90’s TV Shows Were Scary: What's Your Damage Heather reviews Eerie, Indiana

[froodle]

In the 1990’s television was a twisted place. Elvis was on your paper round, every lighthouse was haunted by a toilet ghost, and a dose of brainwashing easily accompanied sex education in High Schools. We remember finding it common place to be mildly freaked out by strange televisual goings on, as we ate our post school snack of weetabix doused in crunchy sugar.

So after coming across an Eerie Indiana boxset this weekend, we got all nostalgic for those romantic days of unsettling programming.

Eerie Indiana

This remains one of the greatest TV shows ever made. A hugely ridiculous statement, but I stand by it, my feet firmly cemented into the ground of “stupid and wholly unfounded opinions that can’t possibly be true (haven’t you seen the Wire?!)”. It starred the hottest 13 year old since Culkin – Omri Katz. Who came complete with the full post-grunge heart-throb kit: floppy curtains, battered denim jacket, and mild hints of paranoia. HELLO DREAMBOAT.

Basically, any show that combines fat twins sleeping in life size Tupperware, Satan as a salesman (with catchy jingle on his very own Fantasia/psychadelic-elephants- in-Dumbo-style TV advert), and a weird grey haired teenager with plus and minus signs tattooed on the back of his hands = WIN.

Best Episode: The finale, when Marshall Teller (the main character) breaks out of filming and goes behind the scenes – discovering that his mum is an actress with tattooed breasts dressed in black leather, and his dad is a camp English thespian. Then in a piece of miraculous meta writing Marshall meets the creator of the show, who talks to him as Omri. Fucking. Brilliant.