I’m a car guy, always have been, so I loved all of the early “Herbie” Love Bug movies. At some point, I caught It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on TV and started reenacting one of the chase scenes* with my Matchbox cars.
*I would add a video of the scene but I can’t seem to find it. It’s the one with the VW van that tips over.
Forbidden Planet is probably the first for me. Interestingly I don’t recall the first time I watched it; the first time gave me mild recurring nightmares about being hunted by The Monster From The Id (not that I knew the name). But I didn’t recognize what it was from, just knew that it was from a movie until I saw Forbidden Planet again and said to myself “Oh, yeah, it was from that movie!”
So I don’t actually recall the first time I watched it, but remember remembering watching it the first time.
I saw that one when I was young as well. I agree with you about the boat trip down the river. That scene still freaks me out, but the rest of the movie was fun.
Born in 1967.
I’m not sure, but it must have been shown on TV. Old Yeller? The Wizard of Oz?
One I distinctly remember being shown on TV was Logan’s Run. That gave me nightmares for a while. I just couldn’t get the Carrousel scene out of my head.
Hard to remember because of my fairly advanced years but it might have been The Absent Minded Professor with Fred MacMurray and Keenan Wynne. I hadn’t gotten out much and was dumbfounded with wonder.
This happened twice when I was 4 years old: For some reason, when adults had a bunch of 4-year-olds and needed to keep them entertained, they screened The Salvage Gang. I remember it being introduced as an “English” film. Until then, “English” only meant to me the language I spoke. Seeing this film revealed that this time English referred to England. At first, the kids in the film’s accent was hard for me to understand. It was my first time hearing a British accent (aside from the guy who recited A.A. Milne’s “The Changing of Guards at Buckingham Palace” on Captain Kangaroo, but that was enunciated clearly). It didn’t help that the audio quality in those days was poor by today’s standards. The second time I was shown it, I understood the dialogue better. In retrospect, The Salvage Gang was pretty progressive for 1958. The ensemble cast was multiracial and a girl was one of the two main protagonists driving the plot.
The first Major Motion Pictures I saw were Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. The latter was my introduction to Nazis and World War II, which my school had not taught yet, I being 5 years old, so my mother had to explain to me what all that black-spider-flag stuff was about on the way back from the theater.
I vaguely remember seeing Disney’s 1961 Babes In Toyland, and being a fearful little kid, it scared me. I was five years old.
In 1965, I was taken to the drive-in with my parents to see The Naked Prey. My mom thought it was a movie about animals in Africa, but it turned out to be a movie about torturing and hunting safari travelers. It made me sick to my stomach and I ralphed up my popcorn. I laid down in the back seat for the rest of the movie so I didn’t have to see it.
When I was a kid, we only went to third-run or re-release movie theaters, where you would get a double bill, with a short and a cartoon, because it was cheaper. We only went to movies my parents wanted to see, not kids’ movies, so there was generally a lot of stuff I didn’t understand, but I was happy to sit there with a 10 cent bag of popcorn and watch whatever (this was in the mid to late 50s). So the first movie I remember seeing in a theater was Rear Window. This must have been a re-release, it was on a double bill with Not As A Stranger (I remember seeing that name on the poster and wondering what the hell it meant). Rear Window grabbed me when Grace Kelly climbed up into the Thorwald apartment, and didn’t let go until until Jimmy Stewart was pushed out of his apartment window, and fell down with that camera trick that Hitchcock used to such good effect.
There was no particular long-term effect that I’m aware of, except I was then hooked on mystery thrillers, especially ones by Hitchcock.
I was born in 1953, the youngest of four farm kids. Driving 20 miles to see a movie was a rare and cherished treat.
Not sure if this counts, but the first movie i was taken to was White Wilderness, a Disney (I think) movie. The only thing 5-year-old me remembers is walking into the theater and smelling the popcorn.
The first movie I remember is Swiss Family Robinson. Of course, the only scene that I can really recall is the early shipwreck.
I was born in 1969, in New Zealand, and lived in a small village in the country, a fair distance from the nearest town, so movie-going was not a regular thing, it was kept to the holiday breaks from school that regularly occurred through the year. That was when the kids movies were properly scheduled, and you’d try to go with all your school friends to make it an event. Basically it was a scheduling nightmare across multiple parents with free days and available cars.
The earliest movies I can remember were things like Snow White and Bambi and For The Love Of Benji. I can also remember Pete’s Dragon and Freaky Friday. Very ordinary kids fare.
I don’t recall being traumatised by anything, but I was very tolerant of dark creepy stuff from the weird shows on TV so those didn’t bother me much anyway.
Those were TV, as mentioned. In the theater, I recall seeing Island at the Top of the World, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, and Escape to Witch Mountain.