Those #$@*ing Adorable ’70s & ’80s Kids Movies

Out of the filthy mouths of babes: Remember when family fare felt incomplete without obscenity-spewing children being presented as though they were just darling as SHIT?

The Bad News Bears (1976) is nothing less than a little masterpiece (and I don’t just mean that as in “little league”), which—coming directly after the brilliant So-Cal teen beauty pageant send-up Smile (1975)—should have permanently established director Michael Ritchie as Hollywood’s humanist (as well as humane and maybe even just human) Robert Altman.

Alas, it is not for Ritchie’s joyfully spiky satire, flawless evocation of time and place, or his uproarious, yet wonderfully warm, humor for which The Bad News Bears is most immediately remembered.

It is for the fact that the movie’s pint-size ball-players swear like sailors or, perhaps more accurately, like actual grown-up ball-players.

So notorious was Bad News Bears’ naughty talk (which includes what today would be the ultimate taboo utterance: the “N” one) that it practically served as the movie’s gimmick: Come see Walter Matthau at his most endearingly disheveled and curmudgeonly, witness weirdo child-genius acting from Tatum O’Neal and Jackie Earle Haley, and hear Tanner trumpet: “You can take that trophy and shove it up your ASS!”

Moms McBeardo initially wouldn’t let me see The Bad News Bears, but I became maniacally obsessive about bending her will, eventually asking, “If I were an actor, and I could be in a Bad News Bears movie, but I had to curse, would you let me curse?”

She said she would and, somehow, that logic ploy not only granted me access to the movie, it prevented me from having to point out that I had heard it all by age 8 (mostly from Pops McB),  including a charming playground sing-along that concluded: “Boys got the dicks/Girls got the cunts/And we piss in their cunts.”

The Bad News Bears surpassed my every expectation and it still does every time I see it (same with Smile).

Go watch it now and The Bad News Bears’ myriad charms will work on you, too (this sentiment most assuredly does not extend to the sequels, Breaking Training or Go to Japan, let alone the remake).

And, perhaps most remarkably, you will be surprised every time a fourth-grader on-screen says “shit” and “son of a bitch” (let alone “nigger” and “spick”).

In our present reality where genuinely sick humor that, not long ago, could only have existed in Hustler magazine is now daily afternoon TV viewing—I am referring (with admiration) to Family Guy—it is surprising that salty language being spewed by tykes can still be so jarring.

But—SHIT!—there it is.

What brought this to mind was a film I have seen maybe as many times as The Bad News Bears, but not for anything like the same reasons.

The Kenny Rogers movie-star vehicle Six Pack (1982) I watch simply because it is there. And there, for more than a quarter-century now, very specifically, has meant on HBO sometime around 4:30am.

Just this past week, I was ringing in the predawn hours of fresh unemployment (more on that some other time, preferably in book form) and there it was, right on HBO like it’s supposed to be. 

Six Pack. My dear friend, Six Pack.

There’s the Gambler himself as NASCAR legend Brewster Baker. There’s Diane Lane as 16-year-old Diane Lane and all the nubile strawberry blondeness that entails. There’s pre-Rusty-Griswold Anthony Michael Hall as a youngster decades away from chomping his first forehead. There’s the insanely fantastic theme song “Love Will Turn You Around.” And there are all the sewer-mouthed moppets you can shake a wood-smoked Kenny Rogers’ Roaster drumstick at.

My most recent Six Pack viewing party reminded me that cursing kiddies actually served as “added value” in family entertainment of the late 1970s and early ’80s—to the point that a movie would have stood out had it not included at least one preadolescent lisping out at least three of George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words at least, like, four times.

Immediately coming to mind are a couple of direct Bad News Bears rip-offs: Skateboard (1978), which I saw on WHT and was amazed to hear Leif Garrett call a helmet “a piece of shit”, and Manny’s Orphans (1978), a soccer spin on the formula directed by Sean S. Cunningham (just prior to his making the original Friday the 13th!).

I have never seen Cunningham’s straight-up baseball bite-off, Here Come the Tigers (1978) because, until writing this piece, I was under the impression that it was simply a re-titling of Manny’s Orphans. Oh, what I and my Netflix queue still have left to learn.

Cartoon giant Hanna-Barbera’s live-action robo-pooch romp C.H.O.M.P. S. (1979) pointedly punctuates its Valerie Bertinelli/Wesley Eure high jinks with a profane exclamation emboldened by some endearing racial inappropriateness.

The very last shot of C.H.O.M.P.S. is a big, black bully of a dog bellowing, in proper jive: “Sheeee-yit!”

As on today’s gritty basic-cable series, F-bombs generally didn’t happen in PG-rated fare, leaving the door open for as many eruptions of “shit”, “son of a bitch”, and “ass” (usually minus the hole) as possible.

In a way, the Cursing Kiddie genre is as endemic of its time, and as unthinkable today, as the Adult Fairy Tale flicks from a few years prior, when the most innocent iconography of childhood was relentlessly sexploitationized via Alice in Wonderland (1976), Cinderella (1977), and Fairy Tales (1979).

Somehow, the whole world acted as though that Snow White getting graphically, albeit comically, dwarf-banged made thoroughly delightful sense. And, like everything else back then, that was completely son-of-a-bitch shit-ass awesome.

Alas, part of my nostalgia for this time is tinged with memories of nervousness, as well. The universe that allowed C.H.O.M.P.S., with its four-letter pimp-joke punchline, to be initially rated G seemed, to Very Youngman McBeardo, to be slipping out of control.

It makes me recall how I believed the plot of the Chevy Chase-Goldie Hawn romantic comedy Foul Play (1978) to be about the hero and the heroine attempting to assassinate the pope.

I really wanted to see anything Saturday Night Live-related (I’m still waiting for The Widettes: The Movie), so I frantically hoped that Moms McB wouldn’t find out that this delightful caper lauded these lovable funny people in their righteous attempt to off our Infallible Father.

Of course, Foul Play details Chevy and Goldie rescuing Il Papa from a hit, but such were the times.

By age 9, in lawless, porn-soaked New York City, it really felt like nothing was true, and everything was permitted … except in my house.

I wasn’t allowed to watch Soap.

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What other gutter-mouthed tot movies need to make this list. Fill me the shit in, would you, you son-of-a-bitch ass-shits?

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