Can young kids appreciate old movies?

I'm 46 but I don't have kids. So I would love to hear opinions from members with kids on this. I recently got around to watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind on Blu Ray (stunning by the way) and realized after 35 years I think it still holds up as a great movie. Whether you think it is or not isn't the point of my thread. I wondered if kids today, say no older than 15 would appreciate this kind of movie or any movies older than they are. I think they would find CE3K way too slow, no action, not enough ufo's and the aliens way too silly. Since they are surrounded today by CGI, rapid fire editing and young actors who don't hold a candle to actors from decades ago. I don't think they can appreciate a great story, moving performances and special effects that consisted of models, matte paintings and makeup. So I would like to hear your experiences when you tried to show an older movie to your kids. Did they dig it or roll their eyes?

 

Younger kids? Yep. My own enjoyed some of the same movies I enjoyed at their age.

Teens? Trickier because, as you said, their expectation levels are a little different. But I wasn't much different when I was their age - I wasn't reaching out for silents or even some B&W films, but I gained a new appreciation of them in my college years. I try to throw in an interesting (to me) older movie once in awhile and I think the one thing that my teen kids have an issue with is bad special effects. But I guess I can't blame them for that. But decent effects, even older models vs CGI, they are A-OK with.

EDIT: They liked "Young Frankenstein" for example, but the original "Clash of the Titans" they found laughable due to the very dated effects.

 

My 8 yr old watched and LOVED the Indiana jones trilogy. She liked temple of doom the most though so her taste hasn't quite developed! I also watched with her Close Encounters which she found a little scarier but liked, just not as much as Star Wars since its pace and story prob appeals more to slightly older kids. I remember seeing it as a kid but just remember the cool UFO stuff not all the rest, so seeing it as an adult, I thoroughly enjoyed it more than I remembered. Esp the beginning where Roy is trying to get his kids to go see Pinocchio - 'Toby you are this close to death!' But as a kid of the 70s, close encounters never sank into my brain like Star Wars, superma or raiders did.

So yes, kids today can enjoy these flicks. As my daughter gets older I try and remember how old I was when Star Wars came out (I was 4) or raiders (I was 8) and use that as a guide.

 

Also my daughter watches some Hitchcock movies with me like Rear Window (she covered her eyes as the killer comes to the apt). Sometimes she watches black and white films with me just for the strangeness of seeing people and styles from back then, but she'll sit and watch I love Lucy reruns. So it really just depends on the kid.

 

Btw this comment by the OP : "I don't think they can appreciate a great story, moving performances and special effects that consisted of models, matte paintings and makeup."

I don't agree. I think a good story, in particular, is universally appreciated and you aren't giving young people enough credit on that. Heck, I love explosions and popcorn entertainment myself. But I also enjoy a good story too and I think the kids do as well.

Again, I think the one thing they might laugh at are bad special effects. But not necessarily model effects ie "2001"-type effects for example. Good special effects aren't necessarily dated and can still have an impact.

 

We've got to give more credit to kids these days, I believe. A certain amount of them will gravitate towards Nosferatu, Caligari, Lugosi and Karloff precisely because they are different from what's being currently spoon fed to them. That's how you can tell the cool kids, BTW.

 

yes, my son and his wife love them.

 

I started appreciating old movies when I was 9 or 10.

 

We watch lots of old movies -- many even in black and white -- with our kids: Age 10 and 15. They've enjoyed screwball comedies with Cary Grant and others, a number of Jimmy Stewart films. It's been fun watching some of the live-action Disney films of the 50s and 60s with them, too. They hold up fairly well. Dated gender references, etc., are good opportunities for discussion.

With my older kid, I've enjoyed re-watching stuff that's a little too intense, yet, for our 10-year-old: Bond movies, scary stuff, etc. We watched "The Shining" last weekend.

Kids are a great excuse to re-watch movies you enjoyed yourself as a kid.

 

yes, and it is so rewarding when they enjoy them.

 

Of course no 9 year old is going to appreciate matte paintings. I loved Star Wars as a kid, but it wasnt because they did an awesome makeup job on Chewie, or the fine acting of Mark "Tachi Station" Hamill. You appreciate that stuff later. The effects probably shouldnt be too awkwardly dated to be a sore thumb , but the story is really the thing. If the story is there and the film is made well and paced well, kids will love it without thinking about it too much. I never appreciated Wizard of Oz more than a fun kids flick til as an adult I saw it in a theater and could see the attention to detail was insane. As a kid, their job is to watch and have fun and fall in love with movies.

 

No. Absolutely impossible. Same goes for music too.

 

I think the answer to this question, as with so much else in life, is "it depends."

For me, I got into classic B&W films via television (IIRC, this was back in the late 70s and early 80s) when a program called "Matinee At the Bijou" used to show a lot of the old silent era movies, like Harold Lloyd and the Keystone Kops, plus a fair selection of early talking pictures and shorts like Our Gang and Laurel and Hardy, all of which I loved. I was also a big fan of the Carol Burnett Show, and she did tons of golden age movie spoofs, so it was fun to later watch the actual films to see where those parodies were coming from.

By the mid-80s, when VHS really started to take off, I was regularly renting videos of old films I had never seen, plus revisiting a few I'd liked if only to see them without commercials. Later still, I've enjoyed DVDs both for the improved picture quality (not always, though!) and for the bonus features detailing a film's background. I as yet still haven't pulled the lever for a Blu-Ray player, but then I'm content enough with my old '92 non-HD Hitachi TV (until it eventually fails).

In other words, I "caught the bug" so to speak. It was kind of a unique set of circumstances in time that permitted this to happen, of course with me being able to have the time to take all this in. Sure, we had our Atari video games, but that was nothing like the internet nowadays, which seems all-consuming.

Long story short, I do think that young kids today can appreciate old movies in much the same way as old novels or old music; that is, if the quality is there, even if it is determined to be "mindless entertainment" that can be enjoyed as a sort of guilty pleasure, there can still be a modern audience for it. The trick is holding a kid's attention span, and I do think that quite a lot of the classic movies are capable of doing just that, so I would perhaps recommend starting with some of the comedies I've mentioned, then move into action adventures and other genres; from there, hopefully the young person's interest will be piqued enough by then to want to seek out more on his or her own.

Not saying this will work in all cases, but I think if us old farts (I'm 43) can effectively communicate our knowledge and enthusiasm for classic movies (which should never be taken for granted) without being overly pedantic, that this alone might help ensure their survival for future generations. Unrealistic perhaps, but I remain ever the optimist.

 

today's teenagers love fantasy films from the 80s. the special effects are not a concern. dark crystal, the princess bride, the neverending story, labyrinth--these films came up constantly among the kids when I was teaching high school. a few of them had seen more obscure examples as well, like return to oz and willow.

 

Good to know, except that I have a hard time considering any films from the 80s as "old movies"!

For me, the term "old movies" properly refers to Hollywood's so-called "golden age" which arguably spans the silent era to the 50s blacklist. Likewise, when I hear the term "oldies" as it refers to music, I generally think 50s and 60s pop hits; in other words, the 80s is not exactly what immediately comes to my mind...talk about relativity, eh?

Thank you for posting, and of course for taking on the challenge of teaching high school.

 

I can sort of speak for the younger audience since I am only seventeen. To answer your question, it is possible, but ones who do are in the minority. Personally, I've always watched movies based on whether I think they're interesting or not, no matter their age or country of origin. Lots of other people, though, have some sort of preconceptions about black and white movies or whatever and refuse to watch them. I've had discussions about movies that have ended in "I won't watch it because it's black and white" or "it's too old" or "why don't you watch newer movies" and so on. And this is way more common than what you'd think, especially if you're of the "let's give kids more credit" mindset. You really shouldn't give them more credit because they really don't deserve it. It's mostly prevalent throughout high school, though. Most people won't watch anything more mentally stimulating than Madea Does Stupid **** #11 or Exploding Uzi Circlejerk, and it's really aggravating. Once you enter college, though, it's easier to find someone with broader tastes and an open mind and a lot of what you could complain about goes away. Maybe it's an age thing. There's still a lot of the other kind, but now it seems more evenly split.

I feel like I started typing this to say something else, but it turned into what it is now. I could try to elaborate if you have any questions about it.

 

When my two nephews were around 5 and 7 yrs old, I put on some Three Stooges shorts. We were about 3 minutes into the first one and they both cried "BORING!" in unison and picked up their Nintendo controls.

 

I did, so yeah, it's very possible. But it depends on the kid and the environment they're raised in. I was always raised with an appreciation for older things in general, so I "got" old films.

 

you know all this makes you one of the 'cool kids' Baba was talking about. the more credit in question goes to you--if you see the bigger cultural picture more readily than your peers, that puts you at an advantage for adding to it in the future.

honestly, it was a great time, and I'd do it again it if I was to have another day job.

I thought of those 80s films right away because they're both anachronistic for and well-loved by many of the students I taught. those movies may have shot before I was born, but I'm sufficiently anachronistic myself not to think of them as particularly 'old.'

this was art school, though, so if you're talking about films from before my parents' time, there were definitely a few kids who were into them. that sort of thing was the province of the film club, who would get together to watch Bergman and who did a 'Cary Grant appreciation month' the first year I was there. a minority within a minority to be sure, but those films will always be relevant to the right people regardless of age.

 

My teenage daughter can't watch classic films from the 1930s through 1960s. She says that the pace is far too slow and the characters speak in a stilted, unnatural way. We have tried hundreds of films in all genres.

 

All depends on the upbringing.

 

I think it's harder for young kinds to appreciate pre-1980s movies that have primitive effects, hokey costumes, and kind of obvious makeup. But I think they can eventually learn to understand what the movies were in historical context.

What's hard I think is the pacing of old movies, which is a lot slower and more leisurely than modern films. I think a movie like Fast & Furious 6 has an average shot time of maybe 2 seconds, where something like Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much has a whole bunch of :30-:40 second shots, and even some that last a minute or two. Very hard for a modern audience to take. The constant use of rear projection in films like this is almost laughably obvious, but there's still a level of artistry there that you can appreciate on a certain level.

 

my nephew & Niece love the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz"!

 

Heck, I have the same problem with many pre-Method movies - not the pacing, but that stilted way of talking and/or the alternately stiff or stagey performances. It can be hard to get past the fact that you're watching someone act.

 

A couple of years back I was given a classic Sci Fi box set and as it was the school holidays I thought I'd see if my niece and nephew, (then 10 an 8), would want to watch any of the films. I didn't hold out too much hope, but they both watched and enjoyed "Tarantula" and "The Incredible Shrinking Man", I was pretty surprised, we never got around to the others, but I think they would have enjoyed "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers" and "The Thing From Another World", those films were old when I watched them as a kid, but I enjoyed them, I guess some things have a timeless appeal. I'm not so sure I'd have the same success these days, now they have smart phones we've lost them.