The Best Kids Movies on Netflix from Your Childhood

Add these gems to your queue and travel back to a time when someone else bought all your food. Enjoy the nostalgia with the best kids movies on Netflix right now.

Hercules
Disney

Image via Disney

Hercules

When we were kids, you couldn't relive shit like you can now, with mini computers at your disposal 24/7. At best, you had a VHS film collection, but you couldn't just thrown on, like, season 3, episode 4 of Cheers or whatever. Nope, you had to wait around for reruns like an asshole. Shit was hard. But now the Internet allows us an unending supply of nostalgia for things that weren't even that long ago. That's exactly why we keep doing these "...of our childhood" posts, because you suckers will always read them. Also, it keeps gross olds from reading our site and asking stupid questions like, "What's a ski-pole job?" Um, it's a girl sitting between two dudes, giving each a handski, like ski poles, possibly in the back row of a movie theater, Mom, now go back to reading the AOL news page.

Unfortunately, Netflix seems to have lost a lot of the classic shows and movies: the OG Batman cartoon series, Spider Man, Gargoyles, etc, which I didn't know when I pitched this idea. But it's all good because the absence of mainstream picks allowed me to bring a couple deep cuts still streaming to your attention. Add these gems to your queue and travel back to a time when someone else bought all your food. Enjoy the nostalgia with the best kids movies on Netflix right now. 

Jaws

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This entire list could be made up of Spielberg movies, and not many people would bat an eye. Still, for the sake of mixing things up, let Jaws be the Spielberg movie that truly marks most of our childhoods. Unlike Spielberg’s more saccharine, family-friendly efforts, what makes Jaws so significant is that for many of us it was our first foray into horror. It’s a rite of passage, a film that’ll do one of two things: keep you away from the beach indefinitely or awaken you to the pleasure of the genre and seek out all things scary.

Balto

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A 1995 animated movie where Kevin Bacon voices a wolfdog named Balto? Maybe this classic Universal Pictures movie fell through the cracks, but if you’re one of the lucky ones, you were witness to a heartwarming tale about a shunned dog — the wolf in him made him an outcast — who, despite adversity, runs across Alaska to retrieve medicine for a dying girl. Balto is a simple story, and although it may not reinvent any wheels, it’s a childhood gem about how love triumphs (or at least it should) over hate.

Pokémon: Indigo League

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Although the concept of Saturday-morning cartoons may not be familiar to some in our age of streaming, Pokémon: Indigo League, the original Pokémon series, is available on Netflix. Whether or not you grew up with the anime show, Ash and his friends’ journey feels timeless. The show is warm, smart, funny, and probably one of the most inventive animated worlds we’ve been given. It’s also incredibly binge-able, serialized in a way that makes an episode-to-episode watch exciting. You’re invested. You want to see Ash and his friends grow. Pokémon is one of our greatest childhood escapes.

The Little Rascals

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There are few things as memorably goofy as The Little Rascals, a sweet movie about Alfalfa and his friends, members of the He-Man Woman Haters Club. The thing is Alfalfa, against club code, has fallen in love, which causes a rift between him and his friend, club president Spanky. If you’re unfamiliar with the the film, this may seem a little eye-rolly, but there’s a reason it has become a cult classic over the years. For one, the kids — real kids, not just teens playing kids — are endearing, naive, and funny in the way that only kids can be. Even in its stupidity, there’s nothing mean-spirited about The Little Rascals. That feels special, rare. There is, however, a cameo from none other than Donald Trump himself at the end of the film, and that — unfortunately – is a bit that just does not hold up.

Casper

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Making a ghost movie where your ghost is the hero and not a source of scares is a pretty bold move, and because of it many of us are intimately familiar with Casper the friendly ghost. His origin story, available on Netflix, is special not only because of its family-friendly conceit, but also for its pretty decent special effects for the time. For the kids with a darker side, it offers a ton of spooky, mischievous fun, while also being delicate in its ideas about grief and death. It’s never heavy-handed, and although its sappy in so many ways, Casper is an adorable emblem of ’90s culture.

Hercules

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Of the many wonderful animated movies to come out of the Disney renaissance, Hercules is not talked about enough. It’s a hero's tale, adapted from a Greek myth, but the pleasure of the film comes not only from the titular character’s adventures, but also from the wacky supporting characters (Hades, God of Hell, is a gem), music, and playful animation.

Fantasia

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While it’s not a movie from most of our youths, Fantasia wins the heart of any Disney fanatic. The miracle of this animated film, released in 1940, is evident in its detailing, its commitment to lovingly giving its audience several vignettes accompanied by classical music. While some of the tales haven’t stood the test of time, Fantasia showcases Mickey Mouse as a young sorcerer who is just figuring out how to perform magic. And that’s what the movie itself is — magic.

E.T.

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Jaws just couldn’t be the only Spielberg inclusion. It just couldn’t. E.T. is a true childhood classic, a film that transcends its genre and is ultimately just a wonderful tale for just about any audience. Its story is simple, about an alien who is stranded on Earth and recruits children to help him return home. But simple is best here, and the film succeeds in making E.T. one of our greatest and most loveable creations. For an alien, he feels incredibly human.

Freaks and Geeks

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Gone too soon, Freaks and Geeks aired just 12 episodes until it was canceled. But the fact that those 12 episodes left the impression they have and launched the careers of many of our greatest comedic actors is not a coincidence. Freaks and Geeks is special because it gets something few shows about kids and teens get. It’s not condescending — it takes them seriously, even while fully laughing at them. And for a show with such a short lifespan, it’s crazy how much its characters and their personalities — the bullies, the weirdos, the nerds — stick with us. It’s a show about teens for teens.

Atlantis

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Maybe it’s a little too mature for a young audience, but Disney’s Atlantis felt like one of the most spectacular movie-going experiences as a child. Few movies have its sense of adventure, sensitivity — after all, it’s about saving a dying culture — and striking beauty. It’s a standard adventure story, taking a researcher to the underwater world of Atlantis, but there’s also a moving love story, some frightening betrayals, and a memorable effort that feels outside of what you’d expect from a studio like Disney.

The Iron Giant

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Of all the nostalgic shows and films from our youth about our youth, The Iron Giant remains a unique gem, one that manages to only grow better after each viewing. A lot of this has to do with its conceit. It takes place during the Cold War, but it’s not your traditional 1950s film. It’s darker, about a young, lonely boy with a widowed mother who discovers a literal iron giant in the woods not too far from his home. A lot of the movie’s pleasures are not immediately discernible at a young age. Back then it was just a fun film about this really cute and clumsy iron machine that strikes up a friendship with a loner kid. But as you get older, you realize The Iron Giant is special because of its specificity, its commitment to subtly expressing things we can all relate to: fear of our government, of our economic standing, of the state of our family. Maybe it’s not what we consciously respond to as kids, but it does linger. Iron Giant lingers.

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