Ridiculous TV stuff that spooked you as a kid

[BobT]

@Phase42

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

Eddie’s father was a widower. Divorce? What do you think this was “Kramer vs. Kramer”?

You wanted a divorced father to be a central character on a TV show in the early 1970s?

[Mister_Rik]

Hey, what can I say? The family television broke in 1975 and my parents elected not to get it fixed. My knowledge of '70s TV is extremely vague. Like I vaguely remember that we regularly watched Room 222, The Mod Squad, The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie and Happy Days. I really can tell you very little about any of them, except Happy Days. The Courtship of Eddie’s Father is stuck in the back of my brain as the one that bugged me.

[guizot]

@El_Kabong

Just about everything in Gumby and Pokey, including the claymation animation technique itself, creeped me right on out.

For me it was the Blockheads. It was never clear what they wanted to do to Gumby and Pokey, but surely it would be something very bad.

And when Gumby climbed to the moon on a fire engine ladder. I think it was the sound effects.

Come to think of it, the Teletubbies are pretty creepy too.

[Eve]

Anyone else remember the heart-stopping horror that was Clutch Cargo? (Scroll to the bottom of that link)

[jsc1953]

@bubastis

The scariest movie I saw as a kid was Darby Ogill and the little people, it had a Banshee ghost and a Death caoch, each done with a glowing effect.

This was the first thing I’d thought of, but decided not to post it because it was truly terrifying, and not just “ridiculous TV stuff”. I’d love to see the movie again, since I haven’t seen it in, oh…45 years?

I’m too old to have been freaked by Sesame Street, but my kids sure were (both of them), by one skit in particular: Smokey Robinson singing “You Really Got a Hold on Me”, while being attacked by a giant foam “U”.

[Kizarvexius]

@jayjay

I had TOTALLY buried this in my deepest subconscious until I read your post! The bean sidhe and the death coach both scared the HELL out of me. Easily the scariest Disney movie I’d seen up to that point.

Same here. Though technically in my case it wouldn’t meet the OP requirements because I saw Darby O’Gill and the Little People in the theater. Scared the living shit out of me as a second grader. Especially when Darby opens the door and the freaking Banshee is RIGHT THERE. Zoiks.

Okay, my freaky TV moments.

• The Six Million Dollar Man vs. Bigfoot, and vs. that weird tank-looking space probe. Those gave me nightmares.
• The shot in the closing credits of Star Trek that showed the blue-faced alien with a stern expression. I remember running out of the room whenever that face was about to make its appearance.
• The episode of Little House on the Prairie when the youngest daughter falls into an abandoned well. I started avoiding manhole covers with a near-religious fervor.

[Tio_Gringo]

Another Sesame Street one:

There were these creepy (to me) “worm” puppets, in which the performers were in a giant flexible tube. They would writh and flip and generally give me a stong sense of unease. This would be in the mid-late '70’s BTW.

Does anyone remember these or what they were called?

[Ethilrist]

@BobT

Eddie’s father was a widower. Divorce? What do you think this was “Kramer vs. Kramer”?

You wanted a divorced father to be a central character on a TV show in the early 1970s?

You mean, aside fr… oh, wait. Divorced. Never mind.

The scariest thing for me that wasn’t supposed to be scary were the chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins. I thought they were going to come down our chimneys and spread soot everywhere, and that there had to be something horribly wrong with them that they would, or even could, do that…

[Robot_Arm]

@Khan

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.

Sounds like one of the natives of the planet Koozbane, but I can’t find anything specific on the web.

[Don_Draper]

@EvilAsh

Another Sesame Street one:

There were these creepy (to me) “worm” puppets, in which the performers were in a giant flexible tube. They would writh and flip and generally give me a stong sense of unease. This would be in the mid-late '70’s BTW.

Does anyone remember these or what they were called?

Sounds to me like Mummenschanz who made frequent appearances on “Sesame Street”, “the Muppet Show” and later “Northern Exposure” among other shows.

My family went to see them - live! - when I was about 13. I recall that a lot of kids in the audience were freaked out and cried and screamed at some of the more bizarre costumes. They also did a skit in which a man and a woman came out in black body stockings wearing human-like masks which were apparently edible. They did a silent dance routine which involved taking turns slicing off pieces of their “faces” and eating them! (Fun for the whole family, indeed!)

[CalMeacham]

I’m old enough to remember seeing The Twilight Zone broadcast for the first time. To a kid, the Gremlin from the episode Nightmare at 20,000 Feet was truly scare-indicing. Today, as an adult, it looks stupid to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_at_20,000_Feet_(The_Twilight_Zone)

The Gremlin looks like a guy with a twisted lip and too much eye shadow dressed up in a Sheep suit.

http://www.sideshowtoy.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?item=6904R

TZ was always good for a care. So were several of the Outer Limits episodes (like Warren Oates’ big-eyed character in “The Mutant”):

http://www.davidjschow.com/limits/ol_episodes4.html

[meow_meow]

@The New and Improved Superman

In order to differentiate from this thread, here we will discuss not actually terrifying / scary stuff like “Twilight Zone” episodes, but the silly, trivial things that wasn’t supposed to be scary, but creeped you out as a kid.

For me, it was the Vegetable Soup segment “Outerscope” about a bunch of neighbor kids (actually puppets) who build a rocketship (called, naturally enough, “Outerscope”) out of wooden planks and pilot it into outer space. They visit a whole bunch of allegorical, surreal worlds in which they learn about tolerance, multiculteralism, the value of a good education, and other assorted “valuable lessons” that mid-70s PBS shows specialized in.

What was uniquely disturbing about “Outerscope” was that the kids were puppets, but with real human hands. The puppeteers would stick their adult-sized hands out the sides of the kid-sized puppet-bodies. Only their hands, mind you, not their arms. So these puppet-kids had giant hands & wrists jutting from their sides, but no arms.

It was like watching a puppet show about kids with thalidomide birth defects.

Evidently, I wasn’t the only kid who thought these puppets looked very ‘wrong’, because later ‘Outerscope’ segments had puppets with regular manniken-like (anatomically appropriate) hands. But the early Outerscope segments just creeped me out so badly that I couldn’t stand to be in the room when my brother watched it.

I remember these. In fact, a few years ago I found someone with copies of all of the VS episodes and bought them. Soooo strange! How about the Outerscope where the puppets go to a planet where all the inhabitants were cleaning implements? The marching army of tweezers? yipe. The rest of Vegetable Soup is pretty strange, too. Remember Bette Midler as a spoon screaming/singing about making guacamole? holy moly.

[jsc1953]

Another from The Outer Limits … the Zanti Misfits. But based on all the web hits this turns up, it looks like I’m not the only one.

[Robot_Arm]

@Khan

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.

Ah, well, I found the Koozbanian Spoobol, but he (?) was only on The Muppet Show, and not Sesame Street.

[Snickers]

I don’t remember if it was on The Electric Company or Sesame Street, but remember the animation of the kid who (I think) is trying to remember how to get back (I don’t think it’s the same skit as the “carton of milk, container of butter, and a loaf of bread” kid, but it might be). Anyway, he runs across a weird jazz guy who steps in and out of his yo-yo string, who describes all the buildings the kid needs to walk by on his way home. The buildings are all animated in a 70s take on 20s art deco, all curves and modernistic lines and pastels. Then jazzy guy steps back into his yo-yo string and disappears. Freaked me right the hell out. Never liked that skit, and they played it all the time. Nasty piece of work.

Tho’ it’s not a TV show, E.T. gave me nightmares for years - when he’s sick and turns all grey, then the hazmat team comes in their suits and seals off the house? Terrifying. Parents, please think before you show this to your little ones.

My sis and bro were also scared of the flying monkeys. I never got to see them - apparently they scared my siblings so badly that Mom never made us watch the Wizard of Oz again. I’ve still never seen it in its entirety.

[Eve]

Oh, I remembered another one: Senor Wences, with the head in the box!

(Scroll down to “Senor Wences”)

[Don_Draper]

And speaking of silly things that gave us the creeps when we were kids, this Gumby short really freaked me out when I was about five.

[ddgryphon]

Topo Gigio really bothered me as a child – I was not charmed.
What truly freaked me out was Senor Wences and these guys:

http://vaudeville.org/index_files/Page770.htm

the puppets made from his hands – scary boys and girls very scary – oooooh.

[Eve]

Senor Wences simulpost!

S’awright?

S’awright!

[sciurophobic]

@chriscya

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.

That was the Oscar winning short “The Red Balloon”. We saw a lot of short films in elementary school, and this was one of them.

I hated it.