Traumafession & NTT:: Dustin in Minnesota on Dusty's Treehouse & HBO's Short Takes

Dustin in Minnesota again, with a two-fer.

My "Name That Trauma" was more freaky than scary, and was actually somewhat amusing. It was a film short I recall seeing at a movie theater before the movie. I also saw it as one of HBO's Short Takes. This was sometime around 1981.

It started with a young boy riding his bike and singing a song. He then arrives at home, where his older brother is mixing up a concoction of kitchen ingredients, which he then makes his younger brother drink. The younger brother turns into a chicken, but still has a human voice, begging his brother to return him to normal. The older brother mixes the correct ingredients and changes his brother back.

Does anyone remember this, and if so, do you have a title? I have searched several times on the Internet for this with no results.

My Traumafession was the ONE episode of Dusty's Treehouse that I watched in the early 1970s. If you aren't familiar with that show, as best as I recall it was puppets of squirrels and other treefolk, similar to when Mr. Rogers had his neighborhood of make-believe — except the whole show was puppets. On one episode, one of the squirrels had taken someone else's medication and was very sick. The lesson was to not take medicine unless your parents gave it to you.

The reason this episode might have freaked me out so much was because when I was about 2 or 3 I took an entire bottle of iron pills and was rushed to the hospital to have my stomach pumped.

This ties in with my first Traumafession here, the Mr. Yuk commercial that terrified me so much. Maybe the iron pills made the idea of poisoning all the more terrifying to me.

Love the site, keep it coming!

Dustin in Minnesota