After weeks of hand-wringing over whether kids could handle the emotional intensity in Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers’ big screen adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, I decided to conduct my own unscientific study and see how my own two sons reacted to the movie. Don’t worry, this is not a Sally Mann-ish experiment, where I threw my kids into a potentially scarring situation for my own professional benefit. I vetted WTWTA first, and figured they could handle the sad-eyed beasts battling the sorrow of the loneliness of existence. That’s life, isn’t it? And any attempt to cover that up is subterfuge and a set-up for a rude awakening down the road.

My real worry going into last night’s screening was that movie is a slow-moving poem to childhood confusion and it was a total crap-shoot as to whether my five-year-old, Huck, would make it through the first act. I also brought along my fifteen-year-old, Ethan, who has always loved the book and had even met Maurice Sendak a couple times when he was baby and his dad worked for his production company. The stakes were pretty high, all around.

Things weren’t looking good about ten minutes in, when Huck wondered aloud why he didn’t have a bucket of popcorn on his lap like all the other kids around him, dammit. My bad. Problem solved. Then, to my surprise, he sat there rapt through the next forty minutes, watching as Max runs away from home, hooks up with a band of bickering Wild Things so neurotic, they make Larry David seem like a zen monk by comparison. About an hour in, when Carol flew into one of his jealous rages, my heart fell when Ethan pulled the collar of t-shirt over his head and started texting friends. But Huck, surprisingly, was still all in. In fact, he probably would have made it through the whole movie without complaint if he hadn’t started jonesing aloud for a cheeseburger during the scene when Max was getting slimed inside K.W.’s mouth. Still, Huck hung in until the credits rolled. Ethan, sadly, was still tented inside his shirt, lit up by his led light like a jack-o-lantern.

Afterward, Huck said he loved everything about the movie, especially the part where Max braves the wild seas in his tiny sailboat. If Max had that much moxy, then maybe he could, too. Oh, and the forts were awesome. Ethan, it turns out, had read the book so many times, that, at fifteen, it was still so alive in his imagination: He had no patience for the liberties the filmmakers’ took to expand it into a feature. “It looked cool, but why did they have to bring in all that extra stuff,” he scoffed. “It’s like when I’m bullshitting to fill out my page count on an essay.”

Okay, so I guess the upshot here might be that this is one movie that works best for kids young enough to give themselves over to the emotional storminess of childhood and people old enough to look back romantically on all that chaos. Okay, PopWatchers, are you buying my arm-chair analysis WTWTA‘s kid-friendliness? Since the movie has already made $32.4 million this weekend, some of you must have taken your kids. What was their response? Would you recommend it to your friends with kids?

More on Where the Wild Things Are from EW:
Box Office Report: Wild Things Is king with $32.5 million
Where the Wild Things Are: Nervous when beloved books are made into movies?
Where the Wild Things Are: EW review

Tonight, The Science Channel will debut its first ever quiz show, the Whoopi Goldberg-produced Head Games. It’s presented in an old fashioned, three-contestant format with a glib Alex Trebek-manque host, stand-up comic, Greg Proops (anyone who survives elementary school with that last name has our condolences and respect), who reads from index cards with science-based multiple-choice questions, like “What happens when you leave an egg in vinegar overnight?” Answer: The shell gets squishy! The video clues, featuring scientists in lab coats and protective eye goggles dipping objects into steaming vats of nitroglycerin, are the coolest part of the show, recalling that awesome ’80′s prime-time series, That’s Incredible! hosted by the dreamy feathered-hair heartthrob, John Davidson.

As I got antsy about ten minutes into Head Games, it occurred to me that in a world with Wikipedia and Google-able answers to all of life’s mysteries, educational trivia shows have lost most of their “wow” factor. And without that, what’s the point? I’m clearly not alone in feeling that these shows are quickly going the way of land lines. It wasn’t so long ago that shows like Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire were fun-for-the-whole-family cultural events and a regular source of water cooler conversation. Now the relevance of those shows seems to have faded to the point that they’re in line to become trivia answers to questions about TV fads of the late ’90s and early ’00s.

Maybe I’m being too dismissive of the vicarious thrill of watching some nerve-wracked nerd win a king-sized check. But I just couldn’t muster much excitement when Head Games‘ bicycle mechanic (seriously) took home a whopping $3,000 and change. I know it’s bad manners to focus on the prize and not how the game was played. But does anyone else feel like quiz shows are seriously tired? Will any of you miss them when they’re gone? And does anyone plan on checking out Head Games tonight? Edumacate me, PopWatchers.