When I was about 8 years old (2016) I woke up early while my parents were still asleep and turned on the TV to see what to watch. Superjail was on and I cried due to so much gore being on the TV, even if it was cartoon gore. I was 8.
Tales from the crypt.
100 ways to die
Wouldn’t go as far as to say it “traumatised” me but In the Night Garden was a surreal, creepy fever dream of a show that still lives rent free in my head. The thing kid me found most weird was that I first saw it in Canada, but when we went back to China to visit family they were airing it there too in the imported shows segment right next to Spongebob and Doraemon. At that point I was really confused because I assumed for a show to be imported it would have to be really well written and acclaimed, but In the Night Garden was such a nonsensical cacophony that it left me wondering what it is about it my stupid kid brain had missed. Still don’t know what was up with that show.
The show that really did traumatise me though was this ghost hunting show on Animal Planet about people’s pets acting weird because they were “detecting” ghosts in their home. Freaked me the hell out because I assumed anything that aired on a documentary channel was real, and the fact that they involved animals in their “justification” of why the place is haunted added to the realism for me at the time. Took until I was an adult to realize that ghost hunting shows are all fake. This was right at the start of documentary channels deciding to sell out to pseudoscience bullshit AFAIK, so they still had a significant air of authority especially for kids.
In The Night Garden is designed specifically to get kids to chill the fuck out and it works so well. I remember having to babysit my nephew once and he was getting worked up by a show called Yo Gabba Gabba which seems to be specifically designed to cause seizures. The next day, oh, that’s weird, that channel is broken and, well, damn, I guess we’ll have to watch In The Night Garden on CBBC instead. It was like a totally different kid.
PeeWees big adventure. Large Marge.
The Julekalender
This is a Danish advent calendar that was released in the early 90s and making fun of different Danish dialects and especially making fun of Danes who were splicing more and more English words into their Danish vocabulary at the time.
The story is basically about three gnomes or nisser, who crash their airplane in Jutland, Denmark and they are stranded there until they fix the plane. They have to get back home because their old papa is dying and needs to read from a very special book to get better. This book is wanted by a copenhagener stereotype by the name of Benny who turns into a goofy vampire when he drinks alcohol. He’s stuck with a couple of jutlandic farmers who are completely oblivious about everything going on.
I was 2 years old when this show first aired on TV and I remember we were watching it together as a family when Benny turned into the goofy vampire and I started screaming. The scariest part was the fact that my family was laughing at the TV. I guess the adult version of that would be to witness a horrific car crash or a violent crime and everybody around you is just laughing. It was such a surreal and terrifying experience and I was way too little to understand the context of why this scene was so funny and why my family was laughing. All I knew was that I had seen danger and evil and that those who were supposed to protect me weren’t reacting the right way and that made it so much worse.
I had to sleep with the lights on for a long time after that because I was so scared the goofy vampire would come and hiss at me and kill me in the dark.
This is the exact scene that sent me into a fit of fear all those years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D1Cnf5OFdc
And yes, I probably shouldn’t be able to remember stuff like this from the age of 2, but I have several verified memories from my earliest childhood that I can’t really explain. I guess the trade-off is that my short term memory is shit and I cannot remember verbal instructions without visual aid.
The Julekalender is great, but it is impossible for non-Danes to fully appreciate since it’s so specifically making fun of Danish language and the differnet stereotypes attached to differnet dialects.
I was too young to watch V when I watched V
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(1984_TV_series)Back in the mid-80s: CHUD. Cannibalistic Underground Humanoid Dwellers.
Being on the spectrum, this really messed me up, even though the special effects were cheesy even for that era. And I mean heck, I was also 15 at the time, and had never seen any kind of a horror movie before…
Just learned a short while ago that the term has been co-opted to describe conservatives in general, and white conservative men specifically. I now find myself in awe at how well-applied that term is.
Honourable mention to The Last Unicorn completely tearing me up with its ending, and throwing me into a two-month existential crisis bender that I don’t think I ever fully recovered from.
this will be a deep cut because I’m talking early 80s in Hungary, but
Futrinka utca and Varjúdombi mesék let’s see how many others are sharing this trauma :)
As much as I love it, that first Batman: TAS Clayface episode.
Gleefully tormenting a clearly desperate man with the thing he wanted most left me mortified.
The Bone Chillers episode where their lunchlady gets replace by someone feeding them food with larvae that can be thrown up if they consume mustard also left a mark but only for a matter of days; I remember foregoing ketchup and getting mustard on my school lunch, the next day. I think I was in elementary school, at the time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ObscureMedia/comments/mdsdbi/bone_chillers_1996_abc_saturday_morning_kids_show/, for those curious.
Not a tv show, I wasn’t necessarily a kid but I remember stumbling on LiveLeak…
For those who want to know what it was.
Tap for spoiler
It was a video of a guy getting dragged behind a car down the highway.
In my days the equivalent was rotten.com
Some of the images are charged into my brain
I also have two from 4chan.
Spoiler
A cage with IS prisoners left down in a pool. A prisoner set on fire in a cage.
Courage the Cowardly Dog. I know it’s a kids’ show, but I was terrified of entering the basement for months after seeing the episode with the floating white head
I only ever saw the episode with the UFO
Weirded me out enough that I have no interest to watch the other ones
Also: Return the slab!
you… are not perfect.
The theme song to Unsolved Mysteries. My mom would be watching it just when Id goto bed and that song had me pissing myself.
So I’m not particularly proud of this, but the emergency broadcasting tests used to scare the bejebus out of me when I was a little kid. Like run into another room and hide scared. I don’t even really know what they were or were for, but they just seemed scary.
They really should teach about those in school. Like I learned how those work from Linus Tech Tips, when I was in high school. Why are we so against teaching how basic infrastructure our society relies on work?
Yeah, same here. It’s those damn alert tones. They aren’t even meant to get people’s attention, in America at least, they’re just a handy side effect of the digitally encoded audio signal the system uses.
The extra siren for Amber alerts though, that’s what would set me off.
The X Files inbred family episode almost feels like too easy of an answer.
Mine’s also x-files, but the cockroach wall one. I think it’s a much later season episode, scully may have been pregnant? But I have no interest in finding it. It gave me a roach phobia. And then when I was an adult, I learned in the south they are MUCH bigger than up north here, and they can fly, and I learned this because one flew into my apartment through the porch door and just crawled around on my wall by the lamp, and was extra horrified.
I didn’t see that until I was an adult and my stomach still turns upside down whenever I think of it. The mother… Horrifying.
the way that she defended the way that her family “loved” each other rings in my ears when i hear a maga person.
The one that always bothered me was like some insect alien creature. That was invisible. But it made insect noises.
I can’t remember the details except that the noise really disturbed me.
Chittery sound.
I’m hongry.
The one that gets my wife is the Tooms episodes.
“The Animals of Farthing Wood”. It’s a cartoon about a group of animals who try to find a new home after humans destroy their forest. Many of them die horrible deaths along the way. Still vividly remember the hedgehog family being run over on the motorway. And yes, it was a kids show!
I loved that show as a kid. No idea why I connected with it so strongly but I always appreciated that it wouldn’t shy away from darker themes.
Yeah, parts of it may have traumatized me, but I ultimately also quite liked the show as a child. I’m sure it helped me empathize with the suffering of wild animals and gave me an early idea of why we should protect the environment.
It definitely wouldn’t fly as a kids show today, but I think it’s an interesting discussion to have when and how much kids’ media should explore darker topics. Ultimately the show was still very tame compared to some of the books my parents got to read as kids, which included things like kids getting ground up in a mill for playing a prank or getting their thumbs cut off for sucking on them.
Yeah it’s one of the shows I look forward to showing my kid one day. That and Avatar the Last Airbender. I don’t know if they’ll appreciate it the way I did but who knows, they might show me something contemporary that they feels same sort of connection to.
kids getting ground up in a mill for playing a prank or getting their thumbs cut off for sucking on them.
That sounds like Struwelpeter. Yeah, quality entertainment there.
