I believe you are talking about “Thriller.”
As far as remembering something silly that was scary at the time, I recall being spooked by the “Lost In Space” episode where there was an entity dressed in a long sheet haunting the Jupiter 2. What made it scary wasn’t so much the fact that it resembled a ghost in a white sheet, but the fact that Dr. Smith wished that everybody would disappear and then all of a sudden the Robinsons began vanishing but nobody saw them vanish. Although truthfully I certainly would not have minded vanishing provided that I could take both Judy and Penny with me.
I was spooked out by this loud, high pitched noise that came at the end of a Picture Pages video tape. For a long time, I would jump up to stop the video right after it was done to not risk it happening again.
I also think that a lot of old cartoons are still vaguely creepy.
I was both spooked and fascinated by the Banana Man on Captain Kangaroo.
I just skimmed the thread and not sure if anyone posted about the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown book series. I was a teenager during the 80s and this commercial would freak the **** out of me. It scared me so much that I asked my mother to buy the whole series for me. Good read for a teen! 
You don’t have to have a point to have (a) The Point.
Also look up “Me and my Arrow.”
As for me, I have always (and still do to this day) found certain segments of the Gumby animated clips to be deeply creepy.
“Superman and the Mole Men” - the 1951 George Reeves as Superman movie.
When those little guys came climbing out of that oil well, it freaked me out for days.
There was a skit on the Electric Company where two people put up a life sized cardboard painting of a train tunnel and then the train came blasting out of it. Freaked the frack out of me every time I saw it. I knew it was fake and I knew it was just TV, but seeing that train coming from a distance, getting closer and closer, and the two people flipping out as the train roars through was freaking freaky.
Spent time on both sides of the Atlantic as a kid. In America, there were a lot of really horrible station idents that scared the living hell out of me. PBS in the early 70s, for example. WGBH’s ident was scary too.
Any number of PIFs (Public Information Films) scared the shit out of me. Retrospectively, being afraid of the Jimmy Saville ones seems eerily appropriate.
Ya know, if we could just monetize the whole corpus of trivial knowledge collectively possessed by the SDMB hive mind…
Thanks for the link!
When I was around 6 or 7 my parents wouldn’t let me watch an episode of Hawaii 5-0 (I think) that featured some guy dressed like a Kabuki, running around stabbing and killing. I still managed to stay up and watch the show thru a crack in the door. Bad move.
Kabuki guys still creep me the crap out to this day.
My 4-year-old recently wailed and ran from the Bad Robot vanity card.
The beginning of “The Honeymooners” when the moon turns into Jackie Gleason’s face used to scare the bejeesus out of me as a little kid. (Watching reruns with my dad, I’m not THAT old, LOL.)
At the end of some TV reruns, they would show the Viacom logo (often called the “V of Doom” by fellow haters on youtube). There was a “V” that started out small, but slowly moved closer to the viewer. All the while, scary synthesized music would play.
When I was three or four years old, I saw a picture of Kermit the Frog with fangs that scared me in a book that my father had about the Muppets. I think it scared my older brother, too. A few years ago, he told me that right after seeing the picture, we happened to turn on the rerun of that episode just at the part where Kermit bites Vincent Price, which made it worse because there was no context. After that, the monster hiding under my bed was Kermit with fangs. Kermit without fangs was still fine. Now I have a t-shirt with the picture on it.
Yes, was it the pioneer of the “Cartoons where only the lips move” genre? I remember Spinner and Paddlefoot, but I can’t remember which was the dog and which was the kid.
This reminds me of another cartoon thriller that used to scare me – Johnny Quest.
Interesting how many of these terrors involved puppets. Mine does, too.
Lamb Chop, which I later found out was a Shari Lewis puppet.
At about the age of 2 (c. 1951), the name alone scared the heck out of me. I doubt if I had ever seen the puppet, as we had no TV, and I don’t even think Lewis was on TV yet. We lived in Japan-- maybe she came there for some kind of show.
But somehow I heard the name-- “Lamb” “Chop”-- how could anything not be evil that involved chopping up lambs? I remember running through the house and hiding in a bedside table that had a little compartment with a door…hiding for my very life because I thought a Lamb Chop was after me.
I definitely remember this very 60’s song, but a Google search turned up nothing. I guess we human beings still have to remember a few things, eh?
I don’t remember all of it, but it started out, “They’re shooting in the streets, Miguel!” Or possibly, “There’s shooting in the streets, Miguel!” The second verse had another non-American name, and the last verse was, “Run for your life, Jack Johnson!” The message being that right now the trouble and strife are Over There, but it’s headed here, so we HAVE to stop it before it gets to our own shores.
That Was the Week That Was (TW3) was a great show. The late 60’s were an interesting time. Lots of angst, ferment, idealism, unrest. I think it’s impossible in today’s world to grasp the impact of the unthinkable event that was the Kennedy assassination in 1963, followed by the Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations in 1968. The Vietnam War, the Kent State killings, the 1968 Democratic National Convention…then Watergate in 1973…the nation’s innocence was shattered in 10 short years. But I digress.
I don’t know why that song can’t be found on the internet. I’m sure it’s in a book or on vinyl somewhere. 
Holy crap, where should I start?
-The aforementioned Viacom V of Doom
-The production card (forget the company name) they used at the end of Barney Miller reruns
-The intro to the old Scooby-Doo movies (the two-parters they did with celebs and other Hanna-Barbera characters), especially the part where Scoob splits into four versions of himself, all running for the four corners of the screen but held together by his tail(s)
-The intro to I Dream of Jeannie, but really only the part where she gets sucked Shop-Vac style into her bottle
-The intro to Bewitched, for some reason
-The devil on The Joker’s Wild
-The mountain climber on The Price Is Right (and to a lesser extent, the hurdler, but I think I only saw that one two or three times before they retired it)
-The bonus round on Bullseye where they used a bolt of lightning and a thunderclap when you lost
-Probably a hundred more that don’t come to mind right now
…and one more that needs some explanation. Growing up in central WI, the local CBS affiliate had a mascot called “Sir Seven” in the 70s up until about '84 or '85. It was basically a cartoon drawing of a knight in a suit of armor. Mostly they used him on station ID slides if I remember. You’d see a drawing of a knight doing something outdoorsy like birdwatching or alpine skiing or something, while the deep-voiced announcer did the ID. Mildly scary for two or three seconds, but otherwise okay. But one night I made the mistake of staying up late enough for the signoff. A full sixty or ninety seconds of the scariest sounding announcing my little ears had ever heard to that point. And usually they just had cartoon drawings of old Sir Seven, but I could swear that night they used a live-action shot of a guy in a suit of armor, standing in the studio or production room or wherever, while an old-style reel-to-reel tape machine rolled in the background. At the very end of the clip, the guy turned towards you the viewer, visor down, couldn’t see his eyes, and pointed his sword right at you. Cut into standard signoff footage and the Star Spangled Banner. Cut to me huddled under my blanket in fear.
As a side note, the station brought back Sir Seven as a mascot a couple years back, only now they use CGI and they do a lot of animated action stuff with him now. I don’t even want to think of how five-year-old me would have handled this.