INTRODUCTION:
Motion pictures have been around for over 100 years. Television has long passed its 70th birthday. In that time, there have been countless movies, cartoons and TV shows made.
A kid growing up today is only going to see a small fraction of what’s available. And that’s fine—active playtime and reading will always be more worthwhile than time spent parked in front of the television set. And a lot of films made over the years have been pretty bad anyways. (By the way, from now on, I’m going to use “films” as a generic term for motion pictures, cartoons and comedy shorts.)
But a little bit of time parked in from of the TV can be a good thing. There’s a lot of worthwhile and age-appropriate stuff for kids to watch. Good storytelling in any form—and that can include TV shows, cartoons and movies--is a healthy experience for children. It all simply depends on responsible parenting—monitoring how much time your children spend watching TV and paying attention to exactly what they are watching. With just a little bit of effort, parents can make TV time a consistently high-quality experience. It’s easy to take advantage of the ready availability we have today of countless films to cherry pick what’s best for your kids.
Now most of the time, kids are going to end up watch fairly recent films. And, to be fair, there’s been a lot of quality stuff made in recent years. The bulk of the Pixar films, for instance, are excellent. Cleverly animated and imaginative cartoons such as Batman: The Brave and the Bold are well worth a half-hour of your kid’s time each week.
But a lot of older films can fall by the wayside—with many children never getting around to experiencing them. There will be some exceptions to this. Disney’s marketing expertise, for instance, means many families will own DVDs of their classic animated films. But for the most part, kids are at risk of missing out on older films that are still quite capable of fascinating and entertaining them.
The purpose of this short work is to provide suggestions for older films that parents can funnel into their children’s viewing schedule. I’ve covered films in a number of genres, with brief explanations as to why I think they’re worthwhile. These are films that, above all else, tell a story extremely well. Your kids will be entertained and perhaps develop a wider appreciation for good stories.
A few of these are acknowledged classics, but I haven’t worked to make this a “classics” list. There are already a lot of worthwhile classic films lists out there. Instead, I’ve intentionally included a number of B-movies in several genres--films that are much more likely to drop below the radar, unseen by all but a small number of old-time movie aficionados. That’s why hardly a day goes by without a six-year-old snatching up an axe and going on a neighborhood rampage. Too little Hopalong Cassidy or Dick Tracy in their lives. (I would quote an expert and cite statistics to back up that claim, but I just made those last two sentences up, so I can’t.)
I do have some general criteria that cover all the films listed here:
I’m a guy. So the films here—inevitably slanted to my personal tastes—probably lean more towards what a boy would like. Most of the films listed here can be enjoyed by girls as well, though. Besides, I have impeccable taste.
I’m a Christian, so the films I’ve picked are going to reflect those values. The films themselves are secular, but they will often deal with themes such as faith, honor, courage, and responsibility.
Language: One film included below (The Great Locomotive Chase) uses the phrase “Damn Yankees” once or twice. I’ve included it anyway because it’s a wonderful film and the phrase is used in proper historical context. Otherwise, everything I’ve listed is free from crude language. Our society has gotten crude enough without my adding to it.
Sex: There are a lot of pretty girls populating these films and teenage boys watching them are going to occasionally take note of them. Odds are a teenage girl or two will be swooning over Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power. But sex really shouldn’t be a spectator sport for children, so none of the films below will be sexually graphic in either their images or the dialogue. (I believe the closest thing to a graphic sexual scene is King Kong tearing off bits of Fay Wray’s clothing. But he leaves enough to preserve her modesty.)
Violence: At the risk of being inconsistent, I’m actually okay with certain level of violence in children’s entertainment. Violence is a legitimate and vital part of good storytelling. A bad guy, after all, needs to be threatening in order to be an effective bad guy. What I’ve avoided are films with graphic or bloody depictions of violence. It’s when the blood starts spurting that I believe arguments about de-sensitizing children may take on some legitimacy. Besides, blood and gore in popular entertainment often becomes an end in itself, detracting from the basic storytelling value that a film might otherwise have.
Smoking: The purpose of this work is to champion older films for viewing by children. That means a lot of these films have a pretty casual attitude towards what we now know is a pretty vile habit. But I’m also working on the assumption that most parents reading this are responsible in the examples they set and in what they teach their kids. So I’m giving the depiction of smoking a pass. Too many really cool films would be left out otherwise. I figure it this way: exposure to graphic sex scenes can distort a child’s view (or, heck, an adult’s view) of love and romance--cheapening a beautiful gift that God meant to be shared between a man and a woman after marriage into something meaningless, disposable, and self-destructive. Smoking is just a really bad habit that previous generations didn’t actually know was bad for you. The former is something that should be avoided by kids. The latter is something that we could do without in films, but isn’t really that big a deal if parents are themselves setting a good example. Besides, smoking in older films presents a reasonably accurate representation of how those generations lived.