Mar 29 2015

Watching Great Movies With Your Kids

One of the pleasures of having kids is watching your favorite movies with them. Some are obvious — the original Star Wars trilogy, Superman, Terminator/Terminator II. Less obvious, but still a good choice, is Aliens. Matt Zoller Seitz sums up the experience of watching great movies with your kids nicely on RogerEbert.com:

as we watched, I realized again that while unfortunately you can’t see a great movie again for the first time, the next-best thing is to show it to people who’ve never seen it.

Star Wars aliens

Star Wars aliens (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(Note: the photo above has nothing to do with this article or the article on RogerEbert.com. I just thought it was a fun pic of characters from Star Wars.)

Well put. I’m not sure what the right age is to watch Aliens, since it’s a bit scarier than Star Wars and Superman. As always, we at DaddyTips advise using your own judgment when it comes to deciding when your children are ready to see certain movies. It’s definitely something that varies from kid to kid, and of course also from parent to parent. A lot of the movies I saw when I was as a kid I saw in theaters when I was younger than I might want my own kids to see said movie. The Jerk, for example. Or a number of R-rated films that I saw because it was a different time. Movies have changed, ratings have changed, kids have changed.

Sometimes it’s not even about the rating. For example, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is rated G. But without a background in the Trek characters, it’s impossible to appreciate the movie. And I personally feel it’s good parenting to make sure your children have seen Space Seed (the first appearance of the late, great Ricardo Montalbán as Khan Noonien Singh) before they see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

To be honest, Aliens wasn’t even on my list of flicks I wanted to watch with my kids, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t be. When they’re the right age, of course.

via Notes on watching “Aliens” for the first time again, with a bunch of kids | MZS | Roger Ebert.