5 Movies From Your Childhood That Are Even More Relevant Now

5 Babe: Pig In The City

Did you see the first installment of the Babe franchise? It was an adorable movie about an upstart young pig who refuses to accept his predestined station in life in favor of ... becoming a dog? Not really -- he just wants to do all the fun things herding dogs get to do, and if it's not too much trouble, to avoid being eaten as a delicious breakfast side dish someday. And he succeeds! How cute! No wonder the film was such a huge hit at the box office, pulling in an astounding $254 million on a budget of just $30 million.

In fact, it was such a success that a sequel was greenlit almost immediately. In 1998, Babe: Pig In The City hit theaters. By most standards, it was a massive flop, with box office receipts of just $69 million, this time after blowing through a budget of $90 million. So you wouldn't surprise a lot of people if you were to say that you've never seen it. Which is a shame, because it's legitimately one of the best films of the last two decades. That's not hyperbole, either. Roger Ebert gave it four out of four stars. Gene Siskel took things a step further and called it his all-out favorite film of 1998. Keep in mind, that's the same year in which classics like Saving Private Ryan, The Truman Show, and The Big Lebowski were in theaters.

It wasn't without its competition, is what I'm saying. It's just that good of a movie.

There are plenty of interesting political and social references that make it relevant today. And we'll get to those, but really, the main thing is that, as stated excessively in the previous paragraph, it's just a really great movie -- one that you've probably never seen. The main reason for this actually speaks to what makes it so good: Aside from the part where the cast consists primarily of adorable talking animals, this isn't really a film for kids.

Sure, the first Babe movie had it's downer moments and secret messages, like the part where Babe is sad after he realizes that his human friends want to eat him. But for the most part, it's a feel-good movie that kids will love.

The opening scene of Babe: Pig In The City, on the other hand, involves the protagonist pig nearly killing his beloved owner Arthur by dropping a bucket on his head, just like you'd expect a stupid pig to do when he goes meddling in things that don't concern him. This forces Arthur out of work, causing the family to default on the payments for their farm. When the bank comes calling, Arthur's wife Esme has no choice but to enter Babe into a sheep-herding contest in the city, in the hope that she'll earn enough cash to keep them from losing everything.

If that sounds bleak, take comfort in knowing that things get so much worse once they leave. I don't want to give too much away, because I do sincerely want you to go watch this movie immediately (after reading about the other four on the list, of course). So instead, here's a bullet point rundown of some of the darker moments and covert messages to be found in Babe: Pig In The City:

-- Overzealous TSA agents (before the TSA existed)

-- An adorable pit bull nearly drowning while dangling over the edge of a bridge by a chain

-- A pregnant chimpanzee who looks like she probably sneaks a cigarette every time the cameras are away

-- Lots of poverty and exploited workers

-- Something very reminiscent of the Nazis storming the ghettos and sending Jews off to concentration camps

And so much more. All that said, I really want to make it clear that it isn't that it's neat for such a dark movie to feature talking animals and whatnot. This is just a legitimately excellent movie that not a lot of people cared about when it came out. Give it a shot sometime if you never have. Oh, and if it matters at all, Babe: Pig In The City was written and directed by George Miller, the hero who brought you the Mad Max franchise.

It seems unlikely that a movie like Beavis And Butt-head Do America would continue to hold any significance in relation to the events taking place in the world today, aside from giving us a reason to laugh at how far the various bands of the '90s have fallen since their salad days. That's true, provided you've missed all of the news about overzealous law enforcement officials that's been making headlines lately.

See, this movie came out in 1996, just a few short years after the infamous ATF siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. While the precise facts and details of this incident are and probably always will be something people argue about, it's generally accepted that the what the government did in the name of ending the standoff was a little heavy-handed -- and by that, I mean that they may or may not have set a compound filled mostly with innocent people on fire.

There were 76 deaths in all. It was extreme, to say the very least. Was the group really enough of a threat to justify that kind of response? Maybe, but again, we'll probably never know for sure.

So in light of all that, it should come as not that huge of a surprise that one of the key storylines in Beavis And Butt-head Do America involves the pair going on the run to escape a pack of rabid ATF agents. Well, not really. In typical Beavis and Butt-head fashion, those two think they're just traveling across the country to do a chick. All of the craziness seems to happen in the periphery, while they proceed through life as they always do.

Aside from that part where Beavis eats a peyote cactus.

On the flip side of that coin is the ATF, who almost immediately peg Beavis and Butt-head as one of the biggest terrorist threats facing our pre-9/11 nation at the time, and in their own typical fashion, they overreact mightily. This most commonly comes in the form of Agent Flemming (masterfully voiced by Robert Stack) ordering cavity searches to be performed on everyone in the general vicinity if there's even somewhat of an indication that they might know something about the terrorist plot which he suspects may be unfolding.

Excessive and ultimately unnecessary interrogation techniques performed in the name of thwarting terrorist attacks that may or may not even be real? That sounds intense. I think we can all agree that it's a good thing we don't live in Beavis and Butt-head's version of America anymore.

3 Little Giants

Ah, Little Giants. Who didn't love this movie as a kid? Right, a lot of people. The movie didn't do much damage at the box office, and truth be told, there isn't anything all that remarkable about it -- aside from the fact that it's called Little Giants, but none of the NFL players who make cameos in it actually played for that team.

But if this movie came out today, while it would still probably be mostly written off as another example of the run-of-the-mill kind of David vs. Goliath story that we've seen in so many movies for so many years now, it might receive some attention for taking on one particular issue: sexism. And though they likely had the best of intentions, the filmmakers would almost certainly catch hell for how they handled the issue if this movie was released today.

The plot centers around two brothers, Danny and Kevin O'Shea, played by Rick Moranis and Ed O'Neill, respectively. One of them is a former Heisman Trophy winner; the other is portrayed by Rick Moranis and, as such, obviously is not.

When Danny's tomboy daughter Becky is cut during tryouts for a pee-wee football team despite being the most talented player, he comes to her defense by starting a separate team for her to play for.

So far so good, I suppose! Girls can do anything boys can do! Except as the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that, key character or not, everything Becky does is motivated by boys. Almost as soon as the team is formed, she develops a crush on the quarterback -- whom you might recognize as the kid who, in later years, famously wrote a letter to Eminem about throwing his girlfriend in the trunk of his car and drunkenly driving her off a bridge.

His parents call him by his real name, probably.

It doesn't take long after that for Becky's shithead uncle Kevin to swoop in and convince her that quarterbacks want to date girls, not teammates. She promptly quits to become a cheerleader. Sure, she eventually comes to her senses and gets back in the game, but only after her crush takes an especially hard hit in a game during the final act of the movie. Keep in mind that this happens well after the team has fallen behind by 21 points. She knows she can help, but has absolutely no interest in doing so until her boyfriend is in peril. We're talking about a game with stakes that include her father losing the business he's worked his entire life to build. All of her teammates are fellow outcasts from the same team she was cut from at the beginning of the film, which also happens to be the team they're facing. Nevertheless, the only thing that motivates her to jump in and help is the realization that the boy she has a crush on might get hurt.

I guess that's a sweet enough message if everyone in the cast is in their 30s or something. Not so much when you're selling that message to a bunch of impressionable tweens.

Speaking of which, up to this point, I've left out the most obvious reason this movie is not only relevant to current times, but also probably wouldn't even get made today. For all intents and purposes, this is a film designed to sell kids on the idea of playing football. That seemed perfectly innocent back in 1994, but nowadays, it's akin to selling parents on the idea that their kids being in constant danger of coming home with a concussion is no big deal.

2 Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

I know: As soon as you saw the title of this column, your first thought was probably something along the lines of "This is going to be all about Ace Ventura, isn't it?" Except I'm sure that none of you thought that, because what significance could a movie like this really hold for people today? What's the message? "Laces out"? "Be nice to animals"? Yes, both of those things. Do them both.

Also, another lesson to take away from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective: Don't be a transphobic piece of shit.

Damn if people talk about it much, but running right alongside the animal jokes and Dan Marino references that made this movie famous is a plot that centers mostly on being transgender as a means of exacting revenge on your enemies. In case you've never seen it, I won't spoil the ending for you here. Just know that it involves several dudes vomiting or otherwise outwardly showing severe signs of physical distress after realizing they'd been tricked into having sex with a "man."

At one point, Ace (played by Jim Carrey) runs off and feverishly scrubs himself down in a shower like Karen Silkwood trying to not die from radiation poisoning ...

... just because he realized he kissed a "dude."

A few people asked questions at the time the movie was released, at which point Jim Carrey assured everyone that, seeing as how Ace's reaction was so over the top, it couldn't possibly be taken seriously. It's a lame excuse, but one we accepted anyway. Likely because we were all too busy wondering exactly what Tone Loc had been up to in the years between this movie and the two songs that made him famous in the late '80s.

Getting sued by Van Halen should've been the answer.

Don't get me wrong; it was a controversy that was definitely covered in the media. It's just that what I really mean is two dudes wrote letters to the Los Angeles Times about it, and they were apparently published in some capacity.

Basically, this makes Jim Carrey just another entry on the long list of celebrities who are so goddamned fortunate the Internet hasn't been around in its present form forever. These days, a movie with an ending like this would go over about as well as a movie about all the upsides to your kids suffering traumatic brain injuries.

1 The Iron Giant

We've talked about The Iron Giant on Cracked quite a bit, mostly because it's one of the most secretly depressing movies of all time -- which is saying a lot, because it's also one of the most blatantly depressing movies of all time. If you've never seen it, basically, it's the story of a young boy who befriends a mysterious giant robot that falls to Earth from space. Except it's more than a robot; it's also a ruthless killing machine that's just barely forgotten that its sole reason for coming here was to destroy us all. It eventually remembers, and shit gets intense. Then it gets sad. Really sad.

It should come as no surprise that it's kind of a downer of a film. It's based on a 1968 novel published in the UK under the name The Iron Man. It was written by a man named Ted Hughes as a means to help himself and his children cope with the death of his wife and their mother, the poet Sylvia Plath.

The Cold War was in full swing at that point in history, so the anti-war messages are abundant. And except for the part where Russia has been replaced by "anyone foreign and nonwhite" as our movie enemy of choice, it's still fairly relevant today.

But it also works as a statement on a problem that's dominating headlines even more than war these days: gun control. In fact, the one-sentence pitch that director Brad Bird used when he initially presented the idea to Warner Brothers was "What if a gun had a soul?"

Heavy, right? It's even heavier when you consider that, in a lot of ways, what happens in this movie resembles the tragic set of events that tend to follow when a child finds an unattended gun at home. It looks like a toy at first, but play around with it enough, and it will inevitably become the weapon that it really is. It might only be for a brief time, but the damage it does lasts much longer.

The moral? Don't leave your guns out in the open where kids can find them, and don't make friends with murder robots. Either choice will only end in sadness.

Adam will be telling jokes in San Diego tomorrow (9/18) with Dan O'Brien and Alex Schmidt. Get tickets here. If you wanted to follow him on Twitter as well @adamtodbrown, he'd be good with that.

If that's not enough Beavis and Butt-head for you, make sure to get your fill when you read 6 Suprising Stories Behind Iconic Cartoon Voices. Are you looking for an underdog story akin to the Little Giants? Well the 2012 election might have been painted as such, but it certainly wasn't one. Read Dan O'Brien's recount of why Romney could never win in How A Movie From The 90's Predicted The 2012 Election.

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