When are we going to get to the puppet carnival?

In this episode we talked about the second 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

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 Whybray, and today we're talking about Part 2 of the Goosebumps TV series from 2023.
Enjoy.

Ren Good evening, Adam.

Adam Good evening, Ren.

Ren Are you ready to talk about some ventriloquism dummies?

Adam (Puppet voice) “I’m always ready to talk about ventriloquism!” Obviously this this is a podcast so you can't see how brilliant that was with me not moving my lips, so the listener can but imagine the perfect ventriloquism.

Ren Yeah. One of your many skills. We just haven't mentioned it because there's there's so many.

Adam Yeah, I don't get to do it at school. Actually, the puppet I was using got taken away from me by the head of English and hidden in a draw.

Ren What??

Adam That is actually true! Yeah, I know. It's outrageous. One of the English teachers was gifted a puppet and she didn't want to use it, and obviously I was not going to let this puppet go unused. A big felt puppet. So I brought him along to my base group and asked the kids what they wanted to name him. And they settled on Krueger, after Freddy Krueger. Not that he resembled Freddy, but that's fine.

And yeah, I used him for encouraging reticent students to recite Shakespeare. So I was like, you know, OK, will you read a part? And they'd say no. And I said, well, will you read it if you get to do it with Krueger on your hand and Krueger can read the part and they're like, yeah, alright.

Ren Why did the head of English— ?

Adam Oh, because he he was quite humorless, to be honest. And he was like, no, it's not necessary for you to be using this puppet, you don't need these kind of bells and whistles. I was like, well, you know, it is pretty entertaining, and I did read a study that shows that things are more memorable if they're entertaining. And he’s like, no, it’s not conclusive, those studies. You don't need to have the puppet.

And I basically ignored him and kept using the puppet. And then I turned up one day and Krueger had disappeared and I thought that maybe one of the kids had nicked him. But no, it turned out he was discovered months later hidden in like a cupboard or a drawer in the English office. And then given to reception. So he sat in reception for a little bit and I don't know where he is now.

Ren Well, that's very charming but a tragic ending. I'm sorry.

Adam Thank you. Well, that was Krueger's origin story, but the first episode we returned to halfway through our Goosebumps relaunch mini series is Slappy's origin story, because we have Night of the Living Dummy, which is one of the most famous Goosebumps books. But as far as I could see the actual episode doesn't exist. So in the original series there isn't a Night of the Living Dummy?

Ren bewildered noise

Adam Yeah. No, no, I really had to look into this. And you know, there were debates about whether this would be like prohibitively expensive but there is a Return of the Living Dummy episode. And this must be one of the only times that a TV show has adapted a sequel but not the original thing.

Ren OK, well, I guess unwittingly thematically, I haven't read the original Night of the Living Dummy, but I did read Night of the Living Dummy Two.

Adam So wow, it's almost like it was deliberate.

Ren Yeah, Night of the Living Dummy Two came bundled with, Say Cheese and Die, you know? Double bill of book.

Adam So yeah, this is quite an ambitious start to the episode. We get Slappy's origin story and it brings us from the 1920s through to the 1960s, and with it, the rise and fall of vaudevillian stage performance.

Ren Yeah! So where we've left it is the the kids, the teens had just realised that their parents had maybe killed Harold Biddle and Bratt comes out of his house — the teacher who's been possessed by Biddle — and says, do you want to hear what really happened? Like, come in and I'll tell you. And so he's he's telling them this story. And as you say, it covers his great grandfather, Ephraim Bratt, a down on his luck ventriloquist who finds Slappy and his fortunes turn around through this mean-talking dummy.

Adam I have to say. So we we've mentioned Harold Biddle before. He is the the tortured teen from the 90s, sort of. I guess Gen X is he? Rather than a millennial, I suppose. Maybe on the cusp. And he must be the angstiest Proclaimers fan who ever lived.

Because this is the second time we hear hear him singing happily along to a Proclaimer’s song. And I do wonder if that's one of his issues, that he clearly never actually discovered, like Radiohead or The Smashing Pumpkins or The Cure. Maybe if he'd actually heard some of those more angsty bands, he would have been able to get some catharsis, right. But he was stuck just listening to The Proclaimers.

Ren Yeah. Very jaunty choice.

Adam Yeah, very, very jaunty.

Ren Yeah. But I've actually been playing 500 miles on the drums because it's a good bouncy drumline.

Adam Yeah. But I do wonder if that was his his main issue, really.

Ren Well, I mean, the thing that we see in this episode is that is that he was a sweet kid before he got influenced by Slappy.

Adam Yeah, he was an earnest kid!

Ren So yeah, in this back story we see that. Slappy's trying to get Ephraim to read some more magic words to complete his plan of some kind. And Ephraim starts reading them and sees this vision of this kind of big burning wooden helter-skelter? And he gets freaked out. He's like, no, I'm not going to do it. So he stuffs Slappy in a suitcase and buys this house in Port Lawrence, (which is the Biddle house) and bricks Slappy in a suitcase into the walls.

And then in 1993 when the the Biddles move in, Slappy starts whispering from the walls. In the basement where Harold's hanging out with his worms and his sketchbook and his Proclaimers albums.

Adam As you say, Slappy gets inside his head. Basically he starts growing quite paranoid and he's not actually — so I found this quite interesting and I don't know if you read too much into it, it seems a little uncomfortable. So he starts basically seeing people as really getting at him, but actually he's not especially bullied.

I did wonder if there was a kind of retrospective: “were 90s victims of bullying really bullied.” It's not been as present recently, but I do remember, you know, a few years back quite a few articles, understandable in the wake of Gamergate about toxic male geeks and nerds, and it's something I encountered again this week about the idea of bullying as a net social good. Which obviously I completely disagree with really adamantly, but you know, the idea that bullying keeps aberrant behaviour in check. And actually the kids who get bullied, well, on some level they are asking for it.

Ren Wow.

Adam Yeah, I know. But I wondered if there's a bit of that in this episode with Harold Biddle. He doesn't really get bullied, he only gains a bit of negative attention, right? And that's only after Slappy’s causing him to behave in quite odd and often quite unpleasant fashion? I don't know, it might be that they're not trying to say anything with it, to be honest, but I do find it a bit odd.

Ren I kind of more got the impression that he had been really badly bullied in his previous school and that affected his perspective of it.

Adam OK, so he's like being hyper vigilant basically.

Ren Yeah, I think that that was more the angle I thought they were going for.

Adam OK, that makes sense. But there's very little focus on the main cast in this episode. You know, they're basically the audience stand-in for this episode making a few snarky Zoomer comments on Harold's tale.

Ren Yeah. We see Harold's parents get increasingly disturbed by his attachment to Slappy and the change in his behaviour. And they try to burn Slappy while Harold's away, and they’ve pushed him into the fireplace and say “We’ll, just tell him it got too close to the fire — and then we'll buy him a car!"

Which is a decent plan, I guess, but it doesn't work. Slappy doesn't burn. And Harold does the spell that turns people into puppets. Which we see happen earlier in the flashback, and it turns his parents into puppet people.

Adam Yeah. It's a pretty neat effect. The puppet prosthetics are quite good. The transform