Yo, I just read this super interesting article called “Weird Childhood Movies” and it’s a must-read for anyone who grew up in the ’90s. The piece talks about how some of the movies we watched as kids were actually pretty bizarre when you take a step back and think about it.
Basically, the writer of the article goes through a bunch of classic ’90s movies that we all know and love, like “The NeverEnding Story” and “The Labyrinth”, and unpacks all the weird stuff that we probably didn’t notice as kids. For example, did you know that the puppets in “The Labyrinth” were designed by Jim Henson of The Muppets fame? Or that the main character in “The NeverEnding Story” rides on the back of a giant talking dog-dragon creature that looks like he could swallow him whole?
What I found particularly fascinating about this article was that it made me realize how much of our childhoods are shaped by things that might seem normal to us, but are actually pretty strange. Like, who decided that a giant purple dinosaur should be the main character in a TV show for kids? And did anyone else feel that “The Land Before Time” was pretty dark for a children’s movie?
Personally, I remember watching a movie called “The Peanut Butter Solution” when I was a kid, and it haunted me for years. The main character loses all his hair, and then gets some magical peanut butter to put on his head that causes his hair to grow back quickly. But then his hair won’t stop growing, and he ends up getting kidnapped by a weird artist who wants to make a wig out of it. Looking back, that movie was seriously messed up.
All in all, I think this article is important because it makes us question the things that we took for granted as kids. It’s easy to look back on our childhoods and remember the fluffy, feel-good moments, but there were definitely some weird and unsettling things that we absorbed too. It’s worth taking a closer look at the media we consumed and thinking critically about how it influenced us.
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