When I was about 8 years old (2016) I woke up early while my parents were still asleep and turned on the TV to see what to watch. Superjail was on and I cried due to so much gore being on the TV, even if it was cartoon gore. I was 8.
Wouldn’t go as far as to say it “traumatised” me but In the Night Garden was a surreal, creepy fever dream of a show that still lives rent free in my head. The thing kid me found most weird was that I first saw it in Canada, but when we went back to China to visit family they were airing it there too in the imported shows segment right next to Spongebob and Doraemon. At that point I was really confused because I assumed for a show to be imported it would have to be really well written and acclaimed, but In the Night Garden was such a nonsensical cacophony that it left me wondering what it is about it my stupid kid brain had missed. Still don’t know what was up with that show.
The show that really did traumatise me though was this ghost hunting show on Animal Planet about people’s pets acting weird because they were “detecting” ghosts in their home. Freaked me the hell out because I assumed anything that aired on a documentary channel was real, and the fact that they involved animals in their “justification” of why the place is haunted added to the realism for me at the time. Took until I was an adult to realize that ghost hunting shows are all fake. This was right at the start of documentary channels deciding to sell out to pseudoscience bullshit AFAIK, so they still had a significant air of authority especially for kids.
In The Night Garden is designed specifically to get kids to chill the fuck out and it works so well. I remember having to babysit my nephew once and he was getting worked up by a show called Yo Gabba Gabba which seems to be specifically designed to cause seizures. The next day, oh, that’s weird, that channel is broken and, well, damn, I guess we’ll have to watch In The Night Garden on CBBC instead. It was like a totally different kid.
PeeWees big adventure. Large Marge.
100 ways to die
Courage the Cowardly Dog. I know it’s a kids’ show, but I was terrified of entering the basement for months after seeing the episode with the floating white head
I only ever saw the episode with the UFO
Weirded me out enough that I have no interest to watch the other ones
Also: Return the slab!
you… are not perfect.
Tales from the crypt.
The X Files inbred family episode almost feels like too easy of an answer.
Mine’s also x-files, but the cockroach wall one. I think it’s a much later season episode, scully may have been pregnant? But I have no interest in finding it. It gave me a roach phobia. And then when I was an adult, I learned in the south they are MUCH bigger than up north here, and they can fly, and I learned this because one flew into my apartment through the porch door and just crawled around on my wall by the lamp, and was extra horrified.
I didn’t see that until I was an adult and my stomach still turns upside down whenever I think of it. The mother… Horrifying.
the way that she defended the way that her family “loved” each other rings in my ears when i hear a maga person.
I’m hongry.
The one that gets my wife is the Tooms episodes.
So I’m not particularly proud of this, but the emergency broadcasting tests used to scare the bejebus out of me when I was a little kid. Like run into another room and hide scared. I don’t even really know what they were or were for, but they just seemed scary.
They really should teach about those in school. Like I learned how those work from Linus Tech Tips, when I was in high school. Why are we so against teaching how basic infrastructure our society relies on work?
Yeah, same here. It’s those damn alert tones. They aren’t even meant to get people’s attention, in America at least, they’re just a handy side effect of the digitally encoded audio signal the system uses.
The extra siren for Amber alerts though, that’s what would set me off.
As much as I love it, that first Batman: TAS Clayface episode.
Gleefully tormenting a clearly desperate man with the thing he wanted most left me mortified.
The Bone Chillers episode where their lunchlady gets replace by someone feeding them food with larvae that can be thrown up if they consume mustard also left a mark but only for a matter of days; I remember foregoing ketchup and getting mustard on my school lunch, the next day. I think I was in elementary school, at the time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ObscureMedia/comments/mdsdbi/bone_chillers_1996_abc_saturday_morning_kids_show/, for those curious.
I was too young to watch V when I watched V
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(1984_TV_series)Not a tv show, I wasn’t necessarily a kid but I remember stumbling on LiveLeak…
For those who want to know what it was.
Tap for spoiler
It was a video of a guy getting dragged behind a car down the highway.
In my days the equivalent was rotten.com
Some of the images are charged into my brain
I also have two from 4chan.
Spoiler
A cage with IS prisoners left down in a pool. A prisoner set on fire in a cage.
“The Animals of Farthing Wood”. It’s a cartoon about a group of animals who try to find a new home after humans destroy their forest. Many of them die horrible deaths along the way. Still vividly remember the hedgehog family being run over on the motorway. And yes, it was a kids show!
I loved that show as a kid. No idea why I connected with it so strongly but I always appreciated that it wouldn’t shy away from darker themes.
Yeah, parts of it may have traumatized me, but I ultimately also quite liked the show as a child. I’m sure it helped me empathize with the suffering of wild animals and gave me an early idea of why we should protect the environment.
It definitely wouldn’t fly as a kids show today, but I think it’s an interesting discussion to have when and how much kids’ media should explore darker topics. Ultimately the show was still very tame compared to some of the books my parents got to read as kids, which included things like kids getting ground up in a mill for playing a prank or getting their thumbs cut off for sucking on them.
Yeah it’s one of the shows I look forward to showing my kid one day. That and Avatar the Last Airbender. I don’t know if they’ll appreciate it the way I did but who knows, they might show me something contemporary that they feels same sort of connection to.
kids getting ground up in a mill for playing a prank or getting their thumbs cut off for sucking on them.
That sounds like Struwelpeter. Yeah, quality entertainment there.
The theme song to Unsolved Mysteries. My mom would be watching it just when Id goto bed and that song had me pissing myself.
Watership Down… The old one, not the newer remake. Just so much fucked up imagery and awful themes in that. Legitimately gave me nightmares as a kid.
Not really a kid’s movie, but I remember seeing Darkman on TV when I was pretty young and having the image of his horribly burned, disfigured face burned into my memory.
Watership permanently affected my personality.
this will be a deep cut because I’m talking early 80s in Hungary, but
Futrinka utca and Varjúdombi mesék let’s see how many others are sharing this trauma :)
I was four and I caught a rerun of the Transformers movie where Optimus Prime dies. I was not okay for a few weeks.
My granddad had also died right about the same time, so it was a double whammy.
Not to mention the unceremonious murder of several other characters throughout, that part with the guys being dropped into the acid with a close up of them melting, the court with the “innocent” declaration followed up by throwing the innocent bot into a pool of shark(ticon)s and the “judge” laughing in evil delight about it, the world-devouring monster planet … That movie did not mess around
(And it was friggin awesome)
