There's no shortage of entertainment for children. Parents want their kids to be healthy and happy, and being happy requires a couple of laughs now and then. Occasionally at the expense of good storytelling, Ice Age provided kids with more than a few guffaws. I should know. I was one of those kids.
Looking back on the Ice Age movies, I sometimes wonder at how my younger self could have such little sensibility when it came to humor. Was a fart joke really all it took to get me to laugh? The answer is yes, yes, it really was. But looking past the crass humor, Ice Age reinforced the vital lesson about the importance of family. No matter if your family consisted of the dumbest sloth, the most sarcastic mammoth, or the scariest of saber-toothed tigers, being part of a unit greater than yourself was meant to be valued.
Morals of the movies aside, the Ice Age series was notorious for including pretty raunchy jokes. Most of these jokes went right over my head when I was younger, but you would be surprised at how many were easily understood. With children as an audience, you would think the creators of Ice Age would have toned down the adult-styled humor. Admittedly, the humor and heart of these movies is what compelled so many people into watching them, and I honestly can't blame them. I have to confess, those fart jokes will still catch me off guard and cause me to burst out laughing. Read on if you want to revisit those moments in the Ice Age series that may not have been suitable for you as a kid, but which you can definitely appreciate now.
25 How Do You Even Play?
Grandparents sometimes have the oddest of hobbies (relatives in general do, but we're dealing in specifics here). In Ice Age, none are so weird as Sid's grandma's. Known to everyone in the herd as Granny, she's a rough-and-tumble, I'm-going-to-do-things-my-way kind of sloth, the complete opposite of Sid's cowardly indecisiveness. Still, with her old age comes a plethora of strange ways, and one of the grossest is when she mentions playing "bingo." Firstly, I don't even know how you could play that kind of game. Secondly, none of the animals wear any clothes in the first place. Wouldn't any regular game of bingo automatically become this kind of bingo?
24 Super Size Me
A running joke in the Ice Age series is about how large Manny the woolly mammoth is. Sid constantly makes cracks at Manny's expense about his size. When I was younger, I thought it was hilarious to make fun of Manny for being fat, but as I've grown up, I've also grown a sense of tact. Making light of a person's weight is not a nice thing to do, and one of the consistently inappropriate features of the Ice Age series is that they do it all the time.
Not only is it an unkind joke, it gets overused.
Okay, we get that Manny is large, but seeing as he's a mammoth, he's supposed to be large. Tell a joke one too many times, and it officially becomes old. Enough with the fat shaming.
23 Storytelling Gone Wrong
In the second Ice Age movie, Sid takes it upon himself to run a kids' camp, but Sid being Sid, he can't control the young animals who attend his camp at all. It's up to Manny to try to rein in the reckless behavior of the children. He does this by telling what seems like a sweet story about a wild burro child. Of course, one of the kids quickly points out that another name for a burro is something that I'm not allowed to type but I can say that it rhymes with "grass." As a kid, I thought the use of this forbidden language was absolutely amusing. Now, I'm surprised with how many times they were able to get away with saying it. Not only did the kid say it once, but Manny afterward retold his story using the new substitution in place of the word burro.
22 Radioactive Points
An anatomically-correct Sid is something I never asked to see. An anatomically-incorrect Sid is also something I never asked to see. In Ice Age: Collision Course, meteors begin to rain down upon the land that our ice-bound compatriots inhabit. The meteors glow a strange color once they hit the earth, but they're flaming spheres from space, so they're more or less what you would expect. At one point, a meteor lands dangerously close to Sid, and it singes the fur off of his chest, causing the tapering points on his chest to start glowing. Never before have we seen Sid's chest displayed in this manner, and after seeing it that way once, I can tell you it's not something you want to see again.
21 That's Not What You Think It Is
The trials of parenthood are innumerable and immense, and Sid experiences a fraction of them when he finds himself responsible for three, young, meat-eating dinosaurs. Once he finds out that they're hungry, he sets out to find them food.
Of course, since he's Sid, he does this in the least intelligent way possible.
Instead of finding them a nutritious fish or bird (they're meat-eaters for crying out loud), Sid decides to milk a nearby, dozing ox. Little does he know that the ox he's trying to milk is not a she. He does grab something beneath all that fur, and you can guess what it was that he tried to pull some milk out of. Sid ends up being chased away by a rightfully angry ox while his three hungry dinosaur children follow eagerly.
20 Repopulation Obstacles
Manny had to deal with a huge problem in the second Ice Age film. He's the last of his kind (or so he believes), which means that once he is gone from the world, all of mammoth-kind will be gone as well. He meets Ellie, a free-spirited mammoth who thinks she's a possum, and the weight of their responsibility to their species almost gets in the way of their love for each other. Things work out in the end, but Crash and Eddie, Ellie's possum "brothers," make some delightfully logical (yet inappropriate) remarks. They tell Manny of the problems with repopulating the planet. One of those problems is that future generations will be obligated to procreate with their siblings as their will be no other options available.
19 An Itching Time
Sid considers himself a ladies' man, but he is sorely mistaken. He is one lazy, idiotic sloth, but he does have a heart of gold. Unfortunately, his good intentions are usually covered in the slop of his horrendous mistakes. He tries proposing to a female sloth named Francine who he's only courted for a day, so of course she rejects him. As she leaves him to his sorrow, he asks after her if she's mad at him because of the bikini he gave her. There's nothing particularly wrong with the gift of a bikini, but this is Sid we're talking about here. Apparently, he gave Francine the gift of a bikini made of poison ivy. No wonder she rejected his proposal so swiftly; anybody would be mad.
18 Peek-a-Bye
Almost losing Diego in the first Ice Age was the most emotional part of the movie. After nearly betraying the group, Diego sacrifices himself in order to save Manny. The others are then forced to leave him in order to catch up with the group of humans they've been trying to deliver a baby to for the entire movie. Thankfully for everyone's hearts, Diego limps after them, and he gets a chance to wave good-bye to the baby before he goes off with his own kind.
Initially, this wasn't the plan.
In the first iteration of the movie, Diego actually perished. But this tested horribly with children who were test-viewing it. They actually cried at Diego's passing. Because of their reaction, the ending was changed to what we see now.
17 Strange Yoga
Nothing is more wacky than having a llama (humorously named Shangri Llama) teach prehistoric animals how to do yoga. Ice Age is meant for kids though, so wacky is more than acceptable. Of course, even wackiness has to draw the line somewhere. In Ice Age: Collision Course, Shangri Llama tries to demonstrate varying yoga positions that don't make for polite viewing.
He even calls one of them the "downward dog" pose.
Ice Age has had its share of zany characters, but I'm going to say right off the bat that Shangri Llama is one of the zaniest. He seriously believed that yoga was going to save the world from the imminent danger of an asteroid colliding with the planet.
16 Float like a Butterfly
Speaking of zany characters, Buck was the zany one who appeared in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Even though he was just a scrawny mammal, he had spent a large chunk of time surviving in the underground land of dinosaurs by his lonesome. It drove him kind of crazy. He frequently talked to himself, and he seemed to create characters out of inanimate objects.
He also told the raunchiest jokes.
At one point, the group sees a giant butterfly swoop past them. Buck grins and says he knew the guy back when he was a caterpillar, before he came out. "Coming out" is a fairly innocuous phrase by itself, but the connotations that it has (namely, that of coming out of the closet) are not too hard to grasp.
15 Size Matters
When we first met Manny, he was a grumpy mammoth. (Not that he changes much in the sequels. He goes from grumpy mammoth to grumpy husband to grumpy father. Not a lot of character development there, but I digress.) But as the movies went on, he became more and more friendly to his fellow mammals. In the first Ice Age, a little rudeness could really set Manny off. When a tapir gets angry at Manny for holding up some foot traffic, he blows up at our favorite woolly mammoth. Manny then turns dangerously to the much smaller tapir and warns him that he shouldn't be so rude with that small of a trunk. Yep, even size jokes made it into Ice Age. Quality counts for something in these movies.
14 Garbage Outfits
Adjectives matter. They're the spices that are sprinkled over our sentences. Where nouns and verbs are the meats and breads of the spoken language, adjectives make everything go down better. As such, there are many adjectives available to use in different situations. Ice Age: Collision Course made the wrong choice in adjective when describing some effeminate hairstyles. Sid makes a snide comment about possible hairstyles that Peaches could sport for her wedding (with Crash and Eddie being the models for said hairstyles). He calls one of them "flirtatious, but trashy." He then plucks a set of fish bones from the hair, as if to excuse his use of an adjective than can mean something other than simply "dealing with trash."
13 A Swear's A Swear
Ice Age is well-known (or at least it should be) for its prehistoric and ice age-related puns. The world of Diego, Sid, and Manny is ripe for those kinds of things. Of course, there are other ways to take advantage of the ice-covered world aside from swanky pun-slinging. One of the mammals we get to encounter during Manny, Sid, and Diego's travels is a beaver. (Well, a beaver-looking creature. It has a horn on top of its head that makes it look like a cross between a beaver and a unicorn.) In Ice Age: The Meltdown, a beaver constructing a dam finds his home in peril from a rising flood. It's understandable that he'd want to shout out an expletive that sounds exactly like what he calls his home.
12 They Didn't Make It
One of the factors that sets the first Ice Age movie apart from the others is the inclusion of humans in the story. Manny, Sid, and Diego find themselves with a human baby that they wish to return to its family. It's a sweet story, but the tale turns a tad bittersweet when you consider that the baby, his father, and his tribe were part of the early humans known as Neanderthals.
Neanderthals end up disappearing completely from the face of the earth.
They are replaced by Homo Sapiens in the future. So the fate of that little baby? He and his people end up fading away. The transient nature of the baby's story is most likely lost on kids, but I sure feel it now as an adult.
11 Descriptive Nicknames
Despite being the group's most annoying member, everyone still loves Sid. So when Sid gets himself lost in the underground world of dinosaurs, everyone goes after him. The journey to rescue Sid is a perilous one.
It involves crossing a gaping chasm filled with noxious green gas.
This chasm is imaginatively called the Chasm of Death. When asked why it's called that, Buck responds that it might have been called the Big Smelly Crack instead. See? This is the kind of humor I was talking about. Why is this funny to me? It shouldn't be. I'm older now; my tastes should be more refined. But nope, Big Smelly Crack still makes me giggle.
10 Cursed Crustacean
Remember that beaver (unicorn-creature-thing) who took advantage of the fact that Ice Age is a ripe ground for ice-related puns and expletives that are disguised as ordinary objects. Well, Sid can totally jump on that bandwagon too. When the mammals took to the high seas in Ice Age: Continental Drift, Sid let loose with his own disguised curse word. Before you tell me that Sid saying, "Holy crab," is not overly inappropriate for young children, tell that to the parents who have to stop them from imitating him. And kids have a tendency to mispronounce words you know, so if they're trying to say "crab," you know what they might actually say in its place.
9 A Sloth Only A Sylvia Could Love
Some sloths were too crazy and stalker-ish to make it into the final cut of Ice Age. Originally, Sid was going to have a very desperate sloth named Sylvia trailing after him. It's hard to imagine Sid turning down any female who was interested in him, but for some reason, he was completely dismissive of Sylvia's pining.
Sylvia was rejected by both Sid and the movie's creators.
However, she was cut from the movie for a very good reason. If she had made it in, not only would children have been introduced to the idea of a double standard, Diego would not have survived the final fight. Because the creators made the choice of keeping Diego, Sylvia had to go.
8 A Gutt Feeling
Villain names are often terribly demonstrative. Captain Hook from Peter Pan has a hook for a hand. Scar from The Lion King has a long scar etched across his eye. Captain Gutt, the villain from Ice Age: Continental Drift, has a name that is equally indicative of his character. However, unlike Hook or Scar, Gutt's name comes not from his appearance, but from his actions, as Manny finds out when he jokes about Gutt being named after his paunch. The Captain tells Manny that he earned his name from how he treats his foes. (And no, he does not tell them gut-busting jokes.) Captain Gutt's preferred method of dealing with enemies is to use his long claws to gut them.
7 Sympathy Pains
In Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaur, Ellie is heavily pregnant with her and Manny's baby. Unfortunately, Sid gets carted off into danger, and Ellie did not want to be left behind, no matter what her condition was. She and the rest traipsed into the dangerous underground world of dinosaurs.
While there, Ellie begins to suffer from labor pains.
While Manny fights off predator bird-things, Diego assists Ellie with the process of giving birth. He's helpful at first, coaching her with some breathing exercises, but at one point, when he's trying to push some predator bird-things away using a log (and resting in a suspiciously giving-birth pose), he complains about how Ellie has no idea what he's currently going through. The look she gives him is answer enough.
6 The Extinction Game
The part in the first Ice Age that made me laugh the most when I was a kid was when Sid, Manny, and Diego try to take back their melon from the dodos. The baby the trio is looking after is hungry, and the melon the dodos stole was the kid's only chance at food. During the whole debacle where they try to recapture the melon, the dodos are a fumbling mess of dumb creatures.
They practically drive themselves to extinction.
And unfortunately for the dodos, that's exactly what you're supposed to assume they did. Kids watching this moment, while laughing at the dodos' antics, are technically watching a comedic extinction event. Don't feel bad about it now. It was slapstick comedy at its best.