What Was Disney Thinking!?

oh S.B. You are so right. Bad News Bears came on and I thought that would be fun with my 4 and 5 yr old. wow, was I wrong. I forgot that Walter Mathough has a beer in his hand at all times, even while driving with the kids in the car. Everybody smokes, even the teenagers. The rascism. Nobody wears a seatbelt. There are definate adult conversations and adult themes.

None of this raised an eyebrow back then. It was good clean, family fun. After sending my kids to thier room, I sat with my jaw open as I watched the rest of the movie! It put things in persepctive. I thought the FCC was loosening restrictions every year until anything goes. Now I see that is not the case! Noone would dare put any of this stuff in a movie or tv show now.

I'm often appalled at the content in some of the old Disney movies. I don't remember being appalled when watching them as a kid, though.

Yeah...there is a lot of stuff in old cartoons that wouldn't fly today. Watch Dumbo again.

My husband doesn't like The Flintstones, either. He says there is enough male bashing in the media today, without our daughters also watching cartoons where the lead is a big stupid man, and his tiny smart wife is always bailing him out. I had never thought of it that way.

Well, they are OLD cartoons and OLD cartoons have lots of hitting and violence and well, our grandparents/parents are okay!

OMG, yes! Old cartoons are SO violent, sexist, racist, you name it! Remember Tom and Jerry? My God I always hated that one, lol! But I guess kids have always found that kind of stuff funny. I loved Looney Tunes but that sure had it's share of nasty behavior as well.
ETA: Tracy K, Bad News Bears was NEVER a movie for four or five year olds! I think I saw it when I was around ten, old enough to know that coach was messed up :p

Yep. Last summer we decided it would be fun to watch the original Bad News Bears with our five year old tball player. We knew there was a little language, but we have talked about "grown up" words before and we weren't terrible concerned. Then the movie starts. We forgot about the drinking , smoking (including the kids) and the racial slurs. It was NOT the movie we remembered watching as kids. We turned if off and promised another baseball movie for the next night...making sure to read the parental reviews before we told him what we were watching!

I understood that when I was a kid. Siamese cats came from Siam ( now Thailand), an Asian culture....so Siamese cats ARE oriental.

Explain that different creatures act differently and just because bears use their paws to talk does not mean that people need to act like bears.

all the time, I had a post about Disney cartoons a while back. The other day they were watching at a friends house, while I was having coffee. The mother lets her children watch the Bratz cartoons. I was of course so amazed what they put in those cartoons YIKES... on the way home my 5 year old says, "When you have a boyfriend do you fall into a dream, swirly water thing when you love them?" I am like NO you don't Hun you will know what that is when you get old enough" Apparently one of the girls, in which ages are hazy, but marketed to much younger girls. Falls in love with a boy and they have a song sequence in which they fall into a dream whirpool and kiss and and what not. Then she says "AS IF" just like the bratz girls. GREAT now I got to listen to those snarky, dis-respectful comments from her for a week YIPPEE.... some of that biz got her in trouble with her dad last night at supper. Her dad says to her "time to eat now M stop crying (we have eating issues with her). She puts up her hand, and says "talk to my hand papa cause I dont like you right now" whoa nelly daddy got a couple shades of red and lets say the rest of the night was eggshells. Not generally do we yell and fight with our little ones, but last night no one was in the mood for that.

Like the racial stereotype birds on dumbo? Or the maid on Tom and jerry?

Lol

Since I've had kids, namely a girl, I have come to REALLY dislike all things Disney...and I grew up on the stuff...honestly it's easier to me to explain away bears slapping each other than to deal with princess INSANITY! Gosh, all a girl has to do is be pretty and find a prince and it's happy ever after...

But really I think a child will learn more by watching this stuff and having a conversation with you had than by not watching it all.

When I was in 7th grade (and we're not going to say how many years ago that was, just assume it is ALOT), we had to do a project where we watched 10 minutes of any cartoon we wanted and we had to note how many acts of violence we saw. It had never really occurred to me before just how violent cartoons are! I don't remember the exact numbers, but they were high!

New Disney is just as bad as old Disney, just in totally different ways. I'll take Tom and Jerry or bear slap flirting over Voodoo evil spirits in Princess in the Frog any day. I recently watched Dumbo again and was shocked at the drunkeness and racial stereotypes... still love the movie though. But that goes on in new Disney movies too.

Siamese cats ARE Asian cats by the way...

Disney can be super-inappropriate. The new stuff is no better than the old stuff - I think it's to make it more bearable for adults...but I like it without the unnecessary stuff. Sometimes I appreciate the adult comments though.

We recently changed our TV over to HD and I was setting up some parental controls on the new system. My daughter is 12, but we are very careful about what we/she watches. So I set the limits at 13 yrs and was able to filter out anything that was marked with "V" for violence, etc. The next morning when she got up, she and my husband were going to watch some Looney Tunes (as in the old ones from when I was growing up). They were blocked because of the violet content and I hadn't given the code to my husband yet so they couldn't unlock it until I woke up - we all had a good laugh at that.

Oh yeah, sometimes I watch those old shoes and wonder what our parents were thinking letting us watch that stuff! But if they watched what our kids watch, they would say we are raising a generation of sissies. LOL!

Of course, it's all about what YOU teach your child, so great job talking to her about it, and also I think you did a great job by not switching it off real fast and ushering her out of the room like it was just pure evil. That really piques a child's curiosity.

Thumbs up, Momma. :)

Never had that problem. My daughter understood that cartoons weren't real.

As for the Siamese cats being Asian, Siam is the country we now call Thailand - it is part of Asia.

There used to be a male body soap commercial with teenage kids in it that used the word "hell"...Neutrogena or Nexus or something like that...I think the context was "whatever the hell you want to do".

There are some PG-13 shows on the Cartoon Network, one I saw where this cartoon hero meets a girl in the woods and he asks her "What's with all the clothes" so she strips down to her bra and underwear, and then they start making out, making all kinds of sex noises. I turned it off when they backed up into a tree and she started wrapping her legs around him. This was around 8 or 8:30 at night! No, I don't let DS watch things like that. The TV was left on after watching a PG show.