If it's animated, it must be for kids.

[mariamousie1]

There have been dirty cartoons since the days of Betty Boop. Not all cartoons are for kids. Where has this woman been?

[cinema guy]

There was always movies and shows on TV that I wasn't allowed to watch but the other kids at school were, including The Hammer House of Horror and James Bond movies. This is going back to the late 70s, before video. While James Bond wasn't inappropriate for 10-12 year olds (though was probably on too late for a scholl night), Hammer certainly was.

Even when I was 12 or 13, when video rentals first started I had a friend whose parents would let him watch videos such as Dawn of the Dead and the Exorcist (before it was banned as a video nasty).

So letting kids watch inappropriate stuff isn't exactly new.

[iradney]

.

So letting kids watch inappropriate stuff isn't exactly new.

Shoot, you probably had caveparents who let the cavekids look at the naughty wall paintings...

When I was a sprog tho, my parents didn't really need to meddle in what I watched. It was cartoons and fantasy and muppets and Jim Hensonland all the way for me!

[Palomita]

I remember my parents refusing to let me watch the series ER with them because they didn't want me to get scarred :P

The show always started late... so the start of the show meant my sister and I had to go to bed, lol. I'm kinda thankful for that... I used to hate needles and stuff like that... sometimes it still makes me queasy... so I probably would've had a hard time watching that as a kid, heh.

I remember when I was 12 staying up late one night with a few other friends at a sleepover and us all watching Bleu Nuit because we were curious as to what the fuss was all about :P Of course the parents of my friend were already in bed, and we made sure to put the volume on really really low so they wouldn't wake up and find out, heh.

[tollbaby]

I remember when I was 12 staying up late one night with a few other friends at a sleepover and us all watching Bleu Nuit because we were curious as to what the fuss was all about :P Of course the parents of my friend were already in bed, and we made sure to put the volume on really really low so they wouldn't wake up and find out, heh.

*groan* I was NEVER allowed to watch Saturday Night Live (even at age 17) because my dad would always stay up to watch Bleu Nuit. After I moved out, I was sleeping over at my parents' one night, couldn't sleep, so schlepped down to the basement to watch tv.... and caught my dad doing the nasty while watching it!!!!! Talk about scarring me for life.

[Becks]

When I saw the name for the thread, I knew what it was about and where it was going. :sigh: Stupid woman.

I've seen the occasional anime movie. Never seen other...genres(?) Don't tell me they're actually hardcore.

Not all cartoons are for kids.

A good many Bugs Bunny and Pepe Le Pew cartoons come to mind...

[marlovino]

To prove the point about most cartoons are marketed to adults ponder this:


The cartoon 'Bugs Bunny and the Three Bears". (For those who need a refresher about the cartoon click here). In the beginning of the cartoon when they are all sitting around the dinner table planning on how to catch a rabbit for dinner look on the back wall at the calendar on the right and tell me what you see.

[Skandranon]

My parents let us watch whatever we wanted, which didn't really matter since I STILL watch childrens movies. The only time I was told I couldn't watch something was when I got bored and found a vhs in my mom's room titled "The Visitor". My brother and I watched about an hour of the softcore, wondering where the heck the plot had run off to, before mom came in and started screaming.

Once she'd gotten calmed down, she pulled me aside and said I could watch it if I really wanted to, so long as I hid it from my younger brother. But I thought it was a bloody boring movie and quickly fled back to my Disney collection.

[AFpheonix]

and the lady said, "Oh, he loves that violence stuff." I opened the manga to the first page and showed it to her (the first page features the hero of the story having graphic sex with a demon women, suring which he decapitates her).

She did not buy the manga, and hopefully she learned to keep an eye on what her kid was reading.

Violence is ok, but sex is right out?

[Gawdzillers]

My parents are quite the hypocrites.
They let me watch all sorts of nasty stuff. The Sopranos, American Beauty (I think that was the first movie I ever saw that showed breasts. I thought the story was still good.), and some movie where this guy draws naked women. Great Expectations I think it's called.

Anyway, they let me watch that stuff and then get mad if GTA: San Andreas has the F word in it.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking, and the answer is no, they don't know about the Hot Coffee mod. Not that I can even access it anyway.

[cinema guy]

But Great Expectations is art. It is Dickens after all. While everyone knows that GTA is a video game and video games are the root of all evil.

If I were your parents (or anybody's for that matter), I'd be more worried about the lavels of glorious, gratuitous violence in GTA rather than the F-word.

[GayleShy]

My mother was the strict one, but my dad let us watch pretty much whatever he was watching, even if it wasn't something my mother would like.

The one time he got caught and bawled out was when he was letting us stay up until 11:00 PM on a school night (bed time was 8:30) and we were watching an LA Law that he'd recorded. (LA Law was a BIG no-no.)

And as to the OP, I used to watch a lot more anime/read manga than I do now, and none of it was for kids. Thing is, parents would drop their kids off at the bookstore whenever I was there, and the kids would just flip through whatever one caught their eye. I thought I'd die laughing when a ten year old picked up a yaoi (boy/boy) manga and freaked out.

[siead_lietrathua]

My mother was the strict one, but my dad let us watch pretty much whatever he was watching, even if it wasn't something my mother would like.
I thought I'd die laughing when a ten year old picked up a yaoi (boy/boy) manga and freaked out.

to the one: my dad would often do that by accident! we would often go out and rent indie movies, and 9 out of ten times he would pick something with sex. violence he didnt care about, but a flash of skin and he turns beet red (kinda funny really)

the the second: if yo uthink that is funny, imagine 13 year old girls screamig their heads off about yaoi when all they mean is men making out. yaoi is much more hardcore. silly teens.

[JustADude]

Violence is ok, but sex is right out?

And that, right there, is pretty much one of the roots of what's wrong with society today.

And, to avoid going off on a massive rant about THAT, let me offer my own experiences:

As a kid, what I watched and read wasn't really censored at all... of course, I was reading at an adult level by the time I was 7-8 so I had a good grasp of the difference between fantasy and reality from a young age. We always rented tapes and went to the movies together, but that was a bonding thing more than a chaperon thing. I was mostly into the typical kids stuff, anyway, but if I wanted to see something R-Rated she'd take me, since they tended to be the good ones.

Her brother, my uncle, introduced me to Anime when I was about 13 and I discovered H-Anime a couple years later when a friend smuggled me a VHS bootleg of La Blue Girl . It was... interesting... but nothing that broke my fragile little mind any more than the internet porn I'd already discovered.

After I'd moved out, when it looked like my late fiancee and I were about to settle down and start a family, Mom told me that she was told by HER mother "You have a child, you raise an adult". Since I seem to have turned out fairly well, I'd say that style of parenting works just fine.

[Becks]

Mom told me that she was told by HER mother "You have a child, you raise an adult".

That's a damn good philosophy.