Childhood favorites that you realized were terrible
Or, the Short Circuit Effect
When I was a kid, my dad took me and my best friend James to the movies to see Short Circuit, a comedy about a military robot that gets hit by lightning and becomes sentient. It starred Steve Guttenberg, Ally Sheedy, and Fisher Stevens, as well as the robot Johnny Five.
When Short Circuit 2 came out, I had crossed the threshold from child to teen and I had lost interest in friendly robot movies. Also, only Fisher Stevens was returning, and even as a child I knew that when most of the cast left between the original and the sequel, it meant that it was going to be A) bad and B) completely different from the movie I had liked in the first place.
(See Mannequin 2: On the Move, in which only the sidekick Hollywood returned with surprisingly little to say about how he’d already had a friend who fell in love with a mannequin that came to life through magic, like it happened so much it was a routine part of his life.)
It wasn’t until Adult I, in a rare fit of sentiment, rented Short Circuit and watched it again that I noticed that Fisher Stevens was playing an Indian man in brownface, and also that the rest of the movie was completely terrible.
So my question for you all is: What childhood entertainment did you love that, when you watched it again as an adult, was so bad that you had to turn it off?
Short Circuit 2 was indeed terrible, especially the bit where Johnny Five joins a Latino street gang and sings their fight song (I am not making that up). But it also has Jack Weston and Michael McKean, so the cast budget must've been high.
What’s Up Doc, I loved it when I was 9 but as an adult neither Madeline Kahn nor Austin Pendleton could save it.