Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Won't Somebody Please Think Of The Children?


So I caught the new Ultimate Avengers movie on cable the other day. Pretty good, a definite improvement on the first. Considering the fact that the first was pretty bad, that may not seem like much of a complement, but there's actually some good bits in the new film ... and wisely, they stuck pretty close to the rock 'em sock 'em action. So even if I wasn't blown away I was sufficiently entertained for an hour and change.

But, yeah, I don't know if I'd want my kids, at least young kids, watching this thing. First, there's a great scene where the Black Widow (in an extremely small dress, no less) takes a cocktail olive out of Tony Stark's martini and, um, swallows it. It only lasts about three seconds but it was a lot more suggestive than I'd have expected, even for a PG film. The most questionable bit, however, was the scene near the, um, climax of the film, when Iron Man and Giant Man have to fly into the heart of the Skrull spaceship to blow it up. Doesn't sound bad, but on film it basically plays as the two of them flying into a large vagina and stimulating a glowing clitoris the size of the Flatiron building. Now, I can't be the only one who saw that, right? Right? I've seen a copy of that one sitting around at work, so I know some of the kids are watching it.

Yesterday I was sitting at work watching television with a group of kids - an episode of Dragonball GT, I believe. Now, I am no Dragonball expert - I can vaguely recognize Goku but I had to have someone explain to me why he was a kid again. But it seemed odd to me that the storyline in this particular episode was that Goku goes to hell, gets tortured by the Devil and tormented by the souls of the people he's killed, and is then devoured by this weird dude with a giant penis growing out of his back. It's not even some kind of vague resemblance to a penis - no, it's a giant, elongated pink penis, complete with enlarged tip and undulating ribs. It grabs Goku and swallows him whole. As I sat in this room with a dozen kids and two or three other staff, I wondered if I was the only person in the entire world who didn't think that was really, really messed up, at least in the context of a kids' cartoon? No one else seemed to notice, which is really disturbing on a whole 'nother level.

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