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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m hongry.
The one that gets my wife is the Tooms episodes.
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.
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.
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 😹
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.
It was the 1970s
I was ~5 years oldLand of the Lost
Dad standing on top of mountain, looks thru binoculars, sees backs of family’s heads. “It’s a closed world, son”
Holly (daughter) stumbles into a trippy Pylon touches a glowing crystal and phases into an alternate, insane reality.
Jesus Christ that was some acid-trip inspired existential crisis.
I was going to say the most traumatizing thing was hearing this kid was 8 in 2016 …
You’re older than you’ve ever been
And now you’re even older
And now you’re even older And now you’re older stillIn the voice of Luke Skywalker: NOOoOoooooo!!!
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.
