Rated G - for the gazillions you will spend on therapy later...

Elizabeth's family birthday party was kind of a bust. We cancelled the "joint" party, and decided to just have a family thing out at my mom's. Well, ended up that no one could make it. One of my grandmother's brothers died, my uncle had to have a defibullator put in, and my brother was having a personal crisis. Elizabeth had a great time, but it was really like just another day at meme's, but with cupcakes and a couple of presents.

So to make up for it, I called my friend Tasha, and asked her to bring her girls and meet me in Hot Springs for dinner and a movie. And when you are taking little kids to the movies, what better choice is there right now but "Chicken Little"? Well, we may as well have taken them to see "The Fog".

Don't get me wrong - Tasha and I loved the movie. We laughed obnoxiously throughout, while most of the rest of the theater sat quietly. It appealed to our weird sense of humor.

What irks me is that they show the ads for these movies, and the ads are a bunch of cutie Chicken Little with his cutie friends doing cutie things, and you think, "Now THERE is a good wholesome movie!" It's not until you get your kids in the theater, and the sky cracks open in an awfully horrific manner, and all these spaceships come down out of the cracks and when the spaceships open up, and these huge, scary spider aliens come out with feet ending in metal spikes, and they start destroying everything in their path and your kid starts crying to go home and burying her face in your lap that you think, "Huh. Maybe we should have previewed this first....?" And it only got worse from there. We actually checked the movie poster when we left to make sure it didn't say PG13.

After we got the little kids in the car, (the bigger girls went to see a different movie that ended an hour after ours... at 13, it is apparently "uncool" to go see a kid's movie with your mom and her best friend, and two little kids... LOL!!) and took them to Sonic for drinks, I reminded Tasha how things have come full circle. Ten years ago, when her oldest was 3, we fell into this same trap with Toy Story. We see the ads with silly old Woody and confused, kooky, Buzz, and all the toy room gang and thought it would be a great movie to take Kasey to see. She became so hysterical over the mean kid next door and his scary mutant toys that we really DID leave the theater. I didn't see the end of the movie until it came out on video.

What is the problem with making a kids movie that is really just for kids? Do we have to have the scary situations, the adult targeted jokes, and crazy storylines? Do moviemaker people think we as adults are so self centered that we can't give two hours (or an hour, in this case) of our time strictly for our childrens entertainment, without having to be entertained ourselves?

It's kind of sad really.