What's something odd that you were scared of as a kid?

I was also terrified of emergency broadcast service tests... and Amber alerts, when they showed up. I think I'd try to figure out what time they usually did EBS tests so I could get up and go to the bathroom or something like that.

I remember when I was about 8, an Amber alert came on while my family and I were watching TV, and I kept covering my ears and asking them to turn off the TV.

I remember at school, on the computers, there was this game where you had to assemble a bunch of images in order to have a scene play out properly. One of these was a snowman melting, and for some reason, I found it disturbing, and I didn't want to play the game as a result.

I used to be afraid of Apocalymon in Digimon Adventure because he was a bunch of wires from the waist below.

Edited by CosmosAndChaos on Sep 25th 2023 at 6:11:19 AM

I had the same issue with Polly’s Math Workshop.

I've been told that when I was very young, I was scared of tacos. I'd be fine with eating the ingredients of a taco, but when I was presented with it all in a shell/tortilla, I'd freak out.

I'm not really sure why. Maybe it just didn't register to me at that age that it was supposed to be food, and/or I didn't know what was in it?

It's safe to say that I've long since gotten over my irrational taco phobia, though.

I went through a phase where I was scared of Porky Pig, of all characters, which I attribute to his weird design in this That's All, Folks! tag that I remember scaring the daylights out of me when I was a little kid:

It reached the point where I would look away from the screen whenever a lot of Looney Tunes cartoons I watched ended and the drum came up, and (not making this part up) there was a point where if I went to the bathroom late at night and didn't run back to my bedroom, Porky would catch me (needless to say, Porky didn't ever catch me...but my parents sure did, annoyed that I kept running through the house and up the stairs at 11pm at night).

The trailer for Muppets from Space.

It was on my childhood DVD copy of The Muppets Take Manhattan and for some reason I was so scared of it that I couldn't even walk past the DVD case of the film at my local library without freaking out.

To this day its the only Muppet movie I haven't seen... granted it's less because of that nowadays and more its lack of general availability (Disney doesn't own it and it's not really streaming anywhere else).

I can relate to kablammin45 associating Porky Pig with nighttime in his own house, since I have done the same thing with Big Bird. And just like with Porky and his That's All, Folks! closing, my fear was caused by the end of the show.

When I actually saw Big Bird's "Toodle-oo!" on TV, I wasn't scared; it was just weird to me how Big Bird showed up in front of that purple static background with a Wall of Text that I couldn't read moving away. After I no longer saw it on TV, it worked its way into my subconscious to inspire my childhood nightmares, where it got mixed with my memory of seeing the Barney Home Video logo appear after a period of black screen at the end of my family's VHS copy of Let's Pretend With Barney.

Unfortunately, due to these nightmares, I remember feeling nervous about Big Bird while watching Episode 4117 (the one where Elmo calls himself "Jelmo").

Since I missed the reruns of the hurricane episodes, couldn't get PBS Kids Sprout in Canada and didn't know about the VideoNow format, it was a while before I actually saw the "Toodle-oo!" again. I remember that the first time I saw a Season 38 episode, which was Episode 4139, since it had a new intro, I was nervous throughout the show that the "Toodle-oo!" might return. For the same reason, I was also nervous the first time I watched the series premiere on the Old School, Volume 1 DVD, which resulted in me feeling jumpscared when the DVD outro with a cartoon character named Bob suddenly appeared.

For some reason, it seemed ominous to me when I could see the hallway light fixture from my kitchen, especially at night. Because of this, I imagined that the light fixture was somehow connected to Big Bird and, by extension, that the smoke alarm near my bedroom was connected to Big Bird's teddy bear, Radar. I probably avoided standing around in the dark in my house due to my thoughts of Big Bird.

Even as a teenager, while playing games with a youth group, I got the feeling that Big Bird might show up in the dark church basement! I also remember that, when I went to the bathroom during a piano lesson at that same church and my teacher started playing a song (I was having my lesson in the sanctuary that day), a thought crossed my mind: "What if that was Big Bird playing the piano, waiting to catch me when I come back?"

On a final note, I saw from a kablammin45 post in another thread that a computer in his family had Porky's "That's all, folks!" play when it shut down. Well, years ago, I found a website that had short audio clips from Sesame Street (which I now know were meant to be used for stuff like startups and shutdowns) and guess what was on there! That's right: Big Bird saying "Toodle-oo!" (as well as another clip of him saying "Coming soon on Sesame Street!", which is where his sign-off originated from)!

Edited by MisterToodleoo on Sep 26th 2023 at 5:44:40 AM

My old house computer used to have a green light that I guess was to signify if the computer was on or not. One time when I was younger, I saw the green light (reflected twice) off of one of the windows, and immediately ran away because I thought it was a pair of green, glowing eyes looking through the window.

I used to be scared of dandelion spores when I was younger. I thought that they were some kind of mutated flying albino spiders.

When I saw Francisco de Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son", I was horrified, causing my child self to associate any black background(Because it has black background) with that painting.

The PBS Kids P-pals bumper. It was on NightmareFuel.Vanity Plate for a little while IIRC—to three-year-old me it was Sensory Abuse.

And the Surprise variant was way worse.

Edited by lalalei2001 on Sep 26th 2023 at 10:49:21 AM

the chinese dragon 💀

The Magic School Bus when they would travel into people's bodies. I couldn't watch, being scared that something would be crawling inside me.

The LG "Voice of Nature" alarm tone, particularly the first few seconds of it, kinda creeped me out as a kid. Especially when the alarm would play sometime early in the morning.

I can sort of relate to the ladybug one.

Edited by MattsLifeRuined123 on Oct 8th 2023 at 4:33:34 PM

When I was a kid, I felt jumpscared when ladybugs would spread their wings.

I also used to be afraid of flies, and there was a time where I was scared while waiting for my family in my car with mosquitoes in it.

Finally asked my mom about the "fear of tacos" thing I mentioned earlier. Apparently, I was mostly scared of them falling apart... which makes sense, I guess.

This one may not be so "odd" technically, but it isn't mentioned on the show's Nightmare Fuel page and only a small number of comments are saying it was scary: The daydream scene in the Scrubs episode "My Big Mouth", where JD's face melts off in a bloody fashion to reveal his skull. That scene terrified me so much, that when I noticed the part before he melts on television after getting back home from one trip, I instantly ran out of the room into another one. It shocks me that the BBFC only rated this episode a PG for "mild language and sex references" without flagging this scene, even considering it didn't actually happen.

I used to be unnerved by the United Plankton Pictures Vanity Plate when I was around 5 or 6.

• The final shot of both Halloween episodes of Rolie Polie Olie, which have Spooky Ooky's face replacing the moon.
• The first wave of action figures for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, which featured Harry covered in cobwebs, Ron puking slugs and Hermione transformed into a cat. They all unnerved me.

Aeolid nudibranch sea slugs and their stinging, tentacle-like cerata on their backs. They still scare me to this day as well.

This may not be that weird, but I was terrified of the Evil Queen from Snow White. I hid in my room when she came on the TV.

I also remember getting really scared one day when I went on some Ouija board website and lied about my age, only to then somehow become convinced that there were actual ghosts around (because kid me apparently believed in the supernatural power of a random website). My mom chewed me out for lying about my age and that was a lesson for me, lol.

Oh, and I stayed up one night because I was terrified of a dumb "scary story" my daycare teacher told. It's the one where a person hid in a clock during hide-and-seek and was later found as a skeleton. For some reason it really haunted me.

My mom often watches true crime shows, including from when I was a kid. I don't recall being too distressed by the actual content... but sometimes the disclaimers at the beginning of them would freak me out. May be related to my young-kid fear of Adult Swim.

I went through an "afraid of content warnings" phase too as a kid.

As a kid, I was scared of the Evil Queen and Maleficent, which made me only watch my VHS of Mickey and the Beanstalk once while avoiding looking at the TV when they both appeared in Ludwig's intro. I was also scared of the trailers for Enchanted and even Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Movie) because of characters who reminded me of the Evil Queen. My fear of those two Disney villains probably stemmed from my fear of Cruella de Vil, which I got because of the following teaser trailer for 102 Dalmatians:

That trailer caused me to stop watching The Tigger Movie, possibly because I misunderstood my mom and thought that drawing any sort of attention to Cruella would put her in a bad mood. For years afterward, I got nervous when I heard the chorus of "Atomic Dog" for obvious reasons.

For a period of time, I had no problem watching the trailer for 101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure on my VHS of Disney's Very Merry Christmas Songs. However, sometime before I heard that my class at school was going to watch the movie, I became uncomfortable with its trailer. I was too nervous to tell my mom why I was nervous about putting in the VHS (presumably while decorating our Christmas tree). Mom realized what was going on as soon as Dalmatians appeared onscreen. She then said, "WE'LL SING VERY LOUD! LALALALALALALALALALALALALA! [my name] DOESN'T WANNA LOOK! LALALALALALALALALALALALALA!" and so on. After that day, I would go in another room, which I think was my parents' bedroom, while my mom fast-forwarded through that trailer. It was because of all this that I knew that people were wrong when they claimed that Cruella wasn't in that sequel (to persuade me to watch it at school), but I don't think I even bothered to correct them.

Later on, I looked away from a clip of Cruella that appears at the beginning of "Ev'rybody Has a Laughing Place" on another Disney Sing-Along Songs tape called The Early Years.

When I was watching bonus features from WALL•E and came across The Pixar Story, I only ended up watching the very beginning. I got turned off from watching it when clips of the Evil Queen (in her hag form) and Cruella appeared in the opening montage of Disney clips. I fast-forwarded through the rest of the movie, and all I remembered about what I saw while doing so was the production image for A Tin Toy Christmas, which I had seen before in the featurette on the Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 1 DVD. For many years, I didn't even know that The Pixar Story is a feature-length film.

However, when I watched Air Buddies, I didn’t look away from the screen during any of the clips from 101 Dalmatians at the drive-in theater. I was thinking along the lines of, "This will be the only time I watch this Air Buddies movie."

You can find my original post on this childhood fear here.

Edited by MisterToodleoo on Jan 21st 2024 at 5:09:40 AM