Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

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 transformation’s obviously achieved digitally, but then you've got some nice practical makeup effects when they are puppet people, and they look pretty good!

Obviously it's quite an exposition-y episode, but it does show more than it tells, I suppose. It's an enjoyable episode. One of the issues I have with this reboot is simply the episode length. You do still get 20 minute episodes of streaming television, but I suppose 40 minutes or more is the norm now. And the thing with the original Goosebumps is, however janky it very often is, it’s stuffed with frights and chills and stupid little cliffhangers! And I I just like how cram-packed a lot of the original Goosebumps episodes are. And it's not like they're cramped packed with quality necessarily, but you get a lot of bang for your buck for 20 minutes!

Whereas I'm not that fussed by the teen drama aspects of this. Like the characters are nice enough and the performances are all decent, but I'm not really invested enough in them as characters to care too much about their relationship drama.

Ren Yeah.

Adam So there are times where I do get a bit bored and I think, oh, come on, I just want — maybe I'm just too much of a kid, really. I'm like ugh, feelings, ugh, relationship drama. No, I just want worms and the evil dummy. But that is basically how I feel.

Ren You're the kid in The Princess Bride complaining to Peter Falk: “Is there kissing?”

But yeah, I mean, I agree.

Adam It's a decent episode though. And obviously in terms of comparisons it automatically wins against the non-existent original Night of the Living Dummy.

Ren Yeah, I wonder what happens in the original book!

Adam I definitely read it. I just remember Slappy gets up some tricks really. Yeah, I do think Slappy is more — I don't say mischievous, it's meant to be evil — but the stakes are quite a lot lower. He doesn't have some grand plan as far as I remember, he’s just an evil dummy that causes trouble. And I swear that in one of the books they defeat him by pushing him onto his back.

Ren Yeah. I mean, I definitely want to believe you. It didn't happen in Night of Living Dummy Two, but I hope it does happen.

Adam Unless this was something I imagined. I mean, it's possible I imagined this is a kid to reassure myself. Like, you know, maybe it's like, oh, my God, if I was, if I was confronted by Slappy, what would I do? Oh, it's OK. I could just push him onto his back and I'd be safe. So maybe this was just me lying to myself to try to avoid facing up to the real danger embodied by Slappy.

Ren Yeah, it's like on Robot Wars, you know, some of those robots, if you push them onto their back they can’t do anything about it.

Adam Yeah. Because the best designs in Robot Wars were always the ones that just had one basic function they were really good at and that weren't over designed. So basically there was that one that was just a flipper, wasn't it, on wheels? And it decimated its opponents. There's that one Hypno-disc, which was literally a disc sander on wheels, I think.

Ren Yeah, and there was Razer, which was just a big claw. Just pierced through.

Adam It was funny because you got all these people designing all these really complex, beautifully designed robots, and they last two seconds against a disc sander.

Ren And then there's the one that was fluffy.

Adam Aw yeah, everyone loved that one. The pink fluffy one, it used to catch on fire. I like that one.

Ren So if you can't be effective, be funny. Is the message.

Adam That’s what I go for as a teacher, that’s for sure!

Ren So at the end of that episode, we see that the teens in the 90s were worried about Harold and they wanted to make a plan to get Slappy away from him. And that's why they were in the house and the fire happened accidentally and they weren't trying to kill him.

Adam He's very wedded to this narrative, though. I do quite like that, you have the narrative with that kind of pull back and reveal. The kids are all just like, so it sounds like our parents are trying to help Harold? They weren’t trying to kill him at all. And he's like: no, you missed the entire point of the story!

Ren Yeah and at the end Brat reveals that he is being possessed by Harold Biddle.

Adam And he traps them within his journal? Yeah, OK. So somehow they're trapped within a book, it's like the page master.

Ren So in the next episode, which is called Give Yourself Goosebumps —

Adam So that was the name, not of an individual Goosebumps book, but of all of the choose-your-own adventure Goosebumps books as a series.

Ren Which were brilliant!

Adam Oh yeah! I think they’re how Goosebumps should be enjoyed, to be honest. And I was a bit disappointed that this episode wasn't interactive. Like that Black Mirror episode, that's what I was hoping for. Or they could have at least been bits like a video board game, where they address you as the viewer.

Like Slappy says: “I can see you watching what's your name?” And then you have to say your name and Slappy says, “Oh, that's a stupid name!”. That kind of thing.

Ren Yeah, I did hope for something more along those lines when I saw the episode title, but they're just trapped in a scrapbook.

Adam Yeah, which is neat, but they don't do enough with the scrapbook aesthetic. Like they do have a page that gets wet, the journal’s dropped in a puddle and then it starts to flood. And another page gets crumpled and the walls start to crumple. That's neat enough. But I guess we've done Paper House on this podcast before, and Paper House is very good at doing this -- representing drawing using live action and the kind of the odd dimensions of a child's drawing being rendered.

Ren That must be one of our most referenced points. PaperHouse is really good!

Adam Yeah, PaperHouse is really good. It's totally underrated.

Ren Yeah, I agree. They didn’t push it as far as it could have gone at all. They don't really seem trapped in a sketchbook so much as just trapped in a house.

Adam Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Ren And it's the teens and Bratt, ad it turns out that Bratt has been in the sketchbook all this time since being possessed. So he's resigned himself to there being no exit, but Isabella Is convinced that she can see a light at the bottom of the void that's outside the door.

So they lower her down and she's in a version of the high school, which is another page in the book. But that gets crumpled up and as this is going on, Bratt briefly becomes himself again in his body because he realises that pain lands him back in his body.

So various teens are punching him in the face within their scrapbook reality to get him back in his body that he is wrangling with Harold for possession of —

Adam Of the body and of his own hand which gives us a lot of “Idle Hands”-style physical comedy with Justin Long grappling with his own hand sprawling about on the floor.

Ren Yeah, Justin Long has a lot to do. I wasn't expecting it when we started this series.

Adam And he really gives it his all. I think Justin Long is one of the the best things about this series, to be honest. He really throws himself into it. But yeah, a bit of a transitional episode.

Ren Yeah. It kind of leads into the next episode where Bratt’s still fighting with Biddle in the car park to get to pages of the sketchbook. But he eventually does and manages to draw the teens a crude exit and the teens escape, but Bratt gets thrown back into the sketchbook.

And meanwhile, Nora, who is Lucas's mum, has been in the psychiatric ward because of the worms? If you remember the worms episode, she was telling people that there was a gigantic worm and so she was in a psychiatric ward, but she got out and she's still on her one-woman crusade that something is not right. And, she manages to get hold of Slappy.

Adam Impressively, yeah. Is that when she takes Slappy out to the log cabin?

Ren Yes.

Adam So this episode is called You Can't Scare Me.

Ren Yeah. What’s that in reference to? Is that a Goosebumps book?

Adam It is, and episode, and I have watched that one. It's pretty good actually, largely for a kind of horrible mud monster design that looks really nicely gloopy and and melty. So yeah, I wrote a few quick notes on it.

It starts in a very old-timey — like compared to the new Goosebumps which does very good period-specific flashbacks, this is a very nondescript old-timey sequence in which a grandpa's killed by the mud monster called Muddy? No, the mud monster, I don't think he's got a name. The Mud Monster of Muddy Creek. Sorry, that's just me failing to read my own notes.

And there's a really lovely kind of pull back and reveal where this opening sequence is then revealed to be a school report given by this character called Courtney. Who is the absolute inverse of the main character in
The Haunted Mask, because in that the girl was scared of everything whereas Courtney is scared of nothing.

And she’s a very preppy, grade A student and as such she's hated by these two ineffectual bullies, Eddie and “Backwards Baseball Cap Kid”. And they are determined to make Courtney scared of something. And so they try various pranks such as, instead of worms it’s a snake, I think, in her sandwich in this one. And she just says: “Oh, look, it's a grass snake. Oh, they're beautiful.”

They they later get hold of a tarantula. And again, she says tarantulas are misunderstood and isn't scared at all. So they decide to trick her into investigating the woods and one of them gets covered in mud and is going to pretend to be the mud monster of Muddy Creek. But what happens is, of course, the monster is actually real. And basically the very silly twist is that Courtney is so unfazed by the monster that she just lectures it about its behaviour for such a long time that the monster then dries in the sun.

So the poor monster. It’s a bit like in the picture book episode we talked about Not Now Bernard, where that monster eats the kid, Bernard, and then the parents just tell the monster off. And the last page is just the monster looking really sad and glum in bed. Yeah, it's a little bit like that.

So this monster tries to be scary and Courtney is just like: “Where do you think you're going to get yourself with behaviour like that? I know you're a monster, but you really ought to shape up”. And basically the monster dries out in the sun and Courtney is hailed as a great hero.

So it has very little to do with the new episode. The only thing it takes from the original, well, it isn't even the setting actually, because it's very summery in the original one, whereas this is wintry. It's very snowy, isn't it, the new episode. So the only thing it takes on the original one is trees. There's a lot of trees in both.

Ren Well, I appreciate your diligence.

Adam Thanks. Yeah, I think it's a shame actually that because this series is so obsessed with Slappy and Harold Biddle, but mostly Slappy, it means that in the second-half we don't get any other monsters.

And I think that's, that's a shame because you know, one of the best things about the Goosebumps books are the monsters.

Ren Yeah, I wasn't expecting it to become so Slappy-focused. Although I guess we did have hints from how they talked about him in the first half.

Adam Yeah, such ominous foreboding. Yeah. I don't know. I just thought that Harold Biddle could easily have drawn a mud monster in his journal that comes alive or something, right?

Ren Yeah. That would have given more stakes to the whole going up to the to the cabin in the woods to to find Nora. Because the teens know that Nora has gone up to this cabin and they're going to follow her because she's in danger, and Harold knows where where she's going and that she has Slappy. So they're following her and it starts to snow really heavily and so on. But you know, instead of that I could have had a mud monster.

Adam They just get kind of chased around by Slappy, basically, don't they?

Ren Yeah, Slappy's disembodied head is talking to Nora. In the sketchbook, in the previous episode just before the teens leave, they see Harold's parents who can't move on because Harold's still possessed by Slappy. So at the end, Slappy gets thrown off a cliff.

Adam Oh, and so Harold is freed from the possession.

Ren Yeah, they managed to distract Harold at the pivotal moment. Is it Isaiah's dad who's hanging off the cliff? Someone's hanging off the cliff.

Adam Yeah, I think it's Isaiah, isn't it?

Ren Oh yeah. Isaiah was hanging off the cliff. And and Harold's about to shove him off and Margot distracts him by by calling him ‘hair bear’, which is his parents’ goofy nickname for him. And she's like: “Your parents still love you Harold, they can't move on without you!” So he he throws off the possession of Slappy and twinkles away into the distance with his parents.

Adam Well, yeah he turns back into Burnt Harold, first. And I noted that Burnt Harold kind of looks like Billy Corgan, of the Smashing Pumpkins. But yeah, as you say, it becomes quite Christian, I suppose. They twinkle off together into the afterlife, yeah. It’s kind of nice.

Ren It's kind of nice, yeah. I’m always a sucker for sweet parents who are being beleaguered in some way, it always gets me.

Adam And then I don't have any notes on the next episode, so it can't be very interesting.

Ren Oh, okay, I have notes. I just rewatched it today, So the next episode is Night the Living Dummy Two.

Adam Oh, okay. I think I've just put them in a different order. And you have actually read the original you said?

Ren Yeah, I read that this afternoon. So the original Night of Living Dummy Two has a protagonist called Amy whose family have a regular Thursday night family sharing night where they all have to share something. that they've done or or learnt in the week. And she hates it.

Adam Oh okay, so with the episode one of the kids shows a video about their family’s flaws and fascinatingly, the video is soundtracked to a funk remix of the Goosebumps theme tune.

Ren Oh wow. Okay, yeah.

Adam Which poses all sorts of interesting questions, but it was also pretty epic. So yeah, I enjoyed that.

(Clip from the episode of, with funk remix of the Goosebumps theme in the background.
Kid: There’s mom sticking to her diet agin. And Dad's getting his hair just right. Here's how come Sarah hogs the bathroom so much. Guess whose new sweater Amy's trying?
Amy: Leave me alone, geek
Dad: Amy, where's your sense of humour?
Kid: Yeah, I could win a fortune on that fractured family video show.
Amy: How many times do I have to tell you not to try on my clothes?
Mom: That's not very nice. Next time, ask to use the camera.
Kid: Sorry.
Kid 2: Now can I have my turn?)

Ren Yeah, so Amy has a ventriloquist dummy called Dennis, but his head falls off whenever she tries to use him. So her dad gets her a new dummy and — it's Slappy! And she finds a slip of paper with strange words written and and reads them aloud and sees his little dummy eye wink.

And then at the next family sharing night, Slappy insults Amy's family and then her sister’s like, a painter, very talented, but he messes up all the paint in her sister's room.

Adam Yeah, that's in the episode. I see. It's a bit of a bratty Slappy. This iteration of Slappy. He draws stick figures on the sister's painting, which is not particularly scary, but it's quite annoying.

Ren Yeah. Yeah, it's quite an irritating dummy, if not necessarily evil.

Adam He smashes the dad's guitar! Does he do that in the book as well?

Ren No, no.

Adam Oh, he did that, just smashes his guitar up.

Ren Amy in the book is going to do a performance with Slappy at a friends’ family restaurant for a three-year old's birthday party and Slappy grabs the three-year old birthday girl's hand and won't let go. It's like crushing this small child's hand.

Adam OK, they have a scene similar to that in the episode, but they don't have a birthday party. That sounds quite good. Quite an effective setting for it.

Ren Yeah that bit was the most effective of getting across Slappy’s menace, I thought. So Slappy keeps doing horrible things and messing up the sister’s paintings and and Amy keeps saying: “It wasn't me, it was the dummy!” and her parents won't believe her.

I've got a description of — oh, actually, I'll save that for textures.

Adam Oh well, let's do textures. I'll do some gargling because I haven't done that in a while. I’ll try.

Ren I’m going to jingle this cat ball.

Ren and Adam (off-key singing, jingling, gargling, echoing) Texture, texture, texture of the week!

Ren The cat was completely unbothered by me jingling the cat ball. She is asleep.

Okay, so this is a description of of Slappy slithering out of Amy's wardrobe and shuffling down the corridor to deface her sister's paintings: “The heavy leather shoes slid over my carpet. The thin, boneless legs nearly collapsed with each shuffling step. Like a scarecrow, I thought, gripped with horror. He walks like a scarecrow because he has no bones. No bones at all.”

Adam Ooh, that's really good. RL Stein does pull it out of the bag sometimes. I was gonna to say actually, similarly, the puppetfied faces. Which I think were quite good, actually in in the in the show. I particularly thought Lucas looked quite disturbing as a puppet.

Ren Yeah, he did. It was good. So Slappy tells Amy that she's his slave now and it'll keep destroying her family's things and they'll send her away. But then Amy's sister reveals that she knew that it wasn't Amy because she saw Slappy painting on her walls in the middle of the night. And they make a plan to defeat Slappy, involving the parents hiding in the wardrobe so they see Slappy coming to Sarah's room in the middle of the night and then he get attacked by Dennis, the former dummy.

And Slappy’s head splits in two and an enormous white worm wiggles out.

Adam Argh! That's pretty awful. I mean, his head got smashed but in the episode what came out was much more ethereal than a worm. Like, you know, it's just some bad fog or something.

Ren Yeah, yeah. A worm. And then the twist at the end is it turned out that the little brother who was meant to dress up as Dennis the puppet overslept and missed his cue. And Amy's like: “Then who fought Slappy? Who fought Slappy?” So that's Night of the Living dummy Two.

Adam Which isn't the name of the episode, right? The episode is called Return of the Living Dummy, I think in the new series. But basically it starts out with Slappy thrown down an abyss, it’s as though we've reached the end of the series and everything’s sort of wrapping up nicely. Things that are quite cathartic, but Mr Bratt has written a book about the preceding events and is trying to get it sold, but his ending isn't very satisfactory.

So it kind of leans into the meta-fictional elements this episode. So clearly Goosebumps can't finish season one without upping the ante, and so Mr Bratt decides that he better bring Slappy back in order to to reach a more satisfying conclusion.

Ren Yeah, he's written a very thinly-veiled account of what happened in the series so far. Everyone having very similar but slightly different names, of which Harold Boodle was my favourite. But yeah, he’s not doing too well mentally, I think it's fair to say, from having been possessed by Harry Biddle for the last several months and living in a sketchbook.

Adam He’s really lonely!

Ren Yeah, he wants to be friends with all the teens’ parents and they're a bit like: “alright, mate.” But yeah, he listens to a podcast about writing that says that a story needs a twist. So he kind of talks himself into finding Slappy at the bottom of the cliff —

Adam As voiced by RL Stein!

Ren Oh, really?

Adam Yeah I'm pretty sure that the podcast interview is with the real RL Stein.

Ren Oh, Okay. That's pretty good.

Adam Yeah, pretty nice Easter egg. And also Stein does indeed like his twists.

Ren He does. He does, yeah. Meanwhile the teens — it’s not a particularly interesting plot, but the teens are in Seattle.

Adam I was literally about to say, do we really need to talk about that?

Ren Yeah, they're in Seattle because Margot’s mum. It's like, oh, Margot, maybe you should move to Seattle. And she's having some feelings about it. Which is fine.

Adam And like, I don't know, they're so wholesome! It's probably good that, you know, the teen characters on TV are more wholesome than they used to be in our day. I'm not saying they should do anything awful, but I put bubbles in a fountain once! I felt really bad about it afterwards, you know I'm not, I'm not saying this was a great moment.

Ren I swam in a fountain once.

Adam Well, exactly. And I just feel like, you know, I appreciate that Zoomers today have a lot of time to spend on Tiktok in the most part, and so that doesn't leave so much spare time for antics. But to be fair, Lucas gets up to antics in the first half of the series, but I suppose after his traumatic encounter with a worm monster he seems to have left his dangerous antics behind him.

Ren Yeah, yeah. He seems quite bereft without his antics.

Adam Yeah. I don't think he knows who he is without his antics, to be honest. And so all the kids are pretty glum, basically.

Ren And Bratt ends the episode by reading the Slappy spell out that his great grandfather didn't go through with all those years ago. He sees this burning spiral tower, but he's like, well, that's probably fine.

Adam “Pretty exciting ending for my book!"

Ren Yeah. Oh, he's also grave robbed a body. He's dug up a corpse and Slappy’s spirit goes back into this, into this corpse of his original form before he was a dummy.

Adam Oh, and Bratt's old dog is also revived.

Ren Yes, Bratt’s poodle.

Adam Which I thought was a nice reference to Pet Cemetery because there's a few Stephen King references in this episode. Bratt’s publishers say he's going to be the next Stephen King. So I thought this seemed to me to be a very deliberate Pet Cemetery reference to get some Stephen King in there.

Ren Yeah, so, next we have Welcome to Horrorland. Which again, is an original Goosebumps book, doesn't have anything to do with this one.

Adam I mean, I was pretty disappointed by that, I'm going to be honest. Like, I really like Welcome to Horrorland, the original. And I think the Choose Your Own Adventure Horrorland book is really peak Goosebumps.

Ren It is, isn't it? It's what I think of, going down that infinite slide forever, you know?

Adam Yeah, that that is one of our RL Stein's greatest ideas, the infinite death slide. I spent a lot of time thinking about that. Like, you know, do you pass others in various states of decay as you go down, like, are you all sliding at the same velocity? Or does it depend on how fast you enter the death slider? Because if so, like, do you end up like going past skeletons? Like are you slowly starving while sliding?

Ren Could you like, accelerate your death by like, tumbling and hitting your head?

Adam Waurgghh, that's awful! But yeah, do you just slide forever? Is it like limbo or purgatory and you don't die, you just slide forever, which is possibly even worse.

Ren Yeah, it's real food for thought, that one.

Adam And the original Horrorland is just like an evil theme park run by monsters. Which is a great idea and like, you know, definitely as a kid I loved this one. It's just perfect for for children's horror because you can take rides and then just create evil or super dangerous versions of them. I don't know, like the teacups. But what if the tea is scalding hot?

Ren Yeah, and a hall of mirrors, obviously.

Adam But when you look into the mirror and you get the long neck when you walk out, that's what you actually look like.

Ren Wahh! Yeah. So did you watch an original episode?

Adam I didn't rewatch it because I actually watched it fairly recently, in the last few years for some reason. Definitely in living memory. The bit that I remember being most well done is there's a kind of lazy river ride where they have to ride in coffins with the lids shut on them.

Ren Oh yeah, yeah, I remember that!

Adam And you get to see these coffins floating down the river, which is a really nice image. And actually one reason I was disappointed is that this episode starts with a flashback to what I thought at first must be the American Civil War, but the dates don’t line up. So it seems to be some kind of conflict abroad, like, maybe this is part of the scramble for Africa or some other kind of colonial conflict.

Ren Yeah, I think it's deliberately vague, but I feel like that's probably makes the most sense of locating it. It's in an ambiguously foreign land.

Adam And it has a kind of American Horror Story aesthetic. Did you want to describe what happens at the start of the episode? Y

Ren Yeah, so this is the backstory of, well, Slappy or the the person that he was before Slappy. And he's a soldier and he's wounded and he stumbles into a cavern and finds this writing on the wall. And when he sounds out these words, it heals his wound. And he takes his name from one of the words he reads: Kanduu.

And then becomes a kind of renowned — well, not a magician. He objects to being called a magician, but a magician.

Adam It's like Job in Arrested Development: “I’m an illusionist, Michael!”

Ren And he goes to a carnival and meets another ancestor of Nathan Bratt who is the original creator of the Slappy puppet.

Adam And you know, I was quite optimistic at this point, to be honest, because I was like, okay, we've got an old-timey carnival. That's great. I really enjoy that. Not only that, we've got a carnival run by a puppet maker who seems to want to have a carnival based around puppetry.

Ren Amazing.

Adam Exactly. I'm like, well, that's wholly in my wheelhouse. You know, let's just set the whole episode in the puppet carnival. But it doesn't do that. Like, why wouldn't you set the episode in the puppet carnival?

Ren Yeah, Why would you tease us with the concept of a puppet carnival and then absolutely not go there in any way?

Adam Seriously. It's like that bit in The Simpsons where they're doing like audience response test screenings of Itchy and Scratchy. Don't know if you remember this one, but the kids end up watching an episode of Itchy and Scratchy and vote on whether they like it or not. I think it's when they first introduced Poochy to the show.

Ren Oh, yeah, yeah.

Adam And there's gonna be an episode where they go to the the fireworks factory. And you see Millhouse go: “Come on, when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?” And right at the end of the episode, Poochy and Itchy and Scratchy drive off in a car and they just drive past the fireworks factory on the side of the road. And that's what happens, us going: “Okay, when are we going to get the puppet Carnival?”

We did not get the puppet carnival. I was not happy.

Ren No. It was very sad. Instead we get Lucas sadly coming back to Port Lawrence 'cause he’s sad. And his dad appears, his dad who died, saying that: “Oh, I'm not dead, son, I just had to go into witness protection.” And Lucas is like, OK, but when Lucas touches him, it's Kanduu and Lucas is puppetized. And so the people of the town are are being turned into puppets and the rest of the teens turn up and chase puppet Lucas that they don't realise is a puppet. And then their puppet parents pull them out of the car and and there's this big wooden spiral structure that's like a helter-skelter.

Adam Yeah, exactly right. You're like, okay, well, this is good because we've got to the puppet carnival. There's a big helter-skelter. That's not the most exciting ride, but sure, we've got a helter-skelter, obviously all of these people have been turned into puppets because they're going to staff the puppet carnival, right. They’re the equivalent to the monsters In the Horrorland episode. Great. Now what's going to happen is, yeah, we've only got, like, 15 minutes left, all right? What's going to happen now is that the teens are going to be forced to go on all sorts of horrible rides.

Ren Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Why didn't they do that? Like, come on, that's such an easy win.

Ren Yeah and instead we get Kanduu’s weird villain speech where he's like: “Oh, you see, people need monsters or they become the monsters themselves. So I'm going to release all of the supernatural monsters by performing the Ritual of the Spire, which is this Helter Skelter.”

Adam Yeah, it's like his version of the Wicker Man, Basically.

Ren Yeah, okay. And then this bit happened where I truly do not understand what happened in this episode. I've had COVID, I’m recovering from COVID so the first time I watched it I was just like: “Oh, well I have COVID. Like clearly this will make more sense if I watch it again.” But I watched it again today and it didn't make any more sense.

Adam Okay, well I warn you my note says: "Gets quite high concept” which generally suggests I haven't understood something.

Ren So the teens and Bratt bring back Bratt’s ancestor, Franz the original carnival puppeteer who originally transformed Kanduu into Slappy. And Franz says he's not going to stop Kanduu, he's going to help him. And they set light to the spire and all the townspeople — but then Kanduu turns into a puppet and the spire isn't on fire, and Franz isn't there anymore. And I have no idea what happened.

Adam Does one of the plucky teens read something from the spellbook?

Ren Well, she does after that.

Adam I thought maybe she read something from it twice?

Ren I mean, maybe. I guess?

Adam I think maybe like a page from the screenplay got lost? Because it does genuinely feel like that. It feels like you lose five minutes, like you just suddenly jump forwards and you're like, uh, what?

Ren Yeah, what is happening?? Because Franz was there and then he's not there and the people were on fire and they're not on fire. And, and like, I don't understand. Yeah, so, I found that quite upsetting.

Adam That's understandable because it is a bit like you're watching a film and you’ve suddenly fallen asleep and then you've woken back up. Except neither of us fell asleep. I mean, we could have done. It could be a coincidence, but I think it's unlikely.

Yeah, so maybe we were both so disappointed, right, by the lack of a puppet carnival that we just blacked out from disappointment.

Ren Maybe, maybe we both had a simultaneous disappointment blackout. And I had one twice because I was that disappointed. Yes, let's go with that as an explanation. And yeah Margot finds the spell that undoes the spell that saved his life at the beginning of the episode, and so it so it undoes every spell that Kanduu’s ever cast? And he briefly becomes a soldier again and he shoots Isaiah, because that boy can't catch a break.

Adam Yeah. And like, that doesn't make sense, right? Like, how does that? Okay, so it undoes it to the point that he's a soldier. That surely like he couldn't have got to that point in the future without the magic. Like surely he should just disappear, and be back where he originally was but dead.

Ren Why does he have a functioning firearm?

Adam It is it some kind of ghost gun?

Ren Ghost Gun!

Adam Ghost gun! Yeah. Oh, I don't know. But anyway, the upshot is it everyone apart from poor old Isaiah is saved. Because he's definitely the puppy to be kicked in this series for some reason.

Ren Yeah, the townspeople snap to and they leave the helter skelter, and they’re like, well, that's a bit weird. And then Isaiah is in hospital and they're like: “Oh, there's there's no chance of saving him.” And Margot reads another spell to revive him. And then Mr Bratt looks in the mirror and sees Kanduu smirking at him and says: "Oh no, not again.”

Adam I think the last episode doesn't really stick the landing, to be honest.

Ren No. That didn't make much sense, and it didn't have a puppet carnival.

Adam Yeah, yeah. So definitely the original Welcome to Horrorland wins that battle of the episode. So I think overall, it's pretty 50/50, actually. I think the original Goosebumps has won as many as the new Goosebumps when I've trotted up the scores.

Ren Which Night of the Living Dummy Two won?

Adam I don't know, possibly the new one. I mean, the original is pretty naff. But you know, as I've said, there are some great episodes of the original and I do mean that not just ironically, like the original Haunted Mask is a really nice piece of children’s horror, for instance, I genuinely was impressed.

Ren I still need to watch it. I will watch it.

Adam It's really good. So, you know, I do think that they both have their charms. Like, I don't think the new one is as spooky as it could be. It could be more fun as well, it takes itself a bit seriously at times, which is odd because it's Goosebumps. But at the same time, you know, I do think it's pretty well plotted. I do like some of the intrigue. It's very watchable.

Ren Yeah, it's definitely very watchable. The cast do a good job. Justin Long is particularly good, putting his whole self into as the character of Mr. Bratt.

Adam I wonder if it would be different had Stranger Things not existed. Although maybe this wouldn't have even happened if it weren't for Stranger Things. Or Sabrina, right? Like it very much feels like. Some TV execs have noticed that Sabrina and I guess Riverdale, Stranger Things that these things are successful and are like, right, okay, let let's try to do the same with Goosebumps.

But I think the problem with that is it never quite knows — okay, so with like the Sabrina reboot, I guess it's like a complete about face as much as the original show is a comedy, right? It's not meant to be horror at all. It's a daft kids sitcom. So it's like, okay, we're just taking the basic premise. I don't really know about the comics, but I think they're much the same that, they're very light and humorous. So it's like, okay, we take this thing and then we're just going to make it grim dark, and that works surprisingly well.

I think maybe the issue is that with Goosebumps, obviously the original Goosebumps is horror. It's just for younger children. So it's basically a question of how do we age up Goosebumps to make it appealing for old teenagers and also the millennials who grew up with the original Goosebumps.

And I think that's quite a difficult balancing act to be honest, that's quite a hard thing to achieve. And I think it does to an extent, like I think tonally it's pretty well judged it doesn't feel cringey. Like, you know, I feel like the Zoomer characters feel pretty convincing. I might be wrong, but to me they felt pretty well written. And you know, the the references for for us millennials were quite good and there's nothing really wrong with it. It is pretty good. I guess I just wanted it to be goofier, I think.

Ren I just wanted it to have a little bit more fun with with being Goosebumps.

Adam And I get the impression that the films do — we haven't watched or talked about the Jack Black films.

Ren Oh, okay. No.

Adam And you know, maybe we should do them at some point because I get the impression that maybe they are goofier. So I would still generally recommend this series, I just don't know who I'd recommend it to?

Ren Yeah, I think that's fair. I think, yeah. I'm not mad about having watched it, it was quite enjoyable, but it was a bit of an odd prospect. Could have done with a bit less of the interpersonal drama.

Adam Yes, agreed, Agreed. But it's not The Water Babies. I don't dislike the fact that it exists.

Ren I just would love to see a high production values puppet carnival though.

Adam I know! When people talk about: “Oh, where, where are the flying cars and so on”, I feel like where are the puppet carnivals? It's like, come on, it's 2024, I should be able to go out on a night and go right, I'm off to the puppet carnival. That should be a viable option, that's not too much to ask.

Ren Yeah. All right, my cat has woken up so. I think that means the episode’s over.

Adam Right, right. Have you told the listeners the name of your cat?

Ren Oh yes, this is my cat. My cat is called Gretchen. Yes, she's just woken up and she's making lots of little gretchy noises, as she likes to do. (Makes little gretchy noises) That sort of thing.

So, our intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, outro music is by Jo Kelly, the artwork’s by Letty Wilson, we’ll have links to to their various things in the show notes. You can e-mail us at stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com or follow us on Instagram at stillscaredpodcast.

Adam Oh yeah, Ren’s been making colleges.

Ren I’ve been making collages for each episode, so you can see those on Instagram.

Adam I’m looking forward to your puppet carnival collage.

Ren Oh yeah, amazing. Do you have a sign off for us, Adam?

Adam Yeah, don't take away your teacher’s puppet, creepy kids. If your teacher has a puppet, let them enjoy the puppet carnival.

Ren Yeah, yeah. Thanks! Bye!

Adam Bye!