Your childhood wasn’t as happy as you think. If you take a look through some Reddit threads about children’s shows, you’ll realize that they contained some pretty dark moments that exposed you to the horrors of our world early on.
1. A girl almost got raped on Degrassi
The Degrassi episode where Emma meets another “kid” online, gets lured to a hotel room, the dude is recording himself and about to molest her, then her mom and teacher come and save her. I always thought the teacher guy was badass after that though.
2. The Powerpuff Girls had a mentally ill sister
Did you know The PowerPuff Girls had a fourth sister?
In one episode, The PowerPuff Girls were feeling overworked, so they decided to manufacture themselves a fourth sister in the professor’s lab. But they used some different ingredients, so the fourth sister came out massive, mentally disabled, and pretty ugly. They playfully named her “Bunny”, and send her off to fight crime for them.
Well, Bunny misunderstands what they are asking of her, and throws the police in jail, and frees all the criminals. The PowerPuff Girls get angry at her, call her “bad” and send her away, only to be confronted by all of the criminals that Bunny had released. They promptly get their asses kicked. Bunny hears their cries and realizes what she has done, and beats up all of the criminals, saving her sisters, saying “Bunny do good!”. However, they didn’t make her atomically stable, so she explodes in a big flash of light, returning to her original ingredients. The episode ends with the girls holding a piece of her dress and they realize that she was good, and it was them who were bad. The narrator weeps and says “For the first and final time, the day was saved… thanks to PowerPuff Bunny.”
Talk about dark.
3. A bullied child tried to shoot everyone
Does anyone remember Static Shock? The superhero with electricity powers? That had a lot of dark stuff in it. Three episodes in particular: the episode where a kid gets bullied and tries to shoot everyone but can hardly go through with that and only shoots one of the people who was decent to him in the leg, another episode where the main character goes to his best friend’s house and finds out his father is extremely racist, and then that Christmas episode where there’s that homeless girl who has the power to freeze everything who lost both of her parents and the freezing is basically a manifestation of her grief. It was a really honest show in terms of its themes and how it presented them.
