I'm powered by worms, I can do anything!

In this episode we talked about the first half of the Goosebumps series from 2023, streaming on Disney Plus, as well as some of the original episodes from the Goosebumps TV series that ran between 1995-8.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

The song excerpt is 'Slappy' by The Tiger Lillies.

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared Talking Children's Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Wybray and today we're talking about the Goosebumps TV series from 2023 and the corresponding episodes from the ‘90s series. Enjoy!

Adam Hello Ren, ye old skipper, me lad.

Ren Adam, you salty sea dog! Back again.

Adam We’re back. We're back again, back with the bad behaviour. Sorry, I'm very tired. It's been the end of a long half term, Ren.

Ren Yeah,I don't really have an excuse.

Adam You don't need an excuse! I know you once compared yourself to the dormouse in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Ren Yeah, still very apt. Just constitutionally sleepy.

Adam Yeah, constitutionally sleepy and constitutionally creepy! Because we are discussing. The 2023 revival of Goosebumps!

Ren Yeah, at least part one of the series.

Adam At least part one. It’s a bit of a well, it's not a mammoth task, there's only 10 episodes, but it's actually quite a rich text. There's a lot to talk about, I think.

Ren Yeah, there's a lot going on. And they're 40 minute episodes, and we wanted to go back and compare some of them to the original ones as well —

Adam Some of them, all of them Ren!I I've dutifully watched every one of the ‘90s originals just as I assume you've dutifully read all of the the books.

Ren I have not. I'm sorry, I only read —

Adam Yeah, I wasn't expecting that.

Ren I read Say Cheese and Die. But yeah we haven't done a lot of goosebumps on this podcast. We did one kind of early on —

Adam We did the Werewolf of Fever swamp.

Ren Yeah. There's like not a lot to say about them?

Adam Oh, well, I don't know about that. There's quite a lot of textures.

Ren Yeah, they're very straightforward though. The Goosebumps books.

Adam I mean, I think the prose style is quite straightforward. And obviously a lot of the books’ premise is a kid moves into a new neighbourhood. And they have a friend and then something spooky happens. And obviously there's only so many times that you can have a chapter cliffhanger of “Oh my, a terrible monster appeared.” And then it was: a dog wearing a mask, or my brother wearing a mask, or a lamp post wearing a mask!

Ren Say Cheese and Die, did have a dog. It wasn’t wearing a mask, it was just a dog.

Adam Yeah, but what was it at the end of the chapter?

Ren It was, yeah. It was like a dark shadow appears!

Adam Because I I think that's RL Stein's probably most significant literary innovation — is the chapter cliffhanger. Even if the chapters just one paragraph long, it's not too short to have a cliffhanger.

Ren That's true. Yeah, it's very efficient in getting as many cliffhangers in there as possible.

Adam A craggy terrain of literature.

Ren That's a texture in itself. Yeah, so. Say Cheese and Die is like the 4th book in the Goosebumps series from 1992. It's quite an early one, and that's that's the one that starts off this this 2023 Goosebumps series.

So what they did for this series is turn it from an anthology show into something with an ongoing narrative. So we have this group of present day teens who are having spooky things happen to them and as the series goes on, they start to figure out the connections between these events and how they're related to their parents, who were teenagers in the early ‘90s.

Adam I mean, this is on Disney Plus, so it is how how these objects and event all exist within the Goosebumps-verse or the Stein-verse or whatever you want to call it, I suppose.

Yeah, and I guess like serialised TV in the age of Netflix is the norm, right? Like there are still the occasional anthologies, like The Twilight Zone was brought back by Jordan Peele and in Britain we've got Inside No.9
But most TV obviously is serialised. This is even more serialised than something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So far I don't think there have been any stand alone Monster of the Week episodes. It's sort of like Haunted or Evil Object of the Week but they are very much connected.

Ren Yeah. They're all connected by this house where a teenage boy died in a house fire in 1993.

Adam This whole setup is quite a funny joke at the expense of millennial viewers, I think. Right, because. The episode starts with this sort of grungy, very ‘90s goth. And I was like, OK, yeah, I can get behind this guy as a protagonist. Sure. Goth feels.

And then you've got Drive by R.E.M. on on the soundtrack. And I'm like, yeah, ‘90s music. I'm a millennial. I like R.E.M! So, you know, I was all set up. And then he's killed in the first few minutes and we jump forward into the scary and bewildering 2023 and you've got all this like hippity-hop pop music on the soundtrack. No more R.E.M. And it's like, screw you, millennial old man! You thought you were gonna get some white boy goth protagonist and R.E.M.? No Sir!

I don't know. I thought it was quite funny because it did feel like it was deliberately making fun of millennial viewers!

Ren Yeah. It's not your Goosebumps ‘90s nostalgia for your family in 2023.

Adam Yeah, yeah, it's not not really a nostalgia fest. Most of these stories are quite rewritten, so I know you read say Cheese and Die, but presumably the episode’s pretty different from the book.

Ren Yeah, so I think Say Cheese and Die maybe got a bit short shrift being the opening of the series because it's doing all of the set up for what this series is going to be, and introducing the characters and everything.

So there isn't actually a lot of time with the camera that causes terrible things to happen.

Adam Which is the premise of the book, right?

Ren Yeah, so in the in the book it's very similar to the to the original TV episode. A group of kids break into an old house that's going to be torn down, but it's being somewhat inhabited by a man called Spidey. And and they find this camera in the basement and it’s a kind of Polaroid type camera but when the photos develop they show accidents and odd things happening to the people in the photos.

Adam So my my memory of the cover is that it's a kind of ghoulish tableau of a family BBQ, but all the family members are skeletons?

Ren Yes. I found that cover too scary as a kid, so I didn't ever read Say Cheese and die.

Adam I mean, to be fair, the skeletons look like they're having a nice time of it, right? I can't imagine the BBQ slips down easy if you're a skeleton.

Ren They're quite cute in the in the TV episode when he has a dream about the skeletons of his family.

Adam Yeah. Did you watch the TV episode then?

Ren I did, yeah.

Adam I mean, it is cheesy. It has a young Ryan Gosling in the main role. But it’s all canted angles and ‘90s longing. Like I don't know, I kind of loved the art direction. I've written down that it reminds me of Sega World, the garish London arcade of my childhood.

Ren Yeah, I love the camera.

Adam Oh, the camera itself. Yeah, it looks weird doesn't it?

Ren Yeah, in the book all it said of the camera is “It was large and surprisingly heavy with a long lens”. There's no indication that it's a particularly abnormal looking camera, but in the episode, well, I think one of the kids says like it looks like a toaster. And it kind of looks like a novelty Batmobile toaster. It's got these fins on it.

Adam Yeah, that's it. It looks like some kind of strange Futurist construction that some weird 1930s artist it would come up with.

Ren Yeah, and it's enormous! Which made me laugh when they get chased out of the basement and they're like, oh, you still have the camera? and Ryan Gosling's like, “I didn't notice I had it”.

Adam Lugging it about with him, yeah.

Adam But pretty cool soundtrack too. I thought, you know, I love the kind of queasy synthesiser music.

Ren Oh yeah, I'd forgotten how good the theme tune is as well.

Adam Oh yeah, Goosebumps original theme tune is amazing. It's really neat.

(Original Goosebumps theme plays)

I mean, something I've noticed you w