Weird Children's Movies From Your Parents' Childhood

It seems like every generation believes their entertainment is far better than what came before it and what came after, doesn't it? Kid-friendly movies and TV is no exception: how many times have you restrained an eyeroll while your parents or even grandparents explain to you why their Saturday morning cartoons or Disney feature animation or anime put the junk you watched to shame? It's enough to warrant an "Ok boomer."

Nostalgia has a heavy hand in these Gen X declarations, just as it does when Gen Z members recall their favorite kid-vids. We all feel warm and fuzzy for the programming we enjoyed over a bowl of sugar cereal, and older folks (we're talking 40+) are no exception. Waxing rhapsodic about the "Pac-Man" cartoon or "Captain Planet" is a fun way to stay connected to your past. The only problem is that when the filter of nostalgia is lifted away, a lot of what your parents and their parents watched was, well, pretty weird. 

We're not saying it's worse than current children's entertainment. We'd just like you to take a look at the following list of kids' features from the 1950s to 1980s and consider, if you will, the peculiarities of what passed as a fun afternoon back in the day.

The third and most deranged Mexican fantasy film centered around child actress Maria Gracia as the titular fairy tale heroine, 1962's "Little Red Riding Hood and the Monsters" represents a sort of "Avengers: Endgame" for the Peliculas Rodriguez production company, which oversaw a great deal of kiddie fantasy fare from Mexico in the 1960s (as well as lucha libre and horror titles). Here, Gracia is joined by not only Tom Thumb (Caesar Quezadas) and his nemesis, the Ogre (Jose Elias Moreno) from 1958's "Pulgarcito," but also the Wolf (Manuel "Loco" Valdes) and a particularly irritating Skunk (Santanon) from the previous "Red" films, both depicted with horrifying costumes that feature far too much of the actors' faces.

This super team is pitted against the Witch Queen (Ofealia Guilmain, tricked out as an unauthorized Evil Queen from "Snow White") and her minions, a bizarro ensemble that features both traditional movie creeps (the Frankenstein monster) and original creations, including a squabbling conjoined creature, a pointy-headed thug with a Super Mario mustache, and a robot, for good measure. 

This unholy crew, which feels like something a child might draw after a strong tablespoon of cough medicine, abuses the Wolf and Ogre at length (even waterboarding them) for turning their backs on their bad guy pasts until Red, Tom, and the Skunk mount a rescue mission.

The original Mexican version is threadbare but well-intentioned kids' fare, but the American dub and edit, overseen by distributor K. Gordon Murray (who gave us the astonishing Mexican "Santa Claus," with Moreno as St. Nick), is awash in ranting dialogue and nonsensical music numbers, delivered with headache-inducing performances. For 21^st century kids, the effect is likely to be as delirious as those who were dragged to see it in Saturday afternoon matinees in the early 1960s.

Herschell Gordon Lewis, who created some of the grossest, gloppiest horror movies of the 1960s, including "Blood Feast" and "Two Thousand Maniacs!" occasionally took a break from dismembering his actors and ventured into other genres. The majority of these were exploitation films like "She-Devils on Wheels," but on two occasions, Lewis tried his hand at children's entertainment. And while no one loses a limb in the resulting efforts — 1966's "Jimmy, the Boy Wonder" and "The Magic Land of Mother Goose" — both are head-scratching experiences.

"Mother Goose" is a filmed version of a live magic show with a fairy tale theme, and while awkward, it can't hold a candle to the sheer oddity that is "Jimmy the Boy Wonder." Antsy, mumbling child actor Dennis Jones plays the title role, whose less-than-wondrous need to blow off his minimal responsibilities leads to a wish for time to stop; noting that Jimmy's laziness has brought existence to a standstill, an astronomer sends his daughter (Nancy Jo Berg) to help the little pill fix the "master clock" and get life back on track.

Opposing them is Mr. Fig (David Blight, Jr.), a villain with colossal painted eyebrows and an attitude towards Jimmy that borders on predatory. Much of the film's running time is devoted to Fig chewing the limited scenery or Jones and Berg shuffling listlessly from one scenario to another. To slow down the action even further, Lewis inserts a wholly unrelated cartoon into the mix, even providing several of the voices (he also narrates). If you're still watching by the time Jimmy reaches the master clock, consider yourself a hardy moviegoer indeed.

In an attempt to stave off the declining revenue plaguing the Japanese film industry in the late 1960s, Toho began marketing their most popular franchise — Godzilla — directly to children. 

The Toho Champion Festival debuted in 1969 with a package that bundled a live-action comedy and cartoon with a brand new Godzilla adventure called "All Monsters Attack," which focused on a young boy and his imaginary friendship with Godzilla's offspring, Minilla (or Minya).

On paper, "Attack" — which played in the States as "Godzilla's Revenge" — sounds like a kaiju kid's dream come true. Who wouldn't want to be pals with Minya? Well, as it unspools in the film, helmed by longtime Godzilla director Ishiro Honda, the answer is: pretty much no one. "Attack" is a resolutely depressing film, both in subject matter and execution. Its kid hero, Ichiro, is ignored by his parents and bullied by classmates, and finds comfort only in dreams involving Minya.

Unfortunately, the misery doesn't end there for either Ichiro or the viewer. The stiff, lumpy Minya (who's saddled with a grating voice in the English dub) is just as much of an outcast as Ichiro, and suffers constant indignities at the hands of various Monster Island occupants (all featured in recycled stock footage) and a new creature, the jabbering Gabara. The only way Minya can win his largely absent parent's approval is to play dirty — which is exactly how Ichiro wins over his bullies in the real world. Toho would offer a more enjoyable kid-oriented Godzilla film with 1973's "Godzilla vs. Megalon," which features the ridiculously cool robot Jet Jaguar.

Actor Jim Dale, whose voice will be immediately recognizable to anyone who enjoyed the audio editions of the "Harry Potter" novels, is top-billed here as a dull-witted lab assistant whose theft of growth-enhancing plant food accidentally results in "Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World." Digby, the Old English Sheepdog that consumes the food, soon grows to colossal height, which attracts the attention of thieves who want to sell him to the circus, as well as the scientist (Spike Milligan) that created the food and the British military, who intend to halt his ceaseless growth with heavy artillery (!).

Needless to say, this 1973 feature does not include scenes of Digby tearing up London under a hail of missiles. You do get an awful lot of slapstick and far too little of Milligan, an anarchic force of nature who co-created the legendary "Goon Show" radio series which co-starred Peter Sellers, and wrote numerous plays, television programs, and features.

Director Joseph McGrath later directed scenes featuring Sellers in the 1967 version of "Casino Royale," as well as five promotional music videos featuring the Beatles, while screenwriter Michael Pertwee was a veteran of British TV and the brother of the Third Doctor, Jon Pertwee.

The Wombles were furry, ecological-minded creatures in a series of UK children's books that rose to international fame courtesy of an animated series that aired on the BBC from 1973 to 1975. Their popularity extended to a live-action musical act that scored several Top 5 singles on the UK charts and a mountain of merchandise, which led to their feature film debut with "Wombling Free" in 1978.

The premise of the film stays true to the Womble formula (the mole-like creatures clean up trash left by humans in their home base of Wimbledon Common), adding some amusing parodies of classic Hollywood musicals. But what made the Wombles' adventures on TV work so well — namely, a five-minute running time — feels interminable in the feature, despite the best efforts of actor-turned-director Lionel Jeffries, who had scored a considerable hit with his 1970 film adaptation of the popular UK children's novel "The Railway Children." 

Adding to the disconnect is the depiction of the Wombles, who on television were cute stop-motion puppets. For the film, they're portrayed by little person actors, including Kenny Baker of "Star Wars" and his "Time Bandits" co-star Jack Purvis. Their costumes have the stiff, blank-eyed look of Sid and Marty Krofft's cult creations like "H.R. Pufnstuf," and as such, inspire far more shivers than adoration.

As Walt Disney Studios itself notes in its own history, the 1980s were a difficult period. The company's live action and animated features released under its Walt Disney Productions umbrella were, for the most part, well-intentioned and even sometimes critically-praised efforts, but almost every one failed to connect with sizable audiences. 

"Midnight Madness," "Condorman," "Trenchcoat" and "Something Wicked This Way Comes" were among the list of box office misfires defining the decade, until "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" and "The Little Mermaid" finally began to reverse Disney's fortunes.

Many of Disney's '80s efforts are forgotten, even by aficionados of the studio's efforts. Case in point: "The Last Flight of Noah's Ark," a live-action adventure that disappeared without a trace following its release on a double bull with a reissue of "101 Dalmatians" in the summer of 1980. It's competently made and features a likable cast led by Elliott Gould, Ricky Schroeder and Genevieve Bujold, and what seems like an exciting premise in a race to transform a downed B-29 bomber into a raft in order to escape a deserted island.

Unfortunately, neither director Charles Jarrott — a Golden Globe winner for "Anne of the Thousand Days" in 1969 — nor three screenwriters could come up with anything compelling or entertaining with those elements. There are some cute animals, minor league suspense and a pair of "comic relief" Japanese soldiers who have been marooned on the island since World War II but the rest is rote fare that wouldn't fly as episodic TV.

What is "The Peanut Butter Solution," you ask? As depicted in this Canadian film from 1985, the delicious spread is part of a disgusting concoction delivered to young Matthew Mackay by a pair of ghosts (!) after a shock causes him to lose his hair. That, in and of itself, is weird enough for at least a half-dozen kids' movies, but "Peanut Butter" ups the ante on odd in what seems like 15-minute increments until reaching what is arguably the most bizarre climax of any film on this list.

The solution, it seems, does its job too well: Mackay's hair refuses to stop growing, even after being cut, which gets him booted from school — just in time to learn that the shorn hair is connected to a rash of child kidnappings (!!) orchestrated by his mad art teacher (Michel Malliot). Mackay is eventually abducted by the teacher and strapped into a machine where the other kidnapped kids are forced to create magic paintbrushes from his hair (insert as many exclamation points as needed).

What begins as a fitfully clever kids' fantasy slides headlong into disturbingly dark territory, which is made exponentially weirder by a tone that veers from broad comedy to more adult-minded material. Case in point for the latter: Mackay's friend Conrad ("Degrassi High" star Siluk Saysanasy) decides to up his teenage game by applying the hair-growth glop to a private area, with appropriately inappropriate results. Add a few early songs by Celine Dion, and you have ... well, we don't know what you have. At all.