What sketches scared you as a kid?

[Flaky Pudding]

Quick question:Why were so many people afraid of the William Weigman Dogs when they were kids? For me, those sketches were everything but scary. I used to think that they were funny, entertaining, cute, creative, and just all around fun to watch. In fact, I still love those skits just as much as I used to.

So when I recently rediscovered them all on YouTube for nostalgia sake, I was a bit surprised to find so many "This used to scare me" and "I used to run out of the room screaming whenever these would come," comments down below. What makes those adorable dogs nightmare fuel to so many people?

Is it just because they have human hands? I don't see anything wrong with that. It's certainly weird but then again Sesame Street is filled with all kinds of weird stuff. Monsters that are obsessed with cookies, vampires that count everything in sight, giant talking yellow birds, and grouchy green creatures that live in trash cans aren't exactly what I'd call "normal" either though. I'm just a bit confused is all.

 

[MikaelaMuppet]

Quick question:Why were so many people afraid of the William Weigman Dogs when they were kids? For me, those sketches were everything but scary. I used to think that they were funny, entertaining, cute, creative, and just all around fun to watch. In fact, I still love those skits just as much as I used to.

So when I recently rediscovered them all on YouTube for nostalgia sake, I was a bit surprised to find so many "This used to scare me" and "I used to run out of the room screaming whenever these would come," comments down below. What makes those adorable dogs nightmare fuel to so many people?

Is it just because they have human hands? I don't see anything wrong with that. It's certainly weird but then again Sesame Street is filled with all kinds of weird stuff. Monsters that are obsessed with cookies, vampires that count everything in sight, giant talking yellow birds, and grouchy green creatures that live in trash cans aren't exactly what I'd call "normal" either though. I'm just a bit confused is all.

It probably most likely is because of the human hands.

 

[YellowYahooey]

My choices for segments which would scare me as a kid:

• "Now then... A Count of Ten" - the strange face is very creepy.
• Blonde Muppet girl showing number 11 upside down.
• Herbert Birdsfoot's lecture about the visual appearance of the letters M and W - it was okay, until the camera angle rotated 180 degrees.
• Goldilocks demonstrates hot, warm and cold using a bathtub - because of the nude girl.
• Y for Yawn (more due to my sensitivity of the way the narrator said "Y" at the end)

 

[Gordon Matt]

I think this is about the only thing that genuinely scared me, and I've never forgotten it.

 

[YellowYahooey]

For some strange reason, "D for Dart" never scared me. Maybe it was because I thought, at a very young age, darts were harmless because of being part of a game.

But yeah, if classic segments were still being aired, this one would likely have been dropped. I did like the segment more for the jazzy background music. And wasn't the artist of this cartoon the same one who did "M for Moo", which also had jazzy background music?

 

[Gordon Matt]

For some strange reason, "D for Dart" never scared me. Maybe it was because I thought, at a very young age, darts were harmless because of being part of a game.

But yeah, if classic segments were still being aired, this one would likely have been dropped. I did like the segment more for the jazzy background music. And wasn't the artist of this cartoon the same one who did "M for Moo", which also had jazzy background music?

That's likely, but I'm sure someone can answer that more definitively than I can.

I only remember seeing that segment once, and it scared the heck out of me. I don't remember ever seeing it again -- but decades later when Noggin was running some of the old shows, it popped up in a "123 Sesame Street" from the 1990s, so it did stick around.

I appreciate jazz now, as an adult. But at the time, the music seemed ominous to me. When I saw it again, I was like, "that's it!" (That was my usual reaction seeing a lot of this stuff for the first time again in my 30s.) It didn't scare me, though I sure remembered being scared of it as a kid. It was great to see it again.

 

[YellowYahooey]

I am pretty sure "D for Dart" was shown quite frequently in the 1970s and 1980s.

 

[LittleJerry92]

With how bizarre Sesame Street could get at times, I made my own personal video on the subject of moments that terrified me when I was a kid.

My little Halloween treat. Enjoy!

 

[YellowYahooey]

I personally think a lot of today's parents who grew up with the show's golden years probably do not approve of the older episodes to today's children.

It's a pity, because the older episodes have far more appeal than today's HD era.

Regarding scary scgments, I also didn't find the segments where Ernie pulled Bert's nose off his face. I get turned off by those segments.

Ironically, I seem to have no problem with "The Mysterious Nose Snatcher" sketch, but maybe that is because we don't see Ernie's nose pulled off in action.

I also find the short end of sketch cue from "The Myseterious Nose Snatcher" creeped me out when I was a kid, because of its high-pitched sound. Whenever that cue was heard when I was a child, I would cover my ears like crazy. The same cue was also heard at the end of "Kermit's Rectangle Lecture" sketch, and even the sketch where Bert and Maria take a plane ride with the sky resembled by film footage.

I believe I heard a different version of that end of segment cue on "Sesame Park" in Canada in the Canadian produced park scenes, but it had more of a lower-pitched sound, ending to a clang. I wonder if any sketches on "Sesame Street" had such lower-pitched version, and if so, which ones are they? I found that version more tolerable than the high-pitched version. Of course, I would have no problem with the high-pitched version nowadays, considering I am more mature and understand it's part of the show and intended to be a form of comic relief.

Of course, I still find the Scanimate film, "A Count of Ten", very creepy to this day and will never watch such clip to this day, and beyond.

 

[Flaky Pudding]

With how bizarre Sesame Street could get at times, I made my own personal video on the subject of moments that terrified me when I was a kid.

My little Halloween treat. Enjoy!

That is a really good list. I thoroughly enjoyed watching that video.