I’ll go along wih the Star Trek theme, except for me, it wasn’t so much the music (though it is kinda creepy) but the photo of the alien they would show at the end of the closing credits. Ya know , the pale faced, bug eyed, pointy eared, slackjawed one? Sometimes they showed a pictured of a green lady dancing. She was pretty oogie as well.
Ya mean this one? Actually, I find the actual Balok from that episode (Clint Howard with a bald cap and fake pointy teeth) even more scary than the puppet…
I had almost forgotten my Sesame Street terror. The song “My Beautiful Balloon” was performed by a muppet guy who, at the end, flew away with the balloon completely out of control. he never came back, either. I think he was screaming as it happened, but maybe it was me.
Know what scared me? Mr. Snuffleupagus. I knew, I KNEW, that he lived under the grates in the sidewalk. He was running along under there where you couldn’t see him (I thought the sidewalks were just a narrow walkway above his tunnels) and one day that trunk would slooowly come snaking up and grab me.
No no no! I can still see that grate from my window now!
Those damn Flying Monkeys in The wizard of Oz. They scared the bejuesus outta me…but I still watched it EVERY year…Mom made Homade fudge that night…mmmm
tsfr
From Sesame Street: The kittens destroying the dollhouse tea party always made me cry. My mom still talks about this and wonders why. Thinking about it, and the song that went along with it, totally bums me out, even today. And I’m thirty freaking six years old.
To me it was the ending theme of the The Outer Limits, looking at all those galaxies with that music! More than terror, it filled me with despair knowing that those galaxies have other beings that we will never meet.
Actually, I have a Sesame Street one, too. “We All Live In A Capital I”. The song itself is so melancholy, and all those poor people living in the desert with nothing to do all day but polish their “I” just made me sad.
Apparently Jim Henson was one twisted motherfucker.
I’m really not sure. Was Eddie’s father divorced, or was he widowed? I can’t remember which. But I was very young when that show was on, so that I only have vague memories of it, and I didn’t really have a concept of a kid with no mother. I didn’t know what divorce was (I was always really confused during grade school “show & tell” when other kids would tell about going to their “real dad’s” house over the weekend) and the only person I knew who had died was my great-grandfather, but I was only four years old when he passed so it wasn’t something that really registered.
So this little boy living with just his father and a woman who obviously wasn’t his mother (I think - wasn’t there an Asian maid/nanny?) just didn’t compute. And I didn’t know what “courtship” meant, either 
Mrs. Livingston, one of the truly execrable cardboard cutout Asian characters on television. How long do you have to live in this country to realize that you call your employer by his real name, not “Mr. Eddie’s Fahdder”?
That’s funny. Looking at that same scene filled me with a sense of adventure and optimism, knowing that all of that was waiting for us to get out there and explore it.
Now, the Galaxy Being (pilot episode) - that scared my ten year old self out of my skin!
I was always freaked out by that incredibly stupid European film about the boy and that red ballon that follows him around. Balloons aren’t supposed to be able to see and think can they? Creepy
One of the first movies I saw in the theater was Willy Wonka. Many terrifying scenes in that one (drowning in chocolate, turning blue and expanding, umpa lumpas, going down that tunnel in that ship).
I googled it and found they have that segment on YouTube. I actually kind of like the song now, but if I saw it as a kid I probably would have felt depressed for the same reason.
Near the end of the movie Aladdin, Jafar sends him to the “ends of the earth”, which I guess is a cold place with lots of cliffs. I thought it was the actual end of the earth, and that if he fell he’d fall off the earth. That kind of scared me.
Also, I thought the Ferangi looked really scary.
Well, mine is from the Flintstones. But nobody else seems to remember the episode. The one that freaked me out had scenes of bad guys wanting to throw Fred and Barney into a bottomless pit! I knew that if the pit was truly bottomless (I was about 5 or 6), that they would just keep falling, and falling, and falling… Until they starved to death. FREAKY. Fred and Barney weren’t thrown in, of course, but some other guy in this particular episode was. Nightmares galore…
There were two skits from Sesame Street that I refused to watch:
One involved Harry, the big blue monster. I don’t remember what the skit itself was about, but at the end he roared at the camera and fogged up the lens (simulated by whiting out the screen). All you could see through the fog were his eyes. Scared the hell out of me. Every time that skit would come on I’d run out of the room and listen to the TV at a safe distance until I knew it was safe to go back in and continue watching.
The other was a skit where some scientist invents a robot with a bowling ball for a head (I think it was called “The Six Dollar Man” or something). The robot goes haywire and starts running around the lab out of control. Smoke comes out of its body and chases the scientist and Kermit, whom I believe was in the skit as a news reporter. The part that freaked me out the most was after the robot lost its bowling-ball “head” it continued to operate! :eek:
You have to wonder if the writers were really thinking when they designed some of these skits.
Mrs Livingston was also the subject of some of the “best” little ditties by Nilsson they used to insert into the show. Once when she gets angry and ruins and pan full of eggs, you hear “Ho, she dropped 'em/Hum, she dumped 'em.” Another one was about her getting a bad grade in night school, and the song went “Ah Mrs Livingston/Oh Mrs Livingston/ An F Mrs Livingston/ Gee.”
The “courtship” aspect was a lot clearer in the movie, which could end in a marriage, not being an ongoing serial.
The 80s tv series V really spooked me when I was little, and I had nightmares about it for years. I can still vaguely remember the nightmare.
Those monster on Outer Limits scared me, especially that fern monster!!
A show called Eureka’s castle once had this artistic short animation that involved some incoherent multicolored squiggles writhing on a black background to some kind of weird psychadelic music. I thought it was going to absorb me and my family. At the time I was really into that show, but that particular bit left me feeling betrayed.
I also remember an episode of Sesame Street where there was a puppet made out of a jar of red/pink “liquid” with a face that looked like it was made out of modeling clay. I think it was afraid of being spilled, but it weirded me out whatever its deal was.
And holy shit, Armus from TNG scared the bejesus out of me when I saw what he did to Commander Riker when I was six. It’s sad because after that I was scared of Star Trek for years even though I was just getting into it through TAS. Ironically, though, a Data-centered episode in the fifth season drew me into the franchise once and for all when I was 10, but the reveal of his severed head in a mine two months later still scared me.
God I love Star Trek.