Creepy Canadian Kids Shows: Goosebumps & Cryptkeeper (Part 2)

 

Creepy Canadian Kids Shows (Part 2 of 2)

 

In Part One, I went over a number of shows I watched in the late 1990s and early 2000s that aided in my love of all things horror, ending with YTV’s Freaky Stories (1997-99). There was another live-action show that aired on YTV at night, and it’s tied right next to Freaky Stories in my memory. It was based on the children’s books I mentioned in the intro of Part One, also titled Goosebumps (1995-98). To name a young boy from my generation who didn’t read at least one of those books is to name a boy who does not exist. Girls read them, too, but most of the stories seemed to feature young male protagonists who get tied up in some kind of spooky narrative that would feature a generic monster or cliché situation. Some stories were more creative than others, but a number of them were brought to vivid life in my imagination through great descriptions by author R.L. Stine, and when I found out there was a show based directly on the books, I had to watch it, because I wanted to see what I had read play out on my TV screen in spectacularly shocking fashion!

I can’t recap every episode I ever watched, but I will highlight a few that still stick with me—some that I found genuinely scary, and some that were genuinely disappointing. The premiere episode of the first season happened to be based on one of the first books I read in the series, The Haunted Mask. As a developing reader, my imagination often placed the characters and action in settings I could easily picture, meaning most of the story took place (in my mind) in my neighbourhood, which actually made it creepier. Goosebumps represents a milestone for me: it was my first experience watching an adaptation of something I had read first, and I reacted the way we often react to adaptations of stories we loved: “Why did they change that?” It was fascinating to see familiar story elements play out in a similar way to how they had been written, yet also frustrating when it didn’t look exactly the way I had pictured it in my mind.

“The Haunted Mask” is widely regarded as one of the best episodes of the show, and R.L. Stine himself has said it is his favourite adaptation. I think it’s easy to see why. It was made as a two-parter (most of my favourite episodes were), which meant not too much of the story had to be cut down, and the premise of an evil Halloween mask is simple but unsettling. The show hit the ground running, and ran for three seasons, adapting numerous stories from the original 62 books and beyond. I never watched the show consistently because it aired as late night re-runs that played at random, but looking back on it, I saw very few episodes from the first season. Sometimes if I didn’t recognize the episode title from the books I skipped it. The old saying is not to judge a book by its cover, but in the case of Goosebumps, I always did that, and it was an effective strategy. I preferred the stories about monsters and weird stuff; titles like “My Hairiest Adventure” and “A Night in Terror Tower” didn’t really appeal to me. The covers were great, though, and usually represented the best parts of the books well.

The problems the Goosebumps TV series repeatedly faced over its three seasons were low production values, inexperienced child actors, and runtimes that couldn’t always accommodate the full breadth of the spooky source material. One of the books I really enjoyed was How to Kill a Monster: a great title, great premise, and great fun to read. The episode’s setting looked utterly unlike how I had pictured the house, the kids were really annoying, and worst of all was the monster itself. Only the monster’s green, fuzzy hands are shown on the book’s cover reaching out from behind a door. In the episode, it’s a brown, scaly thing that’s shown in broad daylight way too often to really be scary. I think I saw this episode around the time I started watching movies with real scary monsters, like Aliens (the monster makes the same roar as the xenomorphs in Aliens, by the way) and it really paled in comparison. There were some other episodes that had a few good moments or at least good endings (such as “Bad Hare Day” and “Haunted Mask II” [also a two-parter]), but as with any anthology series like this, there were bound to be inconsistencies from one episode to the next. Some stories weren’t as scary, which was by design, and even the sillier ones were often entertaining, like “Shocker on Shock Street” and “Say Cheese and Die.” Fun side note: the protagonist Greg in “Say Cheese and Die” is played by a young Ryan Gosling!

There are a couple episodes from the second season that got the job done of giving me a scare. “The Headless Ghost” is an atmospheric chiller about a seaside haunted house, and the tour guide, Otto, turns out to be one of the ghosts haunting the place! I distinctly remember my mom commenting on this episode being scary, which just made me want to keep watching even more. I’m not sure if she was being serious or projecting concerns that it would give me nightmares—which it didn’t, because I never found ghosts all that scary, but one episode that did leave me pretty rattled was “Scarecrow Walks at Midnight.” I had never read the book, so I didn’t know what the plot would be about, and I watched it at our neighbour’s house in their dark basement, alone, so that definitely aided in the fright factor. The farm at night looked a little too similar to my aunt’s farm, and the scarecrows had a simple but scary design. But the scariest episode of all, for me, was “Werewolf Skin” from the third season. It built up the suspenseful story in the first half, then ended with a shocking cliffhanger of a werewolf trying to attack the main character through bars on his windows. That episode actually left me too scared to go to sleep.

Looking back on it, Goosebumps is really corny and not scary at all, but I’m still slightly nostalgic for the charm of the show's cheap 90’s production values, and for certain episodes. It fits in with the vibe of other shows from around that time like Are You Afraid of the Dark and Freaky Stories, and while R.L. Stine went on to write other YA horror series’ like Fear Street and Mostly Ghostly, as well as have his work further adapted to TV and to film, the 90’s was peak Goosebumps era, and in spite of its limitations, the show managed to immortalize that.

I saved the best of the many youthful Canadian horror shows for last. Tales from the Cryptkeeper (1993-1999) aired on Teletoon on Sundays in the early 2000s, but during the month of October I remember more episodes would air, because it was the ultimate animated series for kids who loved horror, and monsters in particular. Unlike the many cliché elements from Goosebumps, Tales from the Cryptkeeper featured some familiar monsters in unfamiliar stories, and original monsters in stories that were sometimes unpredictable. They might turn out to be pretty funny (on purpose) but some ended in ways that did not feel like your typical cartoon. The reason this show was so great, as I later found out, was because it had been spun off from HBO’s live-action Tales from the Crypt, which was based on the EC comics of the same name from the 1950s. Cryptkeeper told some incredibly chilling tales (for a cartoon, anyway) that often taught moral lessons and had immoral characters punished for their immorality.

Even though it has an anthology format in the same vein as Freaky Stories and Goosebumps (more like the latter), there are some recurring characters who pop up in multiple episodes, and the Cryptkeeper himself sometimes cameos in the stories, as well. John Kassir, who also voiced him in the live-action series, has the perfect cackling rasp and laugh. Cryptkeeper is the most iconic horror anthology host of all-time. Others have tried to imitate his mix of chilling, macabre narration with dark, pun-filled jabs, but none have surpassed him. Sometimes the intro/outro segments with him get pretty silly, but it’s all in classic cartoon conventions, and the stories proper may have goofy moments throughout, but these don’t usually undercut the tension or scares. Compared to Goosebumps, Tales from the Cryptkeeper felt like it was trying harder to scare you, and I think because it was animated, they were allowed to push the scares further and get more creative with the interpretation of the source material.

The second episode has one of the stories I remember best: “Nature” is about two brothers who get shrunk down to ant size and must survive being taken into the colony! They burn some ants with a magnifying glass at the beginning of the episode, so it’s one of those morality tales, but that’s the show’s format, and the stories have enough variety that it doesn’t get old or repetitive—at least, not in the first season. One of the episodes that scared me and thrilled me the most was “Hunted.” A relentless hunter in the Amazon pursues the wrong prey: a shapeshifting monster. There’s plenty of action and thrills along the way, but we don’t see the beast in full until the end, and it is a tense showdown between hunter and hunted, with a twist ending that left a cold knot in my stomach even on repeat viewings.

I can’t really do all the stories justice. The show tackles everything from a thawed-out Neanderthal on the loose to a wax museum with monsters that come to life. There are updates on classic tales like “Gorilla’s Paw” (The Monkey’s Paw) and “This Wraps It Up” (The Mummy), then there are more original ones like “Uncle Harry’s Horrible House of Horrors” where a kid enjoys a haunted house ride for his birthday at a theme park and his disbelieving uncle gets the fright of his life. The show alternates between just one story for the whole episode or splitting the runtime between two shorter ones, which adds some nice variety to the pacing of each episode. I actually find the music more intense in the cartoon compared to the HBO show, and while some of the musical themes are repeated over and over throughout the series, they’re still effective.

The first season had just Cryptkeeper hosting the show, but then in season two The Old Witch and The Vaultkeeper were introduced, and they try to take over hosting duties, with Cryptkeeper attempting to fight them off, sometimes to no avail. I didn’t really notice it as much when I was a kid, mainly because I saw the episodes out of order, but looking back, it kind of seems like an unnecessary change, and sometimes gets annoying, but it didn’t ruin the quality of the stories being told. Season three had a delayed premiere five years after the second season ended, and was rebranded as New Tales from the Cryptkeeper, which reduced Cryptkeeper’s hosting role, removed the other two wannabe hosts entirely, and featured a different animation style, with only one story per episode. I hardly saw any episodes from this season as a kid, and I don’t think it’s as fondly remembered as seasons one or two.

Tales from the Cryptkeeper retains everything essential from the HBO show and source material predating it and adapts many of the classic stories pretty faithfully while changing some things to make it acceptable for young viewers, though still pushing the limit from time to time. Of all the Canadian kids’ horror shows I’ve covered in this two-parter of mine, I recommend checking this one out the most. I think it holds up the best overall, and I still enjoy putting on a handful of episodes in the month of October.

“So until next time, boils and ghouls…pleasant screams!”

 

Related:

Top 5 Best DVD Finds: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2017/07/top-five-best-dvdblu-ray-finds-ccc.html

 

Creepy Canadian Kids Shows: Freaky Stories & More (Part 1)

 

Creepy Canadian Kids Shows (Part 1 of 2)

 

My love of horror started not just from watching movies like King Kong and Jaws, or from reading books like Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, but also from watching a number of TV shows as a young, impressionable child. Obviously one of the biggest shows to feature ghosts and ghouls and monsters aplenty was Scooby-Doo. There were so many different Scooby-Doo shows that several generations grew up with a different current one or re-runs of old ones. For me it was re-runs of the original Scooby-Doo: Where Are You! (1969-70) and What’s New, Scooby Doo? (2002-05). Scooby-Doo has always been more about the goofy, repetitious gags and the formulaic reveal that there are no real monsters or supernatural entities, and while I enjoyed the shows as a kid, they were rarely what I would call creepy.

Another cartoon that played up horror concepts purely for laughs was Grim & Evil (2001-04), which later turned into The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy (2003-07). Don’t fear the reaper, indeed, for he’s the best friend of an idiotic, happy-go-lucky boy, and a cynical, unemotional girl. Grim has a Jamaican accent, his scythe is magical, and together the three of them go on outlandish adventures. Both shows originally aired on Cartoon Network, and I had to stay up past my bedtime to catch re-runs late at night on Teletoon. If you wanted an even funnier and more visually disturbing Cartoon Network show with monsters, you had to watch Courage the Cowardly Dog (1999-2002), which I also enjoyed, but I think I appreciated it even more as an adult.

A less well-known show that aired for a short time on Saturday mornings was Phantom Investigators (2002), which mixed together stop motion with puppetry and a little live action in a truly unique and entertaining way. The plot was a bit like a modern update on Scooby-Doo, only the supernatural is real, and the teens don’t have a pet dog, but three of them do have special abilities: telekinesis, telepathy, and shapeshifting. Unfortunately, Phantom Investigators only aired for one season and it’s difficult to find online these days. From what I remember, it had some ghosts and creatures that were actually pretty creepy, and I distinctly recollect noticing the strings on one of the monster puppets, but it still creeped me out even though I could tell it how the effect was achieved.

As great as those cartoons were (and there were even more than that), I’m going to maintain a focus on creepy kids’ shows that were specifically Canadian-produced. I didn’t know they were Canadian at the time—I was a kid, I didn’t care who made any of them, I just wanted to be entertained—but now with the aid of the internet I’ve come to realize how influential Canadian shows were in filling out mainstream channels like Teletoon and YTV with programming that was not all just jokes and light-hearted adventures. As a kid growing up in British Columbia in the early 2000s, there were a few shows I watched from the ages of six to ten that were targeted at kids like me who had an interest in the paranormal, the macabre, and the monstrous, but obviously they supplied a fun kind of fright and were not too intensely scary—for the most part.

One non-horror show that came a little later, closer to my teen years, was a cartoon aptly called 6Teen (2004-10). It was kind of like a Canadian, aged-down, animated version of Friends (also a show I grew up loving) about six teenagers who hang out at a giant mall and work various jobs. The last episode of the first season aired on October 27^th, 2005, and was an hour-long Halloween special called “Dude of the Living Dead” which I realized much later was primarily a spoof of the 1978 zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. The part that stuck with me the most was when the girl working at the taco stand (having turned into a zombie) serves unsuspecting main characters Wyatt and Jonesy tacos, and her severed thumb is in one of the tacos, and one of them almost eats the thumb! It seemed a bit disappointing even back then that the whole episode ends up just being a dream in the mind of the chilliest of the six teens, Jude (who is also obsessed with B-movies).

I used to watch re-runs of a show called Freaky Stories (1997-99), shown on YTV at night in the early-to-mid-2000s on weekends, but it originally aired around the time another famous anthology kids’ horror show was revived: Are You Afraid of the Dark? I may have seen some of the revival episodes or re-runs of that much longer running and more popular show, but I honestly don’t have any distinct memories of watching it, whereas Freaky Stories I distinctly remember watching, and being both disturbed and confused by it. I wasn’t told not to watch it, but I always felt like I was getting away with something when I was able to stay up late and tune in. There was a reason it didn’t air with the rest of the YTV shows during the daytime. If I caught it just as it was starting, the groovy-yet-eerie theme music got me in the mood to be freaked out—and it played during the end credits, too, which helped lodge it in my memory.

The premise for this anthology series is a blue cockroach named Larry de Bug and his friend Maurice the Maggot live in a 1950s-style diner and bridge the gaps between four individual short stories. Larry and Maurice’s segments are live-action. Larry is designed in the spirit of a Jim Henson-style puppet that looks like it would fit right in on the sitcom Dinosaurs, but Maurice has a seriously revolting design aesthetic—he’s eyeless, has a gooey, toothless mouth, and his pale, segmented body glistens with nasty slime! They’re purely comedic hosts, but I always found Maurice off-putting, and I never really understood the diner as a framing device for the show. It doesn’t have any impact on the stories, but is original and memorable. In fact, I found the Larry and Maurice skits more memorable than the freaky stories themselves.

Usually the stories weren’t that freaky, but they were almost always weird. One good thing about this show was if you tuned in midway through an episode, you didn’t feel like you missed too much, because the stories were very short, given it filled a half-hour timeslot. Every story always begins with, “This is a true story. It happened to a friend of a friend of mine.” It’s repeated at the end of every story, too, sometimes with follow-up about how the main character ended up later. The concepts for most of the stories were derived from urban legends and the kinds of creepy tales you would tell at a sleepover or campout. Each segment has a different, singular narrator who tells the whole story in past tense and usually does the voices for the different characters—yet another way this show was unique. The fast pace combined with the constantly evolving animation styles (some better than others) always kept me watching, even if the stories weren’t always that great. I think I might have enjoyed Freaky Stories more had I seen it a few years later. Some of the concepts went over my head, which is probably why I never remembered any specific episodes.

I revisited the first season of Freaky Stories this past summer (streamed on Tubi) and discovered just how messed up some of the stories I had forgotten about really were! In the first episode there’s a story about a dinner party that gets sabotaged by a kid who thinks his cat died because he ate some of the poisoned salmon served to the guests, and everyone throws up. Then, at the end, we find out it was actually the neighbour who ran over the cat and killed it and put it on their doorstep! This is not the only time something terrible happens to an animal in the show. As a kid I didn’t realize the stories in season one’s episodes had common themes, which makes sense to give them some thematic ties, but I think I never realized that because I rarely watched an episode from beginning to end—and because I was a clueless kid.

In Part Two I’ll be revisiting two more programs from my childhood that left even bigger impressions than Freaky Stories, so tune in next time as I continue to explore Creepy Canadian Kids’ Shows!