:What a horribly innappriopriate movie for anyone under 20 nowadays..back when i was a kid it was considered de riguer for a 1st grader to read and watch A Watership Down along with Charlettes Web..so who is wrong or right..Are kids overly protected today..or were we exposed to things far beyond our ability to comprehend back in the old days?


A bit of a dramatization but that movie was jacked up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ystKu9UPME&feature=player_embedded

Are you trying to make me deaf?

This is incredibly intense.... This seriously reminds me of a trip gone horribly, horribly wrong or something...

I don't know how I would feel about this as a kid...

I read Charlette's Web when I was young though. Does that have a violent part in it that I'm not remembering or something?

I can't controll audio.

I've never heard of A Watership Down before, but that video looked damned disturbing. :huh: I've dealt with some pretty disturbing things in RL, but that seems waaay worse.

Now Charlette's Web never bothered me, so I don't know why you're mentioning it as well, even after seeing you mention the part about . :shrug:


:dead:

It's Watership Down, there is no "a." And you probably could have gotten the point across faster just by showing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR07FOF7i1A&feature=related.

Anyway, a lot of parents have made huge mistakes in assuming it's for kids, simply because it's animated and about rabbits (http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m128/redXpiXieXblack/Watership%20Down/CopyofWatership_Down_Dutch.jpg http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51XQZCH7KGL._SS500_.jpg), but it's a stretch to call the film or book inappropriate for anyone under 20. Anyone over 13 can handle either just fine, and they should; the book, which Adams originally wrote for his daughters, is very good and the film is a decent adaptation. And frankly, the content of either is really no worse than what's found in a lot of other "required-reading" high school books (The Red Badge of Courage, Lord of the Flies, 1984, etc.).

Now if there's anything to get mad about, it's the more recent TV series, which was made for kids, and dumbed the story down considerably.

the content has not changed in 20 years, whats changed is that parents now days hide stuff from their children for fear of them being disturbed but what really ends up disturbing their children is finding out about this kinda stuff when they inebitably discover it on their own.

It was part our grade school curriculium way back when ..in middle school we had to learn A light in the forest and A Hole in the wall...In the Light in a forest the protaginost scalps his uncle in excplicit detail but a hole in the wall a crippled kid saves a besieged castle.

Children are over-protected. Or rather, we currently live in an over-protective society, it doesn't just apply to kids really. imo, of course.
I read & saw Charlette's Web before age 8 & Watership Down when I was 10ish and I turned out mostly fine. :whistling:

It's one of my favorite books, actually. I still re-read it. The movie of Watership Down, if you watch the actual movie instead of some edited YT video musical mashup, isn't that bizarre. It has a few violent scenes yes but in the context of the narrative it makes sense/isn't that horrifying. Also, while it's a decent adaptation as far as film goes, it's NOWHERE as good as the book. To this day Keehar & BigWig are two of my fave novel characters ever.


Yup.

Lucky...or maybe unlucky, since maybe then I wouldn't have liked Watership Down as much as I do if I was required to read it.

Anyway, I had to read The Light in the Forest in sixth grade, and I had no objections to its contents then. If parents these days do, then we really are going too far in "protecting" our children. When is it going to be a good time to expose the fact that, yes, the world svcks and it's rife with violence and death? When is it a good time to lift the veil over our eyes? And what about the parents that enforce this crap? Do they recall when they first get exposed to some "horrifying" material? If so, what do they think about themselves? How do they think they turned out?

it was read to my class in the 4th grade, i missed the last day of reading and the conclusion and i was fairly upset since i was enjoying it quite alot. the teacher felt bad enough to give the book to me.

No [censored] way. It's an amazing film, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with letting children watch it. I saw it first when I was about 5 years old, loved it then and I love it still. I'm not usually one of those people who complains about how everything was better back in the day, but these days children are treated like they're complete idiots who are unable to deal with anything more serious than Spongebob of Finding Nemo. How different where children's books back in the 30s. Remember The Hobbit? (spoilers for the unlikely case that someone hasn't read it yet. And remember Bambi? And there's absolutely nothing wrong with showing that to little children. Most of them can handle that no problem, and the ones that can't probably wouldn't be able to even if they were advlts anyway. It helps them mature, so they don't grow up as total retards. Watership Down is no different.

Still, I should thank you. I now feel a strong need to find my old VHS and watch it again.


If the book is really that much better I definitely must read it. To my shame I must admit that I have never even really considered that, despite the film being amongst my most cherished childhood memories.

Watership Down is one of my all-time favorite novels, actually.

The story itself actually comes from stories Richard Adams told to his own two daughters on long car rides, IIRC - so it's at least intended to be appropriate for children. However, I don't think it's innately accurate to say that is was always universally approved as something appropriate for young children. I remember my own parents were somewhat uncomfortable with the film version, after letting me watch it. They had read the book to me as a child, but some of the imagery in the movie is a lot more disturbing when translating it that way. Now, I came out okay(ish) and I wasn't scarred for life, but...

Now that I have a child of my own, I can't say with any certitude just when I'm going to say it's okay for him to watch it. There's a number of fairly mature themes addressed there that I'd probably want to make sure we'd already dealt with before worrying about exposing him to it. One can say that these days parents are too protective - but it's not like I didn't have a number of friends who weren't allowed to watch a lot of this stuff when I was growing up, either. (I mean - I had friends back in the day who weren't allowed to watch The Simpsons, because that was once considered a controversial TV show, so there's evidence for both sides, there...)

Anyway - still a really great story.

It is a proper name, down as in "an undulating usually treeless upland with sparse soil" so yes there is no "a".

I still remember hating this when I was a little kid, and my mother being rather displeased with that... Personally I think kids should not be given scary entertainment until they start demanding it on their own account. It is stupid to think you are "toughening up" kids when in fact all you are doing is stressing them and making them scared. Confidence comes from feeling secure, not from a bunch of emotional shocks.

If you think about it, the whole "anthropomorphic animal with a human mind who is treated as an ordinary animal" is rather dodgy. It is like Nazis and Jews or something. Having your life threatened by someone much more powerful who doesn't care about you at all is a constant theme in kids entertainment (next to "something has gone wrong and we must team together to fix it"). But I don't think it matters so long as there is a happy ending and no-one is really hurt.

I'm screwed up, but for completely different reasons than a cartoon about rabbits killing each other..

Sounds like a discussion about beast races in the Skyrim board :teehee:

I don't know the book in question, but they did make us read Lord of the Flies. That was a moving and even slightly distressing experience, but i doubt it had any effect on how i turned out.

I remember I saw this as a kid. I won't say I'm normal, but neither that this movie had such a scarring impact on me. E.T. however, that's another story. I still can't watch that movie. That little alien is [censored] creepy.

so i'm not the only who thinks that :lmao:

I saw the movie when I was 10. It didn't scare me but I remember I didn't understand some parts of it. In my opinion it shouldn't be watched until you're 13, not for the movie being somewhat disturbing but to make sure you comprehend it better than a kid can.

My parents didn't let me watch Popeye until much later (mom didn't like the 'solve issues by violence' themes). Yet oddly if it was a book they never even checked to see what it was, or didn't care. Because books, of course, were always educational/good for the mind, I guess. :laugh:

I'm not sure I'd say parents are more protective of media content then they used to be, actually....those are the types of things that just fluctuate with time and generational moral philosophies. One generation it's a certain list of books, another it's a certain list of movies, another it's a list of games. Same ol' same ol'. But overall I sometimes watch my family/the news/people around me & think there's more of a tendency to be...afraid?...for physical & mental safety of children and loved ones in general, which can kind of bleed over into everything a bit & cause over-reaction or over-protectiveness. All these laws now...sometimes it seems a bit silly. To me anyway.

This.

I actually read this book for the first time about 4 years ago. I was hard pressed for reading material due to my location at the time. I enjoyed it once I was able to get into it. Not sure how I missed it when I was a youngster. I don't even remember ever seeing the movie.

That was weird but yet looks really familiar....
How lovely murderous bunnies is familiar to me, I do not know.

My mother always swore by Watership Down and forced me to watch the movie when I was younger...

My reaction was something like "Why would you do this to me??"

Ha that is nothing , you are a funny guy. Unless you were born maybe forty years ago. Sure I see why showing it to a 1st grader might be bad but I am 18 and this is just a silly cartoon to me.