Crushed Childhood Memories

• Main
• All Subpages
• Create New

You have fond memories of your childhood and all the books, music, films, tv series and other clean fun you enjoyed back then, in those more innocent days.

But then, either while you are still a child or when you become an adult, some of these precious childhood memories are suddenly crushed. It turns out that a person you always trusted before has a darker side. You suddenly discover a circus clown smoking a cigarette between takes. It can be that friendly children's TV show host who is suddenly arrested for criminal deeds. Or those child actors you enjoyed seeing on the screen turn out to be drug addicts or start a career in the adult industry, or far worse. Or maybe you find out that your favorite children's author mistreated his own children badly.

There's something unsettling about this. Something that was so sweet and innocent back then now leaves a bitter, unpleasant space in your memories. You lose your naiveté and suddenly the world you've once experienced as carelessly joyful becomes far more disturbing. After all Children Are Innocent so when this illusion is destroyed it really is unnerving and even traumatic.

This is often a source for comedy too, since destroying something childishly innocent can be funny as well. Whether it are toys, cartoon characters or Santa Claus: add violence, sex, drugs or other disturbing matters and you will either shock or amuse people.

The same goes for people, films, characters, rock stars,... you admired as a child or a teen, but as Time Marches On start doing things that often destroy all your idealistic illusions about everything that was great about them. This is mostly about seeing previous idols "selling out" as they and the fans age. Not to be confused with Childhood Memory Demolition Team, which is about a precious object from your childhood being threatened to disappear.

Compare Broken Pedestal and Growing Up Sucks.

Examples of Crushed Childhood Memories include:

Comic Books

• Hergé, creator of The Adventures of Tintin, worked for a newspaper in the 1940s which collaborated with the Nazis. In fairness, he later renounced his ties with Fascism.
  • During the 1930s one of his colleagues at his newspaper office was Léon Degrelle, who later would become the leader of the Belgian Rex Party, who collaborated with Nazi Germany.
  • Consider this disturbing panel, which has been censored in the regular albums.
  • Hergé also had a reputation as a child-hater.
• In 2010 it was learned that beloved Belgian comic strip artist Willy Vandersteen of Suske en Wiske had drawn anti-Semitic cartoons for the Nazis during the Second World War.

Film

• Many of the Our Gang (The Little Rascals) child actors had a problematic adulthood and died in tragic circumstances. Most of them never earned anything of their successful film career in the 1930s.
  • Robert E. Hutchins ("Wheezer") died just short of age 20 when his Army Air Corps plane crashed on landing during a training exercise.
  • Norman Myers Chaney ("Chubby") died at age 22 of a glandular ailment.
  • Matthew Beard, Jr. ("Stymie") died at age 56 after a life of poverty, serving time in prison and drug addictions.
  • Scott Beckett ("Scotty") committed suicide by barbiturate overdose after a tragic adulthood with divorce, violence, alcohol, drugs and crime problems.
  • Carl Dean Switzer ("Alfalfa") was shot at age 31.
  • Jay R. Smith ("Jay") was stabbed to death at age 87 by a homeless man he befriended.
  • Darwood Kaye ("Waldo") was shot by a hit-and-run driver at age 72.
  • William Laughlin ("Froggy") died at age 16 when his bicycle was hit from behind a truck.
• Bobby Driscoll, child actor famous for his roles in many Disney films such as Song of the South, Treasure Island and as the voice of Peter Pan, never managed to recover from his success as a child actor. As a teen he became addicted to heroin and marijuana and was arrested several times, including for disturbing the peace and assault with a deadly weapon. He died penniless.
• Drew Barrymore: the sweet two-year-old in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was already a smoker before she was nine years old, and a drug addict by 13.
• Lindsay Lohan: The cute eight-year-old in The Parent Trap remake started having problems when her mother Dina started letting her drink while she was still underage, then she became more known for her party-girl image then being an actress over the next several years, but it was her 2nd D.U.I. arrest in 2007 that really shocked people.
• Nearly every film adaptation of a popular TV show or cartoon show you used to enjoy as a child will be called an utter bastardization of everything that made the original show great. The general population often takes it better than the Hatedom makes it out to be, though.
  • This also applies to sequels, Expanded Universe material, etc. made years after the original, kid-embraced work was made. Even if the original creators are involved, there's no guarantee the now-adult fans won't be distraught over the continuation's quality; just ask George Lucas, who experienced this kind of backlash with the Star Wars prequel trilogy and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Literature

• Lewis Carroll: The beloved author of Alice in Wonderland, an imaginative children's classic, had a disturbing interest in photographing little girls, sometimes naked (though this wasn't an uncommon practice at the time; see Values Dissonance).
• Belgian children's author Gie Laenen, on the other hand, was convicted twice, in 1973 and 2005, for sexual abuse of minors.

Live-Action TV

• Diff'rent Strokes: Child actress Dana Plato died of a drug overdose. She lead a troublesome teenage life even before that.
  • Child actor Todd Bridges had similar drug problems.
  • And of course, there's all of Gary Coleman's issues.^[context?]
• Paul Reubens, the star of Pee-wee's Playhouse was the most popular children's show TV host during the 1980s, but in 1991 he was Caught With His Pants Down in a porno theater, which almost destroyed his career.
• Family Matters: Actress Jaimee Foxworth, who played Judy Winslow in the series, had a brief career as a porn star after the show.
• Eight Is Enough: Child actor Adam Rich, who played Nicholas Bradford, was later arrested for his cocaine addiction and shoplifting.
• Full House: Child actor Jodie Sweetin (Stephanie Tanner) later became addicted to alcohol and methamphetamines.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: A milder example: This show was one of the most innovative, anarchic, unconventional and subversive comedy shows ever. Yet for all its ground breaking achievements the main cast mostly made and performed more traditional comedy in their post-Python career. Even embarrassingly unfunny sitcoms and films where they play the kind of safe, bland, uninspiring and conventional comedy that they originally used to rebel against.
• Bill Cosby was a beloved comedian for decades. If people weren't familiar with his standup, surely they knew him from decades of television, from I Spy in the late 60s to his children's shows Picture Pages and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids in the 70's and 80's (as well as frequent appearances on The Electric Company). His career and fame reached new levels with The Cosby Show in the late 80's and early 90's. Then in late 2014 came the allegations of drugging and raping dozens of women at various points throughout his career, and generations of people who had loved his standup or his various television shows were shocked and horrified by the disturbing allegations.
• William Hartnell, the first Doctor of Doctor Who, was said to be disturbingly racist at times by a number of people, including co-stars Nicholas Courtney (Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart) and Anneke Wills (Polly). Anneke Wills recounted Hartnell's objections to Earl Cameron being cast in the serial "The Tenth Planet", and how she and co-star Michael Craze (Ben Jackson) were disturbed by Hartnell's disrespectful attitude toward Cameron on the basis of his skin color.
• Power Rangers: Ricardo "Rick" Medina Jr., who was best for the roles of Cole Evans and Deker, was arrested in 2015 for fatally stabbing his roommate Joshua Sutter with a katana. He was later released, but the investigation continued. During his hearing on March 17, 2017, Medina pleaded guilty of voluntary manslaughter in court and was sentenced to six years in prison on March 30.
• Kamen Rider Super-1: Shunsuke Takasugi, who portrays Kazuya Oki, the eponymous Rider of the series, was revealed to have swindled money (50 million yen) from his fans in 2013, and has since disappeared from the public eye since 2017.
• A milder example: If you ever saw The Muppets characters being performed by their puppeteers it can be very shocking to actually view with your own eyes they aren't real at all.

Music

• Michael Jackson: If you grew up with this childishly innocent entertainer during the 1970s and 1980s the child abuse accusations in the 1990s and 2000s came as a really disturbing shock.
• Bing Crosby: The crooner with the gentle voice whose song "White Christmas" is still a staple of the holiday classics? Well, according to a book by one of his sons Crosby regularly beat his children and was an advocate of marijuana.
• The Mamas and the Papas: Lead singer John Phillips died in 2001, but in 2009 his daughter MacKenzie claimed that her father had an incestuous relation with her.
• Hearing songs you enjoyed and emotionally connected with when you were young being misused in commercials.
  • Or being covered and sampled by extremely commercial pop artists for young ignorant audiences.
• Seeing rebellious rock and pop stars getting older is often a very disappointing spectacle. Old age destroying their youthful appearance is one thing. But some of them still try to act the part and come over as being pathetic poseurs, while others simply want to be accepted by the mainstream and start to do stuff that is really square, unhip and/or a betrayal of their past beliefs.
  • Bob Dylan, the most famous protest singer of his generation who wrote intelligent criticisms of organized religion and religious fanaticism like "With God On Our Side" performed in front of Pope John Paul II in the late 1990s.
  • Johnny Rotten of the anarchic punk band The Sex Pistols making TV commercials.

Professional Wrestling

• For those who grew up watching WWE's Ruthless Aggression era, Chris Benoit's success as a wrestler, culminating with his World Heavyweight Championship win at Wrestlemania XX earned the admiration of young wrestling fans. But that's no longer the case thanks to his Pater Familicide in June 2007, so much so that WWE had to remove all references and mentions of Benoit one day after WWE made a tribute show dedicated to him prior to details of the horrific crime came to light.
• For those who grew up watching WWE's Rock N Wrestling era, Hulk Hogan was a hugely successful star. Though often criticized for his limited variety of wrestling moves, he more than made up for it with his charisma and his larger than life patriotic American superhero image. However, on closer inspection, it became clear he had a number of dark sides behind the scenes, which make even his Face Heel Turn in 1996 seem tame as far as childhood memory crushing moments go.
  • Jesse Ventura attempted to start a union for wrestlers so that they would be treated more fairly by the WWE. Hogan ratted him out to Vince McMahon and the union was crushed.
  • Hogan was infamous for his ego-driven booking behind the scenes, resulting in things like his impromptu match with Yokuzuna in Wrestlemania 9 and subsequent title victory and his dominating WCW storylines for most of the 90s, at the expense of younger talent.
  • And then there's his sleeping with the wife of his supposed friend Bubba the Love Sponge, and his pillow talk with her was caught on tape where he made a racist remark about how he wouldn't let his daughter date a black man unless the black man was rich (and the fact that he said the N-word didn't help matters either). This resulted in WWE temporarily giving Hogan a Benoit-like removal of all references to him on their website until the media controversy over it went away.

Western Animation

• Walt Disney: The world's most beloved and celebrated provider of clean, innocent fun for children had several dark sides to him.
  • There's the fact that Disney was a chain smoker. He even died of lung cancer.
  • Disney has been accused of being an anti-Semite and a racist, even though proof of this remains a matter of debate.
  • He destroyed the careers of several of his former animators by accusing them of being left-wing sympathizers during the 1940s-1950s anti-communist Witch Hunts.
• Often spoofed with Krusty the Clown in The Simpsons, who is often smoking or doing other disturbing things which children might find shocking.
• Der Fuehrer's Face: Even though this is an anti-Nazi cartoon produced as a propaganda film during the Second World War it features Donald Duck in a Nazi uniform, saluting Adolf Hitler for most of the film. Even though it eventually turns out to be a nightmare it is still pretty disturbing. And this official Disney cartoon even won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short!
• All the direct-to-video sequels to some of their most beloved and classic films that Disney released in the 2000s. Every quality film you used to enjoy now has an inferior (sometimes vastly so) sequel.
  • And then the Live Action Remakes in the 2010s and 2020s make that every quality animated film you enjoyed has now a competently produced but still inferior remake.
• Bugs Bunny's racial slurs in the anti-Japanese World War II cartoon "Bugs Bunny Nips The Nips" (1944) where he violently defeats many Japanese soldiers and at one point even names them "monkey face" and "slant eyes".
  • His brief transformation into an Afro-American singer in the cartoon "Any Bonds Today?" (1942) has also been viewed as shockingly racist, while Bugs actually imitates singer Al Jolson, who was known for his blackface make-up while performing.
• Judith Barsi, the child actress who provided the voice of Anne-Marie in All Dogs Go to Heaven and of Ducky in The Land Before Time never lived to see the premiere of All Dogs. She was shot dead in 1988, together with her mother, by her abusive father, who committed suicide after his horrible crime.