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Eerie, Indiana: eps 1-3
A couple of weeks ago, I found out that one of my favorite shows back in the early '90s, Eerie, Indiana, was out on DVD, so I snapped up the box set. It aired on Saturday mornings in 1991 and 1992, and was rerun for a few more years after that, because I don't think I caught it for another year or two, because I beleive I was over in Wales the semester it was first aired. Only 19 episodes were made.
The general idea of the show was that 13-year-old Marshall Tucker, played by Omri Katz (you may remember him from Hocus Pocus, moved with his family to Eerie, Indiana, statistically the most normal city in the US. However, lots of weird things go on in Eerie and Marshall and his best friend, the nine-year-old Simon (Justin Shenkarow) are the only ones who seem to think anything's wrong. These things range from giant Tupperware-type containers being used to stop time, to Bigfoot raiding the trash, to a mysterious kid who may or may not be an alien or from another dimension, to possibly-sentient tornadoes. Some things are drawn in broad strokes with no subtlety and a couple of times the moral gets laid on with a trowel (probably to appease whoever it is that insists all kids' TV shows have to be educational), but there's a seriously dark streak running through the episodes at times - deaths are strongly implied, although they happen offscreen, and what we see of Simon's home life is quite disturbing.
I'm sure most of you are thinking "Wow! Sounds like X-Files for kids!" And if the show were being pitched today, that's what they'd say. But it aired two years before X-Files did, so technically X-Files is Eerie, Indiana for adults. :)
Episode 1: "Forever Ware"
Marshall's family has just moved to Eerie, and he's only made one friend, the nine-year-old Simon, who he says he lets hang around because Simon's parents don't seem to want him. One day a scarily perky woman with twin boys, all dressed in 1960s clothing, comes by to welcome them to the neighborhood andinculcate show sell Marshall's mother her line of food containers, much like Tupperware, known as Forever Ware, guaranteed to keep food fresh forever. One of the boys slips Marshall a note reading "Yearbook 1964" as they leave. Marshall and Simon research and find a 1964 yearbook from the local school showing twin boys who look exactly like the twins do now. They sneak over to the boys' house at night and watch their mother seal them into giant Forever Ware containers as she tucks them in for the night.
I won't recap the entire episode, because that would take forever and you guys really ought to go find and watch them anyway. This is not one of my favorite episodes, because I never really got any sense that Marshall and Simon would really be in trouble, no matter how evilly the boys' mother laughed.
Episode 2: The Retainer
This episodes starts with Marshall scared of going to the orthodontist (Vincent Schiavelli) to get a retainer. It has something to do with the small Maltese dog sitting outside and staring at the house. Most of the episode is a flashback dealing with a kid he knew named Steve, who found out he could pick up what dogs were thinking on his retainer and headgear. And the dogs weren't thinking anything nice - they wanted freedom, and they wanted it now. (Or at least as soon as they figured out the doorknob.)
This was where we got some serious menace - at one point the door to the animal shelter is propped open late at night with what looks remarkably like a human thighbone, and the mean dogcatcher is never seen again. Plus, the last Marshall and Simon ever see of Steve is him running with a dog pack running after him, although Marshall finds his retainer later.
Episode 3: ATM With a Heart of Gold
This is where we learn a bit more about Simon. Even though Marshall and Simon are best friends, the four-year age gap is a bit much at times, and Marshall likes to go hang out with kids his own age. Simon has no friends, a mysterious yet bad home life (we hear yelling and screaming inside his house as he stands in front of it), and old, patched clothes.
Marshall's dad is an inventor and his latest invention, a talking ATM, is installed outside the bank. The lonely Simon goes to talk to the ATM, which gives him a $20 bill. Simon finds out that people are willing to talk to him and hang out with him as long as he's willing to buy them stuff, and the ATM is willing to give him momey as long as he comes and talks to it, because nobody else does. This ends up bankrupting the town, since "Mr Wilson," the ATM, is pulling money from all the town's accounts to give to Simon. Marshall and Simon solve the problem by stuffing the money back into the ATM late at night, in a somewhat disturbing scene as Mr Wilson begs and pleads with them not to - and with every bit of money put back, Mr Wilson loses a bit of his sentience.
What I found unusually dark for a Saturday morning kid's TV show was that at one point, Marshall is in Simon's room and you hear the noises of a party, with male and female voices, from downstairs. Marshall remarks that it sounds like Simon's mom and dad are having a party, and Simon quietly says that his mom's not home. Story-wise, it allows us to believe why a 9-year-old (who turns ten during the course of the episode, and has his birthday party over at Marshall's house with his parents not in sight) would be riding his bike around the town late at night and why he'd find friendship in an ATM, but with the other hints here and there about how his parents don't care about him, it kinda breaks your heart a little.
I found the DVD box set at DeepDiscountDVD.com for $21 plus free shipping. Worth every penny. :)
According to the IMDB, there was a follow-up series with a new cast in 1998, called Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension, but I've never seen it, and the reviews say it wasn't as good as the first. But I'm still jonesing to see it, even if only to mock. And someone on the messageboards say there was a series of tie-in books with different stories produced at the same time as the second series, but using the original characters of Marshall and Simon, so I now have something new to scour the Internet for!
*rummages around Amazon.com a little more* OMG THERE ARE A TON OF BOOKS HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS?
The general idea of the show was that 13-year-old Marshall Tucker, played by Omri Katz (you may remember him from Hocus Pocus, moved with his family to Eerie, Indiana, statistically the most normal city in the US. However, lots of weird things go on in Eerie and Marshall and his best friend, the nine-year-old Simon (Justin Shenkarow) are the only ones who seem to think anything's wrong. These things range from giant Tupperware-type containers being used to stop time, to Bigfoot raiding the trash, to a mysterious kid who may or may not be an alien or from another dimension, to possibly-sentient tornadoes. Some things are drawn in broad strokes with no subtlety and a couple of times the moral gets laid on with a trowel (probably to appease whoever it is that insists all kids' TV shows have to be educational), but there's a seriously dark streak running through the episodes at times - deaths are strongly implied, although they happen offscreen, and what we see of Simon's home life is quite disturbing.
I'm sure most of you are thinking "Wow! Sounds like X-Files for kids!" And if the show were being pitched today, that's what they'd say. But it aired two years before X-Files did, so technically X-Files is Eerie, Indiana for adults. :)
Episode 1: "Forever Ware"
Marshall's family has just moved to Eerie, and he's only made one friend, the nine-year-old Simon, who he says he lets hang around because Simon's parents don't seem to want him. One day a scarily perky woman with twin boys, all dressed in 1960s clothing, comes by to welcome them to the neighborhood and
I won't recap the entire episode, because that would take forever and you guys really ought to go find and watch them anyway. This is not one of my favorite episodes, because I never really got any sense that Marshall and Simon would really be in trouble, no matter how evilly the boys' mother laughed.
Episode 2: The Retainer
This episodes starts with Marshall scared of going to the orthodontist (Vincent Schiavelli) to get a retainer. It has something to do with the small Maltese dog sitting outside and staring at the house. Most of the episode is a flashback dealing with a kid he knew named Steve, who found out he could pick up what dogs were thinking on his retainer and headgear. And the dogs weren't thinking anything nice - they wanted freedom, and they wanted it now. (Or at least as soon as they figured out the doorknob.)
This was where we got some serious menace - at one point the door to the animal shelter is propped open late at night with what looks remarkably like a human thighbone, and the mean dogcatcher is never seen again. Plus, the last Marshall and Simon ever see of Steve is him running with a dog pack running after him, although Marshall finds his retainer later.
Episode 3: ATM With a Heart of Gold
This is where we learn a bit more about Simon. Even though Marshall and Simon are best friends, the four-year age gap is a bit much at times, and Marshall likes to go hang out with kids his own age. Simon has no friends, a mysterious yet bad home life (we hear yelling and screaming inside his house as he stands in front of it), and old, patched clothes.
Marshall's dad is an inventor and his latest invention, a talking ATM, is installed outside the bank. The lonely Simon goes to talk to the ATM, which gives him a $20 bill. Simon finds out that people are willing to talk to him and hang out with him as long as he's willing to buy them stuff, and the ATM is willing to give him momey as long as he comes and talks to it, because nobody else does. This ends up bankrupting the town, since "Mr Wilson," the ATM, is pulling money from all the town's accounts to give to Simon. Marshall and Simon solve the problem by stuffing the money back into the ATM late at night, in a somewhat disturbing scene as Mr Wilson begs and pleads with them not to - and with every bit of money put back, Mr Wilson loses a bit of his sentience.
What I found unusually dark for a Saturday morning kid's TV show was that at one point, Marshall is in Simon's room and you hear the noises of a party, with male and female voices, from downstairs. Marshall remarks that it sounds like Simon's mom and dad are having a party, and Simon quietly says that his mom's not home. Story-wise, it allows us to believe why a 9-year-old (who turns ten during the course of the episode, and has his birthday party over at Marshall's house with his parents not in sight) would be riding his bike around the town late at night and why he'd find friendship in an ATM, but with the other hints here and there about how his parents don't care about him, it kinda breaks your heart a little.
I found the DVD box set at DeepDiscountDVD.com for $21 plus free shipping. Worth every penny. :)
According to the IMDB, there was a follow-up series with a new cast in 1998, called Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension, but I've never seen it, and the reviews say it wasn't as good as the first. But I'm still jonesing to see it, even if only to mock. And someone on the messageboards say there was a series of tie-in books with different stories produced at the same time as the second series, but using the original characters of Marshall and Simon, so I now have something new to scour the Internet for!
*rummages around Amazon.com a little more* OMG THERE ARE A TON OF BOOKS HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS?
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Man. I'd fogotten how gallows humour the show got at times.
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I am amazed at the amount of books that were published in 1998/1999 - looks like 18 or so. I have another Collecting Quest! Woo-hoo!
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i remember that show, but i never watched it ;(
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i watch it like, 4 times a year anyway. hahah
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This probably has something to do with liking machines a bit more than people, but there you go.
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XD
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I don't remember a dog turning into a girl, but it may have been that mysterious series remake, or it just could have been Goosebumps. :)
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(I may well have been the physical representation of the wussy nerd child universal archetype, and doomed some other child to assume my role when I graduated high school.)
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I remember that my absolute favorite episode was the one in which [spoilers for the last episode, I think?] Marshall finds himself in a world in which Eerie, Indiana is a TV show and all the houses are set props, all of his family and friends are actors playing a role, and everyone insists on calling him "Omri". (But I can't remember how it ends!) [/spoilers] Clearly even mini-me had a love for The Meta.
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I so remember the Forever Ware episode XD
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