Maurice Sendak Tells Concerned Parents They Can "Go to Hell"

Where the Wild Things AreLet’s hear it for Maurice Sendak who just reminded parents that every single re-make of every children’s book or story does not have to be a watered down piece of regurgitated garbage. When told recently that the “Where the Wild Things Are” might be too frightening for kids, he suggested that the concerned parents to go hell and recommended that frightened children go home and wet their pants if necessary.

While that may seem a little extreme to many and sounds as if it coming from a crotchety old man (which may in fact be the case), let’s remember that Maurice Sendak wrote “Where the Wild Things Are” in the 1960s, loves the remake, and strongly believes that parents need to take responsibility for what their children see. Why are parents criticizing the author of one of the greatest children’s books of all times for having his book adapted into a film that supposedly has sparked the interest of adults as well as children?

Making this movie into a book was a kind of dream come true and seems to have been what I would term a heart-project for the real-life Maurice Sendak. While the movie was in production, he said, ““I don't know what to make of it, exactly, but I am so for it, ... I am in love with it. If Spike and Dave do not do this movie, now, I would just as soon not see any version of it ever get made.”  Watering down the movie to make the three-year-olds happy would not have made the movie better, just potentially more commercially viable.

The book was modeled after his somewhat freaky foreign relatives who came to visit his family when he was a child and so terrified he and his sister so much that they considered them monsters. The reality is that monsters are sometimes scary to children. Period.  As a kid, I was scared of the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz, but I am fairly confident that my parents never complained to the Motion Picture Association or the original author of "The Wizard of Oz" for allowing such a frightening scene to be included in the movie and thus causing me nightmares.  

If you think a movie is too scary for your kids to see, don’t take them to it. End of story.