eerieindiana | halloween on Eerie Indiana (Reply)

Eerie, Indiana Pop. 16,661 https://t.co/78fXUJqmOP pic.twitter.com/myqC8EvFAm
— Halloween Love (@halloween) June 14, 2020

Revisiting a beloved show from your early childhood can be a wonderful stroll down memory lane.
Or, it can end up being a frustrating trip into the questionable tastes of your youth.

Today I would like to share with you my thoughts on one such show I chose to rewatch, almost 25 years after I had originally watched it, Eerie, Indiana.

The show first aired on NBC just in time for the Spooky Season, September 1991.After the original airing of 18 episodes where the 5th episode was omitted from broadcast, it re-ran in syndication on The Disney Channel and the 5th episode, previously unseen, was added back to the roster. In 1997 the series re-ran in its entirety on the popular Fox Kids Saturday morning block, which is when I would have seen and remembered it since I was too young to remember most things in 1991 and too poor to have the Disney Channel in 1993.

The only thing I really remembered about the show is that it was less horror than Goosebumps or Are You Afraid Of The Dark and more quirky, weird, and well, eerie. I was really into aliens and paranormal mystery at that age and it seemed like a kid-friendly X-Files or Outer Limits made just for me. I loved the sidekick character as a kid, he was always down for anything, but I couldn’t remember his name (Simon). I did remember Marsh’s (the main character) mother and I shared a name. It’s very weird to hear your own name so much coming from the TV. How do people with more common names deal with that?!

Rewatching it was a lot of fun, at first.

I really enjoyed the storytelling and the show’s ability to mix the surreal with the real. There are background visual gags that I wouldn’t have noticed as a child that really made me laugh as an adult. The writing is easy enough to understand for the kiddos but every episode has something that went *woosh* right over my head when I was a kid. Each and every episode has references to old movies, music, TV shows. and books all from the horror, science fiction, or mystery genre.

I understand these references now, of course, having obsessively sought out and consumed popular media of those genres for most of my life at this point. However, when it was airing and I was 9 I was really just starting to get into seeking out those types of stories on my own instead of just the stuff my family was showing me.

After thirteen episodes,one of which did not air during the network run, the series was reworked to include Jason Marsden’s “Dash X” who I absolutely hate as a main character. He would have been okay to be in his premiere episode plus maybe a background player in one or two more but I just think he ruined the mood of the show.

The character is mean spirited and sabotages the fun and mystery I really enjoyed about the show. The actor really over-acts in a way that is distracting and his gravelly batman voice gets on my last nerve. I’ll say after comparing the first 13 episodes to the final 6 a significant portion of the charm is gone with Mr. Negative-Positive-Minus-Plus-Dash-X around.

I was unable to find a clear reason why the episode that didn’t originally air was kept off the screen on October 13th, 1991, but it’s a really heavy episode and I wonder if the subject matter or possible world events prevented it from being shown on-schedule.

The unaired episode is called Broken Recordand it is about a classmate and friend of our regular characters, named Todd. Todd was the modern early 90s tween son of an out of work farmer who, a year after losing their farm and being unable to find supplementary work, has begun to take out his frustrations on his young son, much like I am sure his father did before him.

Marsh introduces Todd to a Pit Bull Surfers album (I believe this to be a play on Butthole Surfers but have nothing to verify that claim as this episode was written 5 years before they had a huge hit outside of the Texas avant-garde rock scene), which contains the song Eardrum Lobotomy. With lyrics like “No one understands you. No one digs your dream. Just crank up the music, don’t want to hear your parents scream. What you need is an Eardrum Labotomy yeah yeah yeah” this really resonates with Todd and his parental issues so he takes the album home.

In one scene in the lost episode Marsh tells his young friend Todd, who’s really getting into the band, The Pit Bull Surfers at this point, that Marsh doesn’t take the band very seriously due to “all that dumb Nazi stuff” and it’s just good music for mindless headbanging and to help alleviate the aggressions of their 12-year-old lives. It’s never elaborated on, but I like to think that because of their distaste for parental control, Pit Bull Surfers have several other songs about being against authoritarian ultranationalism and dictatorial power.

Then later in the very same episode the friend’s father calls all rock music “Communist Liberal garbage” and that everyone knows messages are embedded in rock music and “those people hide their intentions”. Once we’ve well established the message about parental abuse having a dramatic impact on a child’s demeanor, the climax of the episode includes Todd stealing and crashing a dairy truck where he supposedly gets very hurt, then his father having a huge anger explosion where he plays the records backward and learns a valuable lesson. It’s a pretty good episode but certainly not the best one of the first 13.

After re-watching the entire series twice for this articleI would say I highly recommend it, both for first-timers and those who would be revisiting. If you have children who are into the weird and wacky, watching it with them would be a blast! There’s even a spin-off series from 1997 called Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension, as well as several young adult paperback novels, written around the same time taking place in the Eerie universe that I really want to check out.

I would like to end this retrospective with a nugget of wisdom that would have flown over my head at 9 but really spoke to me as an adult-

Do not trust a dude with a ponytail whose first name is “The”.

As always I would like to know what you think! Did you watch Eerie as a kid? Have you re-watched it as an adult? Have you introduced any kids now to it and if so, did they think it was dated? Please reach out to me on Twitter if you would like to talk about the show and let me know!