Not a moral panic, but after the book Sybil got so popular, suddenly multiple personalities were coming out of the woodwork. Everybody was being tortured and abused and becoming a multiple personality. And some criminals were using this defense to be found “not guilty.”
As FBI man John Douglas would later write: I’ve yet to meet a multiple personality accused of a crime who claim he was a multiple personality before he was arrested.
One of the worst incidents occurred in your state at the Wee Care Nursery School. Invalid, plain out ridiculous expert witnesses presented the stories they placed in children’s mind but even worse the entire jury ignored the physical evidence that showed it was impossible for the day care worker to have committed the acts when she would rarely have been out of view of other adults and never for more than a minute.
I read the (fictional) book Not My Child, where a mother swears her daughter suffered unspeakable horrors in the day care. Margaret Kelly Michaels, an absolutely, totally innocent woman served fie years in prison before being released.
Like I said, a crock of peanut butter that ruined several people’s lives.
In addition to the acts taking place in physically nonexistent locations and/or being impossible.
Happy Slapping or Happy Punching, where roving bands of teenagers would supposedly run up to random people and hit them for no reason. Actually I knew a guy who delighted in startling random people by fake-jumping at them and yelling at the top of his voice just as they crossed paths. He stopped when someone reflexively socked him in the face, hard.
Another perennial favourite is/was “[LocalGang] is having their initiation night on [date], and to get into [LocalGang] you have to kill a random person so don’t go out and if you see someone do [a specific albeit absolutely common thing] that’s the signal you’re a target !”
The version of the Rainbow Party I’d heard of was that the girl whose shade of lipstick was furthest down won.
But yeah, my favourite still remains the truly colossal amount of bullshit spewed about RPGs on prime time television in the mid 90s. It’s kinda weird that the exact same panic (with the exact same bullshit - “they’ll think they’re really their character !” “if they die in the game they have to kill themselves in real life !” “the DM has cult-like powers over the players and anything he says must go !”…) happened in France as well as the US, come to think of it - before the interwebs memes and such didn’t travel as much or as fast.
The whole DM as charismatic cult leader is the one that cracks me up the most. Yeah right. You can’t even get the fuckers to chip in for the beer !
Except the Y2K problem was a real thing that affected many computer systems. Lots of people worked very hard to make sure it wasn’t a big problem. Then when most major issues were averted, the whole thing got reclassified as being some kind of hoax. Of course, breathless newscasts about blackouts and rioting are way more exciting than the reality of some IT people installing/writing some software updates.
I remember reading that D&D would promote satanism and Jungian psychology.
Huh? I grabbed an encyclopedia and looked up Jung.
Jung seemed to me slightly less nutty than Freud, so maybe that might be true.
Still a little overblown by the media. But great for some of us in IT at the time! But then some of us also lost a lot of business because businesses finally upgraded a lot of hardware and software and stopped paying [del]me[/del]those businesses to keep their outdated crap running.
The so-obvious-it’s-hysteria clown thing from 2016.
One of the proponents of Satanic Ritual Abuse was a woman who wrote a book called Satan’s Underground, which was later exposed as false. About a decade later the same woman claimed she was a Holocaust survivor and collected thousands of dollars in donation. These claims were also proven to be false.
Speaking of moral panics, in 1954 a book named Seduction of the Innocent was published which stated that comic books were lowbrow form of popular literature and contributed to juvenile crime and delinquency. There were actually congressional hearings on the comic book industry and the industry adopted the The Comic Code in order to clean up the comic industry. One of the main effects of this was that they stopped publishing horror comics(the most famous of which was Tales from the Crypt).
In elementary school we had a gym teacher that, on more than one occasion, hinted that terrible things would happen to us if we were to be exposed to the music/shtick of Ozzy Osbourne. I don’t think any of us were old enough to have a clue who that was, but we sure became curious.
In response, the Christian band Petra put a backwards message in one of their songs that said, “Why are you looking for the devil when you should be looking for the Lord?”
Back in the 1980s, a local hospital offered free x-rays of Halloween candy, and they got a lot of takers. They never saw anything adverse, and lots of kids thought it was cool to see what their Halloween candy looked like on an x-ray.
There was also an urban legend around here of black gang members (always black gang members) hiding under cars in mall parking lots, and cutting the Achilles tendons of white women as they got into their cars. That also proved not to be true, on any level.
It’s not the same, in that it’s better: Reversing the waveform won’t have the imperfections imposed on the reversed audio by unsteady human hands.
Maybe you consider warped audio “warm” or “human” or something, I don’t know. I will say that the other big analog medium, tape, is also capable of perfect reversal (or, perfect within the limits of tape audio) if you’re good with scissors and tape, or willing to duplicate to a reel-to-reel and put that in a player backwards.
The moral panic around video games as “murder simulators” was funny for the time in which it first achieved prominence: The early 1990s, when the first two Doom games were popular. Do you know what kind of graphics those games had? This is about as gory (and precisely as visually realistic) as it got! Revel in the red pixels! As far as realism goes, your character can outmaneuver a rocket on foot but he can’t look up. I’m not going to be emulating someone who can run faster than an SUV but who has less neck flexibility than a dog, I don’t care how many fireball-throwing imps he gibs with his bare hands. RIP AND TEAR! And that isn’t even mentioning that he can carry a platoon’s worth of heavy weapons at once and fire a minigun (called a chaingun, as usual) at a dead run without being any less accurate than he is standing still.
This idea got a shot in the arm when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were revealed to be Doom players. Thus it joins the ranks of such pass-times as reading (Chapman), listening to music (Manson), and cooking (Dahmer) as things only murderers engage in.
Huh. Usually when I read a Wikipedia article about a dead person, the article has a section about their death. Hope that two-time-losing faker isn’t still out there…
Aspartame was known to cause instant death. Or at least the news seemed to hint that deaths were rampant during the early 90s. None of my friends died from it, so I guess we got lucky.
ISTR some substance on apples that was going to wipe out most of the population. We recovered somehow.
After Chernobyl, the media got into a contest to see who could predict the largest death toll. If memory serves, the comedian Dave Barry wrote that NBC won by claiming all life on Earth was doomed. (I think it was in his year end roundup that year).
Peak Oil was another one of those “End of the World” scares that didn’t really amount to much, it was super popular and clickbait for much of the mid-00s.
Around that time I read a book that claimed gasoline in the United States would be about $10 a gallon by 2008 and $20 a gallon by 2014. Seems like the predictions were a bit off.
It’s been a long time since I watched it and it’s 30 years old now. There’s a pretty entertaining documentary out there called Hell’s Bells - The Dangers of Rock 'N Roll. I get a kick out of the guy narrating it because all you have to do is take one look and not only can you can tell he’s the type who’s lived a wild lifestyle in the past, he looked like he was high then and there.
What about Reefer Madness? Long before the rock and roll/rock music madness, those “colored” jazz musicians were introducing our children to a drug that one puff could cause instant madness? And it was a “gateway” drug that led to worse drugs.
I think this is one of the earliest examples of a moral panic that was pure…peanut butter.
