It's because nobody ever tunes into a show like "Punky Brewster" and expects to be confronted with sh*t like haunted caves and wall-faces and Mr. Pieces.

Not to mention  the innocuously-named "Disappearing Inque", which is without a millisecond's doubt the most Cronenburgian-icky psychosexual twenty minutes of television ever aired on a Saturday morning in-between "Pokemon" and commercials for "The Little Vampire".

The one that wrecked me as a wee lass was a Garfield special that starts out as a cheery funny musical — and then Garfield and Odie are caught outside without their collars and end up in the pound overnight where it's implied they will be *put to sleep* unless Jon realizes what as happened and comes to rescue them. …

Oh, goodness yes, and that's one of the reasons why "Fraggle Rock" was (and is) amazing.  The Invisible Garboyle episode was pretty terrifying, not to mention the one where they come very close to going to war with another group of Fraggles.

There's a similarly messed-up Chuck Jones short starring Hubie and Bertie (I think the same mice in the short you speak of) where they convince a cat with crippling OCD that he *died* by dressing him up as an angel and crying over his "grave".  Cute as most of his Looney Tunes were, Jones could get… strange… at times.

"The girl hitch-hiker is somewhere in the old testament is is the origin of the term "Grateful Dead" - The more you know!"

My favorite recently extinct sci-fi trope is the far rarer and stranger assertion that holograms can do anything, they are like magic.  I guess the Holodeck is the best-known example.  Just how does "hard light' work anyway?

To be fair, it was October.  And I apologize, it's not *that* big and still pretty crowded.  Very nice until the town shut the water off for the season and the toilets stopped working.

Well that did not disappoint.  Up until reading this, I thought my town's custom of having Santa Claus parachute out of a plane was unusual…

I remember reading somewhere that an entire generation of now-adult children was completely ruined by the rows and rows of awful VHS box art on display in the Horror aisles of video stores.  Man, kids these days won't know what it's like to innocently turn the wrong corner on the way to the Family section and end up…

Ah, yes.  Man, I miss *that* Tim Burton.

The friggin' *commercial* for "The Grudge", which I happened to see during the commercial breaks of a comedy series while staying in a rather large, increasingly cold, and mostly empty lake house that my family and I were helping to shut down for the winter, ruined me.

Well, don't leave us hanging!  What was the ritual?

I'm more puzzled by the apparent Sexual Harassment is Okay if it is Done by a Hot Supernatural Being trope.

Man, f*ck Brannon Braga.  I mean, "Threshold"?  The upcoming TNG turd "Genesis"?  Come on!

Guys, I never said us commercial artists couldn't be insufferable pretentious weirdos!

What magical land do you live in where "The Sweet Escape" is not inescapable?  Maybe the album was a flop but around here the damn title track won't go away…

That edition would be Michael Jackson's "Ghosts".  I remember we had a terrific list of suggested topics going.  I'd repost it here, but I don't know if I can scroll past that screenshot…

As an art school kid (BFA in Illustration) let me refine that to Fine and/or Performing Art School Kids.  There are cool folks among them, but a lot of them are the weirdos other weirdos call weirdos.

No "Silent Spring"?