While on that topic, I recently watched the director's commentary for THE INCREDIBLES where Brad Bird spoke, and he mentioned that he disliked the "Saturday morning formula" of villains being unable to be genuinely nasty and superheroes never seeming to get hurt or bleed or whatnot. He felt the reaction was the opposite of what censors wanted; it would teach children that acts of adventure and even combat had NO consequences because no one ever got hurt. He thought that kids wouldn't be "scared" if they saw a hero occasionally get hurt or bleed, or even see characters die, because it would show them that these things have consequences. That was sort of why in THE INCREDIBLES he made sure to show that the giant robot could actually CUT Mr. Incredible's seemingly invulnerable skin and hurt him, as well as to establish that Syndrome outright killed all the other superheroes (Mr. Incredible literally hides behind Gazerbeam's skeleton). Of course, what you can do in a movie is different from a network TV show.
Think of some of the so-called "children's fairy tales". Many of them, in their original drafts, involved things like death and whatnot. Lord knows when I was a kid, I always thought it was silly that characters armed with claws or swords could only cut robots. And that was in the 80's before the current age where every kid has seen THE MATRIX and every 9 year old giggles with glee at slaughtering people in GEARS OF WAR.