8 Films That Destroyed Your Childhood

By Edward Owen /

4. Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Five words €“ Christopher Lloyd murders a toon. For certain readers, that just brought back every repressed memory about this film. The problem was that at first the premise for this film seemed like a great idea €“ a parallel universe where cartoons live side-by-side with human beings. It picked the premise up and ran with it, creating inventive sight gags galore and the amusing sight of cartoons dealing with real-world problems, such as marital infidelity. But an audience can€™t live off just observing stuff €“ unless it€™s a documentary €“ so we needed a plot to go with this new and interesting world. What the scriptwriters decided upon was Judge Doom, and he was terrifying. Rightly cottoning on that you couldn€™t kill a toon with physical punishment, he invented Dip, a toon-killing solution which gave us one of the most disturbing children€™s film sequences ever. It€™s probably Toontown€™s equivalent of a gangland murder. It€™s just so disturbingly graphic, from the adorable toon€™s screams to the agonisingly slow death Doom gives it, and it sticks out like a sore thumb in this children€™s movie. It€™s the kind of moment a kid would have nightmares about it, because€ just look at it. It€™s ridiculously disturbing, and the sort of thing that stays with you way after your childhood€™s over. Whatever sense of innocence you had from watching cartoons, Doc Brown just took it out back and slaughtered it, Old Yeller style, and you can never go back.