kindertrauma

Author: aunt john

Traumafessions :: Reader Jami J.R. on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Tom & Jerry

Posted on By aunt john

There are four things that truly terrify me. Chill me to the bone:

1. The thought that one day MICHAEL JACKSON's children might breed with BRITNEY SPEARS' kids.

Okay, really I'm just kidding there. It's really three things:

1. Fast speeds. I hate them. I get panic attack when attempting to drive on freeways – when someone else is driving I'm okay, however. I refuse to go on roller coasters. I don't even like to watch car races. I can't drive over 55.

2. Those ear bugs from STAR TREK 2: THE WRATH OF KHAN. *shudders* To this day I can barely stand to watch any scene involving them. I can still remember hiding under the blanket at the movie theater when we saw that and my brothers making fun of me for it. I still worry that bugs will crawl into my ear and take over my brain – and I'm 34 years old!

3. This one ending scene of an episode of TOM & JERRY. Jerry makes friends with a baby duck Tom wants to eat. The end of that episode shows Jerry and the duckling at the beach when suddenly Tom POPS out of nowhere and slams a bucket over them. He's laughing evilly as his head lowers down and he starts to raise the bucket just enough to get them. That's the end.

Even as a small child who still thought that babies came from the stork, I never thought Tom would actually eat them. No, I thought of my parents' warnings of strangers and their BAD TOUCHES. To beware of the man in the trench coat offering little girls and boys candy. In that moment Tom, the ever hungry and thwarted cat, became the Evil Stranger looking to kidnap children to sate his unnatural lust.

Wow – my parents really screwed me up there, didn't they?

Traumafessions :: Matt of Cinemachine on Friday the 13th: The Series ep. "The Playhouse"

Posted on By aunt john

Dear Kindertrauma,

Longtime reader, second time submitter – last time I shared about the hit and run child murder scene from THE TOXIC AVENGER. I've kind of learned to make peace with that scene by soliciting and actually receiving a reply from one of the actors, ROBERT PRICHARD, on my blog at CINEMACHINE.

I want to share an earlier trauma which will always haunt me from beyond the safety of connection with those responsible: the episode of FRIDAY THE 13: THE SERIES entitled "The Playhouse."

They used to run this on the Sci-Fi Channel back in its glory days and I didn't even know what I was watching when I caught the episode's first act:

Two kids, a brother and sister, find another kid playing in their neighborhood. After sizing him up they invite him back to their house where they have a little playhouse in the backyard. They climb inside and the siblings tell the other to hold on tight – suddenly there's a lot of wind and whooshing and all three are taken someplace else.

Inside the playhouse-fantasy world there's a checkered floor and the usual Caligari skewness abound, plus the siblings are now handsomely dressed. The kid they brought in asks what's going on.

The brother says something like, "Here you can do anything you want!"

The sister holds out some nice chocolates or candy in her hands and says, "You can HAVE anything you want!"

Then the brother adds, "But you gotta be REAL NICE to us."

The stuff in the girl's hands become worms, the siblings have evil smiles, and I think the kid screams.

This was bad, but the worst part – THE WORST PART – was that they cut to the kid's poor mom, wandering down the street where her son was playing and calling his name.

In the same way THE TOXIC AVENGER showed that poor kid's big sister before he got turned into road mush, there's something about the idea of the grieving parent left behind that just makes a kid's death even more disturbing.

Although I should add that when I saw the full episode years later in reruns, all the kids the playhouse ate up were returned unharmed after the FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES crew defeated it. Can't have that on prime time T.V.!

Keep up the great site!!

— Matt

Name That Trauma :: Reader Cody on a Faux Final Destination for Women

Posted on By aunt john

So, I don't think this one has been done before, but I could be wrong.

I think this was a T.V. movie – a miniseries actually. I think it aired a lot in reruns on Lifetime. I could be totally wrong here. It may not even be a miniseries. What I remember is that it was probably made-for-T.V.; it probably aired over the course of a couple nights.

The main character was some blond woman who took a vacation and while on vacation almost died. I think by drowning, maybe in a boat with some guy. But since she didn't die some kind of FINAL DESTINATION stuff happened and she had to face down seven demons or something that were coming to try and claim her soul. One was a boy on a bicycle who appeared in a parking garage, I think.

At the end she thinks it is over but it isn't – she still has one more to go, and she thought they'd all come. There may be a climax involving a fish tank.

Any help I would appreciate so much!

UPDATE: NAME THAT TRAUMA SOLVED! A heaping of bionic thanks to faullguy for pointing us towards the LINDSAY WAGNER tour de force FROM THE DEAD OF NIGHT!

Name That Trauma :: Reader Kathleen on an Animated Sacrifice

Posted on By aunt john

Hallo!

I love your site, and am very glad it exists, thank you!

There's something I'd really, really like to find.

It was an animation and I know it showed on T.V. at least twice sometime in the late eighties to early nineties, in the U.K., but probably elsewhere too.

It looked a bit similar to DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS visually ('realistic' human figures), but didn't have the same feel at all, some of it was really menacing and alien but it was showed during the day, and it had no sense of humour. It had a title a bit like 'LORDS OF TIME AND SPACE' or something like that, but I've searched and can't find anything like it so far.

I remember a particular part where there were three young male characters, one was a boy I think and the other two were both young men, one was blonde and one was dark – and these two did not seem to like each other.

They were on some kind of mission and had to get into some place where some weird sacrificial thing was happening (it felt like that anyway). It's all a bit of a blur, but I think one of the two young guys ends up sacrificing himself for the others (the dark one I think, but I have a feeling it's because he thought he was going to get something out of it) and there's a totally weird image where he jumps down into some pit from a platform, and he's having a nasty shock then on a weird white fleshy orb with white tentacles sticking out of it, and they're all flailing up around him with all this white, yellowish, hard flashing light.. it was not nice at all! The other two escape and I guess he dies there.

It didn't seem to relate to anything else on T.V. at the time, a one-off thing.

I really hope someone else remembers this clearly and can name it! I'll do anything to see that horrible thing again!

Thanks!

Kind regards,

Kathleen

Traumafessions :: Reader EA on Wegman's Sesame Street Spots

Posted on By aunt john

Hey, guys!

Me again…I recently had a child (that is not the trauma) and so my morning routine now involves a lot more SESAME STREET than usual. The "new" shows are usually about 30% new, 70% recycled old segments and bits. Now, I watched SESAME STREET as a child, but somehow I must have blocked out the horror that now greets me and my son almost every morning.

WILLIAM WEGMAN'S F-ING DOGS!

I mean, Wegman's still photos are creepy enough, but whoever decided that these freakish human bodies with dog heads needed to A) move and B) speak to each other in the most droning, monotone, serial-killer-on-Laudium voices should be consigned to some level of T.V. hell. Seriously…

I'm shocked that kids aren't left with a crippling fear of dogs after these things air. Did DAVID LYNCH have an early career in children's programming I don't know about?

Yours in trauma,

EA