I am going to be a father and am making a jellyfin setup for my child. I want to start early to make a good collection of movies and shows. So I am interested in knowing what other people experienced as positive influences in their lives.
Edit: English and Norwegian is fine, but I can always get dubbed versions of other languages. We will be speaking English and Norwegian with our child from birth. But want to introduce our child to many types of cultures, religions etc.
Roseanne, the first few seasons showed a poor family which I was at the time.
Has there ever been another live audience sitcom that was as down to earth as Roseanne?
grounded for life
I’m a dad, so a lot of these arewhat I’ve found for mine, which was of course influenced by my childhood.
Get The Owl House now for when they’re a bit older, before Disney buries it in the ground.
Danger Mouse both old and new ones, the new ones are amazing.
Duck Tales both old and new, again the new ones are amazing.
Frozen and Moana are IMHO the best of Disney’s movies, all of Pixar’s catalogue.
flight of the navigator
rainbow brite and the star stealer
care bears 2
wizard of oz (39)
sword in the stone
mary poppins
bednobs and broomsticks
charlottes web
petes dragon
drop dead fred
mother goose rock n rhyme
any of the bugs bunny/daffy duck movies
the wizard
neverending story
the pagemaster
follow that bird
american tail
all dogs go to heaven
brave little toaster
princess bride
jetsons meet the flintstones
the flintstones (94)
little monsters
mister wizards world
fraggle rock
muppet babiesok that’s enough i got carried away :)
Bluey. Well, not my childhood but my daughter loves it. It’s adorable, educational, relatable and super positive. And can hit you right in the feels.
From a purely positive influence? Anything on PBS (wasn’t allowed to have cable growing up)
- Sesame Street
- Mr Roger’s
- Any documentary with David Attenborough
- same with Jane Goodall
- Nova
Bill Nye would be the one non-PBS show I remember having an impact
Modernish stuff? Bluey, Miss Rachel, Pixar especially Wall-E, Brave, Coco, Soul, Encanto, Toy Story, Inside Out (when a little older). I like Coco, but Book of Life is an underrated alternative too.
Maggie and the Ferocious Beast (the first English cartoon I remember watching), Rolie Polie Olie, Martha Speaks, Franklin, Little Bear, Total Drama Island/Action, and 6Teen taught me English when I came to Canada.
Star Trek got me started on my path to tankiehood and sci-fi writing. Futurama also significantly contributed to the latter.
Pokemon, Wonderpets and Redwall (and many of the cartoons from the learning English category) got me interested in writing animal characters. Zootopia pissed me off so much with its inconsistent world building that it sealed the deal and made me obsessed with perfecting my own fictional animal world.
Family Guy taught me how not to write characters and their interactions.
How It’s Made is just awesome and satisfying, no further comments.
As a relatively new father (my daughter is around 2.5 years old), you have plenty of time. They’ll be a loving little lump for a while.
What she has loved so far:
- Bluey (a beautiful show about parenting in disguise as a kids show)
- Mister Roger’s Neighborhood (all episodes available on archive.org, but they have to be reorganized/renamed at least for Kodi tagging)
- The Mhppets Show (and anything else muppets)
- (Modern) Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (cg show, and Clubhouse+, the short renewal)
- Dragon Prince
- Sesame Street
- Moana (2 to a lesser extent)
- Finding Nemo/Dory
- Lion King
- Little Mermaid
- Bedknobs and Broomsticks
- Mary Poppins
- Aladin
- Frozen (and all the spinoff stuff)
- Mickey Donald and Goofy: Three Musketeers (this is her current obsession, probably watched it 10 times in the last week)
I’ll come back and edit this with my own shows later.
Good on you for setting up the Jellyfin early, it’s still on my to-do list
My personal favorite childhood movies/shows that made a real impact:
Fern Gully, the Disney animated originals (not remakes) mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Nightmare Before Christmas, Princess Bride, Neverending Story, Star Trek 4 (the whales one), Toy Story
Star Trek TNG and TOS, the old school B/W Addams Family, OG Looney Tunes, Nature on PBS, Nova on PBS, Mr Rogers, Arthur
Additional stuff I’ll be adding to my own kid’s Jellyfin (when I get to it)
Avatar the Last Airbender, Kipo and the Wonderbeasts, She-Ra:PoP (the Netflix one), Bluey, Storybots, Puffin Rock, Lucas the Spider, Trash Truck, Ms Rachel, Daniel Tiger, Elinor Wonders Why
Winnie the Pooh! The episode where they fall down the wishing well instilled in me a lifelong fascination with wishing wells.
I also used to watch a lot of the old Thomas the Tank Engine
David the Gnome and Flight of Dragons
Doctor Who was the big one, but I didn’t get into that until I was a bit older
Everything by Don Bluth. Literally everything his name on is childhood gold. Sometimes a little scary, but in a modern fairy tale sort of way.
An American Tale
All dogs go to Heaven
The Secret of NIMH
The Fox and the Hound
The Land Before Time
His movies never treated children like fools, a sentiment that’s only recently becoming the standard for children’s entertainment and he was doing it in the 80s.
It’s mildly flooding in my area right now so I just watched Rock A Doodle the other day, one of my faves as a kid.
Chanticleer! Out of all his movies that was the one I followed the least as a kid. It confused me in a way it never really went away. I came back to it as a kid and I still don’t really get it, but it has such a fairytale feeling to it.
The Iron Giant for sure
Supaman!
You stay… I go.
I may be a grown ass adult, but that scene always gets the waterworks going.

A gun who chooses not to be a gun. As someone who’s still dealing with their history as a soldier in the war on terror, I empathize with him more than I ever could as a child.
- The Lion King (original)
- Mulan (original)
- Jurassic Park
- Princess Mononoke
- Castle in the Sky
- Spirited Away
- Forrest Gump
- Aladdin (original)
- Men in Black
- Galaxy Quest
- Home Alone
- The Nightmare Before Christmas
- The Matrix
- Toy Story
- Top Gun
- The Terminator
- A Charlie Brown Christmas
- Yu Yu Hakusho
- Cowboy Bebop
Princess Mononoke might be a little dark for an earlier age. There’s some really brutal scenes in it.
Of course that didn’t stop it from being my favorite from age 8 onward, but still.
Yeah there’s literal dismemberment in the early scenes, plus thematically it’s pretty mature too
Hell yeah yu yu hakusho is so good!!! So much raw emotion with great story telling and cool fights. I know he’s the bad guy but when younger toguro turns down a ticket to heaven so he can suffer in purgatory cuz he thinks he doesn’t deserve it gets me so hard everytime.
Funny that you point out the originals Disney movies, that made me think, did the remakes made any impact on the younger generation or is too soon to know that?
Man, I really hope those were just forgettable for them. The Lion King live action remake is so damn disappointing. All the emotion, all the storytelling, just gone. It’s a very poor imitation of the original.
Remakes can be good. The new Dune movies are worlds better than the 70s movie; that is a movie that needed a proper remake. The new ones actually do the books justice.
Same Robin Hood as in the thumbnail for sure.
Also not yet listed, heavily 80s titles:
The Princess Bride
The Neverending Story
Beetlejuice
Big
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
The Dark Crystal
The Rats of Nimh
The Last Unicorn
An American Tale
Batteries Not Included
Fiddler on the Roof
Ghostbusters
Anything with the Muppets up to Treasure Island.
Back to the Future (2015 no longer the future fantasy it one was)









