In this episode we discussed the early 90s TV series Eerie Indiana.

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at makiyamazaki.com. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and their band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk 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, your other cohost is Adam Whybray and today we’re talking about the early 90s TV series Eerie Indiana. Enjoy!

Ren Good evening, Adam!

Adam Good evening, Ren!

Ren It’s good to be back!

Adam It is good to be back.

Ren We’re still here, still making this podcast, just about.

Adam Yeah, just about, scrabbling through lockdown like a pair of daddy long legs with our legs tweaked off by an evil child.

Ren Y eah, that sounds about right.

Adam Covered in lint.

Ren Covered in lint, just wafting around the ceiling.
Yep, so, we’ve been held up by my seeming inability to watch a series of a TV show by myself, but we made it eventually and we’re here talking about Eerie Indiana which is an American children’s TV series from the early 90s about a 13 year-old boy called Marshall Teller, who lives in a small town called Eerie, Indiana, which everyone else thinks is a perfectly normal American suburb, but Marshall says is ‘the centre of weirdness for the universe’.

Adam Which might be our (echoing sound effect) Claim of the Week!

Ren Yeah, getting it in early.

Each episode centres around a different example of Eerie’s weirdness, with Marshall and his 9 year-old co-investigator Simon trying to get to the bottom of something creepy, spooky or disturbing happening in their town.

(Clip from the introduction to the show: ‘My name is Marshall Teller, not long ago I was living in New Jersey, just across the river from New York City. It was crowded, big, polluted and full of crime. I loved it. But my parents wanted a better life for my sister and me, so we moved to a place so wholesome, so squeaky-clean you could only find it on TV. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. Sure, my home town looks normal but look again. What’s wrong with this picture, the American dream come true, right? Wrong. Nobody believes me, but this is the centre of weirdness for the entire planet. Eerie, Indiana, my home sweet home. (Crow caws) Still don’t believe me? You will.’)

The show was first shown on NBC in the states from 1991, and then on Channel 4 in the UK during 1993. Which was before my time, did you watch any of it?

Adam Eh, I would still have been into Sesame Street and the like. It would have gone over my head, to be honest. But my partner Antonia did watch it as a kid and thoroughly recommended that I get on and watch it. But I don’t think it’s been repeated over here, since.

Ren No, I don’t think so.

Adam Which seems like a bit of a shame, because it seems like the off-kilter humour would still appeal to the zany youth of today with their internet humour. And I think it’s held up rather well in terms of production values, and the art direction’s rather good.

This has clearly had more money put into it than say, Round the Twist. And I really like Round the Twist, and it’s probably genuinely stranger and queasier, but it has some pretty shonky special effects.

Whereas Eerie Indiana has a bit of shonk, in the video editing but it holds up visually really well. The matte paintings on some of the sets are just spectacular.

Ren Had you seen any episodes before you watched it for the pod?

Adam Nope, not at all! Had you?

Ren I had seen one episode! Which I watched with my friend Niall but that episode was Reality Takes a Holiday which while it is definitely one of the better episodes, is not really one to start with. Which we’ll get into, but yeah, perhaps not the best standalone episode.

Adam Yes, canonically the last episode even if not in practice.

Ren Yeah. But again Niall’s a few years older than either of us, so he fondly remembered it from watching it on TV. So, was it 18 episodes?

Adam 18 or 19. Apparently the last episode aired for the first time in 1993 when it was syndicated on the Disney Channel, so there was a bit of a delay.

And there was a spin-off called Eerie Indiana: The Other Dimension, which I haven’t watched, it was on the Fox Kids network, perhaps more solidly for kids and a bit less interesting. But if somehow we run out of things to cover…

Ren There’s definitely a few really standout episodes of the series that I think are the ones that people remember? But having said that I was just talking to Ava and the main thing she seemed to remember was Dash X with the X drawn on his hand. But yeah, I think there are some that really standout.

Adam Yeah, I think sometimes it leans into being a bit Goosebumps-y. Like, sometimes the plot’s not much more than there’s a strange creature or apparition and the boys have to investigate it, and then there’s often a kind of double pull-back and reveal, like, ‘Oh, it wasn’t actually an alien it was someone hoaxing an alien! But actually it was an alien!!’.

Ren There’s some of that, and I have to admit that I didn’t maybe pull full attention to every episode. ‘There’s an alien or maybe there’s not, there’s some dogs talking, I get the gist’

Adam I’m mostly in it for Simon, who is Marshall’s little 9 year-old friend played by Justin Shenkarow who is kind of aggressively adorable? I feel assailed by how cute he is.

Ren He is incredibly delightful.

Adam He’s just joy incarnate!

Ren Have you seen a photo of him as an adult? He’s still acting and he still has an adorable face.

Adam Yeah, he’s got a sort of Youtube channel going on. He still seems like a good soul, a nice fella. But he’s so good as Simon! He really relishes the role. The character gets to have lots of things happen to him - lots of identity swaps. He gets really clever for one episode and then really boring and geeky in another one, and he really throws himself into it.

Ren The performances from the child actors are generally really good.

Adam Omri Katz as Marshall does a very good bemused expression, like ‘this is pretty out there but hey, what do you expect from Eerie’ kind of face. And I don’t know if Jason Marsden as Dash X had to keep out that croaky voice all the way through, but he’s really committed to sounding like a young Tom Waits. It’s Jason Marsden who has the Youtube channel actually, he’s a fun guy, he was also the official voice of Max Goof, Goofy’s son since 1995.

Goofy Movie, which might also be a selection for Still Scared at some point.

Ren Urgh, that really freaked me out, Adam!

Adam Yeah, that nightmare scene where he imagines himself going through puberty!

Ren (Audibly shudders)

Adam Sounds of visceral discomfort!

Ren Genuinely scared me, that movie.

Adam Me too!

Ren You just took the lid of something, there.

Adam That’s nice, it’s been a while since I’ve done that! Brings me back to the earlier episodes of Still Scared. It’s been a year or two since we’ve really lifted the lid on something.

But yeah, all the child actors are very committed and seem to be having a good time. You get the sense that this was a fun show to make.

Ren Simon is the most adorable.

Adam Oh yeah! I kind of lose interest when Simon’s not on screen, to be honest.

So did you want to focus particularly on a few representative episodes?

Ren Yeah, I think that makes sense. My personal favourites but also happen to be the first episode, one from the middle of the series and Reality takes a Holiday which should have been the last episode, but wasn’t. So we can go through those and I’m sure we’ll have things to say about other episodes as well.

Adam We’ll hoover up bits, but they’ll be the crumbs on the carpet and these will be the big banana splits on the canteen table. Don’t know what canteen has a carpet, but anyway.

Ren So shall we start with Foreverware, which is the first episode. And it’s also great.

Adam Yeah, it was directed by Joe Dante of Gremlins 2: The New Batch… and obviously also Gremlins as well. And it definitely has that kind of off-kilter, zany energy that tends to define his films. Lots of really wild-eyed over-egged performances and canted angles and wide-angled shots.

Ren Yeah, I was interested in how you’d describe the technical camera stuff about it because I was like ‘it’s definitely doing things! I’m sure Adam will know what they are!’

Adam Yeah, it’s similar to the kind of things that Terry Gilliam does, right. Very bug-eyed and hyperreal and super-vivid. Very cheese-dreamy.

Ren Yeah! So Foreverware is a kind of retelling of The Stepford Wives with multi-level marketing. Incidentally, I read The Stepford Wives for the first time this year and it’s really good, I recommend it!

So the Teller’s have just moved to Eerie from New Jersey, and Marshall’s kind of chill mum, Marilyn, is pressed into joining the local circle of extremely house-proud women, led by Betty Wilson, who want to sell Marilyn on the Foreverware tupperwares that they’re all devoted to, that promise to keep things fresh forever.

But, in a gloriously creepy twist, it turns out that it’s not just food that Foreverware keeps fresh, but also people, as Marshall and Simon discover that Betty Wilson’s twins have been stuck in the seventh grade for 30 years, and break into the house in the night to unseal them from their plastic preservative tupperware beds.

It’s a particularly good image, of these human-sized tupperware, at night, filled with dry ice, and Marshall and Simon peeling back the lids. Good horror!

Adam Good horror! And I keep coming back to the art direction. The props in this show! It does use video editing effects and things, but for me the standouts in this show are the, often ginormous, props. These massive tupperware-style containers, for instance. I’d love to go to a theme park with the objects from this show everywhere!

Ren They really sell it. You need that popping tupperware lid effect —

Adam It doesn’t just pop, it goes ‘fresssshhhh’

Ren Yeah. Good stuff!

Adam And I like the fact that it’s shown to be… I might be going out on a bit of a limb here, but I feel like Eerie Indiana is generally a pretty death-positive show.

Ren Mmhmm?

Adam I think generally in the show it’s shown to be a bad idea to keep things the way they were, or to stop things from changing. Instead, it’s very open to change and that sometimes this means loss or changing family or family dynamics, and sometimes that means death or losing someone. It has this definite theme of ‘let it go’.

I’m thinking also of the bank robber ghost in the Hole in the Head Gang who can’t let go of the fact that he’s the world’s worst bank robber, and keeps trying to re-rob the bank. And can’t let go of life.

Marshall basically says ‘Lots of people are dead, it’s not so bad. You’ll have company’.

Ren I think that’s an interesting call. I’m just looking through the other…

Adam Obviously ghost episodes tend towards that. There’s the one with young Toby Maguire — a very fey and theatrical Toby Maguire. And he’s hanging around and won’t leave until Marshall delivers this letter for him.

Or even Tornado Days in which you have this meteorologist who can’t let go of the fact that he led these people to their deaths and has just been fixated Captain Ahab/Moby Dick style chasing down this tornado.

You could even say that Reality Takes a Holiday about Marshall not being able to move on over the fact that he’s not going to be the star of the show forever.

Ren Yeah, I think that’s a good call. And there is a certain preoccupation with lost things as well. There’s The Lost Hour, which we’re going to talk about next, but there’s also the episode, I don’t know what it’s called… episode four —

Adam The Losers, it’s called!

Ren Aha, yeah. Which has this rather Brazil-like beureau of the lost with ducts spilling goo and clanking machinery and bleeping terminals and apothecary shelves and a certified ‘misappropriation engineer’ who is stimulating the economy by taking people’s stuff so they have to replace it.

Adam Best defence for burglary in court: ‘I did it to stimulate the economy!’

So do you think that Foreverware sets the tone for the series? Because it sounds like you’re particularly keen on it, so maybe some of the other episodes didn’t stand up as well for you.

Ren I did particularly like it, and I particularly liked the creepiness of it, and perhaps there isn’t as much creepiness as I might like.

Adam I think by the time you get to around episode 7, there’s this short run that’s all about Marshall falling in love with different girls, seemingly. Which is a bit off-putting and I don’t know if they were just trying to turn Omri Katz into some kind of teen heartthrob.

Ren I mean, he has the curtains for it.

Adam He does have the 90s curtains for it, that’s true. I have to say there is quite a lot of fabulous hair in this series. Simon’s got his wonderfully bouncy cherubic curls and Dash X obviously has his grey hair.

Ren That whole bit I did zone out a bit, to be honest. About Marshall and his romantic endeavours.

Adam He’s 13 going on 14 and you kind of feel like, come on, give it a few years Marshall. It’s just not very interesting, really. He’s investigating all these exciting mysterious and then he’s like (end of Scrubs voiceover voice) ‘the biggest mystery is the human heart’. Yetis and vampires and all that is a bit more exciting.

Ren That’s probably one of the reasons that Simon’s so great. He’s younger and doesn’t really care about these things.

Adam Yeah, and generally when you have episodes where Marshall’s getting distracted from the mystery, Simon will give him pretty short shrift for it.

Ren Foreverware is perhaps the best execution of the creepy concept, but of a kind that comes back throughout the series. There are other twisted takes on everyday things like the one with the man in the bank telling machine.

Adam I quite liked that one! He’s a sort of over-friendly ATM man, who looks a bit like… plastic head virtual Max? I’ll try googling that but it probably won’t work. Max Headroom! It worked!

Ren (googles) Oh yeah, he does look a bit like that. Who’s created by Marshall’s dad.

Adam Oh yeah, we should probably mention that Marshall’s dad is an inventor, like the father in Gremlins, in fact, but with a bit more corporate respectability.

Ren The things he’s inventing come up tangentially throughout the series. Do you have any examples?

Adam Oh gosh… he invents…

Ren Hot and cold running smoothies! Is something he’s working on.

Adam I don’t think they made that much use of the fact that he’s an inventor, all things considered.

Ren Yeah. You know that he is an inventor, but he also just kind of seems like generic suit dad. Who’s 35!

Adam Oh don’t tell me that. Come on, Ren.

Ren Yeah, sorry. That was mean.

Adam I’m 33! I’m 33! Two more years! It’s weird isn’t it, looking at these figures like ‘They’re an adult’, but I’m an adult! If a child saw me on television they’d say ‘look at that adult!’. I still find it a bit weird when I’m walking down the street and a parent says ‘Mind out of the way of that man’ or ‘Watch out for that man cycling dangerously’ or whatever’s being said about me. I always have that moment of slight mis-recognition like ‘Oh yeah, I’m an adult’.

Ren Yep. What was I saying? He creates this automated teller-man who tries to bribe Simon into being friends with him by giving him money.

Adam Aw.

Ren Yeah, it’s quite sad.

Adam I think a lot of the stuff surrounding Simon is quite sad. It’s not really played upon but he has an either quite absent or abusive family, so he’s always at Marshall’s and basically adopted into the family.

So there was a line in the alien one, Marshall’s Theory of Believability where a character is revealed as a fraud and Marshall’s quite disillusioned and Marshall’s dad says ‘Look, there’s only one thing you can rely on and that’s that your parents love you’, and Simon gets out a tissue and starts crying and I think it’s meant to be ‘that’s sentimental and touching’ but if you see Simon as someone who isn’t loved by his parents that’s really heartbreaking!

And also Simon’s the best, what awful parents to reject Simon!

It is a little bit of a theme in the show, neglectful parents.

Ren Yep, because we have Sarah-Bob.

Adam Is she the girl with the special pencil, the Penny Crayon girl?*

Ren Yep, the Penny Crayon girl. She names herself Sarah-Sue at the end but she lives with her horrible dad and her horrible brothers who make her do everything for them.

Adam It’s a bit of a Cinderella story. And they’re very broadly draw, they’re shown to be incredibly crass and mean and bullying and unpleasant. And then there’s the episode which I think is officially the last episode with Todd, Marshall’s nerdy friend —

Ren Oh, that one’s sad.

Adam Yeah, with this very verbally abusive, bullying father and Todd gets into punk rock.

So yeah, one thing I like about the show is that for all its zaniness it’s quite oddly melancholy. I don’t know if that’s because of the theme of loss, or people who’ve gone missing or who are absent. But I do think it has an interesting tone.

Ren When you said melancholy it made me think of the World of Stuff, which is quite a central location in the show, but is this weird shop that’s also a diner —

Adam — Like a milkshake bar.

Ren And it sells all kind of tat and nonsense, but they’re there quite a lot and it turns up in a lot of the episodes. But it’s this quite big, old barn-like building with these really high shelves with dusty objects on them and it has a very particular atmosphere.

Adam I’d agree, I think it’s part of the show being very much set in small-town America, and it’s Indiana so it’s corn country and it does feel like it’s an area that’s slightly obsolete almost. And there’s a surprising amount of stuff in the background about finances, and the town not having very much money. This crops up quite a lot and they have this greedy mayor who’s always seizing on things that he thinks will bring more money into the town.

Ren Yeah, the town does always feel like it’s slightly in crisis.

Adam It could end up being a ghost town — things are almost on the edge of shutting down.

Ren Which is probably a good point to introduce The Lost Hour, which is an episode I really enjoyed.

We learn at the top of the episode that there’s no daylight saving time in Indiana, ‘the farmers say the cows would get confused’.

Marshall is incredibly indignant that he doesn’t get his extra hour, and decides he’s going to set his watch back an hour anyway. But when he wakes up, everyone else has disappeared.

He goes onto the street and there’s sinister garbage collectors in mirror shades and jack boots, who are walking menacingly towards him but he’s rescued by an elderly milkman who tells him that he’s ended up in the ‘lost hour’.

Adam It’s a real Twilight Zone for kids episode.

Ren The milkman explains that the garbage collectors are there to clear up things or people that are messing up the space time continuum, and Marshall is now one of them. Marshall looks in the back of the milk truck, and sees his family and Simon at breakfast without him, but instead of the missing girl who was on the carton the other day, it’s himself on there.

He figures out that he needs to find the girl who was on the milk cartoon, and heads to the World of Stuff. Even more desolate than usual, but sure enough, there is Janet, who is an honestly a style icon, wearing a a military jacket covered in badges and medals, and a compass, and tassels. It’s great.

She’s not very pleased to see him and has resigned herself to the idea that everyone else has disappeared and she’s on her own. But eventually he persuades her to look in the back of the milk truck, where she sees her family, who are devastated at losing her.

The milkman tells Marshal and Janet than they need to get back before the hour is up, or they’ll be lost for another year, and Marshall manages to communicate to Simon through his image on the milk carton, and tell him that he needs to fix Marshall’s watch.

Simon pulls it off, and both Marshall and Janet are reunited with the main timeline. But not before the elderly milkman drops the bombshell that he’s Marshall far-future self.

Adam Ah yeah!

Ren For some reason! What did you make of this episode?

Adam I really liked this one. It’s really neatly constructed. There are some episodes where the show feels like it spins its wheels a bit but this one is twist and turn after twist and turn.

And it’s one that would have really scared me as a kid. Anything with weird ontology, used to freak me out as a kid — like something metaphorical being literal.

Ren Like accidentally slipping into another reality.

Adam Yeah, those kind of fears were really real to me when I was little. So I think I would have found that episode really creepy. It actually reminds me of an Alan Alhberg story about an elderly woman, I think it’s meant to be a bittersweet and melancholy but quite nice story, but it scared me quite a bit as a kid.

This old woman has squirrelled away a few hours for herself throughout the years, so when she’s on her deathbed she’s able to go back to when she was 8 years old and use the two hours she saved then, and then go forward to when she was in her teens and so on. And that idea of time being displaced, the lost hour and the time out of time wahhh.

Ren A bit like the girl in the painting in The Witches, as well.

Adam Yeah, absolutely, or the start of The Dark is Rising books. I remember the character going downstairs and the house being frozen and when they leave the house they’re in this medieval realm. But it’s the in-between moment that’s scary, not quite in one time or the other.

Ren Yeah, I think that hits on a potent childhood fear.

Adam And this episode was directed by the wonderfully named Bob Balaban. Bob Balaban. What a great name.

I like the fact that you’ve chosen episodes with different directors. The first one was Joe Dante. You haven’t chosen any episodes directed by Sam Pillsbury who directed The ATM with the Heart of Gold, and who also directed Free Willy 3, Nightrider 2010 and Zandalee!

Ren Huh?

Adam You remember when we did the Nicholas Cage blog?*

Zandalee was that film where Nic plays an artist and he has a mental breakdown near the end and goes ‘Black it all out!’ and covers himself with black paint.

Ren Okay, yeah, I don’t remember that one.

Adam You might have repressed it.

Ren Mm. Well. That’s certainly a pedigree. Yeah, and I think it’s probably somewhere between The Lost Hour and obviously before Reality Takes a Holiday that we meet the third main character, Dash X who is a strange grey-haired raspy-voiced kid who’s kind of set up as Marshall’s antagonist towards the end of the series.

A curious character.

Adam And you get the sense that there’s mysterious about him being set up — is he an alien? Where does he come from? And they’re never properly resolved, which I quite like. He remains enigmatic right til the end of the show. And he’s an oddly charming character, he’s very charismatic, but he’s also really out for himself. But then he’s got amnesia and he’s all alone in the world and he’s just a kid.

I was complaining a bit about Dash X to Antonia, saying ‘oh, he’s so mercenary’ and Antonia said, ‘Yeah, but he has to be’. Which is a fair point. He’s living in an abandoned building and having to steal food and go dumpster diving to eat, so it makes sense that he’s sometimes got to put his own interests first.

Ren He turns up in the episode with the ghosts in the mill —

Adam — and then he just sort of hangs around and sometimes comes up with schemes to make money. In The Loyal Order of Corn, for instance, he somehow gets this job at the club so he can find answers about his past. He’s always wheeling and dealing. The Loyal Order of Corn’s a fun episode.

Ren Particularly cheese-dreamy.

Adam Yeah.

Ren Marshall’s dad joins the corn masons, they wear corn hats and call each other Brother Husker.

Adam And sing a song.

Ren And sing a song.

(awkward pause)

Adam Are we going to sing it together?

Ren Ahh, okay. It’ll be horrible.

Adam No, it’ll be beautiful, we just need to add some vocaliser or whatever.

Ren and Adam (somewhat out of tune and time with each other)

    Hail to Thee, O Ears of Splendor,
    Joyously we pledge our job
  We declare our staunch allegiance
    to protect your kingly cob.

Ren That’s enough of that.

Adam Yeah, we don’t want to haemorrhage listeners. We don’t have that many.

Ren We can’t afford to lose more than a stanza of singing.

Adam Before we forget we should go onto our Texture of the Week.

Adam and Ren (Whistle and clomping noises) Texture! Texture! Texture! Of! The Week!

Adam I thought this plaster hand I have could be used as an instrument, but sadly not.

Ren Alas.

Adam Back it goes. It’s a nice ornament. It’s got little smiley faces on the fingertips.

Ren Do you want to go first?

Adam My texture of the week is from an episode I didn’t like very much, but I did like the texture, which is Mr Chaney, the werewolf based episode. Marshall is chosen as the Harvest King and he has to go and face a werewolf in the forest. And the texture of Mr Chaney’s face when he transforms into a werewolf is astonishing.

It’s a really rubbery latex mask and because of the weird video editing effects it morphs awfully into this latex mask. I kept trying to pause it on the morphing and it just looked like this horrible bubbling mass. It was a very strange texture because it both looked very fake and digital and also very material and hairy and oozy. Urgh! Not a good episode, but a great texture.

Ren Mm, cool! Well, my Texture of the Week is Marshall’s whole museum of horror, where he usually puts an item related to the goings-on of the episode at the end.

Including such items as: A petrified baloney sandwich A polaroid of a UFO A Retainer that gives the owner the ability to hear dogs’ thoughts A white gloved hand from a robot ATM mascot A pair of zombie glasses deemed ‘the ultimate tool of mental fascism’.

Adam That’s episode 16, Loyal Order of Corn, there’s another financially based episode next with Zombies in PJs where the town is tricked into buying objects on credit, thus damming themselves to hell in the process. And then the next episode, which should be the last episode is Reality Takes a Holiday, directed by Ken Kwapis.

Ren Yep, so, this is a spectacularly fourth-wall breaking episode, in which the rest of Marshall’s family + Simon go to the cinema, and when Marshall goes to the mailbox, he finds the script for the episode he’s currently in. He goes back into the house, but it’s turned into a film set, everyone’s calling him “Omri” and no-one he knows is acting like themselves.

He goes to the World of Stuff, and finds Radford, the owner, who’s the only person who’s not acting meta, but then Radford brings out a script, and Marshall realises that if there’s a script there must be a writer somewhere.

He bursts into the writer’s office to find Dash X in there, busy trying to make himself the main character and kill Marshall.

Marshall manages to trick the script writer into leaving the set, and sneaks into the office, and rewrites the script so he doesn’t get unceremoniously shot by Dash. He goes down to the family breakfast table set, and tries to delay the filming by asking about his character’s motivation. To which they say: ‘Your motivation is you say a few lines, you go outside, you get shot and you die’. But the rewrites come just in time, and as Marshall says action, the world becomes his reality again.

So yeah, very cool concept, and a fun episode which has all the ‘alternate reality’ tropes of all the characters we’ve come to know suddenly acting opposite to what we expect.

Adam Yeah, and it feels like the actors are sending themselves up as well, which is a lot of fun. Justin Shenkarow playing himself is incredibly brash and awful and playing himself as the most entitled child actor that ever lived. Which is really fun!

And I think it really does manage to get across the panic of a nightmare and things unravelling and the ground slipping away beneath your feet. While also being a really neat ending to the series. I almost wish that we had got a second season about Dash X but also I like that with Marshall getting written out the show gets written out of existence as well.

Ren Yeah, I don’t know if I have all that much more to say about it. It’s just a really good episode!

Adam It is probably not the right one to watch first, I think those episodes you’ve chosen are good ones. I’m quite fond of The ATM with the Heart of Gold, No Brain no Pain, which is the one with the apparently homeless man who’s actually a genius who’s had his brain stolen feels very much like a French Cinema/ Fifth Element vibe to it.

Ren I helpfully didn’t write down any of the episode names but episode 6, the one with the optometrist and the no-fun glasses —

Adam — Just Say No Fun —

Ren Deserves an honourable mention if only for the brilliant montage and they go to the optometrist and everything’s spinning.

Adam I’d forgotten about that surrealist freak-out montage! And Shenkarow’s really great playing this really boring version of Simon. Shenkarow, if you’re listening to this, let it be known that you were the best darn thing about Eerie Indiana!

So, any other thoughts about the show? How do you think it compares to other shows of its ilk? Say, we set it against Round the Twist.

Ren They’re definitely related. I think Eerie Indiana is more contained, and less wacky and scatological.

Adam That’s certainly true!

Ren It does have this slightly melancholy, subdued, dusty feeling to it. Being in this forgotten place, so it’s tone is quite distinct, I think.

Adam It’s also worth mentioning that there’s also a lot of Eerie Indiana spin-off books. Looking on Wikipedia, there’s 17 of them apparently. So yeah, I think these are characters and a world that you can have a lot of fun with. It’d be a very easy show to write fanfic about.

Ren I don’t know if it was a great show for me to binge watch. It has a lot of great moments and weird memorable ideas but not all the episodes are particularly exciting.

Adam Yeah, I think that’s fair. I’ve also been watching The Simpsons during lockdown from the start til heaven-knows-where. I’m now into Season 9 so I’m having to consider how much further we’re going to go. And The Simpsons at it’s best, seasons 3-6 are just stunning episode after stunning episode. Eerie Indiana’s not a classic in that sense, but it’s a really likeable show and it definitely deserves to be remembered.

Ren Definitely, it’s really charming. And does have quite a few sticky idea, I can imagine if you watched it as a kid you’d be like ‘Oh, remember that!’.

Adam Totally.

Ren So, I think I’d definitely recommend dipping into a few episodes.

Adam Although I will add that my DVD boxset was completely terrible. The episode listings were wrong, so one DVD has the same episodes as the previous DVD. So I did get to watch all the episodes but they didn’t match up to what was on the slip cases.

Ren Oh, that is the other thing about it. It isn’t really on any streaming services, at least in the UK, so we both bought the DVD boxset. So it might be a bit hard to get hold of just to dip into a few episodes.

Adam But if you’re an American or even Canadian listener you might find it easier.

Well, so, shall we wrap it up?

Ren Ooh, I’ve just found a few bonus textures at the end of my notes.

Adam Go on then.

Ren ‘Kid stroking the bristles of a giant toothbrush’, that was in the No Fun glasses episode.

Uh, ‘A crow wearing a nappy’, no idea where that happened. Oh, and ‘Cindy’s tornado day costume’!

Adam Oh yeah, that’s a good choice for a texture. A lot of good costumes. A lot of 90s fashion.

Ren Thanks for listening, sorry it’s been so, so long! We’ll maybe not try and watch a series with quite so many episodes next time.

Do you have a sign-off for us Adam?

Adam Yeah, I was going to keep it simple and say ‘Keep it eerie, spooky kids’

Ren Keep it eerie. Catch you next time!

Adam Bye!

• British cartoon from the late 80s/early 90s with a catchy theme tune about a girl who draws things that come to life.
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