10 Ignominious Moments in Dad History

June 18, 2010, By Jack Heffron 0 comments

Jack Heffron

Bad Dad Moments - we’ve all had them. A thoughtless gesture, a cranky criticism, an impatient response after a tough day at work. But the following paters familia had some really bad dad moments that might make you feel better about your own lapses. They might even make you feel like the dad of the year.

1. Michael Jackson loved kids a lot. But when parents kept suing him for loving their kids so much he had a few his own. He was such a proud father, in fact, that while staying at a hotel in Berlin he dangled his 9-month-old son over a fifth-floor balcony, holding the squirmy tot with one arm. The crowd below gasped in horror. But at least Michael protected his son by putting a blanket over the boy’s face so fans wouldn’t recognize him and later try to hurt the little tike. A genius at pop, Michael was no genius as a pop.
2. Familiar story for a lot of dads - a tiff with your teen about career paths. In a bad dad moment, Darth Vader lost patience with stubborn Luke and chopped off the boy’s hand with a lightsaber. It happens. And as we dads know, it probably hurt Darth a lot more than it hurt Luke. Darth later atoned for his Moment by heaving into a bottomless black hole the galactic emperor - his boss! - who was shooting lightning bolts from his fingertips into poor Luke. Been there, done that, eh dads?
3. The list of bad showbiz dads is long - Joe Jackson and Marvin Gaye, Sr. quickly come to mind - but Ryan O’Neill has had so many Bad Dad Moments we can’t list them all. Giving kids Griffin and Tatum cocaine at the age of eleven and allegedly shoving Tatum when she copped an Oscar nomination for Paper Moon - and he didn’t - do warrant mention. Then, at the funeral of long-time friend and lover Farrah Fawcett, just moments after the casket was lowered into the ground, grief-stricken Ryan hit on a pretty blond who turned out to be Tatum - who he didn’t even recognize. Oops.
4. Peter I of Russia may have been “the Great” as a tsar, but as a father he was Peter the, well, Peter. He constantly beat and berated his son Alexi, even told the boy to shape up or he’d “cast you off as a gangrened limb.” Ouch. That kind of talk can mess with a lad’s confidence. Though heir to the throne, Alexi fled the country - but dear old dad hunted him down and threw him in a dungeon. Pater Peter then ordered a few rounds on the rack before his son’s execution. Fortunately, the torture was so brutal that young Alexi died before he was scheduled to be killed. Fellow Russian maniac Ivan the Terrible also murdered his son, but at least his nickname fits.
5. In "The Usual Suspects," master criminal Keyser Soze comes home to find a rival gang holding his wife and children at gunpoint. Soze caps his kin himself then frees one goon to tell the tale, thus establishing ultimate street cred. Now, to be fair, we’ve all been guilty of putting career before family, and this bad dad moment did earn Mr. Soze significant market share in the international drug trade. It also gave new meaning to the threat, “Just you wait till your father gets home.”