"Sesame Street: Old School," the earliest episodes of the pioneering children's television show, was just released on DVD, and the New York Times' Virginia Heffernan noticed something unexpected – a parental warning. The shows are "intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child." Times, it seems, have changed in the nearly forty years since the program launched. 

In addition to characters who live in trash cans or insist that their invisible woolly mammoth-like pals are real, the Monsterpiece Theater segments starred Alistair Cookie, who had a pipe. A pipe that he ate! Heffernan quotes "Sesame Street" executive producer Carol-Lynn Parente: "That modeled the wrong behavior, so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether."

It's hard not to see this as related to the same revisionist tendencies that led Stephen Spielberg to digitally replace police officers' guns with walkie-talkies for the 20th anniversary edition of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

Disney's The Jungle Book (1967) and Dumbo (1941) run the same risk of offending viewers as Song of the South, which M. Faust discusses here. In Dumbo, the crows speak in African American dialect – one is even named Jim Crow, like the laws that once mandated "separate but equal" treatment in the American South. Some writers, Richard Schickel among them, found the portrayal negative, although others disagreed. Similar criticism was leveled at the baboon character King Louie in The Jungle Book, who sings in a scat style (although he's voiced by Italian-American Louis Prima) that "an ape like me can learn to be human too."

And a film like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which took a positive, even heroic, view of witchcraft, would likely rile up certain evangelical Christian factions that find dangerous pagan influences in the Harry Potter books and films.