By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
There’s no debating that family movies of the ’80s were built differently. Sure, they looked bright and colorful on the outside with mascots that kids would fall in love with (looking at you Falkor), but once the movie started, you were going to be traumatized and have nightmares for weeks.
The edgier nature of 1980s family movies was partly due to the lack of a PG-13 classification until 1984. This designation was invented in response to “kid-friendly” movies that were pure nightmare fuel, from the imaginations of a generation of filmmakers who wanted to push the envelope and tell darker, deeper stories than the sanitized children’s films they grew up on in the ’50s and ’60s.
Due to scenes of violence, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Gremlins, both released in 1984, had a big role in establishing the PG-13 rating. The cartoonish, over-the-top violence of Gremlins caught audiences off guard, as did a man’s heart getting ripped out of his chest, but those weren’t traumatic.
Disturbing, absolutely, but the type of imagery that stays with a kid well into mid-life? Not at all, there are far worse examples of how dark kids’ movies used to get, but when it comes to cartoons, it’s mostly the fault of Don Bluth.
The Disturbing Work Of Don Bluth
A former Disney animator, Bluth left and developed his own films in the 80s, including An American Tail and The Secret of NIMH, both of which have moments of dark imagery and danger. A house gets dropped on a mouse in the latter, and a steampowered mechanical mouse hunts them down in the former, but they both have nothing on All Dogs Go To Heaven.
Released in 1989, on the same day as The Little Mermaid, All Dogs Go To Heaven was at least truth in advertising. To get to Heaven, dogs have to die, and they do.
Charlie the German Shepard is run over by a car, going to Heaven because every dog is inherently good, and then going back to Earth by stealing a pocketwatch. In the film’s climax, Charlie has to choose between the watch that has granted him a second life on Earth and saving an orphan girl. It’s not much of a choice. The watch stops, he dies, again, and it’s all right there on screen.
It’s been decades, and I still can’t watch that movie. My mom took me to see it in theaters, and I enjoyed it because it’s still a Don Bluth film, but I can still see the car coming down the ramp for Charlie, the panic on his face reaching for the watch underwater, and his nightmare of Hell. Nightmare scenes were a staple of kids’ movies even before All Dogs Go To Heaven, and for some reason, two of the most memorable included clowns.
PeeWee Sacrifices Kids To Satan
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure isn’t actually a children’s movie; it’s incredibly subversive, a cynical take on child-like innocence. But after Pee-Wee’s Playhouse hit it big on TV, it was common to hear of parents renting the film for their kids, not knowing about Large Marge, or worse, the clown emergency room.
At one point, Pee-Wee has a nightmare that his bike is taken by clowns in an ambulance to an emergency room, but instead of saving it, they sacrifice it to Satan. Bet you didn’t see the end of that sentence coming, did you? That’s what it was like watching the movie as a kid expecting “Word of the Day” level craziness.
The Brave Little Toaster Is So Shocking You Can No Longer Watch It
The clown nightmares continued with The Brave Little Toaster, one of the best movies you can’t stream today, when the toaster has a nightmare about a clown firefighter. In a terrifying moment, the screen fills with the clown’s face as he looks down at the toaster and says, “Run.”
Chased by a wave of water that turns into forks, the toaster is left hanging on for dear life above a bathtub when it falls in. As an adult, it’s ingenious because these are things an electronic toaster would be scared of, but as a kid, it was terrifying.
The Neverending Murder Of Artax Is Worse Than What You Saw
Then there’s that scene. The one you knew would be mentioned when you saw the headline.
In The Neverending Story, Atreyu is on his quest to save the land when his horse, Artax, simply gives up and sinks into the Swamp of Sadness. Watching a horse lose its will to live and slowly sink into the swamp is the saddest movie moment of a generation, but it wasn’t nearly as harrowing as the scene from the novel.
In the book, Artax can talk, which means while sinking into the Swamp of Sorrow, he’s asking Atreyu to let him die. As horrible and traumatic as the scene is in the movie, imagine if we had to listen to a horse ask for the sweet release of death as the swampy water starts to enter its nostrils. The novel was released in 1979, so it’s not technically the ’80s, but even children’s books of the era were designed to haunt us for decades.
The Worst Thing About This 1980s Trauma
That’s far from everything; it’s only a small sample of the type of trauma endured by children of the 80s. Let’s not forget Transformers ‘86 casually killing off beloved characters from the TV series in the opening minutes of its movie, or The Dark Crystal.
Nearly every single children’s movie from the decade had at least one moment we’d end up talking about on a therapist’s couch. And the worst part of all of this trauma? These are our favorite movies.
