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Power Grid

10 Kids Who Discovered Horrifying or Adorable Alien Monsters

by Susana Polo | 12:45 pm, June 7th, 2011


Allow Us to Explain

Allow Us to Explain

We’ve said it before: Super 8 is this summer’s Inception, if only because a lot of its promise lies in the fact that we don’t really know how the plot of the movie is going to go. When we realized that we had to make an Inception Power Grid despite having only the faintest idea what the movie was about, we defaulted to listing great thieves, which ultimately didn’t have much to do with what actually happened in the movie. We recognize that we may wind up, again, slightly off the mark with this Power Grid, which is dedicated to all the little kids out there that managed to befriend the gamut of alien races and improbably survive because audiences don’t much like watching little kids succumbing to the true horrors of alien related deaths in science fiction.

No, the tropes at play in these movies are much more about friendship and accepting differences in others… except when they’re not, because the whole genre is being deconstructed by Jhonen Vasquez or K.A. Applegate. Or when the movie is just awfully, unforgivably, MST3Kingly bad.

But mostly, these extraterrestrially tinged bildungsroman play it straight, giving us some of the biggest tear-jerkers in kids sci-fi. Enjoy!


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  • Anonymous

    Lilo is my favorite Disney character for so many reasons, mainly due to the fact that she has that freaky little doll that she imagines has a head full of bugs.  

  • http://profiles.google.com/quieteyes Chris Talbot

    On the “Tommy” post, there’s a misspelling.  Near the end, the line “It makes it very hear to take our” … should be “It makes it very hard to take our”…

    Just an FYI.  :-)

  • http://twitter.com/Messorius Amber Smith-Cochrane

    Man, I was totally hoping for Flight of the Navigator in this.

  • http://twitter.com/AbelUndercity Abel Undercity

    “It’s not about pods. It’s not about people.  It’s all about pain.” – Dr. Clayton Forrester

  • http://www.facebook.com/rdlawrence Rick Lawrence

    Does “Gremlins” count as a boy finding these creatures?  I was half expecting it to show up.

  • http://twitter.com/MSampo Chris ‘Sampo Cornell

    Synchronicity! http://www.mst3kinfo.com/?p=9893

  • http://twitter.com/MSampo Chris ‘Sampo Cornell

    Synchronicity! http://www.mst3kinfo.com/?p=9893

  • http://twitter.com/thatultragirl Yes, THAT Ultra girl

    I would have been deeply disappointed had I not seen Hogarth – but there he is, hurrah! “I go. You stay. No following.”

    (My addition would have been Musashi and Ultraman Cosmos, if not for two things – one, I don’t think Ultraman is a mainstream girl geek thing, and two, I want to punt grown-up Musashi several star systems over.)

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1741641854 Linda Petersen

    “The Last Mimzy”? Anyone? Anyone??

  • Misty

    As a Canadian who has an appreciation for obscure cartoons, I feel that Katie & Orbie should be on this list. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_and_Orbie

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