Review: Rating T.V. Shows and Movies I Watched as a Kid

When I was still a small child, I didn’t watch that much TV. My family had cable TV and a DVD player that we still use to this day. Roku hadn’t been invented just yet and we wouldn’t get a Roku system until I was about eight or nine (I’m only a teenager, but this is making me feel old now). Most of the stuff we watched either had to come from the library in the form of DVDs or we had to wait for the show to come on at a certain time and then endure the five minutes of ads that would play between suspenseful moments.  Would the characters finally figure out how to spell “ant” or would they perish in the depths of their own ignorance? We will find out after these messages. Now that I’m much older and haven’t watched these shows in years, I’ve decided to go back and review some of those very nostalgic pieces of art that have been seared into my brain.

#1: Fraggle Rock

What can I say about this show? Hmm…

Oh, yeah…

It was nightmare fuel.

My parents had a huge box of Fraggle Rock DVDs from I don’t know when that they would occasionally put on for me to watch and I remember that while I liked some of the episodes and the messaging was fine, there were also so many episodes where I was absolutely confused as to what the heck was happening and totally creeped out by many of the puppets. Like quite a few of the shows and movies I’ll be mentioning today, Fraggle Rock was a Jim Henson project and you could totally tell that he was doing some sort of drug while creating this show. Out of curiosity, I looked up some clips of the show to figure out if I’ve outgrown my fear of the Fraggles, but found out that I have in fact not. I was still disturbed by them and had to turn off the video.

Ultimately, I will give it a rating of 1/10.

#2: Penguins of Madagascar

Though I wasn’t a Nickelodeon kid growing up, one of the few shows from Nickelodeon that I would watch was The Penguins of Madagascar. This show was very popular for several years and it was something that I would wake up early for on Sunday mornings to watch while my dad made breakfast. We all enjoyed the show and to this day, we will still watch the episodes of it that we have on DVD. The jokes still land, and the animation – while definitely inferior to some of the animation used in the Madagascar movies and later spin-off, All Hail King Julien – still holds up and looks pretty good.

It gets a 10/10 from me.

#3: Once Upon a Time

Once Upon a Time aired around the time I was five or so and it was one of those few shows where my mom and I would line up our chairs on the opposite side of the dinner table so we could see the TV and watch the show. This continued for most of the time on (I think) Wednesday nights until the show started becoming way oversexualized and very much like a CW show (which was impressive since it was already pretty cheesy). I tried rewatching it a while back, but only managed to get through half of the first season before losing interest.

In terms of good memories that I got from watching the show, I would rate it as a 9/10, though in terms of how good the show actually was, I would rate it a 6/10; good until it wasn’t.

#4: Sesame Street

This was a Jim Henson production that did not give me nightmares and I loved it when I was little. I remember my dad waking me up in the early morning and plopping me down in front of the TV with my mom to binge watch the it while he got ready to go to work. So many good memories were made of spending the morning binging Sesame Street that I will give it a 7/10.

(Disclaimer: I’m only talking about the seasons that aired in around the 2000-2010’s before Sesame Street starting pushing LGBTQ+ and CRT on kindergarteners and Elmo started unleashing emotional hell on Twitter. Anything made nowadays by Sesame Street sucks and you shouldn’t let your kids watch it.)

#5: Lord of the Rings

Obviously, being raised by two Tolkien fans, I watched those movies constantly while growing up. If I didn’t want to watch anything else in the mornings on weekends, I would just pop the DVD in and we would watch it while going about our chores. It was even better when the rule of “1 movie per child in the morning” went into an effect. Even though I only watched the theatrical renditions of LOTR as a kid, those movies were still extremely long and I naturally took advantage of that to take over the T.V. for a longer period of time than my brother got.

No wonder he doesn’t like those movies.

Overall, I give it a 10/10. Every parent should let their kids watch The Lord of the Rings at a young age.

#6: My Little Pony

I never really got into My Little Pony (the original or the newer versions) or the spinoff series Equestria Girls (I’m cringing at the name too) until after my family got our first Roku player. After that, I would sometimes watch it in the mornings and I remember really enjoying the art style and soundtrack. The messaging was pretty good, and looking back on it, I really like how they incorporated so many Easter eggs from Greek mythology in some of the longer episodes concerning the bigger battles between the forces of friendship and the forces of…I don’t know what. Darkness, maybe?

The message of the show about how friendship is magic and yada-yada was fairly uplifting to me as a child who didn’t have a ton of friends and though friendships are definitely harder to form in real life, the general values shown that go into a good friendship are very true to real life and for that, I’ll give the show an 8.75/10. It had some issues, but overall, it was good.

#7: VeggieTales

This was a staple of every Christian household from the mid-1990s to today. For those of you who weren’t raised in a Christian (or semi-Christian) home, the show revolves around Larry the cucumber and Bob the tomato and their other vegetable/fruit friends who go on zany adventures around town and learn about how much God loves them.

I’m not kidding.

That’s the plot.

Two Christian vegetables going on adventures to prove God is good.

As though that wasn’t weird enough, some of the episodes and even longer movies were either about the vegetables reenacting famous bible stories (like the story of Jonah), fairytales (like The Princess and the Pea or Beauty and the Beast), or straight up doing parodies of famous movies, like The Lord of the Rings (which they cleverly renamed The Lord of the Beans…because of course they did).

In terms of the general message, I would give VeggieTales a 9/10 since there aren’t that many kids’ shows that promote a Christian message, but in terms of everything else, I would give it a 6/10 for cringe.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go make a salad.

Until next time,

M.J.