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. :)
( Episodes 1-3 - 'Forever Ware,' 'The Retainer,' and 'ATM With a Heart of Gold.' Cut for spoilers )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?![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
