Last year I was on a mission to expand my children’s music selections. This year I seem to have a need to do the same with their movie watching. And I’m discovering this movie thing brings a whole new challenge.
At Christmas time I bought a couple movies that we considered classics to watch as a family. A Christmas Story and Christmas Vacation were among them. A Christmas Story is totally up our alley. Christmas Vacation was too – until we got to the part where Clark was imagining his future swimming pool, complete with bouncing, swim suit clad beauty… let’s just say my husband very quickly found the remote control to skip that scene. Not exactly family entertainment.
You would think that would have taught me a lesson. Perhaps I should pre-screen my selections. But do I? Nope! Case in point: last week I was planning our drive south for one of our family adventures. We were going to be in the car for approx 3.5 hours so I hooked up the DVD player and decided to surprise the kids with a movie they haven’t seen: Spaceballs. They all love Star Wars and I thought they’d get a big kick out of this one. Sure, I remembered a few not-so-subtle penis references but I figured they’d fly over the kids’ heads (which they did). And I even remembered the Major Asshole part “How many of you are assholes? I’m surrounded by a bunch of assholes!” (that’s still kinda funny) I did NOT however remember the number of times that movie uses words that… well, that my kids would be punished for uttering.
So picture me driving down the Interstate, kids happily watching a movie, getting some laughs when I hear #!@#! after #%$!@. I’m a fairly liberal parent when it comes to this sort of thing. The kids are going to hear the words sometime, might as well be with me first so I can take away some of their ‘power’. If you can’t think of anything better to say then a curse word, then you aren’t being too creative (and yes, I realize I have been guilty of this very problem). But when you’re just listening to the movie you notice an awful lot of language. “It’s okay, I told myself. Nothing too bad.” I shouted a reminder in the back seat that those words are not appropriate – “remember this is a movie, it’s not real and that’s not the way you should talk in the real world.” Then a few minutes later, I heard the mother of all curse words – I may have gasped when it came flying out of Dark Helmet’s mouth. I looked in my rearview mirror and didn’t see any mouths dropped open. I’m pretty sure the girls would have registered some shock at that one – they are pretty conscious of the really bad stuff. Whew – got away with one there.
It’s funny because we’ve seen these movies countless times – but we’ve seen them on television – where they edit out the inappropriate stuff. Then we forget that the movie might be inappropriate until we’re sitting on the couch together with our popcorn and comfy blankets and someone drops the F bomb.
I just purchased the original Clash of the Titans to feed my kids’ current mythology fascination. Something tells me I should preview it first.
quick like a bunny! 