The future looks bleak, yo

Waking up with "We Are The Champions" by Queen stuck in your head is more than enough to get the gears turning and the wonder machine working on trying to figure out whatever happened to heartwarming, clever, well-written kids sports movies like The Mighty Ducks and The Sandlot. Airbud does not count, nor do the many sequels where Airbud has to play soccer or football. Somehow Beethoven is close, although that didn't really involve sports in any way. But seriously, where did these films go? When and why was it decided that all kids movies must be some type of animation? (And on that note, why are all animated movies now done in that Pixar style rather than drawn? Sorry, I just don't like that stuff. It feels effortless and generic, like the bad Flash animations Flash tutorials have you make.)

I think maybe part of it is that the actors who rocked those old school kids sports movies have all grown up into gross adults and stuff. For instance, I rented this awesomely bad-looking horror movie a while back because it had the fat kid from The Sandlot (he was also the goalie in The Big Green) in it, but it turns out he lost weight when he grew up. LAME. There are some people who just shouldn't be allowed to not be fat; Wayne Knight, better known as Newman from Seinfeld, is another one. That guy just would not be hilarious if he was thin. Who would want to see a dilophosaurus maul a thin guy? Not me. Not even if they played the same scream three times in a row.

Somewhere along the way, the sincerity in kids movies just evaporated. Oh sure, there are probably some good ones that came out in recent years, but I seriously doubt that people will still be making t-shirts of their catch phrases twenty or thirty years from now. I bring that up because I saw an awesome "You're Killin' Me, Smalls!" shirt the other day and wanted the crap out of it, but I had to pass it up because I am poor. But that's okay, because I've got my memories, unlike today's kids. When they grow up and go to college and be poor, there's no way they're going to see shirts of Bolt or Cars and want them. There's just no way! I would seriously bet my roomie's right pinkie against it.

Finally, a kids movie that isn't afraid to scare the shit out of kids

In case you don't follow movies very closely, Coraline is a new PG-rated stop motion film about a terrifying, skeletal, praying mantis woman who lives inside the wall and tears out the eyes of children so that she can lock their souls in a dark room for the rest of eternity.

Hells yes.

I can't even remember the last time there was a good "scary as shit" kids movie. These days, all we get is Ice Age, Cars, and other formulaic CGI bore-fests that all look identical and cast tons of B-list celebrities for no apparent reason. None of them have bite and nobody will remember them 15 years from now when they're blogging on the mindnet (or whatever the future holds for written communication). But me, I remember all the kids movies I saw when I was a kid. And do you know why I remember? Because they were damn terrifying, that's why! I remember the awesome scene from the otherwise terrible movie The Phantom (rated PG, by the way) where the bad guy tricked this other bad guy into looking into a microscope that had blades hidden in the eye scopes that shot up when he turned the knobs and blinded the crap out of him. That was awesome as a ten year old. That opened up a whole new world of terror that I'd never even realized could exist before. And Nickelodeon did a whole day of programming dedicated to promoting that movie when it came out, because old school Nickelodeon knew where it was at: MIND-SHATTERING FEAR.

Which is why it's good that Coraline has come along to scare today's children. Even though it was pretty predictable, a little gimmicky with the 3D, and pretty obviously trying to milk the fact that it had Nightmare Before Christmas' director behind the wheel, Coraline was pretty freakin' scary in a kiddish sort of way. If I had seen this when I was ten, you know what I would have been having nightmares about for the next week and a half? This. And this. And I would have gained a new fear of sewing needles that would probably persist into my early 30s. Because that's what a good kids movie is all about.

Memories.