Unsolved Mysteries. Theme song will do it by itself, but the episode with the Queen Mary ship and the ghostly wet foot prints of a child walking the pool deck ruined me.

edit: here it is

There's a specific episode of that, IMO, horrible 3D Garfield and Friends cartoon from maybe the very late 2000s or early 2010s that made me hate the show. As someone who hates spiders, I hated an episode where Garfield takes an alien's space car to an alternate universe where it's John's head on a giant spider body.

Hated it so much I couldn't even eat something like a hot pocket without worrying about the fuckers being in it.

Edit:

That episode basically killed my enjoyment of the 3D animated Garfield movies with the superheroes, Garfield going on a quest to become funny again, and having to find a way back into comic strip land ( or whatever it's called ). I'd probably be fine watching them now, but no way I'd enjoy them like I did, not by a long shot. Even as an animation lover.

I was probably in middle school when I had my first contact with Starship Troopers and that messed with me. My first exposure was the scene of them defending the base on that big filled planet. As someone who doesn't get along with bugs, you can see why I originally hated the film.

i forgot this show existed.

was the sheriff supposed to be the devil?

Why do I remember that specific visual from that episode and basically nothing else? The...mall was in the pinball machine?

There was the episode with Gilbert Gottfried who was a radio announcer, there was an episode about a ghost monster thing in the pool that the kid turned orange with chemicals....some 30 year old neurons are firing over here folks, and they ain't firing that bright.

It wasn't a TV show, it was a commercial. For acrylic nails.

So I was like 5, this would have been in 1991 or so, there was a commercial on daytime television among the blue star ointment and dirt devil vacuums for some brand of acrylic nails that were easy to put on and take off, and they contrasted this against the "other brand" that showed a woman peeling it off and it had this stringy yellow goo underneath. I didn't understand what fake nails were, so I thought it was just a woman casually tearing her fingernail off.

To this day I compulsively trim my nails very short, I cannot stand the thought of bending my fingernails back.

Upvote for PLIF!

One of the space documentaries from the 90's showed the Apollo 1 fire hatch footage at the beginning. That was quite a bit for a very young child.

The other two are a set of ad's/psa I have not been able to relocate:

One had a girl in a petal car on a country road with an incoming semi, the other a toddler steps off the curb into traffic, while a frantic mother realizes she lost track of them.

They had a tagline like "would you risk your life for this child" or some such. Mid 90's cable.

The theme song to Unsolved Mysteries. My mom would be watching it just when Id goto bed and that song had me pissing myself.

Out of curiosity, was the monster humanoid and it dragged a teacher into the ceiling?

Invader Zim. The animation and shock humor was a little much for younger me, particularly the organ stealing episode.

Not a TV show specifically, but another thing I remember was there were these anti smoking ads with claymation figures that had creepy music and they ate dead birds and things.

I can't remember details very well but yeah I think whoever the victim was , was pulled up into the vent. Maybe it was a teacher and not a bully.

The monster was likely a man in a suit so probably humanoid.

When I try to imagine it , I feel like it was dark brown and black. Maybe slimy or wet. But I can't say for sure.

I think I must have seen this movie when I was like 10-12 ish.

So that would have been 1995-1997. Show could have came out around then or earlier.

I assume some of my memory details aren't quite right since Ive never been able to find it.

Do you have a lead?

I have spent numerous occasions searching. Even watching full reviews of every tales of the crypt episode, thinking it had to be one of those.

The only other lead I have is this.
I recall this other horror show or short anthology episode.
And I thought maybe it was from the same show /anthology.

I'm the scene was a weird kid who collected dead flies and made little diorama like scenes with them. Glued to wires or something. Or maybe it was cockroaches.

And the kid was chubby. Dorky looking.

I can't remember anything else. But the dead insects being made into little scenes was disturbing.

Idk that's my only other possible clue.

Yeah it's one of the shows I look forward to showing my kid one day. That and Avatar the Last Airbender. I don't know if they'll appreciate it the way I did but who knows, they might show me something contemporary that they feels same sort of connection to.

I barely remember the details, but yeah something like that. But I was just a little kid, and that repeated mantra of "Someone's at the door" fucked me right up.

Shot in the dark here: "The Willies". It's kids telling horror stories and there's one story about a bully killing monster "Bad Apples" is the story.

Really young Sean Astin.

Edit: found a trailer, excuse the youtube.

https://youtu.be/yT6lRRuMZyQ

Yeah, same here. It's those damn alert tones. They aren't even meant to get people's attention, in America at least, they're just a handy side effect of the digitally encoded audio signal the system uses.

The extra siren for Amber alerts though, that's what would set me off.

Not a tv show, I wasn't necessarily a kid but I remember stumbling on LiveLeak...

For those who want to know what it was.

As much as I love it, that first Batman: TAS Clayface episode.

Gleefully tormenting a clearly desperate man with the thing he wanted most left me mortified.

The Bone Chillers episode where their lunchlady gets replace by someone feeding them food with larvae that can be thrown up if they consume mustard also left a mark but only for a matter of days; I remember foregoing ketchup and getting mustard on my school lunch, the next day. I think I was in elementary school, at the time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObscureMedia/comments/mdsdbi/bone_chillers_1996_abc_saturday_morning_kids_show/, for those curious.

You're older than you've ever been
And now you're even older
And now you're even older
And now you're older still

In the voice of Luke Skywalker:
NOOoOoooooo!!!

this will be a deep cut because I'm talking early 80s in Hungary, but

Futrinka utca and Varjúdombi mesék
let's see how many others are sharing this trauma :)

PeeWees big adventure.
Large Marge.

I also have two from 4chan.

They really should teach about those in school. Like I learned how those work from Linus Tech Tips, when I was in high school. Why are we so against teaching how basic infrastructure our society relies on work?

Wouldn't go as far as to say it "traumatised" me but In the Night Garden was a surreal, creepy fever dream of a show that still lives rent free in my head. The thing kid me found most weird was that I first saw it in Canada, but when we went back to China to visit family they were airing it there too in the imported shows segment right next to Spongebob and Doraemon. At that point I was really confused because I assumed for a show to be imported it would have to be really well written and acclaimed, but In the Night Garden was such a nonsensical cacophony that it left me wondering what it is about it my stupid kid brain had missed. Still don't know what was up with that show.

The show that really did traumatise me though was this ghost hunting show on Animal Planet about people's pets acting weird because they were "detecting" ghosts in their home. Freaked me the hell out because I assumed anything that aired on a documentary channel was real, and the fact that they involved animals in their "justification" of why the place is haunted added to the realism for me at the time. Took until I was an adult to realize that ghost hunting shows are all fake. This was right at the start of documentary channels deciding to sell out to pseudoscience bullshit AFAIK, so they still had a significant air of authority especially for kids.

Back in the mid-80s: CHUD. Cannibalistic Underground Humanoid Dwellers.

Being on the spectrum, this really messed me up, even though the special effects were cheesy even for that era. And I mean heck, I was also 15 at the time, and had never seen any kind of a horror movie before..

Just learned a short while ago that the term has been co-opted to describe conservatives in general, and white conservative men specifically. I now find myself in awe at how well-applied that term is.

Honourable mention to The Last Unicorn completely tearing me up with its ending, and throwing me into a two-month existential crisis bender that I don’t think I ever fully recovered from.

In The Night Garden is designed specifically to get kids to chill the fuck out and it works so well. I remember having to babysit my nephew once and he was getting worked up by a show called Yo Gabba Gabba which seems to be specifically designed to cause seizures. The next day, oh, that's weird, that channel is broken and, well, damn, I guess we'll have to watch In The Night Garden on CBBC instead. It was like a totally different kid.

Omg. I think that's it.

Wow.

All these years. ....
Monster is in the bathroom. Brownish.
I guess they used toilet humor there to design it.

I always assumed it was an adult show. But I forget how much horror was in kids shows in the late 80s and early 90s.

I still can't believe you knew what I was talking about.

Wow.

Also I guess the kid with the flies WAS from the same show.

I was right about that.

Also explains why I kept thinking it was an anthology. I guess cause it was.

I'm actually surprised by how much I did get right and yet could not find it on the internet for nothing.

Neat! I am glad to have helped connect some dots! Your description fired some neurons and I had to think back to a Halloween party in maybe 1993 or so.

I was too young to watch V when I watched V
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(1984_TV_series)

The Julekalender

This is a Danish advent calendar that was released in the early 90s and making fun of different Danish dialects and especially making fun of Danes who were splicing more and more English words into their Danish vocabulary at the time.

The story is basically about three gnomes or nisser, who crash their airplane in Jutland, Denmark and they are stranded there until they fix the plane. They have to get back home because their old papa is dying and needs to read from a very special book to get better. This book is wanted by a copenhagener stereotype by the name of Benny who turns into a goofy vampire when he drinks alcohol. He's stuck with a couple of jutlandic farmers who are completely oblivious about everything going on.

I was 2 years old when this show first aired on TV and I remember we were watching it together as a family when Benny turned into the goofy vampire and I started screaming. The scariest part was the fact that my family was laughing at the TV. I guess the adult version of that would be to witness a horrific car crash or a violent crime and everybody around you is just laughing. It was such a surreal and terrifying experience and I was way too little to understand the context of why this scene was so funny and why my family was laughing. All I knew was that I had seen danger and evil and that those who were supposed to protect me weren't reacting the right way and that made it so much worse.

I had to sleep with the lights on for a long time after that because I was so scared the goofy vampire would come and hiss at me and kill me in the dark.

This is the exact scene that sent me into a fit of fear all those years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D1Cnf5OFdc

And yes, I probably shouldn't be able to remember stuff like this from the age of 2, but I have several verified memories from my earliest childhood that I can't really explain. I guess the trade-off is that my short term memory is shit and I cannot remember verbal instructions without visual aid.

The Julekalender is great, but it is impossible for non-Danes to fully appreciate since it's so specifically making fun of Danish language and the differnet stereotypes attached to differnet dialects.

In my days the equivalent was rotten.com

Some of the images are charged into my brain

I only ever saw the episode with the UFO

Weirded me out enough that I have no interest to watch the other ones

100 ways to die

I was shocked to see the little kid grown up in the fast and the furious

Check out the Rankin/Bass Hobbit, that Gollum is a whole other monster.

I got got by a semi-campy Goosebumps episode as a kid and I was at home, no excuses. It was the one with the lawn gnomes that would move in the middle of the night, and it ended with them, off-camera, turning the mean neighbor into a lawn ornament version of himself. I still don't know what freaked me out so much, but I couldn't sleep for hours.

Oof, yeah that would do it

Tales from the crypt.

Not to mention the unceremonious murder of several other characters throughout, that part with the guys being dropped into the acid with a close up of them melting, the court with the "innocent" declaration followed up by throwing the innocent bot into a pool of shark(ticon)s and the "judge" laughing in evil delight about it, the world-devouring monster planet ... That movie did not mess around

(And it was friggin awesome)

Yes absolutely I watched it as a child

Unsolved Mysteries made me terrified of being abducted by aliens. I had night terrors a few times from it and anytime a weird light flashed through my bedroom at night I screamed my head off.

This was one of my first horror movies and it scared the shit out of me lol