My last kindertrauma entry was in 2023. Over time, I’ve been recalling little traumas one by one. Some, I’m not sure are worthy, even considered scary by my standards, but they sure do stick out.
The Greedy from Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure
Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure is a fever dream from when I was little and watching Nickelodeon’s Special Delivery. What is Special Delivery? I’m glad you asked. The Nickelodeon documentaries don’t mention it. They just skip right to the child abuse.
Special Delivery was a two-hour special that Nickelodeon aired in the middle of the afternoon every… Saturday? Sunday? I can’t remember. But it was always different and interesting. Sometimes it might be an animated movie, could be live action, could be a series of shorts, a concert, something about sports (yecch), something in black and white (also yecch). Most of them were unaired pilots, CBS Storybreak/ABC Afterschool Specials, or Canadian made-for-TV family movies. But I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that my favorite channel was providing a grab bag and I was here for it. I presume its presence was to fill dead airtime for Nickelodeon–real kids were playing outdoors on the weekends.
One of them was Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure. I was vaguely familiar with the dolls, but too young to comprehend anything but the colorful fluid animation and singing & dancing toys. And I’m not the only one who remembers a sequence in the middle with The Greedy.
It’s a memorable sequence and stands out like a big-lipped alligator moment. Basically, Raggedy Ann, Raggedy Andy, and a bipolar camel fall into this giant pit of taffy. Except the taffy is alive and it sings a song about gluttony and sweets, then wants to eat them. I forget how it ends, but I think they trick The Greedy into eating itself, which is also horrifying.
Little did I know that this sequence was animated by Richard Williams, famous for the animation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and The Thief and the Cobbler. It’s constantly changing form, recombining and reconfiguring the junk food that makes up its body. That, combined with the voice acting, which makes him sound like Homer in hell being fed donuts, makes for a nightmare.
The Ending of Little Monsters
I’ve never seen Little Monsters all the way through (well, now I have because I am an adult with Netflix). I only ever caught the end of it on HBO. But I watched it because of its Tim Burton-esque set design (although it was more like Cats on downers). A nice palate cleanser from my usual fare of Peanuts or Disney. So I had no explanation for why Howie Mandel suddenly became a flat pile of clothes. Or the awful noise he makes when he does. I did understand that Fred Savage was trying to save his little brother. But why were they in gay Hell?
And the ruler of this hell is a Little Lord Fauntleroy dipped in Hitler juice. He comes out on a stage to give Fred Savage some kind of sadistic choice about his brother. At some point, they fight, and Little Lord Fauntleroy’s face gets ripped off, revealing a gross shiny monster face (too bad I didn’t remember this for the Face-Off article), probably covered in Astroglide, as everything was in the eighties. It looks like a Boglin, puppeted like one too, transitioning to an uncanny valley of irregular movement.
Anyway, it becomes a ticking clock to escape “we’ve got Beetlejuice’s underworld at home” or they turn into monsters forever. They race around looking for a staircase out, and somehow they can run from London to Tokyo in the same stride. Anyway, they barely make it, and they phone their parents to say they’re in Australia or Malibu or some place that’s an air flight away. Being trapped on the other side of the world with no parents is its own kind of kindertrauma, but the movie ends on that.
Santa Claus: The Movie: B.Z. (John Lithgow) Flies Forever Through Space
So the premise of the movie is an elf using the magical hay that makes reindeer fly into lollipops for kids. It’s a commercial sensation, but the second version intended for Christmas II explodes when exposed to heat. Of course, the evil greedy toy company CEO of B.Z. Toys has no compunctions about releasing a dangerous product to children. He plans to fly to Brazil when this is over.
But the police come to arrest him for reckless endangerment (and kidnapping a child) in his corporate ivory tower office. Seeing the jig is up, B.Z. opens a window, then stuffs a bunch of magic candy canes in his mouth. Laughing maniacally, he jumps out.
At first he floats, to his delight, but then he keeps going. The cops watch him go up and up and up. Then the scene cuts back to Santa Claus and whatever he’s doing. Then in the denouement, there’s a cutaway of John Lithgow soaring away from Earth, spinning around endlessly in the cosmos, screaming in fear. And in space, no one can hear you scream.
Wouldn’t that be terrifying? Flying into the infinite universe, unable to control your direction, forever and ever and ever. Same thing happened to George Clooney’s character in Gravity, though less whimsical. I presume Clooney would dehydrate to death or run out of oxygen in a few hours. But in Santa Claus World, there’s a bit more magic, and you might live forever.
How didn’t this happen to anyone else? Surely some kid ate two lollipops. Maybe someone had a diabetic sibling and got theirs. Some bully must have gone around and threatened to beat up other kids if they didn’t give him their candy. Or someone stole it and fenced it off. Wouldn’t there be more compulsory astronauts?
Mr. Gloppy from Candyland
The third board game I remember playing (first was Hi Ho! Cherry-O, second was Chutes and Ladders). In the 1984 version, there are two important areas near the end. One is Queen Frostine’s palace, where you can warp to if you draw the right card, giving you an almost-guaranteed win.
Or, if you’re unlucky, you warp to Molasses Swamp, where Mr. Gloppy lives. There you stay trapped, potentially for several turns. Gloppy looked too close to quicksand for my taste. And all eighties kids were well-warned about quicksand, alongside bringing a toaster into the bathtub. Didn’t help that I didn’t know what molasses was. All I knew none of the yummy candy contained it.
Side note: Someone really needs to take advantage of this IP. These are great characters.
A standing gorilla ashtray
Like everyone in the eighties, my grandparents were smokers. In their basement, they had an ashtray that looked like King Kong holding up a dish. The problem was that my grandfather liked to stick his finger in its mouth and pretend it was biting him.
I was forever scared of that ashtray from then on. Always kept a good five feet away from it until I hit puberty and understood that ashtrays aren’t real. Grandpa was weird with kids. He always used to drive me furious by never calling Big Bird by his real name. He always called him “Big Chicken”.
Cookie Monster says “De-lic-ious” at the end of Side A on “The Best of Cookie Monster”
Something about the psychotic way he says it. And the fact that it doesn’t play until after an indeterminate amount of time after the last song on Side A (which is a disco song and does not alleviate anxiety). Scared the underoos off me. (I never got underoos–by the time they came out, I was too big for them, despite my pleas to Mom.)
Plays of this album on my Tape Recorder waned from fear of hearing that phrase. And when I did listen to it, I always kept my finger on the stop button so I could end it before the quip. Sounded like Cookie Monster was going to eat me.
Operation
Well, thanks Mom, for ensuring your little boy would never go into the medical profession. It’s bad enough the game makes that unpleasant buzzing noise, but it also kind of electrocutes you. What are you doing surgery on a robot? I love a game that causes you pain and anxiety (see also Crocodile Dentist). It’s a child’s introduction to American health care, which is its own kind of nightmare.
And it’s not even realistic. I saw my wife getting a C-section and they were tossing her organs around like it was laundry day. The body doesn’t care if you touch the sides during surgery.
The Airplane Gremlin from The Twilight Zone: The Movie
Hey, more fun with John Lithgow.
Fuck this gremlin. You can barely see him through the darkness and the lightning, especially on CRT TVs back in the day, next to our gramophones. But the way this thing moved was unearthly. All twitchy and jumpy like a spider-monkey. Is it stop-motion? Is it robotics? Is it puppetry? I can’t tell, which makes it eerier. Animatronics in the eighties were terrifying.
And then the worst thing isn’t its face or its jumpscares or the fact that no one thinks its real or that fucking obnoxious blonde kid with the Polaroid. No, it’s when John Lithgow gets stuck in the window, then tries to shoot the gremlin. All he’s trying to do is save everyone, but are they grateful?
But the gremlin monkey-jumps, runs up the wing like the Predator, and bites the gun from his hand. It looks like he’s about to kill Lithgow, but then the clouds part and the runway appears down below. The plane is about to land. The gremlin grimaces, frustrated that he didn’t destroy the plane in time.
But then it puts its gross greasy alien hand (covered in Astroglide again) on Lithgow’s face like he’s about to rip it off (more face horror). Then a Danny Elfman-esque violin twang plays and the gremlin wags his finger. Like “ah ah ah, naughty naughty, not this time.” Then it flies off into the storm clouds.
Which means this thing’s intelligent. It’s not an animal just making mindless destruction like a polar bear or Tasmanian devil. This thing’s acting with intent. Too bad they didn’t have DNA testing back then; maybe they could have taken a sample of the goo off Lithgow’s face.
“There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly”
Like the song about the hippo going down the drain, I definitely wasn’t a fan of people who died in horrible tragic freak ways. And it’s gluttony horror like Slither or The Greedy (see above) which is good fodder for kindertrauma–we all eat. It doesn’t help that the song’s tune is a little creepy, like the song from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. And every verse ends with “perhaps she’ll die”, repeating the idea of death in the song. Has anyone made a horror movie of this yet?
It’s already gross, the lady swallowing the fly, whether by intent or accident. But the escalating steps she takes must be deliberate. She swallows a spider to catch the fly. But that doesn’t work and now she’s got a spider inside her, which must be worse because she then swallows a bird to get that spider. The same thing happens, so then a cat. And then a dog. Then a goat. Then a frickin’ cow. It’s escalating like the Cold War, or The Butter Battle Book, which also has a haunting finale.
And now you’re wondering how long this can go on. The song isn’t just reiterating; it’s getting longer. Tension is building. And eventually buildings fall over. Plus, how can this lady gulp something so big? She must be stretching out her mouth in a horrific way like the Poison Cackler or The Thing or It.
Then it gets to horse. And the one thing the song had going for it–the comfortable repetition–breaks. “There was an old lady who swallowed a horse–she’s DEAD, OF COURSE!” It’s jolting and unsettling and morbid. Like a musical jumpscare. And no one learns a lesson. Is this suicide? Is it black humor? All I know is I don’t like it.
