10 Movies that Did Not Define My Childhood

I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of flak from people who fondly remember this formulated children's underdog sports movie, but the reality was that it was one of a thousand that began that whole genre. Every cliche it started, from the slow clap, to the girl who can play sports, has been replicated a thousand times over and with the same results: it stinks! Not only did this movie not define overcoming adversity for me as a girl, but it also didn't define me through the movie's specifically generated stereotypes that only Hollywood executives could come up with. According to this movie, if I am a girl then I must be trying to prove to the boys I'm just as good as they are, have a pretty face with a braid or ponytail, and I usually end up kissing the hero at the end. The worst thing about it is that this stock character could be inserted into any kids sports movie and fit in the plot without any difficulty at all. Next time they make another one of these schlock sports movies, stay out of my gender!

Holy god do I hate this movie. I hate it now, and I hated it back then. More so than any movie of the time, this movie relies on adult fabricated Kid's Komedy wherein the writers think it will amuse kids to have grossly exaggerated parodies of children, slapstick humor, and often cartoon sound effects thrown into the mix. This movie was aimed at children, but why were the references so alien? As a 9 year-old kid, I barely knew anything about the Little Rascals other than what my parents told me, and the cultural stereotypes of Alfalfa somehow felt lost on me. Weren't these kids operating out of the 40's? I remember watching this thinking I was missing something that everyone else was in on. Aside from that, the Kid's Komedy was just plain stupid. The whole illusion of having a ratty clubhouse without decent materials is ruined when they all have matching firefighter gear when it catches fire. Did they seriously have all that stuff lying around just waiting for the off chance a fire was to break out? Who paid for those uniforms? And what about that point where they sentence Alfalfa to death? That's not funny, that's unsettling and Children of the Corn-esque! Seriously, this movie was written for children and it made them so stupid and ridiculous that even the children watching it saw through it. What a turd!

I'm not even sure where to begin with this movie. I know plenty of people both online and off have taken a shot at this cinematic abortion, but I think it still deserves mention for how awful it was to its target audience. I was in fourth grade when I heard several classmates talking about the movie and the three heroes: the child ninjas of Rocky, Colt and Tum-Tum. I thought they were joking, and writing the names down still makes me cringe! Did the writers for this thing run out of interesting sounding names or were they that uncreative? Many kids bought into the ninja fantasy, so wouldn't it make more sense to have cool names like Musashi, Kojiro, or Nobunaga? Were the writers afraid that the viewing audience wouldn't be smart enough to remember interesting names, so they decided on completely retarded ones instead!? Ugh!!! Aside from that, the plot once again relies on more Kid's Komedy with grown adults with guns having their asses kicked by pre-pubescent children, often times with cartoon sound effects thrown in for good measure. Honestly, what was the point of this movie? At least Little Giants had a canned moral at the end. Did this seriously advocate pursuing the ninja gang your FBI father couldn't stop? Did it seriously expect us to believe the lead bad guy could be distracted with jellybeans? Did it really think trying to stop surfers with guns using Home Alone inspired traps was a good idea? Honestly though, I'm not sure who is the biggest sucker. The consumer who apparently bought into the sequels they made out of this trash, or the producers who had to be dumb enough to sign off on it to make them? Not to mention the Three Ninjas spawned a Super Nintendo game The universe weeps for us all.

I'll admit, I do enjoy the occasional Jim Varney slapstick, but having Jim fight the villain of the movie: a two nosed troll that turns children into dolls that just doesn't work. Once again, the writers thought if they dumbed the content down, it would be more accessible to children and with humor they would find funny. Therefore, it makes absolute sense that the best way to stop two bullies who knocked over a clubhouse would be to build a treehouse and repel them with a spud gun that launches dogfood and a device that slings rotten pizza at them like Frisbees. I'm sure these ingenious devices will further help them when they get beat up at school the next day. It also holds to logic that the Achilles Heel of trolls everywhere is milk, and stopping their leader requires kissing it. You know, simple logic! If you look closely, several of the trolls resemble the clowns in Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Not sure what to think of that Still, I remember watching this movie when I was six and thinking that I was somehow too old for it. Eartha Kitt played a very good scary old lady, and her voice still makes me laugh. And remember kids, in the event of a child stealing troll, simply call the village idiot (which shouldn't be hard because he's hanging out with kids anyway), and have him kiss it. Meanwhile the rest of us will be getting out our blowtorches and shotguns.

Yes, this is a children's movie, and no, it wasn't marketed any other way. This was the first movie I actually saw on opening night when I was in seventh grade, and wow was I disappointed. This movie was not styled after the epic cinema of the first three movies, but clearly marketed to sell toys to children. I mean, why not with the loveable (and not at all racist) antics of Jar Jar Binks, the whiny Anakin who wasn't on a power trip, the hilarious catch-phrases of the robot army, or the wacky (and not stupid) jowl flapping Gungan king? Instead of seeing the horrors of an actual army (and not a parody of one) clamp down on a small planet and having it slowly starve to death, we instead get to see silly looking aliens riding dinosaurs throwing blue orbs at those grumpy ol' robots! Forget any level of subtlety or substance, this movie was a letdown then and a source of mockery now. Despite the awfulness of this monkey shit on screen, the firestorm of Star Wars Episode One toys, party supplies, and Pizza Hut promos lasted for months. I remember seeing a toy blaster on sale at the grocery store eight months later, and they were still selling! This movie represented the consumption of art as a commodity and the churning drive to merchandise instead of create a lasting movie. And it did just that. I think I speak for all true fans when I say NOOOOOOOOOHHHHH!!!!

This was another what was the point? movie for me, and I remember thinking just how ridiculous the premise was as a child. The owner of a bunch of appliances, aka The Master moves away, and its up to a plucky toaster, a catch-phrase spewing radio (who has no face), a socially inept lamp, a terribly whiny electric blanket, and loveable old Kirby, the vacuum.  Can you imagine the pitch to the company executives to get this movie signed? Yes, we're going to have a bunch of appliances try to return back to The Master, throw in some songs just to annoy every parent out there, and have the toaster implausibly save The Master's life at the end. You know, a real story kids will like!  Put that bottle of bourbon away Frank Maybe the writers were trying to do the whole what if your appliances were alive thing, but in the end spending years to return to The Master seemed contrived and oddly unsettling. What did the toaster really get out of The Master's company that would warrant it getting ground up in a bunch of gears a dozen years later when the kid was in college?  Do appliances, old and new, really vie for their owners affections so much? This movie was more about separation anxiety as the source to sell movies than it was about a journey.  I wonder how appliances fell towards the Will it Blend guys?

I never bought into the Jonathan Taylor Thomas or Tim Allen craze, but Tim Allen certainly has a hard-on for Christmas movies. I mean, why shouldn't he? It was a classic movie of Christmas being saved by Tim Allen because of Tim Allen saving Christmas! Did I mention kids that Tim Allen has to save Christmas? Just think of all the crazy antics Tim Allen can get into as Santa Claus while surrounded by child-elves. And Bernard. This movie is a classic all you gotta do is believe! flick, but the true icing on the shit-cake seems to be a measure of cheating. Didn't get that Mystery Date game you wanted? Well then maybe you should have sex with Santa! Didn't get that Weenie Whistle you wanted when you were three? Then maybe you should get connections, kid! A few favors to Santa can make getting what you want go a long way Wouldn't having Santa Claus as your father defeat the whole point in being good the entire year? Although, you would have Tim Allen as your father, which definitely evens things out. I'm not sure what moral they were going for when they made this movie. Oh, right. Tim Allen saves Christmas. There it is!

I'm sure this is going to piss off a lot of people, but I think so because many people attach eighteen levels of nostalgia to it. We all know the story, rendered in clay, of Santa and Rudolph and I'm sure many of us can quote lines from it. I bet many more of us can claim to want to be a dentist after seeing it too! This movie was cultural goodness compressed into a can and sliced up on our dinner tables. And it was always on! You get a week off from school, guess what all the networks show? You go over to your grandparents house, and guess what's on TV? You try turning on the radio for some music and they're playing the soundtrack! You try going outside and an unmarked van with speakers is driving around playing it! Aaagh! The main beef I had with this movie and the hundreds they made with Frosty the Snowman or Jack Frost is that your life becomes saturated with them during the holidays, and everyone wants to watch them. Maybe it's the numbing effect of the holidays, or everyone's collective desire to learn how to love again, but these movies are a staple in transparent Disney-esque, refried country wholesomeness. Nevermind that it's just the same story with a few pointless subplots, but there's something about claymation and Christmas that makes our collective brains go soft. I'm sure they're showing these movies non-stop in Guatamalan prison camps.

It had all the makings of a good movie, it really did! Don Bluth style animation, James Stuart, John Cleese, dare I say even Jon Lovitz! I realize that disliking Fievel: An American Tail is akin to punching a baby in this country, but it did have some heartwarming moments and wasn't tied down to the usual topics of childrens animated movies. This one however, blurred together with a series of lame subplots, forgettable characters and dog sheriffs. For several years as a kid, the plot of this movie and Rock-A-Doodle sort of blurred together and I confused the stories. Annoying mouse characters? Check. Hound Dog with personal demons? Check. Hero who sounds like a pudding commercial? Check. Sigh. You would have thought that the Mousekowitz family would have learned their lesson in the first movie not to trust the silky voices of cats, but I guess they just needed more things to do to melt our collective hearts and overcome adversity in a quasi-immigrant fashion. The writers also tried angle us into wanting to be Fievel and fight against the bad guys like him. This further proves the critical point that even the littlest characters can overcome the biggest obstacles is still be a cliche. Fievel Goes West was another sad sequel riding on the coattails of the original movie's success.

Have they stopped making them yet? According to IMDB, they're up to 13 as of 2007, so maybe they're getting close. I wonder if a Land Before Time XXX has been made? Ugh, not going to think on that. The internet can be a terrible place. I remember seeing The Land Before Time on my fifth birthday in the movie theater and genuinely liking the story. Sure, the dinosaur thing was a little weird, but it had memorable characters and had a sort of no-longer-a-child coming of age story. It worked, and was generally a pretty decent movie. I thought the story was done when I left the theater. Boy was I wrong! Not only did these movies lose the charm of the original, but they introduced exciting new themes to us like bullies, cliques, environmentalism and singing and dancing! It's almost as if the movie executives decided to pull out the mystique and danger of the first movie and replaced it with caffeine and Pizza Hut. The shift of the movies went from overcoming difficult odds in a hostile world when you're only a child, to lookit them dinos dance! Instead of acting the grown-up because no grown-up was there, they cop out and give Little Foot a grandmother! Unfortunately, these movies fell into babysitter material to be turned on when looking after children, so I had the misfortune of getting to listen to almost the entire series growing up. You know, maybe they should beat the dead horse some more and make a 14th movie. I'm sure the franchise still has a few dollars left in it.