Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Don't forget to enter all and any personal or family Glamour Shots in the Glamour Shots Challenge! Send your undoubtedly embarrassing photos to childrenofthe90s@gmail.com!

Speaking of things parents weren't all that fond of in the 90s, I'm pretty sure bone-chillingly terrifying children's television programming ranked pretty high up on their lists. It's almost shocking what kid's TV networks were able to get away with back in the 90s. Nowadays you're lucky if you can so much as say "boo" to impressionable and innocent young children without raising angry red flags amongst hovering parent watchdog groups.

In our day, however, things were a little different. Children's shows weren't afraid to be a little edgy, and by that I mean they put kids on edge. For life. No, really. I still have nightmares about that stupid clown Zeebo.

Are You Afraid of the Dark? was a show responsible for scaring the living daylights out of us while inevitably necessitating nightlights. The correct answer to the show's title question was yes, yes we are, and we may never sleep again. Thank you, Nickelodeon, for affording us a chance at nightmare-induced juvenile insomnia. As if our parents didn't have enough legitimate safety concerns for us, they were now forced to spend valuable worrying time reassuring us against the existence of mute child ghosts and evil spirit-filled magic wands. Time well spent.

There were a few episodes in particular that have stuck with me. As in they are forever stuck in my brain, briefly terrorizing me whenever they bob to the cerebral surface. Just for you, though, I'm willing to temporarily forget how pants-peeingly scary these episodes were and share them with you for the greater good of horror-themed nostalgia.

Submitted for the approval of the Children of the 90s Society, I call this story *tosses handful of potassium nitrate into imaginary roaring campfire* The Tale of the Scariest Episodes:

Tale of Laughing in the Dark



I'm with the Rachel Blanchard character on this one. I too suffer from what Kiki describes as "Bozophobia". Really, who isn't afraid of clowns these days? It's all just a little too John Wayne Gacy for me to handle.

Anyway, Cher sucks it up and we return to the ill-fated Playland, an amusement park home to the "spookhouse" called Laughing in the Dark. Catchy name, huh? I get the feeling that's going to play into things later somehow. Our story's stars are generally too chicken to enter, but like any normal kids they decided to do some good old fashioned academic research on the alleged clown haunting.

Apparently there was this clown Zeebo who was an all around bad guy, stealing money from the circus and eventually getting his comeuppance as he burned alive in the Laughing in the Dark spookhouse after an incident with his cigar. Tragic.

One kid dares another to steel Zeebo's clown nose, and the dare-ee agrees so long as the darer will wear the clown nose to school. What could be funnier, really?

Our pal Josh (the aforemention dare-ee) goes into LitD, and it's so-so scary rather than so so scary. At first, that is. Unsurprisingly, Josh is plagued by the clown's ghost, who does weird stuff like write his initials in pudding and sends threatening balloon messages. Josh obliges, returning the nose but leaving us to wonder what exactly we just saw. It may not sound all that scary, but we're talking clowns here. Clowns.

Tale of the Pinball Wizard

Are You Afraid of the Dark - S01E13
Uploaded by andrethegiant.

If we've learned nothing from these tales of terror, it's that when someone tells you not to touch something, for the love of God do not touch it! Is it really that tough a concept? Once you've erred the first ten or so times, you think that you'd realize they were probably warning you for your own horror story character good, but these fictional kids just never learn.

This episode isn't quite as scary as the others, but it definitely drew kids in with its enthralling premise. If you get locked in the mall late at night playing a forbidden pinball machine, you will inevitably end up in a life-size human version of the game. There's pretty much no other possible route from there. You're going to be in a living pinball game, and you're going to like it, dammit.



Tale of the Hatching





I used to think boarding school might be a fun option until I saw The Tale of the Hatching. It wasn't until Harry Potter that I could even think of entertaining romantic notions of boarding school. We're talking years of trauma to my prep school fantasy. Years.

Jazz and Augie are siblings sent to a mysterious boarding school. The school has all sorts of wacky (read: suspicious and inevitably terrifying) rules about being calm and quiet on the grounds. Plus, every meal consists of a substance called "spunge". If that's not a warning sign, I don't know what is. I mean, really. Spunge?

Turns out the headmasters are evil aliens (surprise!) and the spunge contains a trance-inducing mind control agent. Yikes. The kids are hypnotized into incubating the unhatched eggs. Once these mini reptillian cuties hatch, they feast on students for sustenance. I don't like where this is headed.

Luckily, our heroes are smart and realize that loud noises and certain frequencies are the auditory nemeses of these slimy overlords. They blast loud music from their walkmans and save the day...or do they? Like all good AYAOTD episodes, it's a sort of unsettling cliffhanger. In the last scene, we see a single ominous surviving egg. Does it go on to start a new boarding school? Will it inevitably eat Jazz and Augie? Will killing them off stop parents from giving their kids stupid names like Jazz and Augie? We may never know.



Tale of the Thirteenth Floor


We all know the thirteenth floor is reputably spooky, but we didn't know exactly why until we were scared witless (I'm going to say 'witless" and not a more appropriate alternative because this is a family blog) until we saw this episode.

Billy and Karin live on the twelfth floor of a creepy-ish apartment building. The kids like to go play up on the thirteenth floor because, you know, it's abandoned and spooky. Then, dream of dreams come true and a toy company moves in to the thirteenth floor. A toy company! Is there anything better?

Well yeah, if those toy company employees are secretly faceless space aliens. Just a teeny little hitch in the whole playing-with-toys scenario. They draw in our innocent little children and bam! they reveal they're really building a spaceship to take Karin back to their home planet. Billy's a wimp and can't take the atmospheric changes and almost dies, but Karin in an uncharacteristic show of heroism saves him. It's at this point we find out that (gasp!) Karin is actually one of them, a faceless alien. Ahhhh!!!!

Tale of the Dead Man's Float


As a swimmer, this episode really spoke to me. In my sleep. Through undead pool monsters.

I always thought this was one of the scariest episodes, if nothing else because the zombie thing is just so retina-scarring. Kids everywhere boycotted swimming lessons and refused to don those floaty-arm things for years after watching this episode. It's a true testament to how scary this show could actually be. I mean, even looking now at the picture of that pool thing makes me want to go hide in my office cabinets and arm myself with staple removers and letter openers.

Zeke's a nerd eager to win over his crush Clorice. They find an abandoned swimming pool at their school and think it's an excellent idea to campaign to have it reopened. Clorice is a swim team star and Zeke is working overtime to get into her good graces. Everything's going, er, swimmingly until they begin to suspect the pool is haunted, a notion later confirmed by a loner janitor type. Apparently the pool was built on an old cemetary and one body was left behind. I think we all know what's coming up next.

Because Zeke's a geek, he knows that the ghost's sulfuric smell means its acidic makeup could be detected will some good ol' methyl orange. Sweet chemistry lesson, AYAOFD. It's almost enough to lull me into a false calm until OH MY GOD THAT RED ZOMBIE THING IS THE SCARIEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN! I'm not even going to post the pictures here because I won't be able to look at my own blog if it's up here, haunting me. Just watch the video. But don't say I didn't warn you.


The show was great because it was not gimmicky. Sure, it sometimes relied on guest stars like Tia and Tamara Mowry as creepy chameleon girls or hunky Boy Meets World star Will Friedle as a guy thrown back in time by a locket, but the underlying value was in the show's uncompromising dedication to being truly scary. It haunts me still. I'm starting to wish I'd never Google Imaged "The Tale of the Dead Man's Float". Who knew such scary stuff could come out of Canada, of all places?

Frequently Banned Young Adult Books: 90s Edition

On an aside, this is my 200th post! That's a whole lot of 90s. PS don't forget to enter all and any personal or family Glamour Shots in the Glamour Shots Challenge! Send your undoubtedly embarrassing photos to childrenofthe90s@gmail.com.

Not only did I miss banned books week, this poster is from last year!

I know I'm about a month too late to engage in any sort of nationally conscious discussion during Banned Books week; my complete inattention to detail and timely pertinent bookstore displays is starting to show. It's an important issue at any time, though, and if it means we get to join in on mocking all those who seek to censor our allegedly inappropriate literary content, then all the better. If there's a bannedwagon out there, I'm jumping on it. Get it? Bannedwagon? Anyone?

*Cranes neck and shields eyes from monitor glare to gaze out at bewildered readers through their computer screens*

Painful puns aside, it's an issue many of us may not have been aware of as children but that continues to plague libraries and school systems everywhere. In any given society, there's bound to be a vocal contingency of uptight people engaging in the rectal transport of sticks. In a society that enourages free speech, however, the irony of their existence is no doubt lost on their closed minds. That is, the free speech stipulations that allow them to spout misguided uneducated drivel without consequence is the same ruling that upholds these authors' collective right to publish what they please. Quite a conundrum, huh?

Unsurprisingly, parents make up the majority of literary naysayers. It's natural for parents to be concerned about their innocent children's easily corruptible young minds, but the idea of each of us having our own parents is that families can make decisions for themselves and not society at large. Unfortunately, whoever yells the loudest often gains the widest audience, meaning these book banners garnered a lot of attention for their shouting and finger-pointing.

The most frequent reasons cited for protesting a book are sexuality, language, or "unsuitable material". In short, our intellectual freedom to grow and mature as eager young readers is most often suppressed by a bunch of prudes. Because why encourage a child to enjoy reading when you can teach them the value of complaining?

Here's a light sampling of the most frequently banned young adult books during the 90s. Many of the books were written decades earlier, but remained in the forefront of the censorship agenda:



The Giver


In this 1984-esque Utopian science fiction novel, Lois Lowry outlines a world of compliant individuals content to languish in their colorless world. The protagonist Jonas is stuck in a frightening sterile world where people are tightly controlled and exist without emotion. They even take pills to quell the sexual "stirrings" they feel beginning from puberty. You'd think our book banners would be all for that with all of their anti-sex rhetoric, but apparently what comes next is too inexcusable to give the book any merit in their eyes.

The Giver was banned largely for its themes of community-sanctioned suicide and euthanasia, the "release" characters receive if they fail to fit into the well-ordered society. Admittedly it's a pretty heavy issue for young children, but the book touts these behaviors as a negative consequence of an overly uniform society. In more common terms, they're saying it's bad. Don't do it. The book has a strong message of individuality and personal freedom, which we all know censors don't like one bit. It's no wonder they don't want us thinking for ourselves; they want us thinking for themselves.


Forever


Oh, and pretty much every other book written by Blume over the span of the preceding few decades made the list. Some authors really know how to cause a stir amongst conservative morally straitjacketed PTA types. Forever was a shoo-in for raising a ruckus with its explicitly sexual content, detailing the experiences of a high school girl and her boyfriend's foray into physical intimacy. Let's put it this way: the book was released in 1975 and remains in one of the top spots on the banned books chart. I'll give you a hint why it remains so popular among young readers: it's about sex.

On an aside, some statisticians speculate that the dip in popularity of the name Ralph is in direct correlation to the fact that that's what the protagonist's boyfriend names his, er, private parts. Now that's a lasting impact.

Go Ask Alice


This story has a seriously awesome punchline. After years of speculation over the identity of the anonymous author of this drug-addled teenage memoir, it was revealed that it was actually penned by a Mormon youth minister. One of the censor-mongers' own! Ba-Dum-Ching!

Okay, so that didn't really kick the censorship habit. If anything, it just added fuel to the fire. As an anonymous diary, the book was provocative in its depictions of sexuality and extensive drug use. As a book written by a Mormon youth minister, it lost a little of that street credibility. Just a tad. Author Beatrice Sparks allegedly based the novel on the diary of one of her real psychiatry patients, but still. Regardless of the fact that the book is a cautionary tale against drug use, some parents obviously their kids will be drawn to try drugs after reading descriptions of the main character trying to bite her fingers off on a bad trip. Right.




Goosebumps


Not all banned books were contested on sexuality. Some were just plain unsavory. At least that's what parents claimed of the wildly popular Goosebumps series. The books had kids delighting in reading, but apparently at the cost of exposure to some cartoon-grade violence. The horror!




Alice Series



A book about teenagers with sex on the brain? Why, I've never heard of such a thing! On her own blog just a few weeks ago, Reynolds Naylor addressed the issue of parents protesting the content of her book:

It’s usually parents who want their children kept “pure,” as many parents tell me, “from harmful influences.” The mother of a ten year old girl was very angry with me for talking about how babies are conceived in Lovingly Alice. She wrote that since her daughter read that book, “the words penis and vagina will be forever ingrained on her mind.” Another mother tearfully accosted me because she found the word “condoms” in a novel for teenagers, and said, “My eighth grade son doesn’t know what condoms are and I don’t want him to know.” Whenever I hear comments like these, my heart really goes out to their children.

Well put, Phyll. Parents are entitled to raise their children however they see fit, and they certainly don't need to check this one out of the library for their kids if it's in contention with their moral values. It's general right to exist, however, is a whole different story. (That story is called Achingly Alice, available at bookstores near you!)



The Boy Who Lost His Face


The Boy Who Lost His Face was written by Louis Sachar, the author behind the Wayside School books. The protests against insinuations of witchcraft I may support, but I can understand them. My favorite challenge, however, was the inclusion of "obscene gestures". Yes, you read that right. The reader doesn't actually see any obscene gestures, he or she just reads a description of them.




Harry Potter


This one is probably sort of a given. Sorcery, witchcraft, magic: all that good stuff is more than enough ammunition to set off religious protest groups. Despite the fact that the novels fell into the fantasy genre, many censors fear that that faithful children will abandon their Biblical aspirations in favor of a career in the dark arts.

Many parents also feared the books were a bit too dark and scary for young children, which is a reasonably legitimate concern. I'd advise for those parents to not let their six year olds read it. On the other side of the banning spectrum, some critics contended Harry and his pals set a bad example for their kids. He gets into all sorts of mischief and doesn't always obey his elders. You know, he has fun and he's a kid. Quick, hide the book!



Scary Stories


They're too scary. We get it. Let's move on.



The Face on the Milk Carton


The "sexual content" charge, though minimal, I can kind of understand, but the "challenging of authority" allegation? I mean, the book is about a girl who's been kidnapped by her own grandparents. Whose authority exactly is in question? Is it just the general notion that adults can make mistakes, commit crimes, or otherwise act unwisely? It's a bit of a stretch, to say the least.



Everyone has the right to their own opinion, and my disparaging remarks about the tightly wound moral crusaders is just another blissful exercise in free speech. Let me freely say that most of these challenges are the most ridiculous, asinine ideas ever to spew from the mouths of overzealous overprotective over-meddling parents. You, of course, have the freedom to disagree with me. That's the beauty of it. Embrace it. Freely.

Let the Glamour Shots Challenge Begin!

We have our very first taker in the Glamour Shots Challenge! I can only hope there are more entries on the way. Get out those scanners and send your most wildly embarrassing 90s Glamour Shots to childrenofthe90s@gmail.com!

Our first brave soul is Shannon, one of my favorite bloggers out there. For those of you who don't know her, she's the esteemed proprietor of a wonderfully snarky Sweet Valley High blog. She always has me laughing, and in her willingness to laugh not only at Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield and friends but also at herself she volunteered the following photos:


Who would have thought it would be so visually pleasing to pair the hair of a young DJ Tanner with the attire of Fred Flintstone? I'm telling you, these stylists are pure genius. Also, that's an A plus head tilt if I do say so myself.




Oh, oh, oh, there is totally a fringe on that jacket, too! Nice touch, GS. They gave Shannon the cowgirl biker look with pageant hair and earrings from the evening gown competition to match. An original pairing indeed.




The jacket nabber! You all knew it was coming, but who knew it would come with the added bonus of studded denim vest/cuff combo jacket with lace sleeves? That button glare could put an eye out, too. Well played, Glamour Shots.




The Over the Shoulder Smolder! Luckily her photo stylists had the good sense to let her smile in lieu of staring come-hitherly into the camera. After all, she was only fourteen. This shot gives us the full effect of the hair and the jacket, and let me just say it's a 90s Glamour Shot dream.


Obviously a huge round of virtual applause to Shannon, the first taker in what better be a long string of entries. I'm looking at you, readers. If you've got 'em, send 'em!