My friend Joe and I were talking about cartoons that scared the living shit out of us when we were kids, and I was hoping to hear some of your stories. I had the misfortune of stopping on an animated segment of Creepshow when I was young, and assuming the whole movie must be for kids because cartoons were the green-light for “kid friendly.” Big Mistake.
“Hey, Creepshow! Must be a great animated film…I’ll keep watching.”
“I’ll have to admit, I’m a bit surprised that I’ve just ruined my childhood.”
So post your stories! The winners will get a nice box of terrifying crap from me. Here’s one that apparently scared my friend Joe, a cartoon called “Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night.” I’ve never seen it, but the guy posting it lists this as “the scariest scene,” so clearly someone else has been traumatized by this gem.
dear god - I just dropped my toast. don’t worry, five-second rule (dogs licked up the crumbs).
I rented Creepshow and Creepshow II for a sixth grade slumber party. To give full disclosure, Chris - you know where I live(d). Pastures… darkness, gravel roads. It’s a perfect setting for creeptown and scary movies. We ten-year-olds knew we were renting a scary movie, but had no idea what we were in for.
The animated interludes titling ‘the raft,’ ‘the hitchhiker, and whatever the one is about the guy who rips scalps off I can remember clearly.
The story that stands out most is the guy that won’t die holding the sign that reads DOVER.
We little girls with our mt. dews and doritos and PU pizza (woot!) didn’t stop screaming until 2AM.
The following Monday the 6 girls and I began studying for our states and capitals test. There was a shriek in the room every time Mrs. Sphere said “delaware? Class? Delaware?”
I shudder.
Comment by britt — April 24, 2009 @ 8:06 am
[...] we’re on the subject of cartoons that terrified us as children (please, I implore you: enter the contest. There’s one entry for god’s sake. your odds are pretty good.), I think it’s safe [...]
Pingback by Worst Cartoons Ever — April 27, 2009 @ 5:01 am
I was actually terrified by GI Joe as a kid. Yeah, GI Joe. See, I loved GI Joe, and watched it everyday (clutching my duly bought toys that I had to convince my mother it was somehow all right for a girl to play with, but that’s another story).
One day there was an episode where a group of Joes went to alternate dimension where Cobra had won. Interesting take on an episode, right? Flip the whole status quo and see “what if?”
Problem was, as a 6-year-old I didn’t have the faintest clue about what an “alternate dimension” or “other timeline” was. To me, I just tuned in and suddenly Cobra had won and the Joes were scattered or dead. This crushed my little heart. How could Cobra win? They were the bad guys. Bad guys NEVER won.
One scene in particular terrified me, and it was a simple one where the Joes from our universe found an abandoned Joe base from the alternate universe. They booted up the computer and for some reason came up a list of all the Joes that had died. The camera sits on the screen for a bit as one of the Joes (Flint?) just reads off name after name of their dead comrades.
It’s a stark and chilling scene, and it was way too much for my little self to bear. I gave up watching GI Joe that day, and refused to watch another episode until Cartoon Network reran it six years later.
Comment by Anne Packrat — April 27, 2009 @ 7:32 am
Watership Down terrified me,
One day when i was little i was flicking through the channels when i came to rest on a film about cartoon rabbits little did i know what was to come.
I couldn’t find the exact scene that scarred me the most but this is a compilation i found on youtube which sums up the horror.
Comment by Jessie — April 27, 2009 @ 1:01 pm
Is my entry showing up for anyone else?
Comment by Friginator — April 27, 2009 @ 3:18 pm
The cartoon opens like many older Disney shorts do, with the image of a smiling Mickey Mouse, beckoning children closer. Anything that opens like that HAS to be okay for kids, right? So I watched on. In the cartoon, Mickey is caught in the middle of nowhere during an intense storm. Seeing a house in the distance, he goes closer to get away from the rain. He soon has second thoughts, but after being molested by an evil tree he enters. The door slams and locks behind him. He’s trapped, all alone in a creepy old house. Bats start swarming around him and swooping in towards the camera, with their razor-sharp fangs and huge, unblinking eyes. A giant spider drops down from the celing, only to scuttle off into a dark corner. Mickey is horrified. The lights go off. At this point, the Grim Reaper comes out of the wall, and chases Mickey into a room where a bolted metal door traps him. Seriously. A bolted metal door traps Mickey Mouse in a room with death itself. The house is falling apart. It’s old and mostly empty. It’s either abandoned, or the skeletons are the corpses of the previous occupants. Either way, why would they have a bolted metal door? Did everyone do that in the 1920s? Anyway, the Reaper comes closer and closer to Mickey, towards the camera. Closer. Closer. The hood suddenly comes off. A grinning skull is beneath. Mickey runs, but the hall is filled with animated human skeletons. The Reaper grabs Mickey, causing my childhood hero to sob, scream and cry out. The reaper points to an old piano, and utters in a deep, moaning voice, one word:
“PLAY.”
Comment by Friginator — April 27, 2009 @ 4:15 pm
Uh, oops. That was the second part of my entry. I was going to separate it out (it’s apparently too long), but for some reason it got posted out of order. Here’s part 1:
The following cartoon really disturbed me when I was young. It’s like a 1920s version of Poltergeist. For kids. With Mickey Mouse.
I remember being a small child and not being able to sleep one night. I decided to creep out of my bedroom, which was at this time with Mickey Mouse memorabilia. A Mickey Mouse clock. Mickey Mouse bedsheets. A Mickey Mouse cassette player. Mickey Mouse videos that I would watch again and again.
So I went into our TV room and turned on the Disney Channel, expecting to find the usual saccharin-sweet cartoon antics my young brain had learned to nourish off of. But that’s not what I got. What I did get, however, started off innocently enough.
Comment by Friginator — April 27, 2009 @ 4:18 pm
Part 3 of my entry:
Mickey is forced, against his will by death itself, to play the piano for an unholy house of corpses, trembling and terrified, with nowhere to go. Not satisfied with what he’s hearing, Death comes up behind Mickey, grabs his arms, and guides his hands across the piano. Mickey is being violated by the Reaper. The skeletons start to dance, tearing off their own fleshless limbs in order to play each other as instruments. It’s a satanic orgy of fully decomposed human corpses, brought to life by some unseen force of darkness. Back and forth, again and again, they dance, their bones bending and flailing in their obscene ritual of horror. Their necks and spines extend, their heads grinning and bobbing up and down. Again and again. Again and again. Two skeletons start doing the bump, rattling their hip bones together. Again and again. A skeleton uses its own ribcage as a xylophone. Again and again. They dance in a circle. Again and again. Then a strong wind comes through the window, causing all the bones to detach in a cloud of possesed fragments. But the legs remain. Only the legs. They dance. Again and again. Mickey runs, but skeletons come out of holes in the doors. A folding bed comes down, a skeleton rises up from it, and snaps it’s fleshless jaws at a tortured and horrified Mickey. A second, presumably female skelton rises from the bed. Mickey jumps from a second story window, desperately trying to escape the demonic madness. He lands on the ground, alive, but the bones reform into skeletons in a circle around him. After escaping a skeleton residing in an outhouse (apparently someone died in there), he runs away.
Comment by Friginator — April 27, 2009 @ 4:20 pm
Part 4 of my entry:
The cartoon ends.
My young brain could barely process the horror I had just witnessed. I turned off the tv, sat there for a few minutes staring at the blank screen, and ran into the safety of my room. But I couldn’t forget the terrible acts that had just been performed on and around my favorite cartoon character. His image surrounded me. A Mickey Mouse clock. Mickey Mouse bedsheets. A Mickey Mouse cassette player. It was all around me. His image was everywhere. Everywhere I looked, there was yet another image of Mickey Mouse. Again and again.
End. I looked it up, and it was apparently called “Haunted House.”
Comment by Friginator — April 27, 2009 @ 4:22 pm
Strangely enough, I’ve come to enjoy “Haunted House” and “The Skeleton Dance”, while the later was scarier for me (close up’s of skeleton faces jumping around can do that). But 2 things still scare the bejezus our of me and send creeps along me are the scary evil looking eyes mixed with deep eerie music everytime the opening credits came on for “The Scooby Movies” and the CBS Special Presentation bumper back in the 80’s. Both still work their terrifying wonders.
Comment by Alison — April 28, 2009 @ 1:13 pm
‘Saw a few seconds of “Fritz the Cat” as a kid that made me pretty uncomfortable, but not scared.
When I really push my memory, “Shinbone Alley” comes up as one of my earliest realizations that animation could be scary. That scene where the mommy cat nearly lets her kittens drown came along about the time in life when I realized what “negligent parents” were. I dreamed my siblings and I were the kittens. Thanks for the trauma, UPA.
That’s almost as bad as the nightmares inspired by that Raggedy Ann & Andy movie. What! The! Crap?? I can’t even explain the horror of this film, you’ll just have to search YouTube and imagine being a lonely latchkey kid being raised by television, cobbling together dinners out of 7-11 food, watching this soggy, miserable creepfest in an uninsulated, faux wood-paneled living room with no parental guidance. ‘Scuse me, I think I need to refill my anti-anxiety meds…
Comment by Aabra — April 29, 2009 @ 3:27 pm
The criminally un-DVD’ed Chuck Jones Curiosity Shop ran a halloween ep containing a serious morsel of real horror: The Groon. Written by Ray Bradbury(!) the poem about a gelatinous green blob left me shaking on a Saturday morning. WHY ISN’T THIS SHOW ON DVD?
Comment by Rock Ripsnort — May 3, 2009 @ 10:38 pm
[...] is none other than Friginator. How could I not give this guy a box of free crap? His entry was ridiculously long, for starters, but very entertaining. I once wrote a 600 word panegyric to Willie Aames from [...]
Pingback by Worst Cartoons Ever — May 6, 2009 @ 12:19 pm
[...] Worst Cartoons Ever Posted by root 2 hours 19 minutes ago (http://www.worstcartoonsever.com) In the early days of tv animation in the 1950 and 60 producers were looking the story that stands out most is the guy that won 39 t die holding the sign in an uninsulated faux wood paneled living room with no parental guidance worst cartoons ever is power Discuss | Bury | News | Worst Cartoons Ever [...]
Pingback by Worst Cartoons Ever | Wood TV Stand — May 31, 2009 @ 6:33 pm
TV stands using steel frames are the strongest stuff that you can use _
Comment by INGAAS : — October 30, 2010 @ 2:31 pm
the TV Stands that i bought online is made of lighweight aluminum, i like aluminum because it can be anodized ;~:
Comment by Activated Carbon Filter %0A — November 22, 2010 @ 6:42 am
fantastic points altogether, you simply gained a brand new reader.What would you recommend about your post that you made a few days ago? Any positive?
Comment by Richard Sanquenetti — August 8, 2011 @ 12:05 am
you are in reality a excellent webmaster. The web site loading pace is amazing. It sort of feels that you are doing any distinctive trick. Moreover, The contents are masterpiece. you have done a magnificent task on this topic!
Comment by motorcycle goggles — September 1, 2011 @ 9:53 am
I am often blogging and i really appreciate your content. The article has really peaked my interest. I am going to bookmark your site and keep checking for new information.
Comment by buy arginine — November 10, 2011 @ 7:12 pm
Helpful info discussed I am really pleased to read this particular post..many thanks with regard to providing all of us nice information.Great walk-through. I truly appreciate this article.
Comment by pan card — December 6, 2011 @ 6:48 am