Roll “Em!” (And Let it Roll?)

What movies do you remember watching over and over as a kid?  Ah, silver screen memories.  The movies that defined our (respective) generations and which we pop in the player when we want to stroll down memory lane.  And of course see if we can quote them word-for-word like we could years before.

Have you shared your favorite flicks with your kids?

It’s fun to experience those timeless Disney classics. Remember the “Wonderful World of Disney” on Sunday nights?  Even though kids are amazingly tech-savvy and notice the graphics are out of date, the stories still draw them in.  No wonder these are “classics.”  But not all cinematic classics are made the same as my husband and I found out with some of our favorites from our youth.  Wow, what kids pick up on nowadays, details completely off our own radar as kids…the “generation gap” at work.  Movie circumstances we failed to recall before we popped a bit of nostalgia into the DVD player for our kids’ entertainment.

For example, on a “sick day” I thought my son and daughter would love to see the movie Grease, for all the dancing, upbeat music and fun, now considered “vintage,” clothing.  What did they notice instead?  The teenage smoking.  It took several days to convince them that in this day and age smoking is not considered cool and to please stop imitating the act of “lighting up” with milkshake straws.

My bad with that one.  I had totally forgotten the ubiquity of cigarette smoking in Grease, probably because it wasn’t so taboo 30-odd years ago.  That and the soundtrack reigned supreme in the school music room.

The same goes for the generous use of “SOB” (in unabridged form) in the movie Back to the Future:  we attended viewings ad nauseum as teenagers and the swearing was no biggy (we heard it or said it all the time!).  But I held my breath and hoped that my elementary school-aged kids would wax hysterically over the wacky professor and the time-machine car and not repeat a “new word they learned” at school.

Don’t get me wrong, those are two iconic movies; they are period films with teenagers as central characters.  But short of pulling the plug mid movie because of the character development we as parents simply overlooked (or forgotten despite generational evolution), what can we do?  “Common Sense” ratings (like those offered on Netflix) can certainly help but there are scary scenes in movies (think Simba losing his father in The Lion KIng) geared toward six-year-olds and movies geared toward teens with fun content (quirky, wild-haired Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future) that third graders can appreciate.  Rates can serve as guidelines but in the end we know our kids and what content they can handle and what content our family values won’t uphold.  Perhaps the best thing to do is sit down with our kids, big tub of popcorn between us, taking in nostalgic and new films together.  And then have a dialogue about the movie afterward.

I’ve learned (the hard way) to assume nothing when it comes to movies, rated G or PG.  Sometimes these movies dish up the unexpected and when we “Roll ‘Em!” our best bet is to be prepared to not let content roll off our backs (as is easy to do as adults conditioned to colorful language and violence) and instead be prepared to roll out the conversation afterward.