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.
The theme song to Unsolved Mysteries. My mom would be watching it just when Id goto bed and that song had me pissing myself.
Invader Zim. The animation and shock humor was a little much for younger me, particularly the organ stealing episode.
Not a TV show specifically, but another thing I remember was there were these anti smoking ads with claymation figures that had creepy music and they ate dead birds and things.
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.
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
Also: Return the slab!
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.
The one that always bothered me was like some insect alien creature. That was invisible. But it made insect noises.
I can’t remember the details except that the noise really disturbed me.
Chittery sound.
One of the space documentaries from the 90’s showed the Apollo 1 fire hatch footage at the beginning. That was quite a bit for a very young child.
The other two are a set of ad’s/psa I have not been able to relocate:
One had a girl in a petal car on a country road with an incoming semi, the other a toddler steps off the curb into traffic, while a frantic mother realizes she lost track of them.
They had a tagline like “would you risk your life for this child” or some such. Mid 90’s cable.
“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 Chipmunks Movie, not the live action one but the animated one from the mid-80s. I had nightmares for years about a scene where their hot air balloon gets blown around by a hurricane, which I watched I guess around the same time as Hurricane Hugo.
It’s also very possible that my brain invented the whole thing.
There’s a specific episode of that, IMO, horrible 3D Garfield and Friends cartoon from maybe the very late 2000s or early 2010s that made me hate the show. As someone who hates spiders, I hated an episode where Garfield takes an alien’s space car to an alternate universe where it’s John’s head on a giant spider body.
Hated it so much I couldn’t even eat something like a hot pocket without worrying about the fuckers being in it.
Edit:
That episode basically killed my enjoyment of the 3D animated Garfield movies with the superheroes, Garfield going on a quest to become funny again, and having to find a way back into comic strip land ( or whatever it’s called ). I’d probably be fine watching them now, but no way I’d enjoy them like I did, not by a long shot. Even as an animation lover.
The Are You Afraid of the Dark episode with the drain monster. Couldn’t stand on the drain in the shower for about 8 years afterward.
I just remember the pinball episode. Actually I remember almost nothing about the episode except a giant pinball showing up at the end. I don’t remember why that was so terrifying but it definitely left a mark for some reason.
Why do I remember that specific visual from that episode and basically nothing else? The…mall was in the pinball machine?
There was the episode with Gilbert Gottfried who was a radio announcer, there was an episode about a ghost monster thing in the pool that the kid turned orange with chemicals…some 30 year old neurons are firing over here folks, and they ain’t firing that bright.
I remember the pinball one, but it was the one with the weird house with all the mirrors that got me.
It was this red kelpy blood clot that would come out of swimming pool drains and shower drains and kill children. I don’t know anything else about it than that, but it got me good. I don’t remember the pinball 😹
Unsolved Mysteries. Theme song will do it by itself, but the episode with the Queen Mary ship and the ghostly wet foot prints of a child walking the pool deck ruined me.
edit: here it is
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.
That mummy episode of courage the cowardly dog. Scared the piss outta me.
It wasn’t a TV show, it was a commercial. For acrylic nails.
So I was like 5, this would have been in 1991 or so, there was a commercial on daytime television among the blue star ointment and dirt devil vacuums for some brand of acrylic nails that were easy to put on and take off, and they contrasted this against the “other brand” that showed a woman peeling it off and it had this stringy yellow goo underneath. I didn’t understand what fake nails were, so I thought it was just a woman casually tearing her fingernail off.
To this day I compulsively trim my nails very short, I cannot stand the thought of bending my fingernails back.
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.
