One thing that scared me when I was a toddler was the song where the Big Bad Wolf sings about his family. As you can imagine, that one always got me hiding behind the couch, and not looking at the TV, until the song ended! I was also afraid of the "Frazzle" song (mostly because of how he growled before the song started).
During my elementary school years, I was scared of the Kermit puppet that was used between the early and late 70's. (It was something about his eyes that freaked me out). I would always hide until he started interacting with Grover, or another character. (Whenever this would happen while I was watching
Plaza Sesamo or
Sesamstrasse, I would sometimes realize that it was just a skit from the late 70's or sometime during the 80's). There were a few skits that I didn't hide from (a major example being the one where Kermit draws the letter M up on the screen), but a lot of them I always felt the need to hide from when they came on. This also applied to seeing the Season 1 Big Bird and Oscar puppets in the
Sesame Street Unpaved book (thank goodness there weren't any photos of Fuzzyface that would soon become Grover, otherwise I would have been totally freaked out).
Going back to my toddler years, I was actually afraid of the
Sesame Street All-Star 25th Birthday: Stars and Street Forever! special that my parents taped. I would always run out of the room crying whenever my older sister chose to watch it. Now, I'm not exactly sure what it was in that special that frightened me, but according to my mom, it was the way Mr. [Ronald] Grump would scream, or the fact that he was going to destroy Sesame Street.
In addition, there were 3 aspects of
Learning About Numbers that used to scare me when I was a toddler. The first was the
Four Big Lions At My Door song (the way the lions opened their mouths/jaws and how their teeth were showing when they roared was a real fright for me). The second was the beginning of the skit where The Count hires Ernie to answer his telephone (it was how we had The Count's "entering organ music" played over the interior of his castle). The third aspect was the skit where The Count counts 7 flowers (it was how pitch black the background was, how The Count entered the scene like any vampire would, and of course the "entering organ music"). Now, don't get me wrong; while I didn't have a problem with the 1972-1982 Count puppet, it was just the aspects of those 2 skits that really made me very unsettled.
This is all I can think of for right now.
One of the creepiest segments that I remember was where David is dressed as a snake charmer with a turban and all. He is sitting Indian-style between two wicker baskets. The background is that typical gray one they used for many non-street segments. He starts playing some type of musical instrument, like a clarinet, and this haunting Middle Eastern music plays while out of the left basket appears an animated wiggly number 1 and from the right basket a similar number 2. Once the number 12 fully emerges, David simply says "Twelve!". I believe he goes back to playing his music, while slowly he disappears/fades away and is replaced by some type of painting of an outdoor scene with cows and a farmhouse. The other disturbing aspect is that David just sits there staring at the screen without speaking, but for that one line. Hopefully, one day this clip will surface as it was originally a mid 70's clip that was shown well into the 80's.
Yikes! That insert DOES sound pretty creepy!
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