How Movies Teach Manhood(TED Talk_part)

You know, my favorite part of being a dad is the movies I get to watch. I love sharing my favorite movies with my kids, and when my daughter was four, we got to watch The Wizard of Oz together. It totally dominated her imagination for months. Her favorite character was Glinda, of course. It gave her a great excuse to wear a sparkly dress and carry a wand. But you watch that movie enough times, and you start to realize how unusual it is. Now, we live today, and are raising our children, in a kind of children’s-fantasy-spectacular-industrial complex. But The Wizard of Oz stood alone. It did not start that trend. Forty years later was when the trend really caught on, with, interestingly, another movie that featured a mental guy and a fury guy rescuing a girl by dressing up as the enemy’s guards. Do you know what I’m talking about? Yeah. Now, there’s a big difference between these two movies, a couple of really big differences between The Wizard of Oz and all the movies we watch today. One is there’s very little violence in The Wizard of Oz. The monkeys are rather aggressive, as are the apple trees.