Old kid movies and shows you remember fondly

Dungeons and Dragons

Loved this show. My mom didn't let me watch it if she saw it on, because she thought D&D glorified the occult.

The Neverending Story

I used to draw the Ivory Tower. Also it was awesome because we watched it in class sometimes and the sphinxes had giant boobs.

Wonderama with Sonny Fox, and The Soupy Sales Show

I was obsessed with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure as a little kid, even though I guess it wasn't really a kid's movie.

The Wind in the Willows

OP My mother and aunt took me and my brother and cousins to Bedknobs. We bought candy in the supermarket first (!) which was such a budget move and which I’m sure my mother only did to be agreeable to my cheap bossy aunt. Loved the movie and for weeks I tried to get my goddamned bed to fly!

Born Free!

Snoopy Come Home (1972)

[quote] Bedknobs and Broomsticks

Not as good as Mary Poppins--let's face it.

The Gnome Mobile. I saw this in the wonderful John Danz theater which had an enclosed section for people with babies. The lobby was mid-century modern and before it was torn down, I managed to get 5 lobby chairs which I use in my kitchen. They’re a dusty pink Naugahyde and so cool.

Thomasina I liked a lot.

The Banana Splits

The Saturday morning Archies cartoons

Monster movies on TV - Rodan, Mothra, Ghidorah, Gorgo, Reptilicus, The Giant Behemoth, Valley of the Gwangi . . .

I still like the original Scooby Doo.

R11 Those were the pre VCR days when you saw it when it aired or risked never ever seeing it. I was mad at my mother for ten years for not letting me stay up to watch “Destroy All Monsters.”

Gargoyles. TV Movie with Jennifer Salt and Cornel Wilde.

The Cliffwood Avenue Kids, although I doubt many people remember it.

There was a tv movie first shown around 1975 about a Witch that lives in the attic of a house that a mother and son moved into. The Witch makes these wonderful blueberry pancakes that make everyone who eats them go from being sour drips to happy and joyous. I can't remember the name of the movie. For some reason I remember seeing it on Columbus day or one of those NON holidays you get off from school.

Land Of The Lost (1974)

R16 Was it light or scary?

Troop Beverly Hills

The War of the Gargantuas

[quote] There was a tv movie first shown around 1975 about a Witch that lives in the attic of a house that a mother and son moved into. The Witch makes these wonderful blueberry pancakes that make everyone who eats them go from being sour drips to happy and joyous. I can't remember the name of the movie.

[quote] [R16] Was it light or scary?

Can't you tell from the description, Rose? It was basically the American equivalent of "Cannibal Holocaust."

The Friendly Giant

Pinwheel. No one else I know remembers it, but I LOVED that show.

Swiss Family Robinson. The version with James McArthur. I wanted him to be my boyfriend and to live in the treehouse together.

The youngest brother, Francis, could stay because I thought he was fun. But middle brother Ernst could leave. That’d be fine with me.

Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World.

I was obsessed with the movie The Biggest One I Ever Saw as a child.

Romper Room, Brakeman Bill, Wunda, Wunda.

R18- It was light

R23 I vaguely remember. It’s one of the first tv shows I remember watching. There was a grumpy guy with glasses. I think he was broccoli? He was green, I believe.

"Young Love, First Love."

Valerie Bertinelli sings (badly) and avoids her slut mother's advice about fucking men in backseats.

Picture Pages! I always wanted my own Mortimer Ichabod Marker. Never got one.

Pippi movies. The ones from a Scandinavian TV program edited into feature films for American kids. Pippi seemed disturbingly functional...mental. I don’t know why gay people want to be called queer because Pippi in those movies is, to me, Queer.

Escape to Witch Mountain was a favorite. Also the original Dr. Dolittle with Rex Harrison.

Well, fuck! I screwed up my post above. I plead the headaches...

Loved me some Witchy Poo.

Hayley Mills acted in several, from Disney.

All the movies on daily movie shows in the tri-state TV area could be childrens movies. I mean I watched the 4:30 movie and I don't remember movies being above my head - they were fascinating.

On the more Obscure I have always been fond of Journey Back to OZ, It used to play on WGN Chicago 'Family Classics." HBO used to Play the 1974 Japanimation version of Jack in the Beanstalk. Raggedy Ann and Andy A Musical Adventure.

Thomasina. Something about a cat.

The Gnome Mobile. Something about gnomes riding around in a little car..

The Double Deckers, a British kids show that would sometimes play here in America. Something about kids hanging out in an abandoned boss.

Does anyone remember Disney's Island at the Top of the World?

R38 see r10

Charlotte's Web, Benji, Freaky Friday, The Bad News Bears, The Apple Dumpling Gang, Pete's Dragon, For the Love of Benji, The Black Hole.

Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas from early 80s HBO. I watched it again recently and it's not as good as I remembered.

You Can't Do That On Television

Most of the kids were 5 -7 years older than me so they seemed cool and being from Texas their Canadian accents sounded exotic.

It's also the show that started the whole green slime thing on Nickelodeon.

[quote]There was a tv movie first shown around 1975 about a Witch that lives in the attic of a house that a mother and son moved into. The Witch makes these wonderful blueberry pancakes that make everyone who eats them go from being sour drips to happy and joyous.

r17, it was called "Winter Of The Witch", starring none other than every DL threatre queens delight, Hermione Gingold ...and Anna Strasberg. I remember it being on YouTube awhile back.

R44 I LOVED that show. My mom was on this "no cable tv!" kick and she ended up cancelling our cable because she thought we (the kids) were watching too much TV. But before it was cancelled I saw many an episode on Nickelodeon.

I still remember Moose, and the soap opera skit where Luke's arm was in the wastebasket, and of course the green slime anytime anyone said "I don't know" (I think).

I remember seeing the episodes were available for streaming somewhere not long ago. I should go back and watch some of those.

Watcher in the Woods (1980)

This show creeped me out. I remember the climax in the old church. Was pretty dark for a Disney movie at the time.

The Black Cauldron

Not to post too many Disney movies, but I loved this weird tale. The movie was impossible to get anywhere (not sure if it's available now?) so I've only seen it once, in the theaters. I remember at the time seeing a "behind the scenes" look on some tv show that mentioned they'd recorded the sound of the space shuttle launching as the sound of the Black Cauldron being activated.

This movie came out with a Sierra adventure game of the same name, and I loved both the movie and the game. It got me to read the books the movie was based on. They were sort of strange tales that weren't like other stuff I read at the time.

An American Tail, which was in my opinion on the level of some Disney animated classics, but it sits in relative obscurity. The last time I remember hearing anyone mention it was some joke about furries at a standup show several years ago.

Not super old, but loved The Secret Garden 90s film. Gorgeous music and cinematography, and super dark. I loved disturbing children’s movies!

Others:

Return to Oz

Child of Glass

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (and the Child Catcher)!

Whoever said Pippi movies—loved the first film adapted for American audiences (bad English dubbing and all!)! To this day I have a fascination with Sweden because of that movie!!!!!

Fondly, but also a bit disturbed by it. The Selfish Giant that was on TV in the early 70s with the most exquisite sepia toned animation. Of course I had no idea until later that it was based on Oscar Wilde’s story and of course we weren’t really religious enough for me to grasp the whole thing, but I was a somewhat melancholy child and I looked forward to it each year. I remember the music being mesmerizing as well.

I liked the Pippi movies too. They were so strange!

Krull! Unfortunately, Ken Marshall hasn't aged well.

I loved this one season mid 70s live action Saturday morning TV show called the Kids from C.A.P.E.R. Especially the very blond and dreamy Biff Warren who played the melancholy Doomsday who could speak to the animals and was very sweet. It was a wackfest in the vein of the Monkees. By all indications, even though he had married, Biff was most likely Bisexual if not Gay and seems to have died young in 1993 of AIDS. So of course he was the one my eleven year old self would have had my first crush on.

This is a passionate website dedicated to the show by some fan more obsessive then me. Here’s Biff’s page, he could have out Mark Hamilled Mark Hamilton.

I’ll tell you what was fuckin’ BORING to a child - “The Tales of Beatrix Potter”. The dancers all wear big, heavy masks over their heads and there’s no dialogue. It’s not very engaging.

I’d probably be more interested watching it today.

This 1985 Alice in Wonderland movie was horrible. The child actress sucked. But as a kid, I found Carol Channing both frightening and intriguing.

More people should be named "Biff" nowadays.

R58 Well his full name was William Wayne Warren, which makes him prescient in being WWW before the Web. Where Biff came from who knows, but it goes back to American slang meaning “bully,” and ironically one of his first jobs was playing a bully on Shazam on Saturday mornings TV!

There was this very creepy kids movie The Amazing Mr. Blunden in the early 70s based on the book Ghosts by Antonia Barber. It’s got everything- ghosts, haunted ruins, death by fire, time travel, disappearing graves. Apparently, there a new holiday version coming out at Christmas on British TV this year, very exciting.

New version!

[quote]It’s got everything- ghosts, haunted ruins, death by fire, time travel, disappearing graves.

Sounds like New York City's hottest new club!

The less famous Disney stuff like "Million Dollar Duck", "Son of Flubber", "The Wackiest Ship in the Navy", "The Boatniks", "The Computer Who Wore Tennis Shoes", "Herbie the Love Bug Rides Again", "The Monkey's Uncle". I used to live for those movies!

I loved Don Knotts' movies --

The Shakiest Gun in the West

The Reluctant Astronaut

The Apple Dumpling Gang

The Incredible Mr. Limpet

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken

TV favorites included --

Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom

The Wonderful World of Disney

R63 The Boatniks, wow. Without checking, I’m gonna say Stefanie Powers was in that. And only as an adult am I realizing it’s a play on “beatniks.”

R65 here, I was right, Stefanie Powers. And according to Wikipedia, Wally Cox played a sort of yacht pimp:

“Wally Cox had a supporting role playing a man who manages a boat for girls to give parties for the purposes of socializing with men.”

I was a big fan of the Herbie movies

Born Free—I remember how scandalized my fellow fourth-graders and I were when we saw that the hot daddy and his beautiful wife SHARED a pair of pajamas. “She wears the top and he wears the bottoms” was a chant on the playground for weeks.

Surprised no one has said The Electric Company yet.

When I was in first grade I would watch tv before school and the line up was Lassie (5am) Mr. Wizard’s World (5:30), and two episodes of Gumby (6 & 6:30). That was the best. The schedule changed the next year, or I slept in later, can’t remember, but I loved that first grade Nickelodeon lineup.

Seeing a bunch of shows in this thread I want to watch now, or rewatch.

I liked "The Shaggy Dog" (1959) because it had magic, Renaissance curses, evil foreigners, the Borgias, and a giant fluffy dog. I liked the book based on the movie more than the movie (my mom used to buy me random books from garage sales and I'd end up with a wide variety of stories). I saw the original in black and white (it's since been colorized).

Song of the South, which Disney have locked in a vault forever.

The Wild Wild West

I liked the sets and the over the top villains. Also, Robert Conrad in tight pants.

The Phantom Tollbooth with Butch “Eddie Munster” Patrick.

I also loved The Munsters.

The Great Space Coaster!

I wasn't a super fan of E.T. (1982) but I totally loved the board game. I still have it.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, I watched every Disney movie on TV and in theaters. I remember I saw Song of the South (1946) in my local movie theater (and loved it). According to Wikipedia, the film was rereleased to U.S. theaters in 1980, so that's the year I saw it. I have since watched it online (from time to time it appears on random websites). You can also buy it in on bootleg DVD from numerous online sellers.

R78 Now tell the kiddies why that movie isn't available on VHS or DVD anymore.

Anyone else have the Mickey Mouse Disco (1979) record album? My favorite track was Macho Duck. 🦆 The album went double platinum in the U.S. and made it to #35 on the Billboard pop album chart! 💿🎸🎶

Theodore Tugboat

Anyone else read Disneyland magazine in the 1970s? The magazine helped me learn to read. My parents would buy me the latest issue at Kmart (which was THE place for interesting kid things back then). I still have my old issues!

R75 beat me to the Phantom Tollbooth, but the book is infinitely better than the film.

The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Live action, with "real" actors playing Huck Finn, Becky Thatcher, and Tom Sawyer, plus animation. Ted Cassidy (Lurch on The Addams Family) voiced the villain, Injun Joe. The show was a short-lived Saturday morning series in the late 1960s but I watched it throughout the1970s when episodes were included on the show Banana Splits. It's now on DVD, which I have. ❤

My favorite cartoon as a kid was The Roman Holidays.

I also liked The Groovie Ghoolies.

I loved watching Walt Disney as a kid. It aired Sunday nights at 7:00 here in Canada for a very long time. One of my favourite movies was THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY. It’s from 1963, but I saw it in the 70s. I know it was remade, but I think the animals talked. That kind of ruined it. I’ve never seen it though.

One of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons of the late 1970s was Laff-A-Lympics (other faves were Speed Buggy, Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels, and Baggy Pants and the Nitwits). I still have the Laff-A-Lympics comic books. *My* team was the Yogi Yahooies!

I also like on Saturday mornings "The Saturday Superstar Movie"!

When I was a young boy, I LOVED “The Incredible Mr. Limpet”

Come for Don Lnotts; stay for Jack Weston and Carole Cook.

(Now, I’m a big “Ghost and Me Chicken” fan.)

The CBS Children's Film Festival had two movies that really stuck with me into adulthood:

"Hand in Hand," directed by Philip Leacock. Two English kids, a Jewish girl and a Catholic boy, become best friends. At the end, they take a trip down a canal that turns into a river, and the girl falls into the water and nearly drowns.

"Tony and the Tick-Tock Dragon." A rascally little Hungarian boy is locked in bathroom as punishment, and some cartoon characters come up from the drain in the bathtub. He shrinks to their size, and they take him down the drain into their world, where he fights a dragon. I remember him repeating, "Hah-HOO, hah-HOO!" My siblings and I had no idea what it meant, but we ran around the house yelling "hah-HOO!"

My parents took my brothers and I to see NAPOLEON AND SAMANTHA (1972) at the drive-in. It had to have been around ‘74 or ‘75 because my mother’s father had recently died. It was memorable because mom went to the bathroom and got stuck in the stall. She had to eventually crawl out under the door. She was so upset. You can imagine how clean the floor would have been. I liked the movie although it was sad from what I remember. It starred Jodie Foster, Johnny Whittaker and Will Geer.

[quote] My parents took my brothers and I

my brothers and me

Spoiler alert for r90’s rose-colored glasses—the girl dies and the boy goes to her spooky Jewish funeral.

R82 Yes, I had at least six or seven issues. It was really illustrated beautifully. I took very good care of my things as a child…these disappeared, which I was none too happy about.

In the mid 70s, we watched an educational program called "Inside Out".

Pretty sure it was a weekly thing.

It always taught children an important life lesson in 30 minutes with a different cast every week.

One of my favorites was about an AA family moving to a better opportunity and the youngest boy wanting to stay behind.

It was titled, "Traveling Shoes".

I was obsessed with this obscure TV movie. Did anyone else ever see this?

Planet Of The Apes- TV show (1974)

Did any of you watch, later in school, episodes of the 1947-1957 Walter Cronkite CBS news show called “You Are There” where it acted as if they were doing a news program directly from an historical event? I have a very clear memory of the Trojan War one, but didn’t see it on YouTube, so here is the one from the Titanic.

The Magic Garden

HR Pufnstuf was fun.

It was also proof that writers/producers/crew could be cranked off their asses on drugs and still make TV

As a budding journalist I remember this from Saturday mornings.

The theme music was strange but compelling.

In the 1970s schools had a limited number of reel to reel films they actually owed and would show them over and over again during bad weather and indoor recess in the auditorium. One I loved was Paddle to the Sea bout the carved wooden Indian in the canoe that gets launched in Lake Superior and makes it way to the St. Lawrence Seaway. It was filmed in the 1960s, but based on a children’s book from twenty years earlier.

Another film they showed a lot was a natural history one that I had mixed emotions about, it showed the life of family of otters. At one point there is a landslide and some of them are killed and it was a devastating thing for an overly sensitive child like me.

I aged out of this show on PBS in the early 1980s that was about getting middle school kids excited about science and only found out about it going to the university behind it’s educational curriculum, but it was called the Voyage of the Mimi. It’s most notable in that it was Ben Affleck’s first starring role as the grandson of the captain of the boat and I’ve always wondered if middle school gay boys at the time mooned over him and fell in love with Ben that early on. Besides the show, the boat did White Squall like educational journeys after the series, but ultimately had a sad fate as noted in the Wikipedia article. Too bad Ben didn’t get involved in time to save it, but I guess he was to busy chasing whores around.

OMG I vaguely remember this.

Bowl cut Ben!

I want to see the episode where the Mimi gets taken over by pirates and Ben becomes their new cabin boy.

R102 - wow, I had forgotten about "Paddle to the Sea" until you mentioned it just now. Funny how memories sit in your brain untouched for decades.

An obscure one for an American kid -But I've never forgotten it.

R102 You can stream it now

Big Blue Marble

Hong Kong Phooey

I watched my very first gay porn called THE BIGGEST ONE I EVER SAW on 📼 when I was 9 years old circa 1986.

Teddy Ruxpin. The only kid's show that wasn't just random bullshit every episode. An actual story. Well that and the Japanese Wizard of OZ cartoon which I forget the name of.

I actually groaned aloud at the sudden memory of Paddle to the Sea.

There was a series of film strips about the Pacific Northwest, a grandma took her grandkids around WA and OR, showing them various natural and historical sights. It had an odd theme song: 'Up in the mountains... down on the plain... and beside the beautiful sea....'

From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler

R80 I still have the Disco Mickey Mouse album and booklet as well. My favorite track from there is The Greatest Band. Anyways I loved and still love Cloak and Dagger. It was pretty dark for a children’s movie looking back.

R114 loved the book, never saw that movie, I'll have to check it out.

R48 There is a documentary on The Back Cauldron on youtube, its history and what was cut from it. I wasn't a fan of the movie but this is fascinating and well worth watching.

The Sword In The Stone, and Mary Poppins. My grandad took me into the city to see kid movies back in the day> I think I even got dressed up. The only way to see first-run movies was at the big movie theaters in the city. They even had souvenir programs. They would debut there then trickle down for a year or more to the smaller cities, then the towns, and outposts. Sometimes you could see a movie at the drive in a year or more after it came out.

r117 ooh, I'll have to check that out. I thought the movie was really neat because it was so dark and was based around myths I wasn't familiar with at the time.

I liked the Sword in the Stone too, r118!

Wishbone on PBS, That dog introduced me to classic literature.

Pete & Pete on Nickelodean