LogFAQs > #974700163

So, I've thought about it, and I'm convinced: the death of Optimus Prime DOES quality as a children's TV moment. I've fudged my rules a couple other times in equally loose ways, and there is a consensus for Optimus Prime's death qualifying, so I'll go ahead and slot it in. Like I mentioned earlier, two of my top 20 moments are closely enough related that I can just merge them together into one entry to make room for Optimus Prime.

With that said, the top 20 is now set! No more changes, if you're not happy with my top 20 rankings you'll just have to complain in here :p

And speaking of the top 20, let's begin:

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#20: The Day My Kid Went Punk

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/3/2/AAAG8cAAEo4g.jpg
What would I do? Buy him a guitar, I guess?

Afterschool Specials used to be a staple of ABC's mid afternoon lineups throughout the 70s, 80s, and even a bit into the 90s. Attempting to entertain kids while teaching them valuable life lessons, they spanned the spectrum of quality from Emmy-winning classics to truly awful garbage, and between all the misguided morals, hammy melodrama, and overdramatic cautionary tales, I knew these specials needed at least one representative on my list. And while doing my research to find out which ones were the worst, one of them kept coming up at the top of list after list: the 1987 movie The Day My Kid Went Punk, about a quiet, well-behaved young man who suddenly decides to become a punk rocker. Oooh, scary! He gets a pink mohawk, he pierces his ear, and joins a punk band, all to win the heart of a special girl. He looks less punk than Luna Loud, for fuck's sake. The dialogue throughout shows that the writers knew next to nothing about punk rock (and punk rock wasn't even scary at this point, it had been years since the Sid Vicious/Nancy Spungeon incident and now everyone had moved on to commercialized hair metal). His mom, who decides to start a conference on "Punk Syndrome", keeps giving him crap throughout the movie, even though her son's behavior barely changes (he plays music for children about believing in themselves and takes a lonely little girl horseback riding). Honestly, it's hard to tell what this movie's message is, as it waffles back and forth between overdramatizing the punk rock craze and having a "just be yourself" message, and ultimately sort of settles somewhere between, with the protagonist toning down his look but not all the way. While the movie has its entertaining (entertaining in a campy, MST3K sort of way, mind you) moments, it's also boring, nonsensical, and about eight years too late, falling flat even amongst the worst of the worst of ABC's afterschool specials. Movies like these are why kids stopped watching them at all and started gravitating toward Fox Kids, and can you really blame them?