Are You Afraid of the Dark?: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your midnight Society of Microscopic Detail. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan run Tug and Jordan's Today we are talking about the outlier in Nickelodeon's nineties Cavalcade, the show that taught a generation of children to fear nestled as it was in the otherwise comedic bosom of the networks snack programming block. That's right, we're talking about Are You Afraid of the Dark Man? I used to watch the show a lot. I still vividly remember the Tale of the Water Demons. So the one in the indoor swimming pool, it's the one with like the undead sailors coming that's scared the ever loving piss out of me. And then I only later did I realize it is just basically the plot of the John Carpenter movie The Fog. So it just all comes back to old j C for me. Um. But I'm guessing this show would have put a little too much starch into your card again as a kid. No, I actually this was probably the first example of mussy TV I ever had in my life. I never missed this every weekday at either it's either five or five thirty. I forget. I was in front of the TV watching this. I couldn't get enough. I adored it so much. But you're right, I'm not a big horror guy, but my taste do have a dark streak that offsets my sunny exterior, which I feel like i'ven't really gotten the show off much on this show, but it will come. Yeah. I mean, I think I liked You Afraid the Dark because it wasn't blood and gore, which isn't really my thing, but it was just creepy and eerie, which was more my speed. I mean. My favorite episode was the one about the haunted jukebox, The Tale of C seven, where the listener would hit C seven and some old swing band song would play and they'd be transported back in time to like this welcome home party of a World War two soldier and your time travel. I know, yeah, I know, explains a lot, but I haven't seen that episode in probably like twenty years. But I just remember being really like poignant and eerie and sad, and it just it kind of introduced me to the concept of stories that give you goose bumps, which you would have thought I would have learned from the goose Bumps series, but uh no, this was a huge show for me. And it was one that I watched with my mom a lot, who was very disposition a lee similar to me. She was very sweet and sunny on the surface, but had a secret love of the dark side. So I definitely have a soft spot for it. Um, I kind of feel like it's underrated or Memory Hold. I feel like it doesn't get the props that like Legends and Hidden Temple does. Yeah, I mean, we'll get into it, but I think a lot of this is just because it wasn't on streaming for the longest time. You had to watch it on like YouTube. Damn Canadians. Ah, but we'll get into it, don't worry. But yeah, I think you're right. I think it has been maybe Memory Hold a little bit. It's not whimsical like Keenan and Kel or you know, groundbreaking maybe the way that all that was, or or even it's just it was like the weird outlier in Nickelodeon. But it holds up. It does hold up. You know, it sticks with you, It haunts you, it does well. So. From the staggering roster of pre famed child actors who populated the show, to creator dj McHale's burning hatred of both the midnight society and Canadian television, to the show's groundbreaking representation and diversity, here is everything you didn't know about? Are You Afraid of the Dark? The show's creator, d J mcale was an n y U film grad. Sorry about that, Jordan's where that has a badge of honor? My favorite shows? Who who? Told Vulture in he was getting nowhere writing screenplays Sam, but he had a day job that involved traveling internationally making corporate and educational videos. You didn't do that, did you. That's kind of what this is educational. No travel though, But on the advice of a friend, at some point he pivoted into writing children's media. Uh. He actually got to start on ABC after school Specials, which he mentions later helped him kind of bring the gravitas of those shows with like quote unquote real kids and like real problems, And that's how he grounded all the stories of Are You Afraid of the Dark into like real life kids. But then he did episodes of Encyclopedia Brown for HBO, which I did not know as a show called Criss Cross. But it was on Encyclopedia Brown that he met his partner Ned Candle, and they developed a pitch that he told Vulture was bedtime stories for lazy parents that they wanted to do by quote, taking some old time actor who was out of work but whom everyone knew, sort of a how Holbrook or who else George Kennedy would have been good for that, Uh, Carl Malden, Carl Malden and put him in an easy chair with a roaring fire and a big book, and he'd tell fairy tales. We'd record them and put a home video package together for parents who wouldn't necessarily want to sit down and do this themselves for their kids. That's a quote from him. I mean, thus begins a recurring theme in this episode, which is that the creator of Value for the Dark is a really low opinion of humanity. Yeah. I also didn't even put any of the quotes he's given to multiple outlets about how much he hates the state of children's television Now and Disney in particular. UM. But it was while experiencing writer's block as to what these tales would actually be that Michale realized the stories that he liked best as a kid were the scary ones, and so they decided to do away with what he called the creepy concept of having an old dude talk to kids and just have the kids themselves do the work by telling the stories around a campfire. I tried to look up the trope of scary tales being told around a campfire, and it literally like crashed the computer. It's it's like so old. TV Tropes has an entry called around the Campfire exposition, which is a term for like when characters are sitting around a campfire talking and like divulging stories from their past. I can stand by me with the pie contest when Gordy tells like the short story and yeah, and then in the same lot too when they're talking about you know, four Revver and the story of the bees uh kill Bill, when David Carratan tells the whole story about anyway. So that's the bit that they decided to do, and you know what you do, the bit you commit to the bit, and he did, against his better judgment. He did. He grew to hate that bit. We'll get back to that, because, I mean, I guess it really shouldn't surprise me that the creative Are You for the Dark? Is a huge each missing throat? But he's a salty dude. Yeah, I love it, d J McHale, I love it so much. It's a quote machine, but yes, perhaps on Surprisingly, Nickelodeon shot the show down when Michael and Candle pitched it. Initially, the working title was scary Tales upon on fairy tales. Get it. It's all about how you emphasize it. Scary tales sounds lame. Scary tales, oh good idea, sorry tales? Yeah exactly. But in Matthew Clickstein's incredible book, Slimed and Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age, it was explained that this title was actually already taken, which kind of makes sense. That's a really good title, is it? Anyway? It is? Michael told Vulture there was a scary story written by Dr Seuss called What Was I Scared Of? And I always loved that story, So I took that title and thought, well, I was afraid of clowns, and I was afraid of the dark. And that's where the title of our show came from, kind of as an answer to that Doctor seush title, Mine is, uh, do you ever think about how you're gonna be? Remember it after you die? Yeah? That's the adult remake of are you Afraid as it Dark? Do you think about your bills, your ex your deadlines, or when you think you're gonna die? Michael explained to Complex, we pretty much pitched exactly what we ended up making, and they were just like, no, you can't do this. You can't scare kids. It's not going to fly. Um d J. Mchaele hates Nickelodeon and Disney and children, but his is unabashed contempt towards Nickelodeon is so hilarious to me. But he somehow decided to just leave a three page treatment of the show in their slush pile, I guess, in their submissions pile. And in the year between that original pitch meeting and then he and Candle returned to pitch another show, which also did not get picked up. Nickelodeon hired an executive named J. Mulvaney, who also had a hand in green lighting The Adventures of Pete and Pete, which rules, and that guy just kind of came across the treatment in their submissions pile and he literally said, supposedly, why have we not made this yet? And I've read that Terry Castle, who is the daughter of the legendary low budget horror flick director William Castle, she also worked on this show, which gives it a sort of bona fide place in the lineage of of of horror films. And William Castle's the Smeellvision guy, right, all these multisensory things in the theaters. Yeah, The Tingler was one where he had like joy buzzers, like rigged into the seats of the of the theater, so he would be like, it's incredible that the movie would stop, and they would broadcast an announcement the movie was about this like little thing that like ran up people's legs and like chop or whatever, and uh, the movie would stop, and you would hear a voice broadcast into the theater and someone go, ladies and gentlemen, this is not a joke. The Tingler is loose in the theater. Do not panic. And then they would electrify all the seats and people would lose their He also had a thing um that he would just run a ghost on a on a wire from the back of the theater to Yeah he was William Castle real uh in the P. T. Barne mold of like classic American huckster um. Nickelodeon did not want to commit to funding the whole thing despite picking it up, and so Michael and Candell had to check it across the border to the Bacony tundra of Canada and the production company sign arm are crude neighbors to the north. I'm just gonna shown Canada this all time. Sorry Canadian listeners Um, which as well discussed later complicated the rights ownership situation to this SINAR is actually now defunct, but they were responsible for beloved children's series of the era like The Busy World of Richard, Scary Arthur, and Cayu. So sinos agreement required that the show be shot in Canada, which Michael told Vulture was partially due to the sorry state of the Canadian film industry at the time. When we first started shooting the show, the film industry in Montreal was doing very badly. He said, we were the only game in town. So we had the run of the place, all this great stuff for a low budget show. As the season's progressed in the film industry picked up in Montreal, the offices weren't as nice anymore. Um, the campfire scenes were shot in the soundstage. How about that in Quebec? How about that? Do anything for you? You've been to Quebec. What do you think about? Never been to Quebec? With Vancouver very nice, very green, very lush, like Canadian bacon. I bet you do like curling. I bet you she's picture You're like curling, like putting the U in color. You got like you got like a toke. You've got the like little little hat with the little bobby that's what they call the ski cap. To that I've never heard. I think it's one of their's, Like the hat the Pete wears and Pete and pee. It look like the things that come down over the ears. No, it's just like a ski hat. Were like a yeah, it's like, yeah, it was like a beanie. It comes from it's from the bastardized French. What is the French word? Man? Um, your mom's a French teacher, so I assume this is all very near and dear to you well. Toky is a from toka from Spanish meaning woman's head dress, from Arabic from the old Persian tech meaning veil shawl um. Tok is actually what you call the in the chef's uniform. Took Blanche is the mushroom o chef's hat. But in Canada they call beanies. What we would call a beanie or a ski cap call him took. Anyway, production did not want to repeatedly build and tear down this set that they built for the campfire scenes. So that meant that all the wrap around, all the framing devices for an entire season had to be filmed over the course of a couple of weeks, all the intros and out yep. So it not only meant that first of all, they would just have all these kids there for like two or three weeks at a time, and then these kids would never see each other again for the rest of the year, but it meant that they while they didn't have to have everything scripted in advance, they had to have the whole season planned out. They had to know for each and every episode what it was going to be, so the kids could intro it and yeah, I'll the kids have talked about this is like summer camp or an acting camp, because they would see each other for like a maximum of three weeks, and then I've heard I've heard that they crammed a season's worth of these into one week, which seems insane, but I've also heard it took up to three so I mean it's like three minute intros and like a sixty second outro. Though I feel like, yeah, yeah, I mean, they're childre they're children actors, so you know, you gotta great curve here. I mean, I mostly feel bad for the show's creator, t J. McHale, because he's talked about what a massive stress or this was making sure that the stories were, if not completely scripted, at least fleshed out enough to have details in this intro, and he wrote, or at very least seriously rewrote every single one of these shows for the first evan seasons, a total ninety one episodes. Just the thought of that makes me want to break out in hives. That definitely seems like some situation i'd get myself mixed up in. But what actually helped this horrific scenario as far as writers were concerned, was that Nickelodeon was still really wary of selling children horror and suspense stories, so they told Michale, but are you afraid of the Darkhead? To draw some of its inspiration from the world of literature, basically the sort of shield against complaints from parents. Uh that way, this is what McHale told complex. If somebody complained, we could say, what are you talking about? That's classic fiction, that's Dafty Dumarier, that's Edgar Allan Poe. For example, they do an episode that's basically the W. W. Jacob short story The Monkeys Paul, The Tale of the Phone Police had echoes of George or and season two is The Tale of the Dream Machine as common ground with Stephen King's short story Word Processor of the Gods. But aside from the aforementioned fog rip Off episode, they also had one that was a riff on nous ferato. So they didn't hold to get here just literature only. But yeah, they definitely made sure a lot of times that they want my stories that had a precedent, so that they could fall back on that. But it sounds like nobody really complained. I was gonna say, supposedly they did not get one complaint from parents about this show, which is just I guess, a testament to how well they want the line of and not being explicit and gory but still scaring these kids, but not actually featuring anything that objectionable because I remember being terrible. Yes, it's it's so great anyway. As part of his herculean efforts, Mikail Location scouted all over Montreal for eerie, spooky places to shoot. They were granted permission to film in cemeteries, but there were laws against showing the real names on the headstones the duly departed on television, so their solution was to card in a bunch of fake foam tombstones that they would set up that they would to strategically block the names of the people from the shots. Uh and the fake ones all have different like Easter egg references to members of the production staff. There's a guy named Paul Doyle who's a story editor on the show, and he told the Globe and Mail that he remembered seeing one late at night in the editing bay, like doing his edits, and he saw one that said here lies blind Paul, which he assumed was a shot at his editing skills. But he said to this day, DJ denies he was commenting on my editing with that and for the scenes that were set in the deep dark woods, DJ Michhill said that they secured permission for an arbor retum to shoot there, but because of the protected animals and wildlife, he says, quote, you couldn't use any insecticides to kill the mosquitoes which swarm that place like a freaking horror movie. The crew would have these beekeeper outfits, good lord and gloves because it was just so vicious. And I remember the actress Mia Kirshna doing a soliloquy playing this possessed girl and this mosquito landed on her nose and she tried so hard to stay in character and then just said, I can't take this anymore. Oh man, that's sad. There was a location that he picked, a water purification plant dating back in the thirties that had a bunch of these enormous tanks that the location scout took him to and it inspired the episode The Tale of the Hatching, which is about a private boarding school that turns out is run by lizard people. That that's the one with the terrifying skull monster thing. In the indoor pool. My sister was afraid of indoor pools. She might still be to this day because of watching That's the one I was thinking of we're talking earlier. Yeah, that one's terrifying. Yes, yes, funnily enough, this is the second most famous water purification plant in Canada. Um, there's one called the RC Harris water Treatment plant that is famously used in a bunch of different movies because it looks like this. It is a big, imposing like public works building. Um. It has been used in Half Baked. It has been used in John Carpenter and the John Carford movie In the Mouth of Madness. It is played a mental institution in Strange brew Uh. It played in the Silent Sane Asylum in RoboCop the television series. It plays a children's hospital in the cockroach themed horror movie mimic Um, and it is just recently featured in Nightmare Alley, the other Giarma Dotro movie. So you do. You could do a tour of Canadian water treatment plants that have been featured in horror media and it would be two stops long. But what a rewarding afternoon that would be anyway, Writer director Ron Oliver did explain that there were some growing pains involved in shooting this thing in Canada. He said, even though DJ had assembled a really good, smart crew, they were primarily French, so it was a little bit tricky sometimes and we'd have communications breakdowns here there. I love that. Um. But yes, as many people have surmised over the years, the submitted for your approval line was in fact a direct nod to the Twilight Zone for those of you who are not familiar. Uh. That was how host and creator Rod Serling would introduce these shows segments, Um, can you do a Sertling? I almost need like the rhythm of I can't do his voice, but submitted for your approval? Submitted for your approval of the now? Yeah I can. I'm doing the kid from from Your Fair of the Dark? Yeah, no, I don't think I can. Uh. Well. The Twilight Zone was an important tonal reference for Michale. He described Are You Fair to the Dark as a mix of Twilight Zone and of course Alfred Hitchcock presents feeling that it slotted more into the suspense category rather than horror. Yeah. I agree with that. I mean that distinction is really interesting to me. D J McHale has talked a lot about the psychology of horror and how people with the most intense imaginations often react the strongest to it because it's less about what you're actually seeing on the screen and more about what you might see, And that's sort of the first rule of Hitchcock in suspense, the implication of what's behind the door is much scarier than you actually seeing it. And Spielberg did the same thing, although by necessity in Jaws, you know, you rarely see the shark, and honestly, when you do, it's kind of a leftown. Whatever is your head is scarier. Um. McHale has also talked about being traumatized by scary visuals as a kid. He said, I'd see a horror movie and I don't even remember what the horror movie was about. I just remember the face of some horrible thing. I'd have nightmares about that face. So in the beginning, I was thinking, I don't want to present any seeding horrible image that may stick with a kid. But then he sort of slipped and put in stuff like that horrifying clowns. Yeah, yeah, And I mean for me, it was the little girl in the Tale of the lonely ghost. Remember that like little girls, like the little girl from the Ring. But she's in this room where me all over the wall like good guys. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. Speaking of children, now we must get to the Midnight Society, a key element of the show that McHale innovated and then quickly decided he hated. Just I love how apathetic he seems towards these kids, and he admitted that because they only filmed for like a week or two each season, they didn't really bond like most casts do. Like you mentioned earlier. In an interview with Vox, he talks about how the one and only team bonding trip that they ever took backfired on him terribly. Said, I took them all bowling one night, and I hurt my back that night bowling. To this day, it still bothers me. I took the Midnight Society bowling, and now I have a bad back. Sign up. Who do you think hated kids more? Richard Donner, the director of the Goonies, or DJ McHale, Are you in front of the doc I mean Richard Donner had to deal with Corey Feldman film Fair Fair. Anthology shows are really tough to do, and they're really tough to get popular because people watch their favorite TV shows to see what's going to happen to their favorite characters. Michale told Complex, what's the continuing story, what's going to happen to build this week? Well, anthology shows don't have that. It's a different cast every week. So I said, Okay, we need a lynch pin that will tie this thing together every episode. We needed the same kids every week, who obviously would be the show's answer to Rod Serling. They're the closest thing to continuing characters we'd have on the show. But the fact is he continued. The whole time I was making that show, I cared so little about the midnight Society. It was an annoyance to me. The midnight society was never the interesting part about that show. The interesting part was the little movies that we made. It used to crack me up when people would say I like this midnight society better than that midnight society, or I like this kid in the midnight society better than that kid. I was always like, who cares, That's not what the show is about. He was right. Yeah, but admirably he did not half asset when it came to casting this crew, which he'd grow to hate. Despite living in Los Angeles, mchael embarked on what he actually called the Magical Mystery Tour, hitting Vancouver, Toronto, New York, and Montreal for casting sessions, and each those cities for a new cast of kids every season. And this grueling circuit had its drawbacks. Uh, he said. There was one year when I hit Montreal, I started feeling sick. I had a fever. I came out of the shower in the hotel one day and I saw a red dot on my chest and thought, oh no. So I called the production doctor and I said, I think I have chicken pox. I've never had chicken pox. We traced it back. I would see thousands of kids to some audition in Vancouver. That's how I got chicken pox. I was quarantined for ten days in Montreal while prepping for the show, he said, the worst part of his quarantinem's Canadian television. But he was happy that both the Nicks he was He's in New Yorker, he said, but both the Knicks and the Rangers were in the playoffs that year, so he got to watch them rather than curling, which was what was usually on to hold up watching sports and like Kids in the Hall, oh Man, Despite his vicious dislike for these children, McHale realized their value for the show, Uh, telling Vulture at this is the thing that's separated are you Afraid of the Dart? From other shows. A writer would come and say that they had this idea for, say, a haunted car, and I would say, that's cool, but who were the kids. I want a story about a couple of kids that have something going on in their lives that is real and has a real kind of conflict that we would be interested in watching even if we didn't find the haunted car. We had real kids with real interesting stories that intersected with whatever the spooky thing was that week. It's more interesting storytelling something beyond whoa the Boogeyman is scary? Yeah, I mean getting more into his whole psychology of you know what, actually, what kind of scary stories affect people? That's really interesting to me. He said. He didn't want to do things for the sake of a metaphorical explosion, but rather something that was kind of more insidious the emotional component. Yeah. In an interview with Complex, Michail explained how the writers quote rarely played the horror for laughs. There was some humor in there, but we didn't go the goose bumps route of the over the top silly scenes. We tried to make it feel real, to make the characters feel real. And there is a really interesting piece and Mashable a few years back by Jess Jojo called how We faced much more than the Dark and Are You Afraid of the Dark? And in this piece she speculated why these stories struck a chord for young people, especially at this time when they're entering puberty, when they sort of felt alienated from their own bodies. I like to quote some of it. She said. Kids were both the tellers and subjects of the tales, uniquely grounding Are You Afraid of the Dark? And teen perspectives and an important time in their maturation. That's why it had such a lasting impact on our generation. From oral traditions to cognitive behavioral therapy, communal narratives serve a powerful function in society, and Are You Afraid of the Dark gave that power of storytelling the kids, helping them confront the real horrors of teen life with its plots, villains, and moral resolutions. Many of the tales and Are You Afraid of the Dark can be seen as mixed metaphors for the sense of displacement wrought by puberty, making things used to like now seemed childish and repulsive. Dark but it gets darker. The show also captured an even uglier, darker reality from the coming of age experience Only You Can Save Yourself adults who are regularly portrayed as so comically ineffectual that they needed to be saved by the kids whom they previously disregarded. That's why we love horror and why it's been a mainstay since the first stories were ever told. We use scary stories to reconcile with the unknowable, and in the case if Are You Afraid of the Dark, it's the unchartered fears of youth, like rejection, isolation, neglect, powerlessness, and the loss of innocence. Crucially, Are You Afraid of the Dark was also willing to let those heroes fail. Not every story told by the Midnight Society, and it happily sometimes protagonists fell victim to an eagle too big for them to overcome. Just like life. It's perhaps no accident that DJ Mhill's own daughter couldn't watch this show as a kid because she found that just too terrifying. He later told Vulture, my daughter is a very vivid imagination, so even at eight years old, watching Afraid of the Dark was just too scary for her. I keep trying to get it to watch, but she wants nothing to do with it anyhow. Back to the kids that they cast. So the results of these grueling casting auditions, which yielded mostly Canadian actors mandated since this was Canadian production, was a bumper crop of young talent, many of whom would become huge stars, including Ryan Gosling. Michael wanted to cast the budding heart Throb, but he turned down Are You Afraid of the Dark in favor of doing the famous version of Mickey mouse Club. That one crazy year when Mickey mouse Club had Ryan Gosling, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears in the cast on that cast and not one of those people. How much of that suck these days? The Pete best of the Mickey mouse Club. Uh, that took two years in Florida, but Michael snagged Ryan Gosling when he journeyed back up to Canada after Mickey Mouse Club wrapped nev Campbell. Just a few years before her star making turns in The Crab and Scream, Campbell appeared Insode I am not making this up The Tale of the Dangerous Soup as the hostess of a restaurant called the Wild Boar, a restaurant renowned for its green, huge, dangerous soup priced at a hundred dollars a bowl in which the secret ingredient is fear. The secret ingredient is love. Damn it. Yeah. Hayden Christiensen pre Anakin Skywalker. Christensen played Kirk in theisode of the Tale of Bigfoot Ridge. He's also in the a from the afore Mentioned in the Mouth of Madness by John Carpenter. I just have I mentioned John Carpenter in every single episode of Too Much Information, because if I haven't, I'm not working hard enough. Maybe not The Spice Girls, but uh. Future American Pie star Eddie Kay Thomas had his first ever screen role in episode The Tale of the Curious Camera, Firefly and Surrender that he starred. Jewels State appeared in the season three episode The Tale of Watchers Woods and the Tale of the Unfinished Painting in season four, and Alicia Cuthbert was in this Well, I guess when d J mckel auditioned her to be in the second incarnation of the Bid Night Society, he completely forgot that she had already been in an episode already The Tale of the Night Shift and asked her who directed her, at which point she replied, you did, auburn. Yes. It was Cuthbert's first ever roll on camera apparently, but the real M v P of A Y A O T D. I owed. That's harder to say than Are You Afraid of the Dark? To me, no, J Barachel Judd Apatow stock cast players, skinny, Yeah, he right, co writes at all. He's the skinny kid with the black hair. He was in four episodes of Are You Afraid of the Far for which I believe makes him the most cast kid, and in his first one they drowned him to death in a pool. So he's a different Is he a different character? And everyone does he just keep coming back as ghost Kid, ghost kid, just spinning here, just were developing, Yeah, The Tale of Ghost Kid. More established guest stars included Melissa Joan Hart, who was four seasons into starring in close explains at all when she appeared in the Tale of the Frozen Ghost, Tea and Tomorrow Maori, who had been on Sister Sister for three seasons, they appeared in the Tale of the Chameleons. I remember that one figures getter Tara Lepinski started in the Tale of the Lootar Locusts and Boy Meets World. Star will friedle appeared in the Tale of the Long Ago Locket. That sounds like one of the ones that would have been into that sounds like a sad like fifties throwback thing. Also, Bombcat Goldthwaite and Gilbert Godfried front of the Bobcat Goldthwaite guests started in the Tale of the Final Wish and the Tale of Station One of nine point one, respectively. Godfried I didn't know this. He was a horrbuff um Ron Oliver who directed and wrote some of these some of the already Fred of the Dark Stuff Total site called Gaily dreadful Um that his bud Tony Timponi, who is editor of Fangoria magazine throughout its glory years, h that guy said Gilbert would just come into the star log and Fangoria offices in New York and just spend hours reading their back issues, which is adorable. Apparently, Bobcat just ripped his vocal cords to shreds while playing the Sandman in the Tale of the Final Wish because he just had to keep saying these limericks over and over again. They had nothing to do with the plot whatsoever. They were complete non sequiturs, and so we had no cues. So he kept flubbing his lines because there was just nothing to like spark whatever the next line would be for him, and so we had to do them take after take after take over and over and over, and it's just his voice was shot and he just was pounding honey and lemon and tea to preserve what was left of it, which is just hilarious considering he speaks ninety percent of the time as Yeah, so this is what broke him. That's my that's my Bobcat Cold. Rachel Blanchard, who was at the end at the time five years older than the rest of the society, appeared for three seasons. Her character trademark was I'm always in a bad mood. She went on the cat. Maybe that's why she's like old enough to drink, she's hanging out with like teenagers. Uh. She wanted to start in the Clueless TV series and Seventh Heaven and as Sally in Flight of the Concord. Yeah, she's the most beautiful girl in the room. That's right. I used to play that song at parties and hope that the most beautiful girl in the room would assume I was playing it about her and be flattered and come over and talk to me. And that worked exactly zero times. Um I got Playing acoustic guitar at parties in college was such a massive fail. It's yeah, I know. I mean, piano at least gave you a little bit more mystique as like the quiet, sensitive guy, and it was louder, so it was harder to a nor. But it also meant that you were mostly facing the walls you played, whereas with guitar you couldn't help but look around, like hopefully and see who was noticing you. It was It was bad. Did you ever do that? Uh? No? I knew a guy who used to play Blackbird two girls at party. Well, no, there's a twist. He would he would walk up to and be like, hey, I you know. I'm sorry. I really don't usually do this, but that's a terrible start right there. Yeah, well I saw you standing there and I just I had to write. I wrote this and he wouldn't sing it. He wouldn't say but he would just play like the fingerpicking bar that everyone could play it. And his reasoning was that if any girl didn't recognize Blackbird, they deserved to be scammed on by him. I mean, would they laugh if they did? This is stupid? This is did he read the game? Is? No? This is pre the game. That was my party piece too. That was like the most probably this day, the most complicated guitar part I know how to play. I got bad news for your buddy. It's not that's not that it's not that complicated. Oh oh, this is being mean to Jordan again. Charles S. Dutton guest starred Charles as friend of the Pod. Charles Dutton, who appeared in the tail of Cutter's Treasure, has a glowing review of the show in Clicksteen's book Slimed. He said, without a doubt it was very, very, very well produced. It wasn't like anything you would see on Saturday morning, those rather inexpensive kind of half hearted children's programs. I never looked at it as a kids show. I didn't leave their thinking we had done anything amateurish. I looked at it as if we were doing a small movie. Uh. Frank Gorsch, famous as the Riddler on the sixties, Adam West, Batman, and Robin Show guested in the Tale of the Carved Stone. That's a good get. That's a really good get. I feel like we got to give a special shout out to a guy by the name of Ross Hall, who played what I assume was the leader of the Midnight Society, since he's the only guy I can really remember, the one with the glasses. Uh. Ironically, for later seasons, he had to take the lenses out of said glasses because the glass was reflecting off the studio lights. They do that for everybody that Joe Deschanel hasn't had in all those episodes of New Girl, she doesn't have any anything in her. That always surprised me because I feel like you could you must be able to tell when it just goes straight through there's no glass or plastic. Yeah, but I mean it's it's easier than rotoscoping out every individual reflection. Uh. If you were to ask me to describe this guy, I'd say he looks like a TV weather man, and funnily enough, that's exactly what he grew up to be. Ross Hall is a meteorologist for the Canadian Weather Network, and he says that I don't know why I find this as funny as I do. D J. McHale would help direct the campfire scenes by keeping his voice low and spooky, like he was a member of the Midnight Society, just to like keep everyone in the mood, which is creepy but also kind of cute. It's cute. Yeah, he wanted to get him in the get in the spirit. Despite episodes which featured children, um you know, dying uh m. Kale has said repeatedly there was very little pushback from Nickelodeon about episode or as he had feared initially, parents writing in with concerns about the show's content. Yeah, this is really surprising to me, considering the kids died in a really spectacular spectrum of ways, including but not limited to, a love struck kid is violently drowned in the school pool by a swamp monster. That's the tale of the dead Man's Float. Maybe that's the one I was thinking of earlier in the Pool, a teen is haunted by the trauma of his dead best friend whose life he failed to save. That's the Tale of the Shiny Red Bicycle. A girl gets locked in a room and forgotten until she starves to death. That's the Tale of the Lonely Ghost, which features that the little girl in the room where she just wrote helped me all over the walls. Yeah. Scary. Uh. And then there's another where a ghost boy freezes to death after hiding in the woods to get away from a criminal, the Tale of the Frozen Ghost. So yeah, it's not just that they it's not just that the show featured death, but really kind of sobriety, Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but there was one thing that the network did mandate in uh ninety one episodes of the show, all of which featured a campfire. Only once do you see a child light a match? I have heard twice, But we will come back to that. Well, he said, you couldn't show kids striking a match because they didn't want to teach kids how to do that and risk some kids accidentally burning down their homes. There's one that did slip through, he said, an episode I directed. Mia Kirshner was to star in that episode, and in the scene she had to light a lantern and she didn't know how to strike a match. He said, we practically had to fake it because she was like, I've never done this before, which I guess maybe gives credibility to Nickelodeon's theory that we didn't want to teach kids how to light a match. Um, it might have also been a fire hazard because they used real foliage to dress these interior sets where they shot the campfire scenes, and because they would shoot them in these marathon sessions without striking the set in between. By the end of it, like we two or three, the whole thing would basically be a dried up tinder box that could go up at the proverbial strike of a match. He said they nearly got shooting shut down at one point because the the fireman came to the set and we're like, you got a lot of a lot of dead foliage and branches and stuff lying around, and you're shooting your fire a camp Yeah, sitting around your campfire seeing malties coming in. Yeah, your hoser. I read that there was another match incident that slipped through UH during one episode when the Midnight Society we're trying and failing to light the fire. They lit a match, but the logs wouldn't burn, which is maybe the worst lesson to show kids like, don't worry, nothing will happen. But then one of the other kids succeeds in lighting the fire by rubbing two sticks together, the old caveman method. You're an eagle scout. Did you ever succeed in doing that by rubbing the two sticks together starting to fire? I've never seen anyone do it, not a single person. For one of the levels. You have to light a fire successfully with all you get our two matches, and then you if you go over, you flunk. So it's just like you have to make sure you're a really well constructed tinder situation. I've seen people do with lynnon, but I've never seen the rubbing the two sticks together thing. Um. Speaking of campfires, as no doubt the listenership of this show has been waiting for with the big moment, bated breath, the true nature of the mysterious dust sprinkled on the campfire at the beginning of each episode, drum roll, please punch that in might give us a drum roll. Uh, it's powdered non dairy creamer and glittering. Give me a thousand guesses. I never would guess that. Um, that stuff's petroleum based and it actually burns, MacHale told Vulture. Then we added some pire technics in the fire itself. But CREMERA does burn and gives off a little smoke, he said, Crema. But involved in the Vulture article, they actually right. He may have been using it as people refer to clean X for tissues. It was not the actual brand Crema, because actor Daniel De Santos said in a different interview to The Globe and Mail, I came on the third season, was so excited for the magic dust using the fire, But it's just a bag of coffee, mate and glitter. So if you were a loved one worked on the set of Are You Afraid of the Dark, and you can confirm the brand of non dairy creamer used to make the fire do its thing. Well, venmo you five bucks my eternal offer anyone gives you what you want. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Speaking of what we'll loosely call special effects the SFX chief, and Are You Afraid of the Dark is a guy named Steve Kolback, who later went on to win a whole bunch of Emmy's for Game of Thrones. You just italicized Game of throats. No one's gonna read a script that we're reading right now? Is you going through on the Google die? I have a disease. Let me work as Heigel's copy editing my script, but no one will ever see um. Special effects guy has talked about how Are You Afraid of the Dark was an important training ground for him because, in his words, they could never afford to fake things. For example, the twisted claw that was used in one episode that was just a petrified turkey claw, which is gross. That's the monkeys episode. Yeah, you're right, you're right, yes, yes, yes, but without you know, budget or technology for c g I, they had to get creative. And he's talked about how in the episode The Tail of the Headless Horseman, he had to figure out a way to show a boy getting chased across a bridge and then the horse and its writer bursting into flames. And ironically, for the last season a Game of Thrones he had the workout a similar effect based on what he learned on Are You Afraid of the Dark, which I think is funny. And speaking of ways, the influence of All for the Dark has lived on I heard a rumor I wasn't able to confirm this that m Night Shamalan was supposedly inspired to make the sixth sense from a season three episode of Value for You the Dark call the Tale of the Dream Girl. And this episode centers around a boy who's ignored by everyone around him except for a girl who turns out to be a ghost. I guess he's the right demographic for that. I just love to imagine this guy, Steve Colbeck on the set of Game of Thrones and they're like, oh God, how are we gonna set this horse on fire? And he takes a long dragon of a cigarette and he's like, kid, a story to tell you. I'll get your flaming horse with you want flaming noise, I'll get your noise. Uh. Interestingly enough, and this ties into our next BIB. Writer director Ron Oliver remembers a specific episode that nicol Nan did have notes on the Werewolf yarn the Tale of the Full Moon, which he said he heard studio chatter that it was a bit to quote John Waters meets David Lynch, which rules um. He added that he thought that one in particularly was banned in Britain because two kids break into the werewolves house and the British didn't want to seem like they were condoning breaking and entering. Um, because there's so proper people die. How many people die in the serious The children drowning is fine, it's the it's the b andy we're really worried about. Um. But that particular episode was written by Oliver Ron Oliver to have a specific emotional subtext. It was his first script for the show, and as a gay man. He said, it is definitely about a family dealing with how to tell their kid that this uncle is gay. In our case, I just made him a werewolf. But the rest of it is the same. As the father says, there are lots of different kinds of families. Jed, this is ours, um, and then he added, I do know a couple of our kid actors came to me many years later, having come out as gay and thank me for being a positive influence as an out gay man in the industry. As far back as the late eighties. So I'm proud of that. And this dies into the next part, which is where we continually talk about as we talk about all these Nickelodeon shows of this era, of how progressive they were in their in their casting. There were two big mandates with casting, Michale told Vox in two thousand fifteen. Besides good diversity was a big one in the oral history Slimed. The actor Jason Ala Sherrian told Clickstein DJ McHale was way ahead of his time in making sure that his show represented all kids, not just white kids. There was absolutely no problem with their being interracial relationships on the show. And again, this wasn't commonplace. They didn't think it was even worthwhile to comment on it. Instead, they just played like it was normal, which is the greatest testament to representing diversity on a show. And hilariously, Michale told Vox that quote often a kid got nixed by Nickelodeon because they were too Disney, apple pie, freckles, cute, over the top acting. They were like, this is a Disney kid, get rid of him. He got to Sigott Shopic examp as knee kids, and I think that this is seems talking. I think this is one of the things that made Nickelodeon so great. If it's smacked of Disneyanna, they wouldn't do it, and their efforts resulted in an n double, a CP Award nomination, and gender wise, Ron Oliver added in the slimed oral history, I'd like to say, Are You Afraid of the Dark was a boys show, but I have a feeling that it was split down the middle because we'd switch off every episode with there being a girl protagonist or a boy protagonist. They were quite conscious of that at Nickelodeon. We were one of the first shows that actually tried to straddle the middle line and succeeded at it. Front of applause for Aren't Afraid of the Dark, um that iconic theme music speaking of nothing in particular segue Incredibly for a show of this nature and one produced in the cut rate, poutine drenched wasteland of Montreal, Are You Afraid of the Dark had an original score for every episode. Uh Michael told Vulture we scored each show individually like there were short films, which necessary because each show was so different with spooky stories. Music plays a huge part uh the show's music director and composer Jeff Zon explained to art of the title dot Com. I thought it best to bring in about ten writers and have them write samples of their work, and I would direct the process. We found two fabulous composers to share the load. At some point we discussed the opening sequence, but I don't remember if they gave me any footage or a script first, or if I wrote the music alone. I'm pretty sure I wrote a music piece about one minute long with just the outline of the series in my head, and they edited the visuals to that. It turned out to be the horror of commercial air travel in Canada that inspired the theme. I was actually sitting in door Vile air part in Montreal and I started singing theme awaiting for my planes on continued. I just thought about the series about mystery hauntings, scary supernatural things, thrillers and kids, and it came to me. I didn't have music paper, so I scribbled out the notes on a napkin. I really liked it and kept singing it. Then when I played it on piano, the important countermelody came to me, which I used as an introduction and for linking material it's funny to me. In that interview, they keep asking him, They're like, what do you think is like makes a successful TV theme? And multiple time he brings up the Sopranos opening credits Alabama threes woke up this morning, so that's what he considers it. It's great, it's great, but a song whips that was my dad's workout song for the longest time. I will always be fused with my dad on the elliptical machine. Uh, you know, it's funny. I I just listened to the ru Pha of the Dark theme as we started this episode, Like, how do you even hum that piece of music? Yeah, it's like it does not have a particularly stirring melody. No, No, I mean it's just it's it's a it's an amazing sound design. But like, yeah, I so he's talking about like singing it to himself at the airport. I'm just I can't imagine that. But but the way it pairs with the visuals is so good. That opening sequence is incredible because, I mean, pretty much across the board, it manages to avoid cliche. It's not like, you know, a coughin and all like tales from the Trick type stuff. It's like a rowboat bobbing on the water at night, or like thrusted creaking swing sets. Stuff that's scary. But I can't articulate why. It just is all unsettling and unnerving. It's so good. Um. Once a debut, the show was basically a lynch pin of the Snake programming block, but the placement actually kind of came after they had everything in hand. The ratings were really really high, Michael said, I don't know who the guy or woman was who came up with the idea, but they said, you know, there's a group of people on Saturday night are too young to be on date and too old to be in bed, and they're watching TV. And that's when they created Snake. It was as much Snake as Are You Afraid of the Dark? If not more. That became a phenomenon. He continued, I really tipped my cap to Nickelodeon for putting the right shows on at the right time, which nobody had done before. Nobody had ever programmed Saturday nights for kids. Usually it was just Saturday morning programming for kids. But Nickelodeon had the foresight to program Saturday nights as well. That was really in so the first Snake line up went from eight to ten pm with four half hour shows. The eight pm show is a sitcom. Closer explains it all Melson Joan Hart. The eight thirty pm shows a comedy variety show roundhouse. Then the nine pm show is really what they built the whole thing around that was Rent and Stimpy, which was the huge breakout hit at the time, and then if you were staying up that late to see the latest thing that was Are You Afraid of the Dark at nine thirty. Yeah, the sequencing on Snick was really brilliant, like a good album. I mean, the rent and snipy humor really put you in the right head space for are You Afraid of the Dark? Um. Yeah, and I never really thought about the fact that it was on later weeded out some of the younger kids who probably shouldn't be watching that anyway. There's sort of a bizarre continuity to this show that we alluded to a little bit earlier because of the rights situation um, which is best explained in McHale's words. He said, when we finished our run, after we had done sixty five episodes, and sixty episodes was the golden number back then I went back and did a deal with Disney for some other things. The reason I went back to Nickelodeon to do two more seasons of Are You Afraid of the Dark was not because of the network. It was because of the Canadian producer who had the rights to the show all around the world. All of their five year licenses on the show we're running out, so they wanted foreign broadcasters to re license the show and to sweeten the pop They said, how about if we make new episodes? So I agreed to do more, as always agreed, he said Vulture. Nickelodeon played a lesser role in the second group of episodes because they weren't the primary broadcaster anymore, but they still wanted the show and aired all the episodes. For the most part, though there were no changes made other than to cast a new midnight Society. The biggest difference in this second stretch of shows is that McHale was just not as involved as he had been in the first run. He was not physically in Montreal for the filming. He was not involved in the day to day production except to kind of offer comments from afar. He didn't direct any more episodes, but he did work on the scripts from home. I worked with the editors and the and the music supervisors. Um again d J. McHale quote machine, he said, So if you like the show, you can congratulate me. If you didn't like the show, it was also my fault. Um. But by the time the second incarnation of the show hit, Nickelodeon, he said, was already moving away from doing dramas, which is a decision that he puts down primarily to budget. Comedies are much cheaper to do, he said, and kids love comedies, so they went with the lowest common denominator. They figured they had a better chance of getting a hit with a comedy than drama. The networks just want to go the easy route, which is comedy. And then he added that he actually developed another horror show from nick following Are You Afraid of the Dark in two thousand or two thousand one. He said, it took two years for this show to develop until they finally said, you know, DJ, we're just not doing dramas anymore. We just don't want to do them. It's a shame because this show actually seems pretty cool. It's called The Strange Legacy of Cameron Cruz and it was about a psychic kid who was solved ghost stories and other supernatural cases. And they actually made a pilot of this with Jesse McCartney, which is just yeah. But McHale really never felt like the network was all in for All You Afraid of the Dark, probably stemming from the fact that they originally passed on his pitch the first time around, and this sense continued even after the show became a big hit. He later said, I've always felt that since Are You Afraid of the Dark ended, I've never felt the love from Nickelodeon. Maybe it's the whole comedy thing since they've been getting away from dramas, but I never felt like they thought, Wow, we really have this gem that we have the complete rights to. We can show it until the magnetic particles fall off. It really it did, like I mean, it's just what you said. It did kind of just go away after a while. Yeah. There was, however, very nearly and Are You Afraid of the Dark feature film back in the late nineties, Michael said, I did write an Are You Afraid of the Dark movie called The Tale of the Wicked Gift for Paramount. It was an original story about the Boogeyman, who was conjured centuries before by an ancient tribe as a means to discipline children who part The project never really went anywhere because the folks who ran Paramount at the time didn't get that you could make a movie like that, meaning horror light. They felt that horror to either be true horror or Scooby Doo funny. It's too bad. I went back and read that script recently and it's really good. It's never too late. Meanwhile, I was announced in November two eleven that a film adaptation of the series wasn't worked at the Paramount from a guy who would go on to write it, Gary Doberman, and producer Matt Kaplan, who did to All the Boys I've loved before with extreme workman like director DJ Caruso, who did Disturbia and Triple X, Return of Xander Cage on the big screen, episodes of The Shield, Smallville and Dark Angel on TV would have been directing, so the movie certainly would have had a director who would have directed it. The film originally had October two nine release date, but eight months before that, Paramount just quietly removed it from their schedule, which is a bummer and sadly this is as good at time as anything to delve into why the show took so long to make it to streaming. As Michael explained, it's absence on streamers to complex, saying the show is co owned by Viacom Nickelodeon on one side, and then this Canadian company Signar, who were the show's finances. They have complete control over it. Um So for a long time you could only watch it on like YouTube essentially. Now I think it's on Paramount Plus, uh maybe even on Netflix. Jordan's I'm still seeing it on YouTube quite a bit. I don't know. I mean seemingly like illegal versions. Not to blow up anybody's spot. But anyway, as Michael had moved into Young The Realm of y, a young adult fiction, I mentioned a complex. I actually have a pitch out to Amazon now to do a similar series, and I am waiting to hear back from them. Now it's online companies who are doing interesting things. It's Netflix and Amazon. If Amazon doesn't want to do the spooky show I've pitched, I'm going to do it as a book series. So obviously that didn't happen. Yeah, I think he has a book series now called pen Dragon. Yeah, he's a successful like fantasy author. At this point, I can't imagine Michale warmed much to Nickelodeon when the network brought Are You Afraid the Dark back for a reboot in twenty nineteen and didn't ask him to participate. This is according to an article on dennive Geek. Apparently this left some bitter feelings in bad blood with the network, but at least he was complimentary about this reboot, or at least the first of the three seasons. He told Don of Geek. One of the things I said that the producer was be careful because you're making a show that people who are in their thirties have great memories of, and chances are you're not going to live up to those memories, and those memories are probably better than the show was. Frankly, you're not really making a show for them, because they've moved on. You're really making a show for the same age group that we made it for, and they did. I think they hit just the right tone. I think they've done the show a good service. I'd be really upset if they somehow ruined it, but they didn't, so that's good. Nudging accepted. Did you know there's a book series? Didn't? Undoubtedly to compete with the Goose Bump series created by John Peel. Unfortunately not the iconic British DJ the same name, but a different John p a different British John Peel who specializes in TV series tie ins and novelizations. Oh my god, wait, I think he did one for the Avengers movie with Ray Fines and Uma Thurman. Written under John Vincent or Nicholas Adams. It was John Peel because I remember thinking, wait a minute, m A Peal is a movie and John Peel? Yeah? Did you read his Carbon San Diego, Doctor Who or Star Trek novelizations? No? None were English enough for me. What about his series James Bond Jr. Oh that is English enough for me. But I didn't read that. Uh there was an argue afraid of the Dark board game? Huh? What was there? A video game? Kind of shocked there wasn't, or like an educational computer game or like a Doom related like no, okay, well, I'd like to throw in a quick it belongs in the museum segment. The clown doll from the season three episode The Tale of the Crimson clown was put on eBay and sold for five nine dollars, and it was later resold apparently for half a million dollars. I have not been able to confirm this, but it's shown up on various trivialisticals So make of that what you will. I just found that interesting, well, you know, for a Y A O T D fans um. The show's second revival began in October was renewed for a second and third season, the most recent of which premiered just this year July of two. So there you go. That's fun. They get you got that going for you? Which is which is nice? I am afraid of jinxing what has been one of our shorter episodes on a sway without detours into international maritime law. But to be honest, and to be more to the point, as just a horror nerd, you know, I have nothing but good things to say about Are you afraid of that dark? I'm I'm happy that there was nothing creepy, like like actually creepy lurking under the hood here, and that it was a well made series made with love that people are still getting joy from. So allow me to close this out by saying submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society. This has been the Tale of Too Much Information. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan run Talk. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum on the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. 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