The Differences between Goosebumps and AYAOTD
I don't wanna turn this into a Goosebumps Vs. Are You Afraid of the Dark type of thread, because it's impossible to me. I'm a fan of both and enjoyed watching them back to back on weekends on YTV when I was younger. They were both instrumental in how they got me interested in the horror genre, and they both emphasized how much fun it could be to get scared.
On the other end, both had some serious flaws that kind of balanced each other out. What AYAOTD lacked at times was made up for as one of Goosebumps' strengths, and vice versa. For the longest time I could pick one over the other, because watching one would always remind of the things the other did well.
That doesn't change the fact that, in spite of their differences, if you were a kid growing up when these shows aired on TV, then you very likely enjoyed both for what they were, and probably have the intention of showing both to your children at some point.
But what are these differences, exactly? What makes these two shows, the most memorable horror-anthology shows for children and teens, so distinctly different in what they do?
1. Who's telling the story?
When you're dealing with an ongoing theme, cast of characters or over-arching storyline, that can be a major hook for an audience when returning to a show again and again. Sure, style and tone do come into play, but if you're being asked to get invested in a story or characters that just aren't that likeable for roughly 20 episodes a year, how can you sustain your audience?
This is what makes AYAOTD and Goosebumps so good for what they were. They kept kids coming back through the tone, setting, atmosphere, and the expected promises of ghosts, monsters, magic and the undead to fill in those gaps. The stories from episode to episode were all new, and so were the characters, though their ages kept them identifiable with their audience.
The narrative setups were equally important, with both shows taking on different styles.
AYAOTD used an embedded narration style that a lot of anthology shows, like The Twilight Zone and Tales From the Crypt, would employ. Each episode would be introduced by a host(s) who would set up the themes, story and characters ahead of the audience, and once the story was over they would often conclude the story with a joke, a proverb, or simply "The End." This is was a great way to introduce each episode for a few reasons.
First, even though the episodes had new characters, the Midnight Society served as an anchor for the audience, a group of familiar characters on the outside of a brand new story every time; in a sense, it was a nice mix of something old and something new.
Second, because the "real world" that we lived in was heavily implied to be the world of The Midnight Society, where they gathered around the campfire to tell stories, it then sets each story up as being just that: a fictional story, a narrative device that gives the audience the freedom to ease up with the knowledge that the "real characters" are safely on the outside bring this story to life.
Third, the writers often took the time to build mini story arcs with the Midnight Society members over the course of several episodes, so that while you're enjoying a creepy ghost story for the majority of the run time, bookending the episodes would be little character-based encounters that would connect from episode to episode.
And fourth, the embedded narrative function, like many before them, allows the Midnight Society to set up both the themes of the story being told, as well as a bit of background on their characters as the episode begins. With a little over 20 minutes to tell each story every week, that's a lot to ask for to get caught up to speed on fresh characters and a new setting every time. The narrative function may be a cheap way at disseminating information to the audience about the story, but it gives you everything you need to know about your characters and who they are, without wasting any time away from the main storyline trying to set up any logical reasoning for who the characters are and why they do what they do over the course of the episode.
Goosebumps on the other hand did the exact opposite. For the most part, there is no embedded narration, or even a narrator setting up the story. R.L. Stine did make a handful of appearances setting up the episodes of some of the show's most popular two-parters, but for the most part the show is completely absent of this device. It's not conventional for the genre, but to me it works really well.
Rather than framing the story as being a fictional story told by kids around a campfire or an omnipresent narrator, when each episode begins we're dropped into the world of the story. As far as we're concerned, the world of each story IS the real world, and thus, has a different feel to it because of that. It's almost like the story is dropped into a real world where, at first, everything is typical, normal, perhaps mundane. As the story progresses, the kids at the centre of the story discover an aberration, something disturbing and frightening that should exit in the conjunction of the world we live it. Sometimes these creatures stand out and are completely incongruent with the real world setting, which is kind of the point: these creatures shouldn't exist.
Without getting too pretentious about the whole thing, it's almost like Goosebumps is saying "there's lots of mysterious things in the world around us that exist side-by-side without making their presence known, and if we're one of the (un)lucky ones then we might be the ones to discover it." And when you really think about that idea from a child's perspective, isn't that the perfect set up for a kid's show?
If there's one thing kid's never have a shortage of it's their imagination, and letting that imagination run wild; sometimes just for fun, sometimes because they genuinely fear something terrible (if completely) implausible will happen. Even if some kids objectively know these creatures don't exist, does that really stop any of them from hoping, fearing, imagining or searching for the existence of such creatures? To bring a little of that terrifying magic into their own lives?
On a side note, while Goosebumps may not feature an embedded narrative structure on a consistent basis, this begs an honest question: did Goosebumps need a set up? Without having the exact figures in front of me, Goosebumps was far and away the most successful book franchise of all time in the '90s, and even when you consider how the likes of Harry Potter have come along to squash that record, Goosebumps is still right up there to this day.
Point being, Goosebumps didn't need a weekly setup for each episode because most kids tuning in every week were already reading the books. How many of these kids tuned in hoping to catch TV versions of their favourite Goosebumps books on a weekly basis? I'm willing to bet it was a majority of them, and if that's the case then did these episodes really need a setup when kids likely knew the stories already? In a weird way, actually, since R.L. Stine did make that Rod Serling-esque cameo on a number of two-parters, it developed an indicator of its own, letting the viewer know that because Stine was introducing the episode that it had a more special aura surrounding it than the others, and most of the time those episodes in particular were the best.
So, again, both shows set their stories up in two completely different styles, but they both worked for what each show was going for. Both are still very much the same in content, but different in their execution.
I'm be back to add more to this thread, but it's just really fun to think about all the ways these shows separated themselves from each other, and the moments the came back together in how they were both able to chill us to the bone.