And most importantly, what are we watching on Friday night movie night?

Jim:  Four and seven.  We start talking about it on like Tuesday -- what's going to be our Friday movie night? And tonight it's "The Princess Bride". It is probably the third or fourth time we've seen it. We also did Hamilton and all the Disney movies, we watched them over and over again. "My Neighbor Totoro" , we've seen that one now twice --  that was one of the newer recommendations that we had that was a really good movie. I don't know how we found that, but it's probably through another parent or on a blog or something like that.

Dave:  The kids are the right age for the Miyazaki's films, right? 

Jim:  Like, yeah, "Spirited Away". They're a little bit young for "Spirited Away". Should be nine and up.  

Tac:  Those ghosts are pretty nightmarish for me still. Gareth, how old is your son, and what are you watching tonight?  

Gareth:  My Son is seven. We don't really have a specific movie night. Usually every night is kind of movie night these days, but, mainly on Sunday, late afternoon, we'll sit down and do a  family movie order, some food, that kind of thing.  We have the Disney channel, so we  go on there and try to find something that we can all like. 

Tac:  Can I just say Disney channel? I quit Netflix because they took all the good movies and they just moved into Disney and my kids, they don't watch that. Sounds like Jim. You're on Disney, Gareth you're on Disney, I'm on Disney. Dave, are you on Disney? 

Dave:  Yup. 

Jim:  We have all of them. We've got everything. Got Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV.

Dave:  Tac, what are the ages of your kids? 

Tac: I've got my son who's 13 and my daughter who's 11.

Dave:  So we actually are just starting the Friday movie nights, we had our first one last week. My kids are the same age as Jim's there, same class, everything - but one of the challenges that we have is that the seven year old's a lot more mature. And so just finding something that doesn't freak out the four year old where he's just like running away, terrified can be a challenge. And so like last week we watched  the original Mary Poppins. But what are we going to do tonight? They seem to like the musical stuff, but, " Aladdin",  that opening scene where the guy gets swallowed up?  That's not gonna fly with the four year old. "The Lion King", when Mufasa dies, that's not going to work. Tac with your kids may be a little bit different because 11 and 13 are more mature, but just generally, how do you handle that piece? 

Tac:  About 11 and 13 is that my older son is actually more sensitive than my younger daughter.  We did "Lord of the Rings" and my son was like, 'I can't handle "Lord of the Rings"'. We actually had to watch it on  an iPhone. We have a home theater, but he was like, "I can't handle this, this is like super violent". Whereas my daughter, I dunno, whatever,  she's just less sensitive.

There's age, which is an indicator -- but then there's also this kind of propensity to this kind of tolerance thing. That's super interesting.  I actually think the guidelines, particularly "Common Sense Media",  are kind of plus or minus right around these things.

There's a real art to making a family movie that's got something for everyone. It's really hard to do that.  I think generally Disney, right? , "Lego Movie", right. Once you find a property,  I'm just going to stick with that property for a while.

Jim:  It's funny about Disney.  I imagine that they've got like a warehouse full of toddlers chaired up or chained up and they just play these movies over and over it. Just get the best focus group.  Cause they nail it,  whatever it is about those movies. It's just like crack for little kids. Yeah, we go back to them over and over.  It's easily been a hundred times we've played "Frozen".

Gareth:  It's also movies, but it's also, we've been going back, looking at old, eighties TV shows for kids. 

Jim:  We just started "Full House.

 Gareth:  "Full House". Yeah, we didn't get there yet, but we're on -- is it not "Richie Rich", but it's that guy who's  -- he's a, he's a real silver spoon -- the original version of "Silver Spoons". And my son loves that. Yeah. With the train, like the train.

Dave:  Jim, how are you handling "Aunt Becky"? 

Jim:  "Aunt Becky" who's now in jail? Who's going to be going to jail pretty soon. Yeah, we haven't got there yet. 

Dave:  Yeah. You know,  actually since we're talking about movies, you know, the other thing that I'm interested in as a parent, is our books.

For those who have girls, how important it is to you guys to have lead heroines in the books. Tac, does it need to be  an Asian female heroine? Because they're not a lot of them. I'm always on the lookout for new books, especially right now.  Like we're all locked down anyway. And my daughter's at the age where she's really into reading. I think that's the other sort of discovery thing that I'm always curious about. I'm always curious about what everybody else is reading and you where they get  their recommendations from.

Tac:  "Frozen 2" and the "Frozen" franchise -- talking about the crack -- they nailed that.  And then "Mulan" was super, super powerful. I don't know if you guys paid the extra 30 bucks we did and don't regret it. Particularly this having made the story of "Mulan" about the older witch, supporting -- against her own interests , you know, she gave up her life for  the younger generation --  because there was recognition that it's a gender movie. The power is with the women in that one, and the guys are just kind of fumbling through their stuff.  

There are some really strong properties coming out. There's not a whole backlog --  some terrible patterns in the old media that  you kind of have to ask for forgiveness for your kids.

Then with the books thing --  around maybe a little more than seven, but Rick Riordan is this super prolific guy. He wrote "Percy Jackson" and then he wrote more than three other others. And essentially he goes through each mythology. He goes through Greek Roman, and then he does Nordic and then he does Egyptian and he just goes through each one and he makes it modern. And he retains everything --  the gods are still gods, they're just modern, they're flawed. That really hooked my kids into the mythologies. When they look at Thor and they think of Loki in Marvel , they know that there's like, " Is Jane Foster real? Did that really happen?"  Entertaining and educational  -- Rick Riordan -- I definitely have big thumbs up. Very digestible, super, really funny,  the kids follow it. He's got these quippy characters who are always doing things. And generally  the characters tend to be in the early teens.  So for  a preteen reading it,  it's just understandable. There's kind of some romance, but there's never any romance really, so it's very relatable. 

Jim:  My biggest resource of books is Dave, you know, Dave, you've given us a whole bunch of titles. But there's also some other parents that I've connected to and what I'm sensing is if we had a repository for movie recommendations and book recommendations just for our experience and our kids that are ages and, you know, I mean, my younger daughter is more sensitive than the older one. So for "The Princess Bride", there's the rats of unusual size and the torture scene, My younger daughter can't stand that. My older daughter doesn't bother in the least and it sounds like you Tac, maybe your kids are somewhat similar.  Those are nuances that are important to know. It says it's appropriate for ages nine and up or whatever, but there's some sensitive kids that can't handle it. If there was a website or a blog that I could go to for solid movie recs and books, I'd go there all the time. You know, once a week, I think easily. 

Dave:  And what about you Gareth? 

Gareth:  My son he's reading a lot. He reads quite a bit. He reads mainly comic strip type books. One is  a series of books called "Dog Man". And if anybody  heard about that? 

Tac:  "Dog Man" is awesome. " Dog Man", that's the same from "Captain Underpants"? 

Gareth:  Exactly. Awesome. Awesome. "Captain Underpants, "Dog Man", there's also this other series called  "The Bad Guys". "The Bad Guys" is all these kinds of animals sort of characters that do these crazy kinds of things are part of a gang of both men and women, are females and males. There's about 11 or 12 books there. The most recent thing he's been into is "Calvin and Hobbes". He's just gobbling up that stuff, even though a lot of it's over his head, he just loves the humor and the kind of antics they get up to. That's very much  boy-ish kind of stuff.

Dave:  Is he finding a lot of these books through friends or it sounds like he's driving a lot of the things that he's looking for. How does he find these? 

Gareth: We have a ton of books. My wife is a big reader. She's a lot more of a reader than I am and she just goes out and just buys a ton of books. She'll look stuff up and say, "Hey, son, do you think you like this?" And he'll go, "Yeah, no, maybe yeah". Then she would just go and buy a bunch of them.

Dave:  And then she's like "here, try these." 

 Exactly. 

Gareth:  Yeah. And then for the "Dog Man" stuff, "The Good Guys". I just found "Good Guys" in Target.  I was walking through the book section in Target and I thought, "Oh, I'll get one or two of these, he might like this".  It's really kind of a hodgepodge approach .

Dave:  Yeah. Nice. Yeah.