Stay Tuned #54: Goosebumps (1995)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster.

Reviewer beware....

Welcome to Week Two of R.L. Stine October, Ticketholders!

If you didn't guess from the byline, I'm reviewing Goosebumps today. Not the books (it's been twenty or thirty years since I read one), the Disney+ reboot (that's for the third week), or the movies (that's for Halloween). No, I'm reviewing the original 1995 series that ran for four seasons.

So as the old tagline went, reader beware! And please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your favorite episode at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue so I don't have to steal a cursed artifact from that new shop that just opened up in town, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest hair-raising news on my content.

I struggled with how to go about reviewing seventy-four episodes of content. I'm not ambitious or granular or masochistic enough to go through each one the way I did with the Children Of the Corn movies last year (that was torture, and there were only eleven of them, a short film, and a short story to deal with). Also, most of them are kind of the same. But just now, I decided to start by talking about my personal history with the Goosebumps franchise.

Giving Myself Goosebumps

As a kid, I had all sixty-two of the original books, which I collected and read as they came out. I also had some of the Give Yourself Goosebumps (a "choose your own adventure" type of series) and Goosebumps 2000 books before I outgrew the franchise (and lost interest in keeping my original collection when my copy of The Beast From the East disappeared one day). I also don't remember much after the midpoint of the third season, as mobile viewing devices, digital recording hardware, and streaming technology didn't exist, so I had to be in front of the TV when the episode was on and endure...commercials! Also, the show was a bane for my OCD, as the ending credits always finished before the green goo dripping down the screen could cover the background entirely, no matter how big or small the cast and crew list was. In a few rare cases, it barely covered half of the screen before the credits were over. Watching the series again for this review is a clear indication that it still bugs me to this day, and that I have secretly ripped my OCD into multiple instances of OMP3 and sold off the hard copy for a tenth of its original value. And because OCD focuses on details, that's the perfect forced segue into the production details....

Info, A Scare!

Now, the production details: Filmed in Canada for broadcast on Fox Kids from 1995 to 1998, the Goosebumps television series was a children's horror anthology based on the books by R.L. Stine. It had an iconic theme song composed by Jack Lenz (Hallmark's Good Witch franchise) that was given a remix treatment in the later seasons' ending credits by Brad McDonald (the 90s Spenser For Hire movies). It's also important to know that the show was developed and produced (yes, in Hollywood - even Canadian Hollywood - those words mean different things, just like a director and a cinematographer are somehow different jobs) by Deborah Forte (who created Scholastic's movie and television division, so she's responsible for cool stuff like the Magic School Bus cartoon and the Goosebumps movies, but also failed launches like The Golden Compass) and featured impressive animatronic creature effects and props by Ron Stefaniuk (Suck, The Love Guru, and The Tuxedo) and Alan Doucette (Witchblade, Dracula 2000, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and Shazam!). There are also a few surprise early acting roles for well-known actors and actresses, which I will get to when I talk about the highlight episodes.

Before that, I'd like to get back to what I said earlier about the episodes feeling very similar, especially in the first two seasons.

SPOILER! They're All Goosebumps!

The lead character of any given episode is generally introduced in one of three situations: being bullied at school, pranking or being pranked by a sibling at home, or having an adventurous best friend who gets them into trouble (and sometimes, moving is the greatest terror, too). In the case of the bullying and pranks, the victim has had enough and stumbles upon some supernatural means of turning the tables that backfires and they have to find a way to reverse it. In the case of the adventurous best friend, the story usually has a creepy building or a room that a suspicious adult (usually filmed with a combination of low-angle, Dutch angle, and fisheye lens because that was how you made people look intimidating in the 90s) tells them "see that? That's forbidden and dangerous! Whatever you do, don't go in there!" At some point, the main character runs and/or is chased down a narrow, foggy hallway in a combination of Dutch angle, slow motion, and a low frame rate before they decide to do the one thing they haven't tried yet with fifteen minutes left in the episode, and it ends with them finding out that they and/or their family and/or best friend are alien robot monster werewolf mummy vampire animal ghosts. Also:

Season One

As was the style at the time, the first episode was a movie special of sorts (an hour, as opposed to the standard half-hour episode length or the feature-length one would expect from actual movie-style pilot episodes) introduced by R.L. Stine himself. And as a horror host, he's an excellent children's novelist. He can crack a joke just fine (look at his pre-horror work as "Jovial Bob" Stine), but his delivery is too stilted and clinical here for him to be included alongside greats like Rod Serling or the Cryptkeeper.

It's an adaptation of The Haunted Mask, which falls into the "getting bullied at school" formula and takes place around Halloween. Carly Beth (the Little Bear franchise's Kathryn Long - by the way, her best friend is played by the Good Witch herself, Kathryn Short, and that is not a joke, even though it's really funny...) steals a mask from a local novelty shop to scare her bullies, but it turns out the shopkeeper is a Dorian Gray-alike who peels off his face (he's done this many times prior to the episode) and adds it to a forbidden mask collection in the back room of the shop (which becomes a basement in the sequel episode somehow) when his personal flaws begin to mutate his appearance. So anyone who puts on one of the masks will find it harder and harder to take off as their personalities and bodies begin to change to fit the mask. This premise falls apart if you think about it too much, but it's a horror story for kids, and Long does a good job of giving Carly Beth the depth her character needs as the transformation progresses.

Skipping the second episode, we move onto The Girl Who Cried Monster, a "pranks at home" episode that gives its fable inspiration (obvious from the title) a horror twist. The practical creature effects are pretty awesome here and the villain (Eugene Lipinski) is genuinely terrifying.

Another highlight comes right away with the two-parter Welcome to Camp Nightmare, wherein The 4400's Kaj-Erik Eriksen plays Billy, the main character of a "don't go in there" story that's set at a rather...unconventional summer camp full of adventurous bros who die one by one until only Billy is left. Like many of the two-parters, it has spots where the pacing can be a slog because it was too long to fill a single episode so it needed padding to get to the hour mark, but the ending plot twist is pretty out there (if not original) for its time.

The episode after that is another classic adaptation, The Phantom Of the Auditorium. It apparently got re-adapted into a musical in 2021, and has a subtle but chilling twist that bears revisiting. Also, there's this interesting bit of ADR (look at Zeke's lips):

Now for some low points with...

Piano Lessons Can Be Murder (an easy-to-figure-out twist, a much goofier tone than we've grown accustomed to, and there's the fact that at the same time Spider-Man had to avoid mentioning blood or using guns with bullets, children could watch an episode of Goosebumps with "murder" in the title where a robotics genius makes piano-playing animatronics out of people's severed hands because censorship practices will never make sense), Return Of the Mummy (bad acting by all parties, a predictable twist and forgettable ending, cultural insensitivity, and it's the first case of skipping the original - Curse Of the Mummy's Tomb - presumably because it was too cost-prohibitive to have multiple mummies after spending all of their pennies on the set design), Night Of the Living Dummy II (Slappy is a merch machine, so let's skip the first one because he wasn't the villain there! Also, it's basically Child's Play in terms of the plot. But the effects and editing that bring Slappy to life are as good as his inspiration, if not better), and My Hairiest Adventure (A terrible garage band disappears after using expired tan lotion to look cool for their audition, and a bunch of dogs show up in their place; I wonder what the twist is? It's sarcasm and a cat-baby!).

Getting back to the bangers, the two-part Stay Out Of the Basement! plays hard to my fear of carnivorous plants and has a disturbing twist and ending despite being an "annoying sibling" meets "whatever you do, don't go in there!" story.

Likewise, It Came From Beneath the Sink plays hard to my fear of things having teeth that shouldn't have teeth despite being a fairly goofy "moving is the greatest terror" story and having a blatantly foreshadowed twist ending.

In Say Cheese And Die (yes, children got to see the word "die" on their televisions on the same network where Spider-Man's Gwen Stacy inspired "death" of Mary Jane just sent her to an alternate dimension), Ryan Gosling gets a cursed camera that predicts bad futures, and Officer Scott Speedman shows up to investigate when the camera makes one of the neighborhood kids disappear.

Another special episode, A Night In Terror Tower has a brother and sister touring the titular tower of terror in London when the exhibits seem to come to life...and more. The acting gets bad (especially when the kids try to do British accents), but the twist is unique as these things go, and the ending is a relatively happy one, which is rare in the series.

There's one more two-parter, but it's forgettable, so I'm moving on.

Season Two

Be Careful What You Wish For is a middle-of-the-road, "use supernatural shenanigans to turn the tables on your school bullies until it blows up in your face" story with a Gypsy woman stereotype in it, hammy acting, and a flat ending. I wish it didn't exist.

Speaking of things I wish didn't exist, the Attack Of the Mutant two-parter is among the cheapest-looking adaptations in here, probably because they spent all of their money on having Adam West in a gazelle costume for five minutes. It's faithful to the cover art, at least.

Bad Hare Day is a "steal magic for personal gain" story, with the first instance of an end credits remix. Aside from the typical setup, this episode kind of breaks the traditional mold that was established in Season One by being enjoyably lighthearted. Plus, Who's Line Is It Anyway? star Colin Mochrie voices a rabbit who turns out to be an evil magician (played by Boondock Saints' David Ferry doing a Mexican Beetlejuice pastiche).

Skipping another forgettable episode, we get into back-to-back bangers with the practical effects standout, Go Eat Worms and the bully/prankster-subversion masterpiece, You Can't Scare Me. They deserve to be seen, not torturously talked to death.

Revenge Of the Lawn Gnomes plays into the more comedic tone of the season so far, and is another take on the "thing that shouldn't be alive is alive and pulling pranks" premise. The only real highlights here are the Gnome effects and Jordan Prentice suit-acting and vocalizing one of the Gnomes.

Skipping one more, we have a longer streak of quality episodes with the Attack Of the Jack O'Lanterns two-parter (which may have the darkest ending in the show's history, so I like it despite the usual two-parter pacing issues), the Haunted Mask II (Long & Short return, and even with the similar story, pacing issues, and spatial continuity error I mentioned earlier, it's a good resolution to the first special), Let's Get Invisible (the Air Bud franchise's Kevin Zegers plays double-duty in an Invisible Man-meets-Invasion Of the Body Snatchers story with a good but foreseeable twist ending), The Scarecrow Walks At Midnight (the best thing I've seen in a cornfield since the Twilight Zone, with some reanimation voodoo and a dark twist thrown in), and Monster Blood

(a fun classic with hokey but ambitious giant animal effects that gets a TV-original second part that mixes old-school horror like "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" and The Blob).

Skipping a fun but "it's another one of those" episode, we get to How to Kill A Monster (despite its "don't go in there" setup and being yet another instance of children getting to see violent death words on TV, I like that I couldn't remember or predict where the plot was going, and the creature suit is awesome) and

Calling All Creeps (a typical "get supernatural revenge on the bully" cautionary tale, but the unpredictable plot progression and watching the main character navigate a reptilian invasion as he becomes a villain by necessity was fun).

Skipping a formulaic two-parter and a forgettable episode, we come to The Blob That Ate Everyone, which, if I'm being honest, I can't remember aside from the In the Mouth Of Madness setup and the impressive monster effect that isn't faithful to the cover, but looks better.

The season closes out with a special of Night Of the Living Dummy III, where Hayden Christensen doesn't like Slappy because he's coarse and rough and irritating, and he gets everywhere. The usual Slappy shenanigans ensue with a gangster dummy named Rocky getting in on the action, a satisfying ending to Slappy's character, and a disturbingly wacky body horror twist.

Season Three

Goosebumps goes meta this season and dips heavily into spinoffs and original content, starting with A Shocker On Shock Street, which features things like the old man mask from Haunted Mask II and a Creep head from Calling All Creeps among the collection of our main characters' father's movie props. It's a "whatever you do, don't go in there" story set in a pre-opening amusement park (a horror-themed Universal Studios-type park called Shocker Studios) where the animatronics and effects are more lifelike than expected, and it has some subtle foreshadowing dialogue and a dark twist that feels eerily relevant to the modern day.

My Best Friend Is Invisible is a combination of plot points and twists we've seen before with one of the series' darker endings that, pun intended, I didn't see coming.

The next two episodes are pretty forgettable, but I'm highlighting Don't Go To Sleep for how much it shows the series' age. A boy who's sick of being the youngest in his family spends the night in the "whatever you do, don't go in there!" room in his house, and ends up hopping realities where everyone treats him like an adult, all the while getting chased by the Wish.com Men In Black as the viewer is assaulted with so many cliché camera angles and tricks that you feel like you're being interrogated by a Beastie Boys music video about Nintendo and Sega commercials.

After skipping two of them earlier (Don't Wake Mummy and The House Of No Return), I'm going to talk about two episodes that are based on the Tales To Give You Goosebumps series (Stine's short story competitor for the Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark series, right down to using the same title modifiers like More, Even More, Still More, More and More, and combinations thereof). And not because they're good. You can tell a Tales episode (aside from not recognizing the titles from the mainline series) because they drag in the middle more than the average half-hour episode would, kind of like a bad two-parter does, but in half the time, which is worse. First is Click. It's basically the Adam Sandler movie before the Adam Sandler movie, but with kids and the dark whimsy of Stay Tuned. The characters are annoying and the Universal Remote premise is a dead horse seldom beaten but beaten far too much. I did enjoy the visual effects and there's some shared universe stuff going on with The Scarecrow Walks At Midnight being on the TV in one scene and the main character winding up in a setting similar to the reality court from Don't Go To Sleep by the end, so it's not all bad.

Speaking of all bad, R.L. Stine wrote a short story about a Gypsy aunt who uses magic prunes to turn her nephews into old men so she can forcibly marry them to her bridge club friends. It's called An Old Story, and it's wrong on whatever level you're thinking of, and other levels you're not thinking of. Don't watch it.

Another skip brings us to the two-parter, One Day At Horrorland. A family road trip leads the Morris family (the stupidest family in all of AmeriCanada) to a horror-themed amusement park run by monsters, until they get roped into a gameshow mashup of Wheel Of Fortune and Card Sharks where the host offers them "snacks" that include Ear Of Holyfield (because topical humor always ages well, professional screenwriters are our fellow kids, children would totally get that reference, and their parents would totally find it to be in good taste, just like sarcasm). This is the only adaptation to have an ending that's significantly different from the book, and Horrorland, like Slappy, would become an icon of the franchise later on, but it's a horrible pair of episodes.

Ticketmaster's Note: prior to writing the Season Four intro, I sought out information on why the Goosebumps TV series ended so abruptly there, and I came across videos on the YouTube channels Secret Galaxy and Kid Leaves Stoop that helped me greatly with that. Also, I stumbled upon John Wolfe, a horror content creator with glorious hair who is doing a re-read/rewatch comparison series on Goosebumps. Long story short, that "it's the only adaptation with an ending different from the book" statement is very wrong, as previous episodes had endings that deviated from their sources. Thanks for having more time on your hands than me, John!

Getting back to my post and skipping a wacky but forgettable episode, the Tales adaptations finally get genuinely good, starting with The Haunted House Game (Smallville Supergirl Laura Vandervoort plays one of two children who get tricked into a haunted house and Jumanji'd by two bored ghosts, but they won't be the pair's last victims...) and beating the odds in stereo with The Perfect School. Unfazed by the pacing stigma of being a two-parter and a Tales adaptation, The Perfect School is also a rare case of a bully protagonist (the Resident Evil franchise's Shawn Roberts, showing remarkable charisma and range for a child actor who would grow up to deadpan it as Wesker on the big screen) as he navigates an unsettling military school with some disturbing secrets. Great lead, great action and suspense, and a rare happy ending.

Skipping another two-parter (a flat, predictable, forgettable, slow werewolf story), we get to two more fun Tales and two lackluster sequels.

Awesome Ants may be a "reckless friend gets main character to ignore the EULA of supernatural mail-order item" story, and the giant insect effects are cheap and hokey-looking, but the twist ending makes it worth the watch.

Bride Of the Living Dummy is the first Goosebumps 2000 adaptation, and a blatant, plothole-riddled capitalization on Bride Of Chucky (which came out earlier that year, predating the book of origin as well). Somehow, Slappy survived being blown up by lightning in Dummy III, and he's looking to settle down...with a child (who is already being manipulated by an evil plastic doll with a crush on Slappy). It's flawed and wrong and derivative.

Strained Peas is a Tales adaptation with a boy trying to deal with his new baby sister, and comes to learn that she may not be human despite his parents thinking he's unable to adjust. It's a good balance of darkness and camp, and a unique take on the tiny terror genre. Maybe not as technically impressive as Slappy in the Living Dummy episodes, but it's a better and more original version of the concept.

Say Cheese And Die...Again! couldn't afford to have Ryan Gosling come back, and his character is stupid now because he needs to prove the camera is real so he can get an A in English. Also, pictures of him and his girlfriend turn the majority of the episode into a Thinner ripoff. It's an underdeveloped negative of an episode.

And now, a completely original, serialized three-parter! The "Chillogy" (a.k.a. Karlsville) is the most ambitious and solid effort in the series, centering around the miniature town of Karlsville, which sucks in those with flaws or unfulfilled desires, putting them through horrific trials by fire, focusing on a money-obsessed girl who learns that trying to sell a lemon can literally make her into a greedy little pig, a baseball player who learns that being the star of the team isn't as important as he thinks (especially when the other team is made up of repurposed Horror costumes and the baseball itself is trying to eat you - a cool effect that plays hard into my aforementioned fears), and his younger brother with a yearning to belong (unless that means being miniaturized and coated in magic plastic to increase the population of Karlsville). Karl (Daniel Kash, who played Spunkmeyer in Aliens, among over 200 other TV and film roles) is a fun, intimidating, charming villain. The third part feels a bit weak in concept by comparison, but works as a conclusion.

The Chillogy worked as a season finale...but the lead actress in Teacher's Pet (a mediocre Tales adaptation about a science teacher who's given himself the ability to morph into animals - an...Animorph, if you will) died from meningitis, so we got that as the finale instead. It's a nice tribute, but (and I don't mean this antagonistically) I wish Michelle Risi had died after being in a better episode...or not died at all.

Season Four

By 1997, R.L. Stine's publisher (his wife's Parachute Press) was in the midst of a full-on legal dispute with Scholastic over licensing profits and Stine's suspected breach of contract for using ghost writers to maintain his monthly output. Readership and viewership (and therefore profitability of the franchise) were in for a scare as the fanbase aged out. So the original series ended at sixty-two books and the 2000 series was prematurely canceled twenty-five books into a forty book deal when the lawsuit reached its final form and Stine's relationship with Scholastic was dissolved. This is also apparent in the fourth and final season, which adapts only four books (one from the 2000 series) in two-parter format for a total of eight episodes. All of these feature a Brad McDonald ending remix.

How I Got My Shrunken Head has pretty ambitious production value (or a convincing approximation thereof), and though it is a Goosebumps adaptation of its own, comes off as a better execution of the Return Of the Mummy concept, down to the magical artifact and evil research colleague. On a deep level, I guess it could be interpreted as an anti-religious and/or anti-establishment argument ("authority figures want to make you their conformist slaves!" and "don't rely on superstition and idolatry; the magic was inside you all along!"), and the visual effects take a dive in quality in the second part, but it looks good otherwise and the twist ending was happy and silly.

The Ghost Next Door is unique as Goosebumps ghost stories go, making the Sixth Sense-esque twist a blatantly obvious midpoint reveal to end the first part on, and explores what the main character would do with her afterlife if given the choice. Character motivations seem to flip-flop at random in the second part, but the unique plot and happy ending are more sophisticated than you'd expect from a Goosebumps episode.

Cry Of the Cat is the only Goosebumps 2000 adaptation aside from Bride Of the Living Dummy, and is the first book published in the series. It goes back to the meta feel of the early third season by following the basic points of the book (character name, cat, etc.) but doing the adaptation on a film set for an "Exorcist, but with a possessed cat" movie. She gets scratched by a cat named Rip (a limited but disturbing-looking puppet effect) and starts acting more feline. The exposition behind Rip is a mix of supernatural and sci-fi that doesn't entirely make sense on reflection, and the twist ending is one that's been done to nine deaths, but the meta angle and the budget creature effects land on their feet.

Deep Trouble (an adaptation of its sequel, but the only "skip the first one" - the others being Return Of the Mummy and Night Of the Living Dummy II - to be titled as the original book in the episode) is the last pair of episodes in the original Goosebumps TV run. Character motivations have clearly been changed to ignore the original Deep Trouble (such as the kids not knowing what their marine biologist father is doing - gene-splicing plankton with Monster Blood, apparently - or who the villain is), the plot meanders, throwing in a secret society of mutant fish-people (up to the show's usual good standard of masks and prosthetic appliances) and an island of giant animals (up to the show's hokey standard of upscaled and poorly keyed, normal-sized animals, but with way more of them now), and the twist is a safe, goofy one to end the series on. The Haunted House Game's Laura Vandervoort returns as Sheena Deep for this episode, and that's pretty much all that's worth saying about Deep Trouble, and about the Goosebumps television series in general.

As I'm writing this conclusion, it is 11:00pm Monday night, and I am exhausted, as is my phone battery. So I will finish up with the visuals, formatting, and link insertions on the day of release (tomorrow). I went more in-depth than I expected, but not as much as I could have.

Thank you for reading this far, and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your favorite episode at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue so I don't have to steal a cursed artifact from that new shop that just opened up in town, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest hair-raising news on my content.

Ticketmaster,

Out For A Scare.