Were you Afraid of the Dark?

If you were a fan of Nickelodeon in the early 1990s, then you might remember a show called Are You Afraid of the Dark? The basic premise was this: a group of kids met at night to tell scary ghost stories. This was the foundation of SNICK or “Saturday Night Nick”, two hours of shows starting at 8PM. I was a fan of the original 1990-1996 run.

The stories were your typical middle school ghost stories. Some had happy endings, some ended with a “you didn’t really defeat me!!!”, or the rest ended with a “character’s imagination went wild and everything had a logical conclusion, but then the character was right” ending. I remember enjoying these as a kid and some really did scare me. One episode had some black skin-tight-clothing-clad people from another dimension that can only be seen by one girl with novelty x-ray glasses. Whenever I was alone and felt someone behind me, I imagined it was them. Or the story of the scarecrow who follows the directions of two kids too closely to build a baseball field and accidentally murder their uncle or something.

 “If you build it, they will come.”

Or the skeleton covered in vomit that lived in a pool and killed the swimmers and my sister and I would intentionally stuff our faces with food so we can pretend to spit it out when we heard the line “the pool was built over a cemetery”.

Ok, so some of the stories were pretty stupid when I think of them in hindsight. Here is my list of the stupidest AYAotD? episodes. My legal obligation: <SPOILER ALERT!>

"The Tale of the Phone Police": Two boys like to prank call people. However, there is a “Phone Police”, a group that finds phone abusers and punishes them. They somehow manage to erase the existence of the abusers within minutes. One boy manages to rescue the other and everything is back to normal. The one kid’s sister tells them they were eating mushrooms or something and that the story she told them was bull. OR IS IT? A pizza man comes to the door and claims to have the wrong address. After leaving the house, he removes the pizza logo from his car and reveals “PHONE POLICE”.

What was the point of that ending? Why didn’t the phone po-po take the kids right there and wipe the older sister’s memory again? Was he about to come back for the kids? This seems like a story my great-grandmother would have told my grandmother in the 1930s to not play with the new technology, because new technology works with magic.

"The Tale of the Water Demons": An old man stole jewelry from a shipwreck, which causes the ghosts to haunt him, and two cousin’s help him.

Are we really going to steal the plot from Garfield’s Halloween special?

From what I can remember, the old man hasn’t fully slept in three years because if he sleeps, the ghosts come out of the water and will kill him. One, how is this man still alive if he only gets a few minutes of sleep every day? Two, why doesn’t he move to Kansas? He can sleep a full eight hours before the ghosts, who walk at normal zombie speed, get to him. Can they come out of any water or just the spot of the wreck? If he did move to Kansas, it would make for a better story: The ghosts tire of endlessly walking inland a few miles every night because of one man’s greed and the cousins could help the ghosts find eternal peace by returning the stolen necklace or whatever.

 But really, why would you want to live in Kansas?

"The Tale of the Room for Rent": An old man rents out a room in his house to the angry ghost of a guy he killed and stole his girlfriend in World War II. Well, technically he didn’t kill him, even if everyone in the story including the two girl protagonists thinks grandpa is responsible. The parachute didn’t deploy. That's just poor engineering. Plus, it was World War II. If the man wasn’t shot in midair by a plane and made it to the ground, he still could have found himself looking down the barrel of a Luger. It was war, and it’s not grandpa’s fault. It’s not like he intentionally sabotaged the parachute to kill him and take his girlfriend. Plus, the “stealing the girlfriend” story is kind of old and worn out.

"The Tale of the Hatching": From Wikipedia: “Two siblings are sent to a boarding school where the students are brainwashed into caring for mutant reptiles' eggs, who are bent on world domination.” No comment.

"The Tale of the Thirteenth Floor": A brother and sister find a toy factory on the thirteenth floor of their apartment building. The owners are aliens who want the girl, who is actually their daughter. Again, No Comment.

Now for the stupidest one of all, "The Tale of the Dream Girl": Again, from Wikipedia: “A teen named Johnny discovers a ring and after putting it on, begins seeing a girl that he falls in love with. He soon learns though she died in a car accident”. However, we get a twist ending: Johnny is also dead, he was her boyfriend and died trying to get her ring before a train hit their car.

He simply forgot about being dead and returned home as if nothing had happened. I was under the impression that years had gone by from the accident to the episode, but the time passed is not specified. Even if it was just a week, wouldn’t you notice that: your mom is upset, she isn’t setting a place for you at the table, she went to your funeral, she doesn’t talk to you, your boss doesn’t talk to you, only your sister talks to you, you’re not getting paid for your work, your co-workers mention your death, the story in the newspaper (actually shown in the episode), etc, etc, etc.

You know what is really sad though? This episode inspired M. Night Shyamalan to make The Sixth Sense and have a similar twist ending. For those upset with his recent work (I liked Signs and The Village), you can blame this episode for all your frustrations. Also, as Cracked.com notes, he was at least 23, when he saw this. A bit old for Nickelodeon.

Really? Nickelodeon isn't known for their quality programming?