Picture it: You're in the third grade, and after a long, difficult day of learning how to do long division and write in cursive, you're spending the afternoon relaxing in front of the TV to enjoy some of Disney, Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network's finest programming. Everything's going great...until a scene comes along that is so unexpectedly dark that it will linger in your memory long into adulthood, whereupon a BuzzFeed writer will ask you to share it.
Hello! I am that BuzzFeed writer, and I would like to know which scenes in children's TV and movies were so unexpectedly dark that the phrase "tonal shift" doesn't even begin to cover it.
If you, like me, were a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender, maybe you are haunted by the image of Aang's mentor Monk Gyatso's skeleton lying amongst a pile of other skeletons, therefore confirming to the 12-year-old (!) Avatar that his culture is well and truly destroyed.
Or you heard a reference to the right-to-die proponent Dr. Jack Kevorkian in an episode of the Rugrats and thought, "no, surely not," only to rewind and discover that yeah, Rugrats made a doctor-assisted suicide joke.
It's possible that what lingers in your memory the most is one of Pixar's trademark montages that'll wreck you for all of eternity, such as the one about Carl and Ellie's marriage in Up.
