Author: aunt john

I had to search your site TWICE for this one, so amazed was I that no one had brought it up yet…

There's no shortage of traumatic Disney moments. Everybody's traumatized by the Evil Queen in SNOW WHITE, by DUMBO's separation from his mom, by the Death of Mrs. BAMBI, and by the sheer FACT of PETE'S DRAGON, but one extremely traumatic Disney moment that seems to get short shrift is one that caused no end of nightmares for the Lil' Vicar, the "Pleasure Island" sequence from PINOCCHIO.

You remember the set-up–after being tempted off the straight-and-narrow by that sly, conniving Fox, PINOCCHIO joins a boatload of other wayward boys on a trip to Pleasure Island, a bad boy's paradise where everything that grown-ups won't let you do is not only allowed, but encouraged. PINOCCHIO and his friends gorge on sweets, smoke cigars, play cards, fight, break glass, drink beer (maybe it's meant to be root beer, but that's not how I remember it) and gleefully break every rule they can think of, basking in the glow of completely unsupervised freedom.

It all seems pretty great until PINOCCHIO, green from smoking stogies and sick on sweets, listens to one of his pals waxing poetic on the wonders of being bad. The boy lets out a long, boisterous laugh that, in mid-guffaw, becomes the bray of a donkey! His bravado suddenly gone, the boy brays again, this time in terror, as his hands curl into hoofs, his ears elongate, his snout grows, and he transforms horrifyingly into a little, LITERAL jackass! The editing, animation, and sound design here is bad enough (terrified by what's happening to him, the tough boy starts wailing pitifully for a mother who ISN'T THERE before the last bit of his humanity disappears and with it his power of speech), but then the same thing starts to happen to all the OTHER boys on Pleasure Island, paradise suddenly transformed into a Boschian Body-Horror HELL! Not content to let that horror suffice, the Disney team turns the screw further by having faceless brutish toughs round up the boys onto cattle carts (Holocaust imagery! Great for the whole family!) to be sold either into hard labor or to the glue factory. As the train pulls away, the jackasses that once were boys can be seen weeping helplessly, the victims of their own uncontrolled appetites and, presumably, lax parenting.

The now donkey-eared PINOCCHIO manages to escape with Jiminy Cricket's help, and later has to face the larger horror of Monstro the Whale; but for me as a kid, that was a cakewalk compared to the horror, helplessness, and horrible separation from one's loved ones depicted in the terrifying "Pleasure Island" segment. I'm even a little shaky writing about it now, more than thirty years later!

DAMN YOU DISNEY! Even THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON didn't do THIS to me!

AUNTIE SEZ: Thanks for sharing Vicar! Kids, be sure to visit the Vicar of VHS at his virtual Pleasure Island, a.k.a. Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies, where bad behavior is most definitely encouraged and will NOT cause jackass ears to sprout from your impressionable heads.

If there was one thing that would throw me for a loop when I was a kid watching either the silver or small screen, it was something about crossing paths with someone that was a "some-THING." The thought of seeing a humanoid left me scared to walk down our dark hallway at night after seeing IN SEARCH OF.  In a related way, I had an equal fear of the sub-human.  This is where the KEN RUSSELL-directed ALTERED STATES comes in.  The mixed-genera flick received a humble blip at the 1980 box office, but ads showed that you were in for a wallop on the senses.  I was 10 when it came out, and would not be allowed to see it. Good thing, since the T.V. advertising was thoughtful enough to save viewers from the shots I'm talking about here: The lead character in his famously-horrifying deformed condition.  (If you know the movie, WILLIAM HURT becomes a deformed screaming blob-o-human due to a regression to a de-volved state of humanoid existence.  Are things brought into clarity upon seeing the film? No… It's a KEN RUSSELL film, folks.)

The fact is, I DID run smack into the trauma-rific scenes of this movie in surprise-attack fashion. California people here may remember an ‘80s Bay Area television show called EVENING MAGAZINE. This was one of those trite local fares covering stories about neat local places to eat, hike, and explore, and was good for getting you between dinner and CHiPs on a school night.  Sounds great right? Well, there was one EVENING MAGAZINE reporter that needed his head examined.

Clearly having seen the movie, this particular reporter's dainty segment on a little-known isolation tank location in San Francisco described that, for a fee, you can be deprived of senses and improve meditation.  So what does he decide to splice into this human-interest piece?  A SUB-human life-form writhing like a banshee and slamming his deformed appendages into walls – yes, the climax of R-rated ALTERED STATES!

A cold sweat hit all the grannies in the Bay Area, and me, simultaneously.

Yeah sure, the movie, like his segment, features isolation chambers – so obviously the thing to do is show the movie's KEN RUSSELL-horror-hallucination-freak-out and shock everybody during prime time!  I guess it was meant as a timely pop culture in-joke, but WTF?

I'll never understand why I had to get that dose of heart trauma at that age by a things-to-do segment.

If I could find that reporter today, I'd get medieval on his a$$!

Growing up in upstate NY, there was very little to do so my father would watch horror movies late at night. Well one night my parents were painting their bedroom (mind you I was probably really young at the time) and while mom was off watching THE CLIENT in the living room, dad was watching THE X-FILES in my room. "Do you promise not to be scared?" he asked. Me being young and gullible, I agreed to watch it with him. It was the episode with the Flukeman and all it took was 10 minutes into that episode for me to go screaming for my mother. I'm not really sure what it was that scared me but to this day I haven't watched the episode.

I however continued to be terrified and even got into the old comic books my father had from his youth. The one series that scared me the most, I don't remember the name (it was from the '60s/'70s) but the gist of the series was that it was twists on things you wouldn't normally be scared of led by a story teller witch that really reminded me of the crypt keeper. One such story has always stood with me where a kid is dying and the grandfather spends the whole story trying to keep death out only to fail at the end. I think he dies instead but that part's fuzzy. Another one was about a killer Easter bunny who dipped the children in chocolate and then ate them. Real messed up stuff. It's driving me mad that I don't remember what this series is called!

UNK SEZ: Ericka, thanks for the great traumafession. I'm a big fan of the episode "The Host" from the second season of THE X-FILES as well. It's one of the most disturbing (and sometimes nauseating) of the series. As far as that comic goes, I'm not familiar but an exceptional place to do some archaeological digging for it would be THE HORRORS OF IT ALL. Even if you don't find exactly the comic you're looking for, you are sure to find something equally good or maybe even better.