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!