Month: May 2014

One of the staples my misspent youth was enjoying, "That's Incredible!". It was a kitschy hodge-podge of stuntmen, magicians, psychics and other dentally challenged fraudsters looking for their fifteen minutes of fame. I loved it! Sometime this show would slip in some really disturbing stuff, and this is prime-time TV mind you. One segment was about this lady who died and had this vision (near death experiences was a T.I. mainstay btw) of Jesus and the Devil battling for her soul! The cinematography was creepy! It was filmed in black and white, and if I remember correctly, they used this low camera with a fisheye lens looking up at these two hooded characters writhing about. And the scenery was like this burned out hillside with a dead tree. Very nightmarish! I wasn't prepared for that kind of imagery on a Monday night! Might have been the inspiration for the cult art film, "The Begotten". But who knows. Anyway, the next day, I remember a schoolmate being equally disturbed by that segment as I was. Wish I could see it one more time.

Oh and hey! While we're on the subject of Creepy and That's Incredible!, let's talk about John Davidson! I mean, what's going on behind those eyes? That smug smile! (Cue psycho shower scene music) My Dad never liked him, ever since that streets of San Francisco episode where he played a cross-dressing (as Carol Channing) murderer, he didn't want anything to do with him! I later learned that Johnny Depp is also afraid of John Davidson…. so there! I'm not afraid as the aforementioned, but I wouldn't want to meet him on a lonely road at night.

Well, I've done it, fellow KinderCats and KinderKittens; I have found what I believe to be my earliest childhood trauma inspired by the media, going all the way back to when I was three or four. This required a bit of YouTube digging, but at long last it has been exhumed. It's pretty silly, but for my parents, this one was oft-mentioned to friends.

From a very early age, my folks took pride in my fondness for scary stuff. This was linked with my early ability to read, and since I was a straight A student, they saw no problem with encouraging my macabre tastes. Typical parental bragging would usually ensue, but it was frequently linked with this observation:

"And to think that when he was a baby he was scared of a commercial for Zest soap!"

It was true. I was a pretty placid little kid, but during the handful of times this spot hit the airwaves, I would cry like the hordes of Hell had been unleashed against me:

To me this is a kindertrauma in the purest sense of the concept – an otherwise innocuous something that, for whatever reason(s), pushes buttons that set off a chain reaction of fear. Seen in retrospect over four decades later, it has absolutely no similar effect, but it's easy for me to identify three elements that came together to make this commercial terrifyingly toxic to my very young sensitivities:

1) Bars of soap should not unwrap themselves. I was three, what did I know of the world? Was this something that could happen anytime to the bars we would pass in the supermarket aisle? Or even worse, to the ones Mom kept in the hallway closet? And once unwrapped, could said bars…

2) produce lather that was ALIVE? Those suds were out to get me, and I'm pretty certain I associated lather with getting it in my eyes and stinging like hell. Stephen King has often remarked that the purest form of a monster is that of the blob – mindless, hungry, consuming anything in its path. Some primal fear was resonating here, people. But the worst of all by far was…

3) The voice. That "…ooooOOOOH" grows out of nowhere as the soap exudes from the unwrapped bar, the sound made by ghosts, the wordless siren-song of all things spooky. (I'll even go so far as to assume that as a child I thought the female singer was dead, spectral; after all, we couldn't see her, right?) She has the oversold quality that's common to 50s and early 60s singers of being just a bit too emotive, too enthused about that shampoo lather. I think it's something David Lynch nails whenever he employs music from this period. Hearing it now, I recognize that "voodoo lounge" quality to the melody that was popular at the time. Plus, the tune is neither major nor minor but modal, a relative rarity in pop music that makes it more eerie and exotic.

I've found a couple of other Zest ads from subsequent years that use that four-note "Oooh, what lather" motif, so this commercial must have done its job at branding. But none of them had the effect this one had upon me. It was my first clue in life that I was hardwired to detect the horrible and the haunted.

And to answer the obvious question: Yes, I occasionally use Zest.

Like most ‘70s kids, our television selections were the three networks and PBS so my television viewing was pretty well limited to educational stuff like Sesame Street and Electric Company with the occasional avant garde kids shows like the almost counter-cultural Zoom and the elusive Hodge Podge Lodge. Since children's educational programming was in its infancy, things that have since been deleted or would never even make it past the censors was common fare. Psychedelic scenes, barely toned down music and dances (I remember one African themed dance group that would have made Katie Perry's short skirt and cleavage look tame- this one prompted my grandmother to change the channel) and frankly scary clips dominated this new genre of television.

The one clip that scared me the most featured the word "Burn" with a spooky female voice saying, "Burn" and then the letters bursting into flames. I don't know why this terrified me so much but since I had accidentally seen a show about spontaneous human combustion that had kept me awake with screaming nightmares for weeks, anything with fire in it was horrifying to me. I'm actually not sure if "Burn" was on Sesame Street or Electric Company but I would close my eyes and plug my ears when it came on. A YouTube search hasn't produced any results either.

A fire phobia didn't stop me from smoking as a teenager and young adult. That is until the horrific anti-smoking PSAs started coming on around the mid 1990's- by then Joe Camel and any advertisement that could possibly induce kids to smoke was banned but commercials better suited to the horror genre started showing up. As an adult I felt sorry for the horribly afflicted people but I was still horrified by the ads, which generally showed up after 10pm.

One showed a lady (now deceased) smoking a cigarette through the hole in her neck which gave me cold chills and another featured a lady who had numerous surgeries and treatments that left her with a bizarre sounding robotic voice and sadly disfigured face. One night I woke up to the spot- thinking it was some sort of sci-fi horror film, something like a human machine hybrid like the Borg on Voyager or something- to my half asleep brain it was terrifying. I was almost disappointed to find out it was a sad terminally ill human who has since exited from her pain. I quit smoking after that.

MaryR