That's meant an uptick in things that we often don't do because of the amount of time on weekends we usually spend out of the house. Like board games, and family movies or TV shows.
Only thing is, "family" TV shows sometimes don't get correctly labelled. Sometimes they'd benefit from a warning along the lines of "May be too intense for children under, oh, 18."
The following post contains spoilers about two Netflix properties, one a movie (The Mitchells vs. the Machines) and one a TV show (Sweet Tooth, though only about 40 minutes of its first episode).
Our family just finished watching the first and so far only season of a Disney+ TV show called The Secret of Sulphur Springs. It was what we watched to fill the hole left by Wandavision, which is what we watched to fill the hole left by The Mandalorian. Now we need something to fill the hole left by Sulphur Springs.
The obvious candidate, and the candidate Disney certainly wanted us to choose even before we got to Sulphur Springs, was The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. But we looked into a parent viewing guide and decided it was too likely to contain the type of semi-intense violence that's in the Marvel movies we don't let them watch -- you know, the movies the Falcon and the Winter Soldier are in.
Little did we know that our actual replacement pick would be far more traumatizing.
I should say, that my wife picked. No blame or judgment. If you do the work to find the next show for your family to watch on Sunday nights -- though it was Saturday night in this case -- saving me the trouble of having to do it, I'm in no position to criticize, nor would I want to.
But yeah, Sweet Tooth was not the right choice.
It starts with a virus that kills most of the Earth's population. That's not said in so many words, but even if you're 10 and 7, as my kids are, you pick up on it pretty quickly. When it's clear that there are only a few people left, well, that means all the others are dead.
But the extermination of the human race was not what made this show so troubling for my kids.
My older son was scarred by the telltale symptom you've got the virus, beyond the fact that you look like hell and have all the flu symptoms. It's that the pinky finger on your left hand starts fluttering uncontrollably. Just that one finger. My son told me afterward that it was going to haunt him. Fortunately, he slept well that night. (Actually he said he was awake at 3 a.m., but at least he didn't come bother us.)
For my younger son, it was that the main character -- a "hybrid" named Gus, which means he was born part human and part deer, in this case -- threw his stuffed dog on a fire in an attempt to put it out. The stuffed dog got badly burned. For a kid who still has his blanky, threadbare though it may be, this was intensely triggering. (He slept soundly as well, without even the 3 a.m. wakeup.)
Oh, and then there's the fact that his dad dies. The whole human race dying was bad, but the dad dying was much, much worse.
He is, or was, played by Will Forte, an actor we love (my wife and I are currently watching the final season of The Last Man on Earth). And so much for him being one of the stars of the show, which we thought would be the case. Yeah, he dead, to quote Tandy on that beloved end-of-the-world comedy. (What is it with Will Forte and the apocalypse?) So that's the reason my wife and I were sad, beyond our kids' evident distress.
For the kids, it was probably thinking "Well, at least Gus still has his dad." Yeah, for only about 35 minutes of the first episode, kid. They didn't specifically discuss the effect of Gus' dad's death on them, probably because it's a lot more scary to talk about fears of your dad dying than fears of having a twitching pinky finger or a burnt stuffed animal.
My older son made a couple attempts to say it was too scary and could we stop watching, but it took the younger one breaking into tears for us to finally pull the plug.
Fortunately, we recovered in a big way the next day -- even though it was still the apocalypse.
The Mitchells vs. the Machines, from Sony Animation Studios and produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (and sounding like it was written by them too though they were not credited), was also my wife's choice, but only because she got there before I did. I'd heard from multiple sources how great it was, including the actual founder of Flickchart, whom I'm friends with on Facebook. It landed at about #60 for him overall if I'm not mistaken.
This was more our speed, and quite Lego Movie-y in its general level of energy and humor.
The premise is that a dysfunctional family -- comically dysfunctional, not actually dysfunctional -- is caught out on a cross-country rode trip in its beaten up old station wagon when robots take over the world. These sentient menaces started out as personal assistants that were the outgrowth of smart phone technology, and there are some funny bits about the blithely disastrous thought processes of tech giants.
We laughed from beginning to end.
For one, nobody's dad dies. In fact, nobody dies at all. This may be the end of humanity as we know it, especially since the robots are gathering up these humans in order to shoot them into space on a one-way trip into oblivion. But that action never transpires (spoiler alert, wait I already gave you that), so it's mostly just about the antics of this family as it evades comically presented AI robots, who reminded me a bit of those droids in The Phantom Menace.
It occurred to me that you can present bleak material in a children's movie, but it can't present as bleak as it is or else it'll drive them to distraction. The Mitchells vs. the Machines understands that.
I suppose if Sweet Tooth were presented more comically than it is, it wouldn't be the type of project Sweet Tooth is trying to be. But it might have my family as viewers.
Maybe, especially during a week that we're locked down because of a virus, we needed the world to end from robot apocalypse rather than virus apocalypse. That's a lot better escapism when we can't actually escape.
There was a last benefit to The Mitchells vs. the Machines, which is a reminder of the curative power of family. We probably needed that as well at the end of a weekend in which our patience with each other had inevitably gotten short.
It was like the movie was reassuring us that we're going to be okay, and that's what any family movie should be doing.
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