Some things in our lives age really well: timeless family recipes, worn in stuffed animal childhood toys, and throwback photos that serve as a reminder of how far we’ve come. And then there are the things that don’t age well, or in fact, age really poorly. Yes, early 2000’s movies that once defined our childhoods, we are looking at you.
Recently, it’s been made painfully clear on Reddit — the holy grail for internet discourse — that our childhood sheltered so many of us from fully understanding how terrible tv and movies aimed at kids were while we were growing up. Now, before you start blaming Gen Z — the generation dubbed the scapegoat for controversial hot takes — for dissing the icons of the past, there might be some truth in the thread when we take a walk down memory lane.
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“Idk if anyone's said it yet but Agent Cody Banks is pretty cringe. Used to love them as a kid but looking at them now it’s not the same as before,” javiguz27 mentioned in the two-day old thread that currently has 20.1k comments. If you were wondering if Frankie Muniz’s Big Fat Liar still holds water 19 years later, Reddit user ParkingtonLane confirms it certainly does. (Was he the original pop culture scammer?) It’s miraculous that after watching Kangaroo Jack, we weren’t completely bewildered at a rapping wild animal, or that we accepted those flimsy paper glasses with red and blue lenses in Spy Kids 3-D Game Over as cool. In all honesty, what we were watching back then was some odd, weird stuff — and God bless our parents for not only sitting through those movies with us, but, as someone mentioned on the thread, renting them from Blockbuster, and taking us to see them in theaters.
If you dig more, someone by the name of BasicWitch999 brought up Mary Kate and Ashley, the dynamic duo that dominated the entertainment scene after their appearances on Full House (who didn’t love Uncle Jesse?) who went on to star in movies like Switching Goals, Passport to Paris, and Billboard Dad to which one respondent credited for teaching them how to properly scramble eggs. The patron saints of trending movies at the time, their films are forever engrained in our brains or better or worse.
The kid movies of the 2000's understood the assignment of their time, but looking back on them as adults proves just how strange they were. As Reddit user, mungis, so eloquently sums up the collective struggle to grapple with adulthood and childhood nostalgia: “let’s just say I don’t think I was the target audience.” With the twin fashion designers’ recent 35th birthday passing, reality hits that we’ve all aged quite a bit since their peak; it’s very clear that those movies we loved so much might be better off staying in the back of our minds.