Thinking of some childhood shows and movies from ages 4–9:
Speed Racer – a favorite kids’ cartoon of my kindergarten class, features large amounts of routine deaths of hapless race drivers caught up in the carnage of hyper-aggressive racing and murderous rival drivers cheating and operating in gangs to knock other drivers off cliffs and into walls, etc, where they explode. It’s one of the main interesting things about it – the persistent theme that danger is serious and can kill people at any time if they aren’t up to the challenge or make the wrong decisions.
(Watch just 45 seconds into the intro to this episode when the jolly peppy child-friendly intro suddenly shows a race car lose control, burst through a guard rail, and fly through the air off a cliff… the camera then lingers to show a colossal fireball that surely the driver had no way of surviving.)
Star Wars . . .
Space 1999 – plenty of death an violence, much of it quite gorey
Westerns (e.g. the oh so wholesome show The Rifleman, where Chuck Connors’ character doesn’t want any trouble, but routinely finds himself just having to use his rapid-fire rifle marksmanship to shoot lots of badguys)
World War Two movies…
Peter Pan – Cut off Captain Hook’s hand and fed it to a crocodile who then keeps hunting Hook. In the original version, Pan kicks Hook into the crocodile’s mouth, where he is eaten to death.
Bambie – Bambie’s mother dies in a fire