Category: Traumafessions

My sister and I were part of a "board game" family. Many an after-school evening or a Saturday was spent playing the whole gamut, anything from Ker-plunk, to Don't Spill the Beans;  Uncle Wiggly, to Parcheesi. We had ‘em all, and it was all good fun.

That is, until the dreaded "Operation" game found its way out of the closet and onto the kitchen table.

I'd like to revisit this "Classic", which showed up one Christmas, although it was most certainly nothing Santa was asked for by means of a list.

From the illustrations on the box and game board alone, you just know something is horribly, horribly wrong.

The premise is you, the "Wacky Doctor" (that is to say, you, granted  the temporary license for a first-grader to perform surgery),and your friends take turns trying to remove problematic organs from all over the bloated, naked body of an irritated looking man with a CRISPIN GLOVER-inspired haircut. The man is all pale and fleshy. The organs and such are white like bones. The openings in his body where they reside are, of course, blood red.

Oh, it's supposed to be amusing enough…he has an Adam's Apple shaped like a little plastic apple, a Funny Bone, and a Charlie "Horse". But here's the rub…touch the metal sides (exposed nerves I would wager) with your metal tweezers when performing an extraction, and what do you get? A loud, God-awful buzzer noise and his nose lights up bright red! Based on the "wackiness" factor of the doctors on the lid of the box, and the fact that the uninsured man is clearly conscious through these harrowing procedures in spite of there being some kind of gas tank pictured, it's pretty evident that he is going through a living nightmare much the same as TIM ROBBINS in JACOB'S LADDER, and you are playing the role of one of his demonic tormentors. I can only guess he was "gassed" just long enough to get his corpulent form up on the table, and carved open. Where did he come from? My guess is he was a homeless "Joe Everyman" found on the streets, probably offered a free lunch in exchange for some volunteer work.  The fun ensues when he wakes.

The lid artwork also sports such tools to be used as a bone saw, an oil can, and a blow torch! One doctor is smoking a cigarette as he operates, with the ashes falling in the man's face. The other doctor is wearing no pants. Wacky, indeed!  I'm sure it was only the technological restrictions of the 70's that kept the buzzer noise, jolting as it was, from being what it was intended to be: a long gut-wrenching scream of pain and terror sound clip.

Yet the wackiness continues, in spite of the poor fat man's objections, and gleefully another inept surgeon gets to take a crack at these procedures.

Look at the board again. Clearly, the patient is looking down at all the openings that have been hastily been carved into him, and he's none too happy about it. Even if he has been numbed, open-heart surgery (removal, actually) is just one of the gruesome extractions to take place while he is helpless to do anything but watch. His fate will take one of two paths, that of continued unsuccessful extractions and mind-blistering pain until the young "doctors" lose interest, or being dumped in a bathtub full of ice water, without ribs or kidneys, and a note telling him to call 911, if he wakes from the shock.

This is what echoed through my mind, when I was slated for a tonsillectomy at age six. All the assurance in the world going to sleep and waking up with a big bowl of ice cream did little to quell the fears of an "Operation."

The multi-part episode featuring the "mole men" scared the whatever out of me. For weeks, months, years, I was scared to look out a window for fear those creepy things were infiltrating.

UNK SEZ: Thanks Rich! That two-part episode titled "The Unknown People" was in fact once a 58-minute-long theatrical feature entitled SUPERMAN AND THE MOLE MEN. No matter the title, in any form, those pesky little mole men are indeed creepy! You can reacquaint yourself with the little buggers HERE.

To this day memories of this movie still cause me to turn on all the lights in the house and shut all the doors that aren't being used.  It was MY STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN, made in 1988, and I didn't have the horrible luck of seeing it until 1991, when I was 5.  The movie is charming enough… an alien is sent to space on a mission and she takes the form of a babelicious woman (the actress KIM BASINGER) who marries some nerdy guy (played by DAN AYKROYD) whom already has a daughter.  I honestly don't remember too much of the plot, the only thing I can remember about the movie is the object of terror… Bag.

The character's name was Bag, or The Bag… and it was an alien cohort of KIM BASINGER's that lived in her handbag.  I remember it was funny when she started talking to her bag, I actually remember some parts of the movie being hilarious (when I was a child) until I saw what Bag really looked like.

Bag is, essentially, a skin tube with an eyeball stuck at the end… like a stalk, almost.  I remember its tube being wrinkly and a brown color and that horrible giant eye.  That's all it was… and it spoke.  Bag didn't actually bother me too much when I first saw it.  I was scared but I wasn't terrified to the point of tears until I realized how much of a bad alien Bag was.  At one point in the movie Bag got angry and slammed the doors of the house the stepdaughter was in, closed the blinds, and stuck her to the ceiling by levitation or something.  She was crying and sobbing and obviously terrified.

The worst part of the movie was when Bag went insane in the end. I think there was a storm… something involving electricity.  I think Bag got struck by it in the end, but the crazy shit that was going on before hand was so frightening to me that I was sobbing in terror.  I suffered nightmares about Bag for quite some time after seeing that movie.

I have wanted to add something to your pages for some time now, but every time I think I have something not yet covered, someone else has already unearthed it as their Traumafession. So in place of my own kindertrauma I offer one for my 4-year-old daughter…

A few weeks back my daughter was watching TV in the upstairs room and we could hear her talking to the TV and interacting with the preschool type shows as she does, yelling out letters and numbers and colors and the like. About 5 minutes later I noticed it was quite quiet and went upstairs to find her backed against the wall in terror. I turned to see what she was watching, thinking she had wandered off the pre-programmed favorites somehow and saw this….

"TIPI TALES – are adventures in story and song, where Elizabeth, Junior, Russel and Sam play, laugh and grow together in the forest." – from the tipitales.com website.

Not sure if they have it in your neck of the woods, but here in Canada it runs on one of the kids channels. It looks harmless enough but when I went to look up TIPI TALES on YouTube the preview picture for the above clip perhaps sheds some light. Maybe it's just me but that face gives me the creeps…….

AUNT JOHN SEZ: Sonny, first of all, thanks for bringing this future TRAUMAFESSION catalyst to our attention. While I don't think it has crossed the border onto American airwaves, I could be wrong. Have any of you readers seen this program? If so, feel free to sound off in the comments or, better yet, report it to your local office of Homeland Security. Clearly, the last thing America needs is more childhood nightmares caused by children's television puppets. I'm looking at you LADY ELAINE FAIRCHILDE and SESAME STREET EGGMAN!

Since we're on the topic of frightening puppets, I'd be remiss not to mention the original, old school terror LITTLE MARCY who has agreed to demonstrate her unmatched powers of creepiness in a song. Hit it LITTLE MARCY:

Growing up in Australia in the eighties I was subjected to an AIDS awareness commercial at a young age that featured a robed Grim Reaper bowling for victims. I was not really old enough to understand much of what was going on but it used to strike real fear in my heart. It's not quite as humorous as the stuff you guys usually show, but I think you'll agree it's pretty terrifying.

UNK SEZ: Geez, you Aussies actually went there with the spinning baby!!! Between this, the BUNYIP SONG from DOT AND THE KANGAROO and PRISONER CELL BLOCK H, I'm beginning to think Australia is the new Transylvania!

I had a cousin who was really into hip-hop and he got me into the music too when I was about 11 or 12. He had this one CD, Busta Rhymes' When Disaster Strikes (1997), and I was really into it. I would claim to my friends that Busta was my favorite artist and I would watch MuchMusic when I could to see if any of his videos were on, (this was before YouTube).

One day we were watching MuchMusic, (RapCity or something), and then one of the videos from the album E.N.E., The Final Frontier (1998), came on called "Gimme Some Mo." I was totally focused in on it.

The video is a parody of LOONEY TUNES and really weird. It starts off with Busta as a kid talking about how "he bumped his head." From there his eyes start to dilate…and then start to swirl. Busta, as a kid, turns into this blue monster with yellow eyes and long teeth. Almost like a Japanese Hannya or something…but with these long dreads. This is when I started to get freaked out. It was the scene where he is chasing after his mom down a hallway and grabbing at her from behind a door…  that image gave me "the fear" before bed and a few nightmares.

I suggest you check it out, maybe you can relate to how this scared me as a kid.

UNK SEZ: Mark, at first I had no idea how a BUSTA RHYMES video could be scary but after viewing it, I see your point. Not only is the Busta gremlin-beastie a freakish image to behold, but the song samples the immortal BERNARD HERRMAN's opening theme for PSYCHO! I'm sold; this freaky video brings the trauma!

The one film that scared me was a film by GARY GRAVER(1982's TRICK OR TREATS). I saw my dad watching it in the family room and I wanted to watch it. He told me okay. And it was all fine until the crazy man started chasing after the babysitter. That seriously traumatized me and I had always pictured the murderer outside my window. And that is why I avoided slashers for a bit of time.

Just wanted to say, I adore your site. Anyway, my personal childhood trauma occurred in 1995 (I was 6-years-old then) during the Superbowl. I'm there with my family, eating some chips, enjoying the game and commercials, until I saw something that screwed me up but good—Pepsi's 1995 "Sucked In" commercial.

It's the one where the kid (wearing a sailor hat, no less) is slurping his Pepsi on the beach. He's slurping and slurping, and finally overdoes it and gets sucked into the bottle from his straw, leaving him trapped inside.

Alone.

I was scared to watch another commercial for the next two or three years, and although I'm a huge horror fan now, I refuse to give that commercial another viewing.

I saw this anti-drunk-driving P.S.A. when I was about five and spent a long sleepless night vowing that when I grew up, I would never so much as look at beer…

I found it on youtube a while back and decided to face my childhood fears, and discovered that between the MICHAEL JACKSON, the eighties hair, the ominous voiceover, and the rather regrettable acting, it was actually incredibly silly, but of course one does not notice these things when one is five. Perversely, this spot and the many other P.S.A.s that turned TV-watching into an unsettling adventure for me and no doubt many of my contemporaries also left me with a lifelong interest in public service and cause marketing, so that I can say for certain that it is a very lucky thing I didn't grow up in the U.K.; since their public-service ads make the drunk-driving skeletons look like Winnie-the-Pooh, and not even the creepy live-action Winnie-the-Pooh who talks about "not-okay touching", but the regular cute kind.

(It turns out, too, that Matt from X-Entertainment, who is about the same age as me, had a similar reaction to this classic. (Check that out HERE).

Anyway, I love your site; I was a pretty easily traumatized child and am now fascinated by the childhood nightmare-fuel phenomenon. Keep up the great work!

UNK SEZ: Our pal Mickster left this in the comments section of the last post, but I think it's front page material and I wanted to make sure that nobody missed it:

What about the use of numerous wonderful cartoon characters in 1990's Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue? My niece and nephew viewed this several times when they were little. I'm surprised that no one has had a traumafession related to this cartoon. Read about it HERE