The original post: /r/movies by /u/CheeseIsMyHappyPlace on 2024-06-13 19:51:32.

I saw Short Circuit 2 when I was about 8 or 9 years old. All my friends had seen it too. That was standard entertainment for young children. I remember the last quarter of the movie making me feel very anxious, and a bit upset.

(Spoilers for it ahead.) But I watched some of it again a few days ago and BRUH! I’d forgotten how nasty it gets. The scene where Johnny5 gets betrayed and beaten to death by the bank robbers is something that would make me worry about showing that movie to a 9yo today. One of the hits results in his eye being squished by a hard impact with the sharp end of a crowbar, all clearly shown on screen. Johnnys confused begging being drowned out by Oscar shouting “finish him” during the beating makes it downright traumatic. Not for me now as an adult, of course, but I’m shocked that scene was shot like that for a movie aimed at young kids. And that’s just the start of the violent last act.

But now I’m feeling all nostalgic and trying to think of the other violent stuff that was made for 80s kids. I didn’t think a beating with a crowbar was particularly violent at the time so I feel like there must have been other movies like that but I can’t quite remember any. Star Wars had violence but it was cartoonish instead of scary. I watched Schwarzenegger movies when I was under 10yo and I found some of them a bit too much (eg: Predator) but they were made for teens/adults. What are the made-for-young-children movies that had that Short Circuit 2 level of explicit scary violence?

—EDIT TO ADD—

Thanks to comments I think I’ve realised why I had vague memories of some family/kids movies being shockingly violent but couldn’t remember more than that one specific example. Movies used to be savagely messed up! Perhaps my brain just didn’t want to recall some of those horrors. Plus I think there’s loads of old kids movies that I started to watch but couldn’t finish, because of scariness rather than violence though. I’m in full nostalgia mode now. Got weeks worth of traumatic kids movies to watch and the list still growing. Actually excited mwahaha. As has been mentioned below, having little kids watch scary/sad/traumatic movies can be a good thing sometimes. Let’s hope so!