I was not a particularly nervous child, but it seems to me now that TV exaggerated certain dangers. The ones I’m thinking of, which turned out not to be such a big deal, include:
Anything that you were once led to believe was dangerous or sinister?
Quicksand is real and dangerous.
The use of marijuana.
Candygram.
Paris maps?
I still remember my wife looking up and saying “Oh, come ON, that doesn’t happen in real life!”
It was a grand piano being hauled up by a winch on the roof of an apartment building, and was clearly going to be swung through a top floor window. But until it was, it was swinging freely, just waiting for a cartoon character to walk under it…
But it got me thinking of the same thing this thread is about:
In real life, we don’t have to worry about all those things we repeatedly saw as kids.
There aren’t anvils hanging over our heads. No quicksand in our local park, no biplanes crashlanding into our living rooms, our vintage yellow cab isn’t going to get its accelerator stuck so it has to drive off a hinged bridge but not make it to the other side and it falls… onto a barge where it keeps driving until it jumps onto another barge and then another… Oh, and our cat will not be blown up by an army of dynamite-toting mice…
And no morbidly obese cotton candy salesman is going to hand us a big bunch of balloons and then we float away.
Being put into a permanent schizophrenic state by taking LSD. That little tidbit of antidrug propaganda never happened. At least…hey, you wouldn’t lie to me would you? It ain’t cool to lie to yourself man, ain’t cool one bit…man
Oh and that the liberals were gonna turn the USA into another Communist Nation
(Not a political jab, I was genuinely taught this as a kid)
Hairy palms.
I wish I’d thought of that
Toxoplasmosis has become less scary for me.
Not that I was ever super-scared, but as a cat-lover with much feline contact during pregnancy, it was kind of a concern.
But it’s not lurking everywhere to swallow people up in the manner portrayed in old movies.
Killer shrews
It doesnt “suck you down” like in the movies. It is still a very real hazard, but not as shown.
Tarzan and Jungle Jim movies and TV shows led me to believe the jungle was horrifically dangerous. Boa constrictors ready to jump out of trees, venomous snakes and tarantulas and scorpions lying in wait along every trail, crocodiles lurking in every pond. I seriously thought you would need a suit of armor to walk around in a tropical forest.
When I finally encountered tropical forests, they weren’t any more dangerous than ones in the southern US. I rarely see snakes of any kind, and you mostly have to go looking for tarantulas or scorpions if you wanted to find any.
But the thing the movies didn’t warn me about was ants. Ants are by far the most likely thing to give you a bite or sting. After that is wasps and bees.
Quicksand?
Hell, mud can be a dangerous hazard. I once stopped our pontoon boat along the shore of the Allegheny at a spot I should have avoided. Three dogs and my gf all hopped off the bow, into a foot of water covering intense mud.
My gf sunk into the mud and struggled to pull free, but first she had to help the dogs back onto the boat. Eventually I backed slowly away from shore while she hung onto tone bow. Once in deeper water I was able to help her board.
“was”?
That was quicksand. Just a couple of miles from where I used to live there was an artificial swimming pond that was drained leaving behind a couple of acres of quicksand. Luckily it was in a populated area and the people trapped in it were rescued before they finally fenced it all in. It’s real, it’s dangerous.
You never watched any of those old movies or tv shows where a miles-wide colony of “army ants” swept across the jungle eating everything and everyone in its path?
I can say from first hand experience that it can cause protracted issues like a protracted manic episode frosted with delusion. A rather similar state to being an avid CTist.
But not permanent if the shrinkazoids figure out how to treat it, and, once properly treated, not a condition that resurfaces with subsequent LSD use. Probably two-thirds environmental/situational.
I like to relax by driving my truck around the countryside and solving mysteries. You don’t have to tell me about the dangers of quicksand. Almost lost a buddy. Old Man Withers came kind of close to getting the abandoned hoard of pirate gold - not nearly as close as he believed. But it was foolish of him to dress up as a cowboy ghost just to scare the townspeople.
Sure. The Naked Jungle,, starring Charlton Heston, is one of my favorite jungle movies of all time. But the “Marabunta” are mythical. They’re a combination of leaf-cutter ants, that eat vegetation, and army ants, that eat small animals. I love the scene where the Marabunta first appear, and we see an entire forest disappear in a matter of minutes. And the scene where they eat the lazy sentinel who fell asleep on duty. Best of all is the scene where they make little boats out of leaves to sail across the moat Heston has constructed to protect his plantation.