When I browse Dejanews, I find this a favorite topic on the alt.tv.sesame-street group: What sketches/cartoons/skits scared you as a kid?
The only ones I can clearly remember frightening me were as follows. There was a counting cartoon with bugs. It started off on a blank yellow screen with a weird clicking sound. Then a rather ugly bug crawls on screen, then three more, counted off by the announcer until we have "five cute little bugs." Then the last bug turns and crawls "over" the first...and gets bigger. This is repeated until we have "one big ugly bug!" filling up the screen. That used to creep me out when I was little.
The other one was BIG TIME scary to me. This was actually a series of several, but I didn't know this till years later cause I'd always head for the hills when it came on! Yes, friends...we are speaking of the dreaded Willy Wimple Anti-Pollution Cartoons.
For those of you who don't remember, there were several folk-songish cartoons about a careless and rather nasty-looking kid named Willy Wimple, who in each one did something nasty to the environment: throwing trash on the land or in the water, and cutting down trees. The song went on to say, "Now if every kid did it, can't you see, what an icky mess it would be?" The cartoon and song would go into the consequences of what the world would look like if "every kid did it". They all concluded with a shot of the earth from space...brown and dirty...and a gruff, "YUCK!"
I think what scared me when I was a kid was that I somehow missed the "if every kid did it" line. Therefore, I thought that this one kid was responsible for screwing up the entire world. (I cheered myself up, though, by imagining a little story inside my head in which Big Bird and the gang, sans Oscar of course, tracked down Willy and forced him to clean up his mess.)
Anyway, thanks to this and other anti-pollution sketches, I became a real bear for not throwing trash around. But even now, I get a bit of a scare even thinking of them...
Other minor scares: that cartoon with the cracks on the wall turning into animals and one evil-looking "crack monster", and the News Flash with the horse running up the clock and smashing the thing to bits. But this was nothing compared to the pure stark horror that was Willy Wimple, Arch Polluter.
Some of the sketches that others have said scared them either had no effect on me or were sketches I loved. For example, the orange that sang Carmen's Habanera is often put in the scary category...but that used to crack me up no end!
Anyway, consider this thread therapy. What sketches used to scare you?
The only ones I can clearly remember frightening me were as follows. There was a counting cartoon with bugs. It started off on a blank yellow screen with a weird clicking sound. Then a rather ugly bug crawls on screen, then three more, counted off by the announcer until we have "five cute little bugs." Then the last bug turns and crawls "over" the first...and gets bigger. This is repeated until we have "one big ugly bug!" filling up the screen. That used to creep me out when I was little.
The other one was BIG TIME scary to me. This was actually a series of several, but I didn't know this till years later cause I'd always head for the hills when it came on! Yes, friends...we are speaking of the dreaded Willy Wimple Anti-Pollution Cartoons.
For those of you who don't remember, there were several folk-songish cartoons about a careless and rather nasty-looking kid named Willy Wimple, who in each one did something nasty to the environment: throwing trash on the land or in the water, and cutting down trees. The song went on to say, "Now if every kid did it, can't you see, what an icky mess it would be?" The cartoon and song would go into the consequences of what the world would look like if "every kid did it". They all concluded with a shot of the earth from space...brown and dirty...and a gruff, "YUCK!"
I think what scared me when I was a kid was that I somehow missed the "if every kid did it" line. Therefore, I thought that this one kid was responsible for screwing up the entire world. (I cheered myself up, though, by imagining a little story inside my head in which Big Bird and the gang, sans Oscar of course, tracked down Willy and forced him to clean up his mess.)
Anyway, thanks to this and other anti-pollution sketches, I became a real bear for not throwing trash around. But even now, I get a bit of a scare even thinking of them...
Other minor scares: that cartoon with the cracks on the wall turning into animals and one evil-looking "crack monster", and the News Flash with the horse running up the clock and smashing the thing to bits. But this was nothing compared to the pure stark horror that was Willy Wimple, Arch Polluter.
Some of the sketches that others have said scared them either had no effect on me or were sketches I loved. For example, the orange that sang Carmen's Habanera is often put in the scary category...but that used to crack me up no end!
Anyway, consider this thread therapy. What sketches used to scare you?