Parents Come Up Losers In Latest Movies For Kids

In this summer’s crop of movies, kids rule and parents drool. And if they aren’t pictured as smarmy louts, parents are uncaring, angry or just plain missing.

Take, for example, the movie “Matilda.” It’s all about a super-intelligent little girl who gains special powers to triumph over her dopey, negligent parents.

Or “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” all about a seventh grader who is regularly belittled by her insensitive parents. She doesn’t exactly triumph over them, but she survives.

And there’s “Harriet the Spy,” in which bright little Harriet is totally misunderstood by her foolish parents.

Taking the theme to the extreme, in “House Arrest,” kids actually lock their parents in the basement in order to quiet them.

Adults of the world - be aware. Those of you who dump your children at a presumably “safe” G-rated flick and come back to pick them up after you’ve finished shopping may be picking up a different child than the one you left.

The littlest moviegoers may be armed and waiting for you - fully aware of new tricks and weapons in the continuing battle against adults.

Children love these flicks. They laugh. They howl with glee. They are, in fact, empowered in a way that doesn’t exist in their real world.

Hollywood has found a new gold mine. With “The Lion King” grossing in excess of $1 billion worldwide, the movie moguls are itchy-britches to churn out more kid’s fare. They’d prefer that parents, paying adult prices, come along, but the premiere target is the kid.

Kids know what they want. They watch those commercials during the Saturday morning shows and they, you can bet, will make life miserable for the parent who doesn’t take them to see the movie of their choice. They rejected “Flipper” and “Kazaam” and “Dunston Checks In” earlier this year, signifying that dolphins, monkeys or basketball heroes can’t cut it if they don’t have a hip script to go along with their image.

Kids, in fact, don’t like childish movies. Talk down to them and you’re likely to get an empty theater.

Food fights and fart jokes always sell. Even more is a dumb adult. Pee wee and Ernest were big hits because they were stumbling louts who could easily be bested by the children around them.

You can’t blame the little tykes. If you want to know what it’s like to be a kid, try walking around on your knees all day and hearing taller people tell you “NO” every time you make a move. Authority figures are a pain in the neck, or wherever, even to big people.

Parents have unwittingly replaced Russians and Nazis in a Hollywood that, in the post-Cold War era, has been hard put to find safe villains. In the world of PC, movie writers have had a tough time rooting out their new villains. Movie parents have become either dolts, wimps or tyrants. It isn’t a new ploy. Hollywood started painting parents as the enemy with “Rebel Without a Cause” in 1955. James Dean realized that his father (Jim Backus of Mr. Magoo fame) was a weakling who lived in the shadow of his foolish mother. Teenagers for the first time had affirmation of something they had always thought but had never seen pictured in movies - their parents weren’t really smart enough to be running the world.

Once the teens got money to pay for their movies and records, the world of entertainment was never the same. Parents have seldom been pictured as knowing, articulate, guiding forces since, at least not on-screen.

Meet Harry and Zinnia Wormwood. These two are the parents played by real-life couple Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman in “Matilda,” based on a dark version of childhood as created by novelist Roald Dahl. Harry is a beer-guzzling father who forgets infant Matilda, leaving her in the car when he brings her home from the hospital. He sells faulty used cars and berates little Matilda when she insists upon reading. “There’s nothing you can get from a book that you can’t get faster from television,” he tells her.

Mama Zinnia pops gum, dresses super-tacky and spends all day at bingo games. The couple refuses to let the child go to school because “there would be no one at home to sign for the packages.” Of course, Matilda is a genius and develops magical powers to get revenge upon her parents.

DeVito, who produced the movie as well as directed it, was not set back when I told him that a child was carried, screaming with fear, from the screening of “Matilda” I attended. “Not all children are the same. It’s drama. After all, the parents of Hansel and Gretel left them deserted in the woods. No matter how extreme the situation is, kids will get it,” he said. “My kids loved the book, and they wouldn’t let me change it. I checked with them every day. Our point is that you don’t have to give up just because your parents aren’t perfect. Go inside yourself to make yourself better.”

“Matilda,” though, includes a school principal, Agatha Trunchbull, who puts children in a dungeon when they talk back, or grabs them by the pigtails and throws them out the window. British actress Pam Ferris, who has the role, is not worried about her effect upon moviegoing children. “Subtlety is not what we were going for,” she said. “You can coddle children too much. Drama is a part of growing up.”

In “House Arrest,” which opened Aug. 14, parents Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Pollack are lured into the basement, where their children are staging a Hawaiian-style wedding anniversary party for them. The children lock them up in order to keep them from divorcing. The trend spreads across town; other parents also disappear.

Even in the White House, parents are pictured as being too busy to be bothered. In the upcoming “First Kid,” opening in September, the president and first lady are too busy campaigning to give their young son attention. He, in turn, finds understanding only from a Secret Service agent assigned to guard him (played by the comic Sinbad).

But all adults don’t fare as badly as parents do in current movies. Children often, in movies, find a substitute for negligent parents. In “Harriet the Spy,” based on Louise Fitzhugh’s novel, the title character finds solace in an understanding nanny, played by Rosie O’Donnell. Matilda finds caring via a teacher, appropriately named Miss Honey. In “Kazaam,” the resident kid turns to a genie, played by Shaquille O’Neal, when real-world adults give him no help.

When the parents aren’t being negligent, they are away.

Why, when you think about it, has almost every Disney classic featured a hero or heroine who is minus at least one parent? Are the scriptwriters telling us that this is a need that the young audiences can readily identify?

Danny DeVito considered the theory during an interview in Los Angeles the other day, but maintains that his “Matilda” is only reflecting a dark need that Roald Dahl had in the book. “Some of the smallest children might be scared, but I think children are cooler than adults realize. I know the studio was skittish about the whole idea. But children like extremes. They like someone who is all bad - or all good.”

DeVito said that he maintained order on the set of “Matilda” with the child actors by shouting “KIDS RULE” at the end of every completed scene. “I’d tell them that there was a time to play and a time to work, but that we had to have the scene right. Then, I’d remind them that ‘Kids Rule.”’ When it comes to current movie marketing, DeVito obviously has a point.