That one haunts me as well. (And curse Talon for finding a link to it, which I could not resist clicking on.)
Consider this too: that cartoon teaches you pretty much zilch about the letter “I”. It doesn’t show you common words with an “I” in them. Doesn’t talk about the different pronunciations “I” takes on, either by itself or in combination with the other vowels. Doesn’t show you a lower-case “i”. No, all you’ve learned by the end of the cartoon is that there’s this letter, and it’s named “I”, and here’s what its capital form looks like.
And, you’ve learned that it’s kept very clean, in the middle of the sky. By doomed souls who are condemned, for eternity it seems, to polish the damn thing over and over, toward no apparent purpose. Is this their personal hell, or merely a purgatory? What sins did they commit to deserve this? Are they being punished for having big egos in their past life? (Too much “I”, don’t you know.) Or are they truly beyond all hope? Have they been lobotomized or zombified so that they will always be happy idiots, polishing the “I”, numb to their pointless existence?
Do they, in the end, finally love Big I?
Do any letters really need cleaning anyway? Can’t we just make a new one pretty much anytime we want? There would seem to be an infinite supply of them. Or, is this special “I” the ultimate ur-I, the Platonic ideal “I”, without which no earthly “I” is conceivable? Should we be looking to the sky whenever we must render an “I”, to make sure we get it right? Will all I’s vanish if the ur-I is neglected? Or is it some sort of god, like Zeus, that must be pampered and appeased? What would be the nature of its vengeance, should it get a little filthy?
Thanks to everyone who described The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. I’m still not sure why it scared me so much, but who knows what goes on in the mind of a 4 year old kid. I’m wondering how the maid wound up with a name like “Mrs. Livingston” (as she seems to have been a recent immigrant from Asia) … or perhaps that’s best left unexplained.
The Sesame Street examples you all are coming up with are a riot. I always liked Capital I, I thought it did a good job of promoting the importance of diligent home maintenance. A Sesame Street skit that freaked me out was the guy who went around painting numbers on random stuff. The stuff didn’t belong to him! What if some crazy guy I didn’t know came up and tried to paint a number on our house? What would I do?
Dude! That was Mr. Bentley, the guy who lived below George and Weezie! And he frequently victimized the First Lady, Abigail Bartlet! (Seriously…Stockard Channing was a “victim” of the Mad Number Painter in at least two different segments of that bit)
Mine are The Devil from the game show Joker’s Wild and the Tasmanian Devil. One of my worst recurring nightmares as a 4 to 5 year old was seemingly waking up in bed, then looking over the edge of the bed to the floor where the Tasmanian Devil screamed at me. It was not so much the cartoon character itself, but a stuffed Taz that I believe my sister won or bought at Marriott’s Great America in Gurnee. Once she found out about my nightmare, my sister would hide the stuffed Taz in various places in my room where I’d find it by surprise and freak out…
Not sure why The Joker’s Wild Devil scared me so much, but I remember at least one very vivid nightmare where he appeared floating in the stairway of my house. I would still watch Joker’s Wild with my mom, but would cover my eyes when the Devil appeared.
Right after kindergarten, my family moved from rural Middle Of Nowhere to the bustling, urban metropolis of Pittsburg, PA. Needless to say, there was a little cultural shock for me, like suddenly having more than 2 or 3 TV stations to watch, to say nothing of having “neighbors” whose house I could SEE.
One day shortly before I was to start first grade, I caught one of those late-70’s After School Special shows, where they show kids learning some important moral lesson like not beating each other up or saying no to drugs and all that. Being 7, in a place with a LOT more people that I was used to and seeing this… strange… show CONVINCED me that when I went to my new school EVERYONE would be trying to beat me up, push drugs, make me smoke, and that FREAKED me out.
Thus began a school career made notable by a seemingly inexhaustable amount of running away from other kids. Socially compenent? Me? Not even slightly.
Thank you for that link! I’ve been trying to find out what happened to this act for a while, but I could never find anything. Helps to know how it’s spelled, I reckon! Even as a kid, I thought they were hilarious!
As for the the thread topic–mine was the opening sequence of “My Three Sons.” The combination of headless bodies and that somewhat melancholy music scared the crap out of me when I was little!
I have puppet issues, too, along with clown issues. I never liked Bozo the Clown or Ronald McDonald.
The puppets from Mr. Rogers freaked me out more than a little, too.
Muppets are okay for some reason, but The Land Of Make-Believe was always a scary-ass place.
For me it was an old episode of Wonder Woman, with these invading aliens called the Krill (or Trill, or something similar). They wore gold jumpsuits, with eyeless masks, and sprinkled glittery mind-control powder. shiver Plus they talked in this weird electronic burbly language. double shiver Oh yeah, and they jumped really high all over…I need to go to my happy place now
When I was growing up, highschool age, I regularly watched the old BBC Dr. Who episodes (the Tom Baker eps mainly), there were a few eps that really freaked me out…
1; any Cybermen episode with the Cybermat attacking humans and injecting them with that wierd glowing toxin, seeing day-glow red/orange/blue veins in the victim’s neck was quite unsettling
Yes you do. That’s really funny! He always just seemed like a peaceable groovy dude to me. Maybe if he had a bad acid trip things could get scary though. But he’s just a puppet after all. Maybe if you were alone on a dark and stormy night with a Dr. Teeth doll/puppet and it started talking or moving. That could be scary. There you go, I’ll leave you with that thought.
For me the scariest stuff I can remember was just about every other episode of Little House on the Prarie or The Waltons. So much drama and bad shit going down in otherwise peaceful settings.
I never made it that far. For years, the first appearance of Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion was it for me. That feeble attempt at a roar scared the crap out of me.
When I saw the original Invaders from Mars on TV it scared me, because the UFO parked itself in a sand lot, and my backyard was full of sand at the time. I was sure that they were under there and were going to turn my parents into zombies.
Not on TV, but another indication of my feebleness was The King and I. Yes, the musical with Yul Brynner. My great aunt took me to it in Rockefeller Center when I was pre-kindergarten, and five minutes in, when the boat got boarded by the Siamese Navy, I had a fit and demanded to leave.
As for Lady Elaine, I’m way to old to be scared of her, but I knew my wife was watching way too much TV with the kids when she started talking seriously about how Lady Elaine was such a bitch.
Oh man. Not once, but twice, my parents took me to see E.T. and I started screaming and crying at this part and they had to remove me from the theater. They thought I was sad because E.T. was dying, but no…I was terrified of E.T.! When he’s all grey and feeble and laying on the floor in the bathroom…"MOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM"
shudder
I never did sit all the way through that movie until I was like 15. I hold it solely responsible for my lingering irrational fear of aliens.
As far as other silly stuff goes: I have no memory of this, but when I was really little there was some commercial for some local place like Earv’s Garage or something, and at the end this deep voice would say “EARV CARES!” My mom told me every time that commercial would come on, I’d hide behind the couch, and when the voice came on I’d cover my ears and cringe into a little ball. Scared me to death, for some reason.
You realize, don’t you, that Drew Barrymore’s tears in that scene were genuine? At her age, she honestly believed E.T. was real, and it was extremely upsetting for her when he “died”.
Maybe, but how important is it to scrub the outside of one’s house? The I-men don’t even have outside windows to clean. Just flat orange siding all around. And it shouldn’t be an all-day, every-day job, really. What’s taking them so long?
Bad luck too on the shape of their house. Most of the rooms must be pretty small, and stacked right on top of each other. Hardly any privacy. Only the bottom and top floors would give you some breathing space.
All in all, I’d rather live in a capital “F”, though there might be some structural problems at first. But they’re cheap, so you add on a couple extra rooms and BOOM, it’s an “E”, and you flip that baby around for an easy 20 or 30 grand after taxes. Especially in this market. You know that “Q” down the street? Used to be an “O”? The Larsons are selling that now for twice what they paid for it, and retiring to Florida. Heard it from a guy who polishes the tail.
*O, we all live in a capital F
Right off of Highway 90
Behind the Burger Chef …
*
