Children's shows

I don’t know about you, but I recall my childhood shows as being the most morbid, disturbing stories ever written. You remember Sesame Street? It had a vampire with OCD. It also featured a guy with Tourette’s, who lived in a trashcan, and appeared to be made entirely of marijuana.

As a child, I always prayed that Big Bird would finally receive the psychiatric help he so desperately needed. Remember how he was the only one who could see Snuffleupagus? He would tell the other members of his neighborhood, “Look! Snuffy’s right over there.” And the other people would smile and nod and say, “Sure. Of course he is.” And Big Bird would scream, “He’s killing a little girl right now!” And the camera would pan over, and there the wooly mammoth would be, with his trunk wrapped around Prairie Dawn’s neck as he violently and repeatedly slammed her against the asphalt. Then, that night, Big Bird would sit in his nest, his feathers slick with blood, Prairie Dawn spread across his lap, her neck broken, and Big Bird would cry and say, “Look what Snuffy did! It was all Snuffy’s doing. I swear!”

. . . That’s how I remember it, anyways.

Or how about Guy Smiley? That guy was on his way to becoming some sort of freaky super villain. He used to create the most demented games. He had one called Squeal of Fortune. In this game, he would place a pig in a wheel and spin it, and contestants would guess how many times that the pig would squeal before he . . . I don’t know . . . vomited and passed out, I guess. Basically, Guy Smiley was a few inches away from becoming Jigsaw from those Saw movies.

Speaking of the Saw movies, what happened to those things? The first two were so good, and then the series turned to garbage. The only reason I kept watching them was because I felt obsessed with the question: How would MacGyver get out of this crazy, death-contraption? If the producers ever make a MacGyver versus Jigsaw movie, I would jump all over it, drooling.

But back to evil children’s shows. Remember the Care Bears? They were these super annoying teddy bears that could talk Sylvia Plath’s head out of an oven. But they always brought along this one character, aptly named Grumpy Bear. Given the Care Bears’ objectives, I’m uncertain why that they kept bringing Grumpy along with them. In any case, Grumpy was a dark, wonderful character. There might be an episode where a small child is crying because her daddy went to the store to buy milk—two weeks ago, and it doesn’t look as if daddy’s ever coming home. The child would cry, and the Care Bears would try to cheer him up . . . but Grumpy would say something like, “Your father probably left because you’re such a crybaby. Your wussiness probably chased him away. Nice going. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to sit under a rain cloud and tell children to believe in themselves.” Great!