5 Classic Family Movies That Are Unwatchable Today

It's far too easy to look back at movies we loved as kids and assume that they're just as great as they were when we first watched them. Memory is a fickle mistress, though — and it can be deceiving. Sure, there are a lot of family movies, kids movies, and family-friendly movies that have held up pretty well over the years. Pixar's catalog is fairly unimpeachable; not only does the original "Toy Story" still look great, nothing feels insensitive, weird, or simply out of date when you rewatch it. Even though "Singin' in the Rain" and "The Sound of Music" aren't necessarily movies designed for children, both have aged spectacularly well and hold up beautifully through decades of rewatching, and plenty of classic Disney fare fits this bill too, like "The Lion King," "101 Dalmatians," and even "Mulan" don't suffer when you revisit them years after their release.

This is, however, not universal when it comes to family-friendly movies. Admittedly, at least one pick on this list suffers from weird content in its source material, one sweatily tries to make a disturbing historical event into a romantic musical movie, and one was made with the best intentions before feeling sort of icky in hindsight. Without further ado, let's talk about five family-friendly movies that are borderline unwatchable when you think about them for more than a few minutes or apply even the slightest amount of scrutiny.

On the one hand, it's not Disney's fault that "Peter Pan," the animated film that they adapted from J.M. Barrie's 1904 stage play of the same name, contained plenty of questionable material when they made it. On the other hand, because the animated take on "Peter Pan" came out in 1953, things were, well, different. So what's the deal with "Peter Pan," and what's in it that's so weird in retrospect?

As young Wendy Darling (Kathryn Beaumont) amuses her younger brothers John (Paul Collins) and Michael (Tommy Luske) with stories about the titular Peter Pan, the boy who won't grow up, her father George (Hans Conried) decrees that soon she has to move out of the family nursery and accept her ascendance into young adulthood. (George also chains the family dog, Nana, up outside of the house, insisting that she's a dog, not a nanny. George stinks.) One evening, Wendy, John, and Michael are awoken by Peter Pan himself (Bobby Driscoll), who whisks them away to Never Land to hang out with his Lost Boys and never grow up at all. Even with the vengeful Captain Hook (also Conried) 

So, it's not great that the tiny fairy Tinkerbell (pantomimed by Peggy Lynch), who's obsessed with Peter and violently jealous, asks the Lost Boys to shoot Wendy with guns so that she can take out her perceived competition. Even that, though, isn't quite as egregious as Tiger Lily and her father the Indian Chief (not to mention the character simply known as "Squaw Woman"). Unfortunately, because it's a product of its time, "Peter Pan" utilizes savage and cruel stereotypes of the Native American population, and it's sort of icky to revisit that part now ... especially when you consider that Tiger Lily doesn't utter one word in the movie.

"Dumbo" manages to pack a lot of weird, wild, horrifying, offensive, and uncomfortable content into a movie that only runs for 64 minutes. Released in 1941 and based on a story (originally designed for a toy) by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl, "Dumbo" opens in mid-winter in Florida as a white stork (yes, really) delivers a whole host of baby animals to a circus ... but one grown-up animal, Mrs. Jumbo the Elephant (Verna Felton, who also voices the Elephant Matriarch) is left without a special delivery. Thankfully, a different stork shows up in the spring and presents Mrs. Jumbo with a bouncing baby elephant boy, Dumbo, whose diminutive size and enormous ears allow him to fly.

So what's the problem with "Dumbo?" First of all, do you remember it?! It's weirdly frightening, which is strange to consider when you actually think about the fact that this movie is designed for small children. Not only is Dumbo's mother hauled away and marked as criminally insane for defending her different little son against bullies — both animal and human — and to try to find her again, Dumbo ends up working with a bunch of clown firemen who make him dress up like a baby and humiliate himself, at which point the adorable baby elephant develops depression. To make this considerably worse, Dumbo then gets drunk with his mouse buddy Timothy (Edward Brophy) — as a reminder, Dumbo is canonically a child, who is now drunk — and hallucinate pink elephants in one of the film's scariest sequences.

Then ... there's the crows. After falling on hard times, Dumbo and Timothy meet a group of black crows stylized as a sort of caricature of Black Americans. Yes, the crows are heroic, but their leader was initially named Jim Crow. Not great at all!

"Grease" is a ton of fun, but it's also a movie that gives you quite a bit of pause during a rewatch. Director Randal Kleiser's adaptation of the stage musical of the same name follows the same general beats as said musical: after a magical summer at the beach together, Rydell High's reigning king Danny Zuko (John Travolta) is shocked to see his warm-weather fling Sandy Olsson (Olivia Newton-John) appear as a transfer student.

Apparently, Danny misrepresented himself as a perfect gentleman at the beach, and he's really anything but, leaving Sandy bereft and forced to make friends with the imposing, popular, and chic Pink Ladies crew, made up of Betty Rizzo (the truly incomparable Stockard Channing), beauty school dropout Frenchy (Didi Conn), the constantly snacking Jan (Jamie Donnelly), and the ditzy Marty Maraschino (Dinah Manoff). Meanwhile, Danny cavorts around with his own gang, the T-Birds, made up of his lieutenant Kenickie (Jeff Conaway), aspiring womanizer Sonny LaTierri (Michael Tucci), the doofy Putzie (Kelly Ward), and Doody (Barry Pearl), the youngest of the bunch. 

So what ages poorly about "Grease?" Again, this movie is a delight, but it's wild that kids routinely watch this. There's a joke about sexual assault in the song about Danny and Sandy's romance when he's asked if she "put up a fight" before they first hooked up, Rizzo has a full accidental pregnancy scare storyline involving Kenickie, and in the movie's big finale, Sandy changes everything about herself for a man. Also, can we talk about how old these high schoolers are? Kenickie and Sonny are probably the worst offenders; honestly, the latter has a receding hairline as a high schooler. It's enough to make you believe that the entire movie is Sandy's hallucination as she drowns, including the flying car at the end.

Disney's take on the real-life story of the Powhatan Native American woman, "Pocahontas," is ... not exactly true to life. In short, the movie tells the story of how Pocahontas (Irene Bedard) falls in love with an English settler named John Smith (Mel Gibson) as his men attempt to take over her land; in real life, Pocahontas was written about by the real Smith in his letters home, but she married a different British man named John Rolfe, returned with him to England, and was dead by the age of 22. The Disney movie tries to paint the story of Pocahontas as fantastical, romantic, and even supernatural, but the real story is significantly darker; not only was Pocahontas taken captive by settlers more than once, but her death in a foreign country feels bitterly sad. "Pocahontas," unfortunately, is a misfire from top to bottom because it so sorely misrepresents relations between Native Americans and English invaders.

Frankly, historian Camilla Townsend really hit the nail on the head in a 2024 interview with Smithsonian Magazine. As she put it:

"The reason it's been so popular—not among Native Americans, but among people of the dominant [Western] culture—is that it's very flattering to us. The idea is that this is a 'good Indian.' She admires the white man, admires Christianity, admires the culture, wants to have peace with these people, is willing to live with these people rather than her own people, marry him rather than one of her own. That whole idea makes people in white American culture feel good about our history: that we were not doing anything wrong to the Indians but really were helping them, and the 'good' ones appreciated it."

Townsend nailed it: "Pocahontas" is in, retrospect, not a feel good movie. Sorry, Grandmother Willow.

The main question we have about "Mrs. Doubtfire," at the end of the day, is simple: why did he do all that?! Directed by Chris Columbus, adapted from the 1987 novel "Madame Doubtfire" by Anne Fine, and released in 1993, "Mrs. Doubtfire" tells the story of Daniel Hillard (the late, great Robin Williams), a struggling freelance voice actor living in Los Angeles who genuinely loves his three kids — Lydia, Chris, and Natalie, played by Lisa Jakub, Matthew Lawrence, and Mara Wilson, respectively. Unfortunately, thanks to Daniel's constant antics and inability to commit to a job, his wife Miranda (Sally Field) gets understandably exasperated and asks for a divorce, devastating Daniel and the children ... especially when Miranda, a homeowner with a steady job, gets full custody and Daniel, who's now technically homeless and largely unemployed, is denied shared custody.

Look, it's obviously not ideal for a dad who truly loves his children to have to fight for shared custody and find a job and a place to live in the process, but surely there's a better solution than "pretend to be an old British woman named Euphegenia Doubtfire who looks and sounds mostly the same and work as a nanny so that you can live in your old house with your wife and children." Everything in "Mrs. Doubtfire" does, inexplicably, works — he alienates Miranda's handsome new boyfriend Stu Dunmeyer (Pierce Brosnan) and even gets the kids to keep his secret when they catch him, uh, peeing standing up — but at the end of the day, is it really advisable to give even shared custody to a guy who pulled this stunt, even if he does have a popular TV show for children by the time the credits roll? We think not!