MovieChat Forums > Sesame Street (1969) Discussion > Nightmare fuel thread, redux

Nightmare fuel thread, redux

posted 12 years ago by jmfabiano524-1
4 replies | jump to latest

I notice that most of the older threads are now gone, so...here we go again.

I've been watching/reading up lately on Sesame NF (including a Guy With The Glasses video), so here were ones that I think could qualify:

- Anyone remember the one with the rabbit spelling out the word "street"? Then when he tries to cross a car comes zipping by, then stops as an adult rabbit says in an unfriendly voice, "Would you be more careful crossing the street?" That one used to bother me, maybe because I had an adult in a car talk to me like that once?

- The "life of a frog" cartoon...you know, the one where a kid asks where frogs come from, and they show how they develop from tadpole to adult. The ending is well known for the frog hopping into the distance and yelling "HEYYYYYYYYYYY KERMIIIIIIIIIIIIT!" I suppose that should be funny, but as I didn't know what it was saying when I was younger, I just took it as random yelling and that scared me.

[–] mactach 12 years ago

May I ask why you're mentioning the fact that the other rabbit driving the car spoke in an unfriendly voice?

What do you expect? Many others would of done the same thing.

[–] jmfabiano524-1 12 years ago

Well when you're a kid, it's all the same as long as it sounds negative. It doesn't matter who's wrong and who's right.

Another one I thought of...not SCARY, but a downer nonetheless: it was about a bird and this guy who was chopping down all the trees. The music was very depressing.

[–] jschillig 12 years ago

I think you might be talking about the series of "Willie Wimple" cartoons about pollution and respecting the environment.

There was one about littering, one about water pollution,and yes, there was one which showed Willie chopping down trees willy-nilly (hee) and a bird that was baffled because his own tree was chopped down. Each cartoon had the line "Now, if every kid did it, don't you see/What an icky mess it would be?" Each one ended with a shot of the earth from space, brown and grimy, and a gruff "YUCK!"

Those cartoons DID scare the crap out of me when I was little. I think it was because I somehow missed the "if every kid did it" line and thought this one kid was responsible for messing up the entire world. So for me at the age of five or six, the Willie Wimple cartoons were the kiddie equivalent of a post-apocalyptic dystopia, a Mad Max Jr., if you will. (And that kid just looked so nasty...unsettling for a little girl like me.)

Have a look at them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aTsze_Awpk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb2w81eFMuA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOzIO5uNKh8

There are only a few others I can remember actually scaring me. The News Flash with Hickory Dickory Dock scared me because of the loud noise the horse made destroying the clock, and of course I was unsettled (if not actually scared) by the infamous Crack Master cartoon. My cousin tells me I used to be scared of The Count; I don't remember that (but in the mid-seventies when I was a little kid, I think The Count was a lot creepier--you know, that business of looking sinister and hypnotizing people).

But the only other one that used to send me running was one I can't even find on YouTube. As the cartoon starts, we see a yellow background with a rather eerie clicking sound. The source of the sound comes into view...a rather gross-looking beetle. A pleasant-sounding male voice counts off "One bug...", then the process is repeated until "five cute little bugs" are onscreen, lined up side by side. Then the bug on the end turns around and crawls to the left, "merging" with the bug on his left and growing into a LARGER bug. "Four bugs..." the voice starts counting, and again, the process is repeated, the bug growing larger each time, until "one big ugly bug!" fills the screen, and slowly crawls off. And let me tell you, that huge bug was FREAKY.

Other skits that scared others either didn't bother me, or I enjoyed them. The opera-singing orange used to crack me up no end!

[–] jmfabiano524-1 11 years ago

No this was a different one...the music was all instrumental in this, and in the end they grow new trees.