My Most Traumatic Childhood TV Memory

 

My Most Traumatic Childhood TV Memory

 

The first time I saw Godzilla was in a beer commercial when I was four years old. It wasn’t actually Godzilla, but it was a giant dinosaur-like monster intended to imitate the concept, and it freaked me out. A snowboarder does a jump off a mountain and gets eaten by the beast, then gets regurgitated, and that imagery of a giant dinosaur in the snowy mountains has stuck with me my entire life. Looking back at the actual ad today, it looks phony, goofy, and utterly unremarkable, but to my unimpeachable four-year-old brain, it was as fascinating as it was terrifying.

I’m blessed and cursed with a memory that seems to exceed the memories of many other people I know in terms of details from years gone by, so naturally I have many childhood memories both good and bad, but the bad ones remain vivid because it’s a biological function of humans to remember bad stuff more clearly in order to avoid similar situations in the future simply out of self-preservation. When I think back on traumatic childhood memories that specifically have to do with things I saw on TV, though, a few come to mind quite clearly.

There was an episode of The Simpsons I haven’t been able to track down in which a guy sticks a vacuum cleaner hose down Homer’s throat to retrieve something he ate (if anyone knows what episode this is from, please tell me in the comments!), and I was too young to comprehend it. The idea of having something like that shoved down my throat was viscerally upsetting, and it didn’t matter that it was only a cartoon. The first time I watched the 1966 animated TV special for How the Grinch Stole Christmas! the contortion of The Grinch’s face in the first scene with him on Mount Crumpit haunted my nightmares. The “Sea Monsters” episode of the docuseries Paleoworld used old B-movie footage and the black-and-white creatures scared me so much I had to look away. Several years after these early traumas, the first part of the Goosebumps episode “Werewolf Skin” left off on a disturbing cliff hanger with a werewolf trying to attack a boy through steel bars on his window, which left me too scared to sleep.

None of these moments are scary to me anymore, and I find it fun to think back on them from a current perspective, but there’s one TV memory I have from childhood darker than any other. It isn’t about monsters or creepy animation. It’s from a Claymation series designed for children, and it might seem like a strange example if you know the show.   

It’s Pingu.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Pingu is about a young penguin’s life and the lessons he learns growing up with his parents, younger sister, and peers. The episodes are five minutes and usually played in-between other shows. It’s one of the first kids’ shows I remember watching, and I loved Pingu’s little adventures in his Antarctic Claymation world, but then came along an episode called “Pingu’s Dream” that was unlike any Pingu episode before. It deviated hard from the usual fluffy content and delivered one of the most-disturbing villains from a kids show ever created.  

This episode of Pingu, a show I otherwise adored and have fond memories of, was the thing that scared me more than anything else as a kid, hands down. I would have been about four or five years old when I first saw it. The episode begins with Pingu’s mom reading him a bedtime story and putting him to sleep, then he starts dreaming. I had no idea what was going on. I don’t think I really understood the concept of dreams yet, so I was just confused at the illogical nature of the episode right away. Their house, which is an igloo, floats into the air and flies away like some kind of UFO and disappears, leaving only Pingu and the contents of his bedroom behind. Where the hell did the rest of the décor go? The stove? The couch? Where were Pingu’s parents? He’s left totally alone on the desolate ice flat. Then, it gets even weirder. Pingu’s bed comes alive. The legs grow and shrink and move all around, the mattress contorts, and then the frame starts walking around like a horse. It starts off as seeming bizarre, then becomes more fun and Pingu seems to enjoy it. The music becomes idyllic, the bed keeps trotting along, and things seem like they might turn out okay. I was momentarily lulled into a false sense of security.

It cuts away from Pingu having a good time and shows a massive head slowly peek up from behind a cliff, but only half the face can be seen. It’s a face with solid black eyes and dog-like nose. Whatever this thing is, it clearly is not modelled after the same cartoonish style as the other characters. Then the head quickly ducks back down as Pingu walks by. He hasn’t seen it yet. He’s still having a blast on the trotting bed, but then the bed starts behaving strangely again. The head pops up once more, but we the audience see what it is in full. It’s either a humungous seal with a moustache or a walrus without tusks. I’m not entirely sure which one it’s supposed to be, but either way, it looks menacing (I always thought of it as a walrus, so that’s what I’ll call it) and it just stares at Pingu, who is still completely unaware he’s being watched.

Seconds later, Pingu and the bed are the only things in frame. It can be a bit hard to judge where one ice sheet ends and another begins because of the white background and foreground. Pingu’s bed is walking along, and then literally out of nowhere, the walrus POPS UP RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM with eyes wide open and mouth agape. It’s the first jump scare I ever experienced, and damn was it effective. Just to clarify something for anyone unaware, none of the characters in Pingu speak any real words, they just utter gibberish and emotive sounds, and this walrus is no different. To make it even more horrific, though, the walrus snorts, and his voice sounds like Tony Todd’s from Candyman: deep and haunting. And he chuckles. A lot.

Pingu reacts to the giant walrus surprise by whimpering and cowering. Little Clayton instantly found the walrus scary, but now the hero of the show was scared, too, making it seem even more menacing. The walrus puts what I can only describe as a giant ice cup over Pingu and his bed, and then laughs maniacally, shaking his head and bearing his way-too-human-looking teeth. At this point Pingu is straight up panicking, which the walrus takes great joy in. He lifts the cup and reaches over with one of his giant flipper’s and stretches Pingu up and down like the pile of modelling clay that he is. The walrus gives his most intense and maniacal laugh yet. As if this could get any scarier, right?

The bed tries to walk away, but the walrus blocks it with his other flipper. Then he picks up the mattress and eats it like a chocolate bar.

W.T.F.

Little Clayton thought for sure the walrus was going to eat Pingu. I didn’t know a whole lot at that age, but I knew enough that this bastard could eat a penguin, and had such an appetite that he didn’t even hesitate to eat a mattress. The bed frame keeps on walking and Pingu takes off along with it. Of course I’m freaking out at this point. The walrus is still laughing, and then he starts snorting, all while pieces of the mattress cover hang from his jaws like strips of flesh. Pingu slips and falls down a cliff (!) but then wakes up in his bed, realizing it was all a dream, and his mom consoles him as he cries. The end.

When that walrus first revealed himself, I became unnerved, but at the jump scare moment, I was so horrified I ran to the other room and watched the rest of the episode half-hidden behind a wall, too afraid to fully watch, but too concerned for Pingu to completely look away. It stuck with me, too—they re-aired the episode a while later and as soon as I realized it was the dream episode I left the room and didn’t watch the episode at all. I couldn’t handle it.

The combination of the walrus’s jerky stop motion, more realistic design, his far-greater size than Pingu, his deep voice/laugh, and the way he toys with Pingu, all added up to the first time something on TV truly terrified me, and even to this day, I still find that walrus disturbing. He doesn’t seem as maniacal with his intent to me now as he did to Little Clayton—I think the walrus was just playing around and probably didn’t want to eat Pingu—but the fact that Pingu himself is so upset is what really portrays the walrus as such a villain. Apparently he was supposed to roar originally, but they changed the audio because it scared kids in the test screening. No shit.

It turns out I’m not the only one who was traumatized by this episode, which doesn’t really make me feel better. Other essays and videos have been made about this scarring five minutes of television, and they reflect the same disturbed sentiments I have relayed. It’s too bad others were affected, as well. If you ever decide to give Pingu a watch, whether you’re a kid or teen or adult checking it out for the first time, or revisiting it as something from your childhood, remember what I said about this episode. Show it to your kids at your own risk and relive the nightmare if you dare.

 

Related: Creepy Canadian Kids Shows

Part 1: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2024/10/creepy-canadian-kids-shows-freaky.html

Part 2: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2024/10/creepy-canadian-kids-shows-goosebumps.html\