Australian Council on Children and the Media

Mars Needs Mums

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What age is this for?



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What’s it about?

Nine year old Milo is in trouble for disobeying his Mum. She sends him to bed without being allowed to watch his favourite TV show. Milo tells his Mum that ‘my life would be so much better if I didn’t have a mom’. Later on he’s sorry for what he said and goes in to his Mum’s room to say so but finds her being kidnapped by aliens from Mars.

Milo chases after the Martians and ends up as a stowaway on the spaceship. When they get to Mars, Milo finds that it is ruled by females who put Milo in jail. He manages to escape and finds a huge rubbish dump where he finds Gribble, a human who arrived as a boy like Milo. Gribble tells Milo that the Martians took his Mum to programme their babies with the memories of a good human mother. Milo also finds out that unless he can rescue his Mum she might die in the process.

What to look out for

This animated science fiction movie has quite a lot of action and tense moments and fighting between aliens and humans such as:

  • Milo is often chased by Martians who fire at him with laser guns. He just misses getting hit by green bolts of energy.
  • Martians capture Gribble with laser guns and blast his house.
  • Gribble is about to be shot by a Martian firing squad when Milo comes to his rescue.

There are also scary Martian characters including hairy ape-like males, guards in armour and robot dogs and other scenes which would frighten younger kids such as:

  • Gribble remembers seeing his mother strapped to a table and a machine with a giant needle-like probe is poised to pierce his mother’s head. There is a flash of light and his mother is vaporised.
  • Milo’s mother is strapped to a table and the machine poised to pierce her head. The machine is fired up and Milo frantically attempts to free his mother.
  • Gribble is very upset when he is forced to remember the death of his mother. He tells Milo that he thinks it was his fault that his she was killed. The Martians had chosen his mother because Gribble was a good child.

Moral of the Story

The message of the story is that kids should know that although it’s never nice to be told off it’s usually because Mum knows best and she does it because she loves them.

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