That’s How This Man Sees It With Gary McCoy – Should Scared Kids Be Able To Sue?

You’ve no doubt taken your kids to a “Kid” movie before.  You’ve stood in line for an eternity at the concession stand so you could load ‘em up on Peanut M&M’s, corn dogs and cokes.  You’ve wandered into a dimly lit theatre and tolerated that agonizing aroma that only an overfilled room of little carpet crawlers can conjure up, just in hopes that you can nap for an hour and a half while they’re mesmerized with the latest computerized cartoon.  Bet this never happened to you though. 

Just last week in a theater in England, hundreds of kids were packed in to see Madagascar 3.  The lights dimmed, the previews all ran their course and it was time for the movie.  Bam!  Up comes the opening scene of…..not Madagascar…but Paranormal Activity 4.  Wow.  Before a cat could lick his rump, hundreds of kids are running, screaming out of the theater.  That was probably exaggerated a little, but it’s how the story was told to me.  Apparently some of these kids, as young as five, were hit with a full dose of a bloodied corpse flying right at the screen.  One of the ladies in the movie said the frightening scenes played for over two minutes before the kids fled the theater — long enough “to scar them for life.”

The theater offered the terrified moviegoers a refund and complimentary tickets, as well as the chance to see the real “Madagascar 3″ half an hour later.

Since this was in the UK, I really don’t know if these parents will be able to get much more than the apology, but I’m betting if it was here in the good old U.S. I know what would happen.  Some of these parents would already have their kids practicing their walk with a limp or drooling on themselves because “that’s what the jury will want to see.”  You know it’s true.  Was the theater wrong?  Certainly, but mistakes are going to happen.  Milk is going to go bad in cartons, coffee from McDonald’s is hot, and on occasion you might find an animal hair in your Beenie Weenies.  But it doesn’t mean that somebody should be able to milk the system and retire because a kid might possibly one day start eating paste because “he once saw a movie with a dead body in it when he was 5.” Course, that’s just how this man sees it.