The Little Mermaid
The moral of the movie is basically this: Disobey your parents, sell your soul, and in the end, you'll have the man of your dreams and live happily ever after! ...What?
This is a stupid way of looking at it. It's not like disobeying her father didn't have consequences. She did something stupid, and she suffered for it. She had to, as Blaze said, clean up the mess she made. I can see someone learning this "moral" after only watching the beginning and the end of the movie. Did YOU watch the whole movie? Did it really make disobeying your parents seem like a good idea?
She didn't sell her soul, she traded her voice for legs.
Watching the Little Mermaid certainly didn't teach me to go trading important things to scary fat ladies with tentacles so I can live happily ever after with some dude I met earlier.
Speaking of which, most Disney movies and musicals, apparently, teach you that you can fall in love and live happily ever after with someone in just a day's time! But I'm pretty sure anyone with a brain can figure out that isn't true.
Batman: Brave and the Bold
Batman teamed-up with a demon to fight a villain in one episode. Really? They're teaching kids that demons are supposed to be their friends!?
Same thing applies to Raven's character on Teen Titans.
I think if anything you learn from things like this that you can't judge people by their appearance or their background. Just because someone comes from questionable backgrounds doesn't mean they can't be good people!
I don't think this teaches lonely children to go become devil worshippers and summon demonic beings from Hell to be their friends. Not that they could accomplish it if they tried!
Dexter's Lab
In one episode, Dee-Dee got her own secret place like Dexter. This drove Dexter crazy and he decided to sneak in. He was later
trapped in a box, and Dee-Dee decided to "Punish" Dexter by playing in and destroying his lab. Pardon me, but doesn't every episode
of Dexter's Lab feature Dee-Dee breaking in and destroying Dexter's Lab? Isn't Dexter justified in sneaking into her secret place?
The moral is "It's ok to mess up a boy's room, but not a girls!" The same moral is also taught in..
Fairly Oddparents
One episode featured Vicky reading Timmy's diary and humilating/torturing him with it. Timmy decides to get back at Vicky by reading
her diary, yet the show treats Timmy as if HE'S wrong and out of line for doing it and in the end, he suffers some punishment for it.
(Translation: "It's ok to read a boy's diary to all his friends and enemies, but it's WRONG to do the same to a girl!")
Like Keith said, it's a "two wrongs don't make a right" lesson. Just because someone does bad things to you does not mean that you should retaliate! Stop looking at it from a boy vs. girl point of view.
The Dark Knight
You all know I love this movie, but I really hate the message it sends. By the end, Dent is a completely innocent man who is horrifically scarred, loses the love of his life, and is corrupted by the Joker. He goes after the criminals responsible and serves some harsh justice. And he's treated as if he's the bad guy. (Well, he does point a gun at Gordon's son, and Two-Face always was a villain in the comics.. but this is a different approach to the character, showing him as basically an innocent man) Not to mention, Batman has to lie in order to be victorious at the end. The message sent by Nolan is a very whiny, depressing one "There is no way to fight crime and evil. The world will always be consumed by it, and if you try to stop it, you will only lose everything in the process. Also, to fight evil, you have to lie. Everyone can be corrupted and evil will always win." I'm very disappointed in Nolan who crafted what was otherwise a masterpiece of cinema. The whole movie was incredibly dark. (the way Batman SHOULD be, but I digress..) If they simply ended the movie with Batman telling Joker "This city just showed you that it's full of people ready to believe in good" it would've given this very dark, violent movie some sort of moral message, saying that "While things can ugly, and seem very bleak and dark, you don't have to give in." But they didn't end it like that and you basically wonder what was the point of the film. Entertaining movie with great production values, but no real message whatsoever. Just a lot of darkness, violence and immorality with some pretty cinematography and intelligent dialogue mixed in.
Ok first of all, you're not "completely innocent" if you go around killing people. Harvey Dent was about to kill an innocent child, for fucks sake. You're not innocent when you go around threatening children. Yes, terrible things happened to him, and he was a mess because of it, but that doesn't remove blame. You kill people because your life has gone to hell and you think it's their fault, and I'm pretty sure you're still going to be convicted of murder.
Anyway, I think the problem here is that you're very naive. Life isn't all black and white. Sometimes right and wrong aren't clear. And not every movie or tv show is trying to teach a clear moral. Life sucks, it's confusing, and the only way you really learn anything is through experience. How is teaching children that things like corruption, greed, violence, darkness, etc. do not exist help them?
I'm sorry you were raised by a television, and that you think you can imagine the negative aspects of life away. But just because you believe something is wrong doesn't mean people should pretend it doesn't happen. And just because fiction is made up doesn't mean it has to avoid dealing with issues that are controversial, or different from what is ideal. Good stories are believable ones.
Cartoons and movies generally don't advertise that they're trying to teach your kids what to believe in, and that's because they're made to be entertaining! Children aren't watching these things and taking notes on how to live their lives. Most of them are going "ha ha what a silly crab" "I want to be pretty like the little mermaid" or something like that. If they start trying to act out what they saw, and it's a bad thing, it's their parents job to make sure they get the right ideas. God forbid anyone expect parents to pay attention to their children and raise them!
tldr version: movies and shows are for fun, not for morality. Children need to be taught by their parents what is right and wrong, not by pictures on a screen. Entertainment is not Education.
