Category: Traumafessions

SALUTE YOUR SHORTS was part of what I refer to as the "golden age" of Nickelodeon. For those of you who don't know, Nickelodeon did consist of amazing shows at one point in time and these shows included but are not limited to; CLARISSA EXPLAINS IT ALL, NICK ARCADE, FAMILY DOUBLE DARE, ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK?, WHAT WOULD YOU DO?, PETE AND PETE, and LEGENDS OF THE HIDDEN TEMPLE.

SALUTE YOUR SHORTS followed a group of campers at Camp Anawanna, led by their camp counselor Ug, as they got themselves into numerous shenanigans.

One episode in particular has always made me a little uneasy. It highlighted the camp ghost story of the legend of Zeke the plumber. As the story goes, Zeke got his nose bitten off by a parrot and could not smell the gas leak in the camp one night. He blew up and now haunts the camp looking for his cursed plunger. While the story is a little silly and clearly meant for entertainment purposes, I cannot help but still feel incredibly scared when I look at the face of Zeke the plumber.

It must be the nose. I don't think I remembered there ever having been an explanation for why his nose was bloody and bandaged, and so just seeing a guy in a creepy mask with a bloody nose was enough to make cower.

In the episode, camp bully Budnick (Whose name I always thought was ButtNick) is dared to spend the night out in the woods at the site of Zeke's legendary death. There are a few dream sequences where Zeke haunts campers dreams; the sound of the plunger awakening them and the way the mask moves when Zeke talks….yikes, it still scares the bejesus out of me. Not to mention getting a plunger in the face would be equally terrifying.

UNK SEZ: Thanks, A.D. , I missed this show when it was on but I do know that one of its stars later went on to be to be eaten by giant bugs in THE WILLIES! Now, all you readers out there, make sure you check A.D.'s blog THE HORROR DIGEST, it's pretty darn great and you can find it HERE!

Seeing as someone else started talking about music (cf. Steve Miller), my kindermusiktrauma song would have to be "D.O.A." by Bloodrock from 1971. Ostensibly a song about a plane crash victim told in first person, the song starts with a Hammond organ that has some of the creepiest, deepest, dirtiest production imitating an ambulance siren. It goes on from there to a pretty basic (yet rather turgid) 3-chord progression, culminating in the chorus "I remember we were flying low and hit something in the air." Pretty graphic lyrics about a lost arm, a dead girl staring back at the narrator, and the classic climax of "Dear God in heaven, teach me how to die!"

The whole thing sounds like it was recorded on some bad b-movie set in Texas, with thuddy drums (typical for the time) overworked bass licks in the chorus, crazy deep and dramatic vocals, then – and this is what always really got me as a kid – THEY SLOW THE TAPE DOWN AT THE END OF THE SONG AND CROSSFADE TO AMBULANCE SIRENS!

I downloaded this song a few weeks ago, and it still has the same effect on me as being up late watching a Movie of the Week from the same time period.

The song made it to #36 on the Billboard charts, according to the Bloodrock Wiki entry.

I'd be curious if other folks remember this song, or have similar trauma moments (I can think of "One Tin Soldier" ("Go ahead and hate your neighbor/go ahead and cheat a friend") and the spoken word break from Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City" as two other immediate trauma inducers).

I am submitting this on behalf of my husband because he will never do it himself.

Recently we were talking about stuff from our childhood that we loved or what scared us and I mentioned how I used to love to have a record played every year on my birthday that had my name in it. It was a space guy and he would say, "Hey Jennifer, it's your birthday."

He told me that every year his family would play his record for him and as soon as he heard the first few notes of "Hey Matthew" he would run out of the room. Well I did a little research and it is by Captain Zoom. They now have a wedding version and an anniversary version. I clicked on the sample and he said he got chills. We have a son Matthew and I wanted to get it for him for his birthday, but I think my husband would kill me.

I just found this on youtube and could not believe I found Matthew.

I wanted to tell everyone about a childhood trauma that used to haunt me. In fact, it still haunts me somewhat to this day. Your readers in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area will likely remember this, but I'm sure that everyone can appreciate this trauma no matter where they live.

In the DFW area in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we had two children's TV hosts that were local celebrities. One was Mr. Peppermint – he was the kind, sanitized, completely safe children's T.V. show host. And then there was Icky Twerp. Icky was the other children's T.V. host. The one that pushed the envelope just a little bit. The one that parents secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) wished their children wouldn't watch. And, of course, all the kids wanted to watch Icky.

Icky was huge in DFW, often packing local malls to the brim when he would make a personal appearance. Icky hosted Slam Bang Theater, a show filled with cartoons and old THREE STOOGES shorts. In between cartoons and Stooges, he would perform some wacky slapstick skits. Pratfalls happened, pies were thrown, and everything was fine…until Icky brought out the apes.

Icky had a couple of sidekicks named Ajax and Delphinium that scared the hell outta me. They were simply men dressed in gorilla masks, but it was creepier than it sounds. First of all, even though their heads were distinctly simian, the rest of their bodies were undoubtedly human. Secondly, I guess 1960s ape mask technology was not yet perfected, because something about these ape-heads just wasn't right. It's hard to place my finger on it, but these apes were super-creepy for some reason. Of the two, Ajax scared me the most. My 5 year-old eyes had an attraction/repulsion to these horrible man-beasts. Even though they scared me beyond belief, for some reason I was unable to look away from these unholy abominations.

For those of your readers who are skeptical about just how scary a man in a gorilla mask performing slapstick skits on a children's T.V. show can be, I present to you Exhibit A – the attached photo. Take a good look at these ape-like hellspawns, and ask yourself if this is appropriate for a T.V. show targeted at the age 4-8 crowd.

WTF?!

I don't know if you guys ever tackled this but my stars, this book was terrifying to me. I found it in my Catholic school library when I was 9 and it has photos in it that look like stills from some movie you'd see when you were home alone.

Basically a whole town gets infected by a strange fog and the people start slowly turning into plants, they get strange marks on their face and at one point they find a woman that has completely turned into a cactus. It's really effectively done.

Like a lot of things produced in the 1970s, it has a real downer ending as well.

Cheers!

Brian

UNK SEZ: Thanks Brian for turning us on to THE PLANT PEOPLE! If there is anyone out there who has never visited PLAID STALLIONS before, let me just say I'm jealous of you because you are about to have the time of your life. Traveling to PLAID STALLIONS is like diving into a pool of non-stop nostalgic awesomeness and your cherry trip is an unforgettable one. Jump in HERE!

O.K., I have to admit I wasn't always a horror fan. And only recently have I warmed up to it. And usually I lean toward the horror comedies like CABIN FEVER, 2001 MANIACS, and EVIL DEAD. But some movies I remember that creeped me out were LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, JAWS and WITCHES. And as a kid, I remember being really disturbed by these films.

A movie that actually really scared me when I was younger, sorry it's not a horror film, was that one scene in INDEPENDENCE DAY when the alien kills the scientists in the lab. Even today it makes me a little uneasy. I mean that scene is brilliantly executed. The disgusting alien, the tentacles, and making the scientist talk was really scary! And I love how they play on what you don't see. The alien massacres the whole lab, but because of the smoke and everything, you can't tell what's happening until it's all over.

And the best part?!?!

"What is it that you want us to do?"

"DIE!"

UNK SEZ: Thanks Jason, for letting us know what scared you! Kids, Jason is the Director of a film called COWBOY KILLER you can learn more about his film at its official website HERE or check out the trailer and synopsis below…

Deranged cowboy drifter Roy Thompson arrives in a small town and immediately begins savagely murdering the locals. The carnage runs at full throttle as the town's citizens try to figure out how to defend themselves against the folksy killer.

Though WAR OF THE WORLDS is a terrifying property in anybody's hands, the version which scarred me as a youth was 'Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of the War of the Worlds.'

Back in the mid ‘90s, my neighbour/best friend had an older sister who recorded it off the radio for us onto a cassette. Our neighbours had a shed which was kinda like our hangout as kids, there were chairs and a radio there and we used to keep toys and stuff there also. So we used to listen to WotW on a beat-up old radio/cassette player in the shed, and because we were kids, it seemed to be incredibly long and epic… not to mention terrifying. We'd listen breathlessly to RICHARD BURTON's commanding voice (I still know the opening narration off by heart) describe the coming of the Martians, backed by the most otherworldly sounds that British ‘70s prog-rock could offer. The music was mysterious, eerie and threatening, and combined with Wells' alien-invasion story of heat-rays and incinerated bodies, it was certainly enough to traumatize.

A couple of years later, we discovered that another neighbour living further down the street had the actual LP from the ‘70s. This opened a whole new level of trauma- the paintings of the Martians themselves contained within the record booklet. The tripods just looked incredibly alien- we were unsure if they were supposed to be the Martians themselves of if they were machines controlled from within (due largely to one image of the crows tearing bright red flesh from a downed tripod)- which only added to the horror. The most stirring painting was the one in which a tripod is destroying a street, and some of the fleeing crowd pass close to the 'camera'- and we can see the blood on their faces. Horrifying.

The biggest factor adding to the trauma was that all this was happening in the 19th century- I was deeply troubled that these people were being confronted with a horror they had no means of understanding, never mind combating. For some reason I found the idea of an alien invasion terrifyingly real, but found the quick-fix-it ending (nothing the humans do succeeds, the Martians are killed by bacteria) unconvincing and therefore unconsoling.

Years later, and the opening bars are still enough to send a chill down the spine, though I am amazed at how ‘70s, and how disco (!), War of the Worlds really was. But however strange, this was one property that definitely scared more than a few kids.

I was recently getting a tooth filled, and was reminded of a childhood trauma. No, it's not dental-related. It's the song that came on the "lite" classic rock station: Abracadabra, by the Steve Miller Band. I actually liked this song as a kid, but for some reason…maybe the "I want to reach out and grab you" line, maybe the spooky electronic effects…it also really scared me. And that was before I saw the totally terrifying video.

Come to think of it, that STILL scares me…

Greetings!

ALF. An innocent comedy show from the ‘80s?

No!

The 25th episode of the first season "La Cucaracha" was frightening beyond imagination.

The story: Alf finds slimeballs in his spaceship and in the package was a cockroach
from Melmac. Its reaction to our insecticides is not death, it starts growing. The Tanner family leaves the house to get more potent insecticides and Alf is alone and defenseless
with the giant cockroach.

The cockroach chases the scared Alf through the house, and the end fight in the bathroom is the soul shattering climax. No escape, no mercy.

You never see the giant cockroach completely, only its giant antennae and legs.

The Cockroach is unstoppable; and Alf is totally terrified.

Very disturbing for a harmless comedy show.

I never forget this episode. It scarred my life forever.

UNK SEZ: Speaking of ALF abuse, what is not to love about the painting below ("We Can Has A.L.F.?") by artist CASEY WELDON?

Another terrifying moment for me….and you can just ignore this if you want, I am not sure of the limit on these traumas, because today, I am a huge horror fan who usually never has to look away (unless we're in today's "horror" with human torture, just not my thing)….but anyway, I was not as brave or as into it as a kid. The moment is when the humans take off their masks in BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES and reveal the mutations.

OMG.

I was so so so afraid of that, it practically killed me. But I loved that series of movies so much and still do.

Not so much a scare, but an indelible chill up my spine forever and still today is the closing scene of the original PLANET OF THE APES……damn you all to hell….if you were watching that as a kid and seeing it for the first time without knowing what was coming, it was clearly the fondest trauma I've ever had.

UNK SEZ: Thanks for the traumafessions Smidget and don't worry, here at kindertrauma, just as in real life, there is no limit to the number of traumas you can have!