BW Media Spotlight

Well, guess what I want to die in a fire.

If you’re new to this site, you should know that the trend of kids shows turned into subversive horror is one I’m long past over. Popeye and Winnie The Pooh are public domain? Turn them into horror movies! We want to make a new Banana Splits, but now the costumes are robots who want to kill everyone because their show was canceled. They’re already planning to snag the early version of Mickey Mouse now that the early shorts have started going public. I know you hate children, but do you have to be so blatant?

When it comes to original “kids” shows, I’m usually a little more relaxed. Oh, I’m still not a fan but I’m not as angry at Five Nights And Freddy’s and its various inspirations because while it still hates your childhood it’s not ruining someone’s childhood favorites. They just find it funny that toys are killing kids and each other, video games are run by satanic cults (literally and figuratively) that steal souls, and whatever the hell else they’re going to come up with next. These are originals and I’ll take them case by case. The Freddy Fazbear games are actually kind of interesting, though I think the dead kid souls being stuffed into robots, toys, and games is getting overdone. Try something different.

I can’t decide where Buddy, a horror comedy from the guys who made that Too Many Cooks video for Adult Swim, exists on the childhate scale based on the above scene (if YouTube still has it up. If it keeps them from turning Barney the dinosaur himself into a horror movie or whatever an “A24” style movie is, I’ll reluctantly accept it. (No, really, that was a plan. For all I know it still is.) Buddy is so clearly a Barney stand-in that the final trailer just straight up ripped Barney dialog even though Keegan Michael-Key is supposed to be the character in the movie and I doubt his Billy West or Dean Wendt impression is going to be that good. (I do my research.)

Now, you might wonder how anyone could see that and think it’s a good thing for kids, rather than yet another adultified “let’s make a child thing evil” parody? And yet, according to The Mirror‘s US site that’s exactly what happened in at least a few movie theaters. From Avenue Q to The Puppetland Murders, the idea of an adultified kids show concept isn’t new. I’m surprised Doctor Who never got there given Russel T. Davies ” make mundane things scary” motif from his first run. It’s meant to be comedy, or in the case of the Freddy Fazbear franchise inspired by the supposed fear of restaurant animatronics from the 1980s that I never saw from any kids on the rare occasions I was at the local Chuck E. Cheese. Said musical robots are gone and now it’s just a birthday game space with someone in a costume…I think. I haven’t been in a long time but it’s what I see in ads when the mouse isn’t a cartoon character.

So somehow parents looked at that and said it would be great for their kids? Was that the plan? Is this another version of those YouTube ads using kids characters to up the numbers of their creepy fetish videos? (Speaking of blatant hatred of childhood innocence.) No,  it just sounds like parents realized the price for being lazy parents.

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