This week, the Heave staff was asked:

What’s something you were really into as a kid that didn’t hold up when you revisited as an adult? And what changed?

Johnny Coconate

Sports have gotten wimpier except hockey, but hockey is the neglected child of American sports. Basketball used to be a sport, and football favors offense a little too much. Not sure how much I can comment on baseball since I grew up during the steroid era, though it was entertaining to see freak versus freak.

Trent Zuberi

Board games. I used to look forward to playing them as a kid but almost cringe at the thought of them now.

Meghan Bongartz

I was REALLY into the movie The Last Unicorn when I was a kid, so when I saw the DVD at Family Video a few years back (I was home visiting my family in Peoria, don’t judge!), I promptly rented it. I don’t think there was one particular thing that didn’t hold up about it, so much as the movie just isn’t good. I think I had a much stronger imagination as a child that allowed me to see past the terrible animation, terrible dialogue, and terrible voice acting. The plot was surprisingly not awful for what it is, it just had nothing supporting it.

Matt Brassil

I’ve tried to revisit most movies from my childhood to gain perspective. Usually it holds up because it’s The Lion King or Aladdin and those are just gold for everyone. However, I went back to watch Mortal Kombat Annihilation (the one I liked as a kid because people turned into their creature counterparts), and the word “despair” comes to mind. The CGI was insanely cheap and brief and it showed. The movie is also ripe with enough camp to make my head spin. Most movies like that are a rough rewatch. Spawn is another example; the cape looks silly.

Dominick Suzanne-Mayer

Like Matt, I made the mistake of revisiting Spawn at a period in my life in which a PG-13 rating and the scandalous presence of Marilyn Manson on the soundtrack didn’t elevate it to legend status on the spot. It’s not good. A lot of things I’ve revisited aren’t bad so much as they’re inexplicable; this question was inspired by my revisiting Good Burger over the weekend and realizing that whoever wrote that was probably given a McDonald’s gift card, a pound of weed and a five-day deadline, and they responded in kind with some of the weirdest family filmmaking I’ve ever seen. For me, though, the biggest disappointment wasn’t a pop culture item per se, but instead, Medieval Times. I went as a kid, and thought it was awesome. I got to eat food with my hands, yell at the show without reprimand, and every time I stopped eating more food was provided for me! Then, just before I started college, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? held their Chicago auditions at Medieval Times (yeah, I don’t know why either), and I had to enter the battle arena with all the house lights on. What I saw was a sad, tiny sand pit smaller than a football field. It was then that I realized that adulthood is cruel.