R.L. Stine's 'Goosebumps': Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of My 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 too Scholastic book Fair staffers of Spooky Season. I'm Alex Heigel, I love you so much right now, and I'm Jordan run Talk and Jordan's Today we are notching uh t m I first by covering our very first book. Wow, that's that's our first book. That's nuts, although I can't think of a better way to kick it off. Who is this? Or Lolita um this? Or Warren Peace this or Myra Breckinridge Well book series and TV show and movie. No, we're not talking about Lee Child's Jack Reacher series. We're talking about Mother Truck and goose Bumps, Jordan's What's Your Beef with the Bumps? O beef, no beef, nothing but love. I I spent all my spare pocket money as a kid on these books. I literally used to measure chores in terms of how close it would get me to obtaining a new goose Bumps book with my allowance. I was never in a Harry Potter was never an animals. It's never in the Lord of the Rings or anything like that. All about goose Bumps. Not even to choose your own adventure versions of Goosebumps. No, I wanted straight classic, slappy from another living dummy. One of the most perfect literary villains. Say Cheese and Die, and it's equally good sequels, say Cheese and Die again. Brilliant. Collecting these it was like collecting trading cards or something. They just were so colorful and the graphics were so evocative, you know, I mean, I hear all these stories about you know, our parents generation would buy Sargeant Pepper the album and go home on the bus and read the album cover and try to study it for clues and stuff, because it was just there was so much happening in that cover. That's what I used to do on the ride home from the bookstore with the Goosebumps books. Like the covers, there was just so much happening there. I loved it so much. The only downside for me it was really this sort of vague sense of day after Christmas depression that I would feel after finishing one of the books. What was it, something like sixty two books in the original series. I must have had at least fifty at very least. They gave me so much joy. I loved them. I think I was somewhere in there I wrote earlier three dozen, but now I can't remember if I because I don't think you could always get them in order, so I think I was kind of catch just catch can and hopped around like, oh yeah, but also you don't you don't have to read them. You're not missing anything if you're like reading them out of order. They weren't connected. There were ones that didn't really interest me, Like I was never really into the animal ones. I was more into the weird creepy like there was one about like a magic set with like a rabbit on the cover, I remember, and the dummy ones, and I was like the Abominable Snowman of Pasadena, Like all these just kind of weird, like off kilter stories as supposed to, like things with ooze and guts and creepy animals and stuff that wasn't really my thing. I think my favorite stay Out of the Basement, because it has that iconic cover of hand reaching the plant, monster hand reaching out of the basement. Haunted mask is also really really good one that all time book cover stolen from Halloween three, the movie Everything's People. Just John Carpenter Man. Everyone knows him in every episode well, from the winding road that R. L. Stein took to become a fabulously wealthy children's horror magnate, to the planned feature film adaptation of the series debut by Horror Film Royalty, to Stein's relationship with his fellow horror icon Stephen King. Here's everything you didn't know about goose Bumps. Robert Lewis stein Vinson. That's not his name. His real name is Robert Lawrence. Nine was born on October in Columbus, Ohio, and started writing short stories and jokes at the age of nine on a typewriter he found in the attic of his home. He says this constantly in interviews. I never wanted to be scary. I only wanted to be funny, and then he would shortly after get it nicer typewriter for his bar Mitzvah present. Finding an old typewriter in your attic sounds like the start of one of his books. Yeah, exactly. Uh, my family was very poor, he told The Guardian. There were five of us. We lived in this tiny little house on the edge of a very wealthy suburban community in Ohio, three doors from the railroad tracks. Again, it sounds like a plot from one of his books. I love that. I can't tell if he's putting this next interviewer on, but in an undated interview with The Strand magazine, he says he's never learned how to type properly. He said, I'm totally left handed, and I just started typing with my pointer finger, nothing else, just one finger, not even two. And I've now written three d books on this finger. My typing finger is totally bent, totally curved from all these books. I don't know my dad types in a similar way, like I know a lot of people who can do the hunt and peck method. So yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's true anyway. He says, I never planned to be scary. I always just wanted to be funny, told the Huffington Post and many many other people. It's just like his stock SoundBite answer. He said, I'd be typing up these funny stories but I don't know why, and my mother would be outside my door and she'd say, what's wrong with you? Go outside? And play. Stein also drew inspiration, as a lot of kids from his generation did, from the groundbreaking tales of the Crypt comic series, as well as movies and the Twilight Zone. A lot of the Goosebumps titles are these fifties horror movies my brother and I saw every week. He told up post it Came from Beneath the Sea, became a goose Bumps book called it Came from Beneath the Scene. That kind of thing. In particular, he started in movie called Dead of Night where event Triuliquist has a dummy that comes to life, as being particularly formative on his signature character Slappy, as well as a chapter in the original Pinocchio where Pinocchio falls asleep with his feed on the stove and burns them off. I don't remember that that book is wild, Yeah, the original Italian book. Yeah, I had it as a kid. That's really upsetting cool. I think he likes squashes, Jimminy cricket or something like. Yeah, it's pretty wild. Um, like everyone his age, he loved Twilight Zone, calling Rod Serling a hero of mine. His tastes are really really funny. We'll talk about Ray Bradberry in a second um. He loved Kurt Vonneguett. He has also called P. G. Wodehouse his hero of the Jeeves and Booster books. Yes, very much. Although he's funny, like, he doesn't that sort of English sardonic, almost Hitchcock like sense of humor. I'm surprised skills insult comics for like slappy yeah, but I mean, I don't know. I'm thinking of like all the the Albert Hitchcock presents stuff, which I don't think he's really mentioned much of, but that seems to have that that wary like if you look at interviews with him, he has that kind of the way Hitchcock just kind of has this like wary bemuse the look in his face as like he turns and there's like an axe in his head or something like. Yeah, he is that really dark, dry sense of humor in interviews and when you see him on camera that, um he's very English. I feel like, so I can actually see him being a pig Woodhouse fan. Um Man. Those dummies really traumatized our parents generation. Like my mother forbade me from ever having Evangelik was dummy in the house because I mean, I get it. They're unnerving, like in the same way the clowns are unnerving, but so many people of a certain age that I know are just like hell no when it comes to those Ventulok was Dummies, which I was kind of drawn to because I love that whole Villian variety shows thing. Yeah, I was. I could see that night. Yeah, right, was Dead of Night, like a big horror movie. Um. It's interesting because it's an anthology horror movie one part of it. Um, and there's like an H. T. Wells adaptation, and it's interesting. Is a kind of a curiosity because horror films were banned during the war, like you were just not allowed to meet in Britain. Yeah, and it's from forty five, so they were like literally, you know, going against the against the law there. I was just wondering if that was like in the sun way that Jaws made people afraid of going to the beach that summer, or Psycho made people afraid of taking showers and stuff, like, if that movie really made an indelible mark on a certain generation for being freaked out by Ventril like with Dummies. Martin Marty Scorsese as a fan back to r L. He said, I didn't read books until I was nine or ten, but I was a real comic book freak. Talking to Time magazine in June of this year, there were those scary ec comics when I was a kid, Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. I loved those. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and one day my mom dropped me off at the library. The librarian said, Bobby, I know you like comic books. I have something else you might like, and she took me to a shelf of Ray Bradberry's stories. They were so wonderful, get your mind out of the gutter. They were so imaginative and so well written, and all had great twist endings. He also told the Strand that he liked Isaac Asimov and Robert Checkley, and he was able to meet Kurt Vonnegut, who is also a favorite of his, because Kurt Vonnegut's daughter loved goose Bumps, and that got him invited over to the Vonnegut's for dinner. That's adorable, that said Stein was, by his own admission, faint of heart. He said, I was scared of everything. He's talking to Barnes and Noble in seriously, I was a very fearful kid. I think this is one reason why early on I stayed in my room typing out stories. I was very shy and very fearful. I'd be riding my bike at night, and when I was bringing it back, I always thought someone was lurking in the garage. I always knew something was in there, so I tossed my bike in and run into the house. It was not a good way to be a kid, being fearful, but it helped me later on. I can remember that feeling of panic and use it. He's either lying or he's over it, because he told people as an adult, he's told people like he he doesn't get Garrett anymore like he was. He's talking about watching horror movies. He said he really like The Shining. He talked about watching it follows, but he's like, I'm just not afraid of things anymore. So either he grew out of it, or he's lying to all of us. Um So, if you were a loved one can confirm that r L sign is capable of feeling fear. I could provide proof of that to us. Well, that made you five bucks. Uh so young r L would actually distribute self penned joke magazines around school, to the point where his teachers actually asked him to stop. He claimed to g Q last year that he had written over a hundred joke books. The fun fact from that interview is that he's written forty books across the Fear Street and Goosebumps series that were set at summer camps. He never attended summer camp as a child. Did you ever sell stuff that you made to your elementary school class or middle school? No? No, I've been make what would I have made? I got in trouble because I was really in the robots in like first and second grade, and I used to take soda boxes and cover them with tinfoil and deal the stuff to make robots out of him. And I brought one in that I put the box on a remote control car and kind of like very furtively use the remote control car, you know, the remote to drive it around. But it looked like this robot I had made was like, if not sentient, like able to move, which was cool. So that I was I would like take orders to build some for my friends, But then of course I'd give it to him and the remote control car wouldn't be in it and they'd complain, and I got in trouble for doing that. No, um, perhaps uh, perhaps predicting a life spent in the arts. I had absolutely no instinct for making money as a child. Um if I got busted for frauds. So the two genders. R. L. Stein attends Ohio State University in Columbus, and because his family was so poor, he had to live at home while attending school with his brother as his roommate. But he found a new outlet for his comedic aspirations. He said, at the time, every college had a humor magazine. He's talking to the verge in Very few of them are left. They all pretty much died out in the sixties and were replaced by underground newspapers. Ohio State had this humor magazine called the Sun Dial, and that was the editor for three years. That's basically all I did in college. I never went to class, and I guess as the editor of the magazine, he was entitled to of the profits, which I don't ever remember being a thing for any of the school papers I was involved with. I mean different profits. Yeah. Um, So he used this money as profits from the college paper to move from Ohio to New York because he thought that if you wanted to be a writer, he had to live in New York. So Sein drove from Ohio and a white corvet. Speaking of Crazy Corvet, it's the book that Ralph Nader wrote, Unsafe at any Speed about there. I was supposed to be really unsafe, because I think the gas tank was. I might be thinking of the Pinto but that exploded in rear rear collisions. Yeah, this one, I think it was in the front. There was something about the way it was made made it very unsafe, and I think it exploded to well. It got r l in New York and he sold it for four dollars when he got there and got him to his first apartment, which is on Waverley Place, at the bottom of a shaft. Uh. He gave this. I guess the air shaft in the apartment, Like you know how the New York City apartment buildings are often built around a courtyard to get some air draft into the inner city, into the inner apartments. I guess he would have been at the bottom. He gave this great interview to the Village Voice all about his time in New York. In he said, I'd have to call out to get the weather forecast because I couldn't see out the window. My parents would send me news clippings of bad things that happened in New York three killed in bars and say, how can you live in that jungle? He was, in fact robbed at least once. I told the A V Club that his first adult purchase was a TV set, which was stolen from his apartment on the very same day he bought it. Oh did he do? David Lynch like? I feel like they would have been able to commiserate on these kinds of mean ready spooky tales while living in a spooky world or else. Steins still lives in New York. He's never left. He has a place in sag Harbor, but I think he still lives in the Upper West Side. He loves going to the met Opera. Something I learned um about him while researching this. What is his net worth? Roughly is in the hundreds of millions? It must be yeah, yeah, yeah, deserves. His first job as a writer in the Big Apple was making up interviews for women who ran six movie magazines out of Brownstone On. I never saw her dressed, he told The Verge. She was always in this brown bathrobe. She never went to the movies. She just did these magazines. I would come in in the morning and she'd say, do an interview with Diana Ross. So I'd sit down type type type type type, and I'd write an interview with Diana Ross, and she'd say, do an interview with the Beatles fine type type type. And we made it all up. It was a great job, and I had to write three or four of them a day, so it taught me to write really fast. It didn't last very long. How is this legal? If you were a loved one has ever been harmed by inaccurate celebrity magazines? Gest written by Robert Lewis Robert Louis Stein Vinson, you may be entitled to take part of class action class action lawsuit being brought against him by the podcast Too Much Information Anyway. After that, Robert H. R. L. I Can was weird calling him. Robert Stein went to what he called the worst year of my life, which was as an editor at a trade magazine for the soft drink industry. He told the Verge, I would write about new syrups and flip top cans, and there was a big debate back then over whether soda could come in plastic bottles. I had to cover bottlers conventions. He made a hundred forty dollars a week, and hilariously, the offices were across the street from the candy industry journals. Jordan, this sounds like your dream job. Actually, which way? Both of them? I guess, Yeah, you could moonlight for one. You could yeah, oh man, buddy, and maybe even you know, contribute freelance articles at Diabetes Weekly. In r L S, I'm gonna just gonna go with r L and r L S a V Club interview. He also said that he had spent some time writing for a men's magazine, which he described as the worst job he ever had. He said, I think it was a sex and sadism kind of magazine because they would give me all kinds of photographs, and they were always photographs of women all tied up. They were very vile photographs, and I would write short stories to go with the photographs. I was kind of ashamed, and I wasn't really proud of what I was writing, so I wouldn't sign my name. I signed the name of my high school principle instead. That's funny. Yeah, In nineteen sixty eight or nineteen sixty nine. Stein goes to work for Scholastic after answering an ad in The Times, and he becomes an editor for Scholastic Junior, writing history and geography articles and news stories, and eventually running his own magazine Search. He said it was a history and current affairs mag gazine for junior high kids, but written at a fifth grade level, sucking a mental floss. That's how I learned about reading levels. I learned all the vocabulary lists for fourth and fifth grade, and that's how I kept goose Bumps easy to read. So totally unrelated. Do you remember great illustrated Classics? Oh? I had so many. I love those books. They were even doesn't know. They were these abridged versions of every great piece of literature that you could imagine. There were hundreds of them, and I didn't realize until I was shamefully old that they were rewritten. Very I was very upset to learn that I had not actually reads. Oh yeah, no, great expectations all this stuff. I was Alexander Dumas, I Victor Hugo. I thought i'd read all those by age you know, eleven, And turns out I read a very dumb down version, but I love them anyway. In fact, to this day, I don't know which of those have actually read versus Like the Real Thing. Four years after search, Stein's dream came true when he was given Bananas, his own humor magazine, for which he wrote under the name. Yes, he was given Bananas and he thought, Gee, this is tops. I can move back to Ohio now. Um. Yes, he was given Lordship over Bananas, which was a humor magazine under the imprimature of Scholastic, for which he wrote under the name Jovial bob Stein. Some of the book titles from around this area that he wrote included How to Be Funny, Miami Mice, and A hundred one Kid Jokes. He also wrote novelizations of movies like Ghostbusters, Too Big Top, Peewee, and under different aliases James Bond, Indiana Jones novels like I Think the certainty that you have read a Jovial bob Stein work in everyone I'm speaking in the general population is approaching one like this guy has more written words out there than like. It's like him and Joyce, Carol Oates and Stephen King at like a distant third that is crazy Yeah. Anyway, Bananas was published five Scholastic Press for seventy two issues between nineteen seventy and then apparently they fired him or it folded unclear. That was like my life's dream, and when it ended, I thought I'd just coasted the rest of my career, he told NPR. I had no idea what was in store for me. I thought, God, I'm never going to shave again, never get dressed, to mental floss, adding that around this time he was making ends meet by writing Bazooka Joe comics and jokes for bubble Gum Rappers, along with Rocky and Bullwinkle and Mighty Mouse coloring books. What a time to write professionally when you could write Bazooka Joe comics and jokes for bubble Gum and earn a living wage. I just that's that's beautiful to me. Yeah. Different, It was a different time, perhaps a better one, certainly a kinder, gentler time. I'm always are you curious about the people who write the fortunes for Fortune Cookies? I wrote a script once in college about somebody that was their job, and I still I could have taken that as an opportunity to actually learn like what people who actually do write those what their lives are like, but never did. I'm curious if you were a loved one writes fortunes for fortune cookies. Please get in touch and high go with m au five bucks. As you meditate on that, We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages, stein Os is big break in horror. To another sadly unnamed horror writer, this is again in that Mental Flass interview. I was having lunch with Gene Firewell, the editorial director It's Glastic. At the time. She just had a fight with a young adult horror writer and said, I'm never working with him again. You could write a good teen horror novel, how about it. I hadn't read any teen horror novels, but I didn't say no to anything in those days. I ran into the bookshop and bought a bunch of horror books. So in Stein publishes his first novel, Blind Date, and it hit number one on the publisher's weekly list, and he follows it up with a few more in the same vein The Babysitter, Beach House, Hit and Run, and The Girlfriend. I've never heard of any of these. I don't think they're part of the fair Street series, but they are, like you know, they're under his name. Um. Bizarrely enough, he also finds time around this period of his life to co create and script the Nickelodeon show Eureka's Castle. What Yeah, times not a lot of people that know that. Uh no, A lot of people know that jovial Bob Stein, Um, she wrote. He told the A V Club. This came to him by a producer named kit Leybourne, who get this, remembered Stein from when they both worked on an animated project about the toy color forms. Remember color forms? Yeah, I remember color forms? Well, they could They helped Bob Stein get a job at Nickelodeon. How would you define like basically reusable stickers, right, Like that's the best thing. And I guess this is like a promotional video that they made and this guy, kid Layborne, remembered Bob from it and offered him the job of head writer on Eureka's Castle. Moral of the story is, kids, if you're a freelance writer, never turned down a job and be nice to everybody. Yeah, seriously, it's a good life lesson in general, but especially for freelancers. Wow, I'm just I'm I had the fact check this because I used to watch this all the time and I absolutely no idea written by R. L. Stein head writer. Damn, that's crazy. I'd always liked puppets, he said in the A V Club interview. I don't know, I think that's creepy. Anyway, the show debut, which is the same year that he launched the Fear Street series. I actually didn't know that Fear Street predated goose Bumps. Um, but they did. Fear Street is like the teen version of goose Bumps where they're like children are actually murdered. Yeah, they were adapted for Netflix, and the Netflix series is like super gory, like he They asked him about it and he was like, well, they really ratcheted up the gore. Um. Apparently he was also uh Bob jovial. Bob Stein was the first editor of Nickelodeon magazine. You know that, and he hated Barney. That also came up in the court of my research. He hated Barney because he thought it was lazy compared to the other kids programming that they were doing. Uh. He unsurprisingly for a man who's written more words than God by himself, he called the collaborative process of TV the hardest thing to get used to. I'd write a script, I'd bring it to a script meeting at this long table with all the puppeteers, producers, directors and all these people, and they would rip my script apart, and I would go home and write another one. And I wasn't used to that at all. I mean, that sums up my entire experience in my screenwriting program at school and college. Well, Eureka's Castle ended, which is two years after Stein launched Fear Street. I mean, even if you don't like this dude's output, he was he is a worker. So Eurku's Castle ends in which is two years after he launched Fear Street. Following his initial run of those one off teen horror books that we talked about earlier. He explained to the Huffington Post that the publisher wanted one a year, and I thought, oh, one a year. There must be a way to do a series. And then we started thinking about location and that kind of thing, and I thought, if I can think of a good name for the series, I'll be off to a good start. I always wonder why they don't move to Happy Street. It's funny he's He's talking multiple in multiple interviews I've read about him being like, They're like, how do you come up with ideas? And he's like, I start with the title and work and just work from there. He's been doing that since at least Fear Street. God love him. Fear Street is markedly different from what Goose Bumps will become, mostly because of its violence. Uh. He told the Village Voice, I killed a lot of teenagers, and I wondered why I liked it so much. Then I real time quote right there. Then I realized it's because I had one at home even better. But the series was an enormous success. I read that as of two thousand ten, they sold over eighty million copies of just the Fear Street ones. So that's not even factory in goose Bumps. Uh. And that has to have grown, because, like I said, they recently rebooted it for Netflix. I can't I've never heard of this series until this very moment. Wow, did you read any of those when you were done with They were too they were too too adult for me? Yeah? Um so Stein was leary too. In the words of my Glove. With the formula, I was very reluctant to do goose Bumps because I was doing Fear Street books for teenagers and I didn't want to mess up the older audience, he told Time. But it was actually Stein's wife, Jane, who actually was also the editor of the Goosebumps series, and her business partner, Joe Marrica, who convinced them to do the goose Bump series in the first place. He said, my editors, my wife and her partner said no one's ever done a series for seven to eleven year old scary books. We have to try it, and I didn't want to do it. This is him talking to the Today Show. But then he said, that's the kind of businessman. I Finally I said, all right, well, okay, if I can think of a good name for the series, maybe we can try a few of these. He's stuck in the Strand magazine. And a few weeks later, I was reading TV Guide and I was flipping through the TV listings and there was an ad at the bottom of the page and it said it's goose Bumps Week on Channel eleven, and there it was. I thought, God, that's perfect. It's the perfect name, right, So we tried it. I didn't have high hopes. No one had done it before. None of us really expected much. And I guess originally they were only contracted for four books, and uh it brought out a new one every two months. And talking to the Boston Globe and he said they just sat around. There was no advertising or hype. I didn't do any appearances. This was all before social media, so it was kids discovering the books and kids telling kids. It was entirely the Secret Kids Network. The second contract is for eight more books, and then it took off and he continued to eat news in When goose Bumps first came out, no one bought them. They sat on the shelves for months, and today with all the computers and everything, they would have been yanked off. They would have disappeared. But somehow, after three or four months, kids discovered them and took them to school and showed them the other kids. How did you first come across goose Bumps? I'm trying to remember. I don't remember. I think definitely like a Scholastic book fair. Oh yeah, actually, now that you mentioned it, probably me too. Um, just being a little weirdo that I was, I was like just the art sold to me we'll get to the art for real art. Um Stein's productivity is famous. At one point, he was writing a goose Bumps and a fear Street novel every month. He told The Village Voice, I never went out for lunch. I would do twenty pages a day. That's insane. It takes me a full day to do fifteen pages of these episode outlines. Well, I have all the information in front of me. We're researching, though, he's just banging out. Oh, that's even hard. Make stuff out, that's even harder. I can do it, he's he told Mental Flaws. I can do a goose Bumps outline, which is to thirty chapters in three or four days, but if it's not going well, it might take me two weeks. In that outline, he told Scholastic, I created a cheat sheet of every character in the book. I write down the character name and a few characteristics, and that really helps me. I work backwards from most authors, he told Huffpoe. Most authors have an idea for a book they write there writing later on, they think of a title. I have to start with the title. It leads me to the story. Kids always ask everyone asks, where do you get your ideas? I want to say, where do you get your ideas? Because we all get ideas. Mine actually come from thinking of the title first, where do you get your ideas? Punk hostile response to the kids. The guy's been one of the biggest authors in the world for like thirty years. I think he's probably pretty sick of PLASTI where he gets his ideas? Like you know. He also was a number of guiding rules for his books. For one, he told having Compost that he'll never set a book in New York because the suburbs are more relatable. He said, it's a superstition. I've never done it. A lot of kids don't know New York. They know a nice suburban backyard, but they don't know New York City. It's kind of elait in some ways. I think. I think it would make the stories more obscure for kids and secondly for goose bumps. He said, I have to make the kids know that what's happening in the book couldn't really happen, that it's just a fantasy. And then when I write the Fear Street books or an adult book, I have to make people think it could happen. It's kind of the opposite but he also admitted that he didn't have the formula nailed down right out of the gate, and says that the first book in the series, Welcome to Dead House, some of these titles are very bad. It was too scary. He told Tom Magazine. I didn't have the right combination yet. It doesn't have the humor. But by the second book, Stay out of the Basement, I got it. I just figured I don't really want to scare these kids, So anytime the scene gets really intense, I throw in something funny, and of course there's a punch line at the end of every chapter. Yeah, Goosebumps introduced me to the idea that the first installment of any series is usually terrible because they're just like finding their footing. Welcome to Dead House was lamb, not animorphous. Uh you know who liked? You know who like Welcome to Dead House. George Romero. So shows what also crucial to Stein's process his wife Jane. He told The Village Voice that he had been in New York for two years when he met her at a party in Brooklyn. That quote, I didn't want to go to because it was raining, and I thought, how am I going to get back from Brooklyn for forty years later, those of us who lived in Brooklyn were saying the same thing about going to parties in Manhattan. He said. When we got married, I was twenty five and Jane was twenty two. I don't know what the hell she was doing. Our first apartment when we got married was on seventy five, between Columbus and Amsterdam. He told the Village Voice, you wouldn't go to Amsterdam because it was too dangerous. What are favorite old John and Yoko up there? That's just a few blocks from the Dakota where they used to hang out. Weird sliding doors kind of moment um to the verge, he explained. We were both at Scholastic for many years. She was actually my boss for four years there. That was not great. I got lousy raises. Yeah, yeah, he just if you just imagine him as like a cat skills like like borsched belt comedian, it's just become these very hilarious She'd be embarrassed to give me a really good raise since we were married, So I got very bad raises. So funny. Jane approves the chapter by chapter outlines that Stein drafts of each book, and he still remembers getting one back from her, and in his words, up at the top of the outline were two words. It said, psychotic ramblings. That was it, psychotic ramblings. That's been your notes on some of my out Yes, that's true. Yeah, she's a very tough editor, he continued, She's really smart, and she's just too good. Too good an editor. You don't want an editor that good. I don't get away with anything. I always say, she's like a hockey goalie. Nothing gets past her. Uh. Speaking of the Stein family, his son apparently had a cozy little side hustle while he was in elementary school and the books were at the height of their fame. He said, I think my son used to sell parts in Goose Bumps for ten dollars. He would come home and say, Dad, you have to put James in the next one, or Dad, you have to put will in, And of course I always did. That's possibly my favorite part of this entire episode, kidding. If I was in Goose Bumps, I would dine out on that for the rest of my natural life. That kid, kid is a genius. Stein later told the Boston Globe the book started and around I was the best selling author in America. We sold four million books a month at a time. Nine five The Hide of goose Bumps. The USA Today Top fifty books list was usually twenty to twenty five goose Bumps books. This is our al Stein talking to the Verge. But series unfortunately wasn't without its attractors. Stein, talking to the Boston Globe, said, in the beginning, there was a big resistance to the books because no one had ever done a horror series for seven or twelve year olds, and the covers were scarier than the books. That's very true. In fact, the goose Bump series landed near the top of the American Library Association's Challenged Books of the Nineties list at number fifteen. It was apparently challenged more than Madonna's Sex, the Anarchist Cookbook, and Howard Stern's Private Parts, But you know, it was number one on that The Scary Stories to Tell the Dark series probably the only other children's book horror series that beats goose Bumps in terms of actual horrifying impact. I never read those, Were they Oh my god? Well more so? Yeah, they were, but maybe more so you want to talk about illustrations. I do remember the like skull ap peering out of the smoke on the cover or something. Yeah, yeah, those books holy crap. I mean, just like grizzly skulls. And that's the thing. I was never really like a horror guy or into spooky stuff as a kid. All that said, Stein initially thought, he said, he thought there would be more protests than there were. Uh, he said to the Hollywood reporter, I thought people would be very reluctant, but partly because the covers were so much more scarish and scary than the stories. A lot of parents were upset. They were trying to get goose Bumps out of school libraries, and that happened quite a bit in the early days before people really knew what it was. But it happened a lot less than I thought. Speaking of those covers, they are the work of an illustrator named Tim Jacobus, who had been working for Scholastic for a few years. The publisher offered him and another illustrator, Jim Thizen, each a cover to audition for goose Bumps, and Jacobs was assigned goose Bumps number one, the aforementioned Welcome to Dead House. He got a whole chapters background which would later winnow down to a single paragraph of description as his working relationship with Stein evolved. That's all you got out of Jovial Bob was one graph to write the whole cover off. I like Tim's art right from the start. Stein told the aga or the what is that the American Institution of Graphic Artists Graphic art dot org. Yeah, I thought Tim captured just the right level of scariness for the age group. We didn't really want to terrify kids, but we did want to excite them with our covers. I was most happy that his covers captured the humor of the stories as well as the whore. Each cover took Jacobs around thirty five hours to produce. The format was always square canvas sands the iconic goose Bumps logo, which was created in house at Scholastics. It was not his work. He usually produced around three eight by ten sketches for each cover before developing a color study and turning to his acrylic based paints and an airbrush on a slightly textured number eighty illustration board for the final product. As way more detail than I thought I was ever going to get to give everyone about the process behind making Goose bumps covers. Uh. Sometimes when the characters from the books were featured in the design, he was given a budget for artistic models, although one of the most famous ones, the Haunted Mask, he simply used his niece. I mean, I'm glad you gave all that information because these are I feel like the like the hr Geiger illustrations for young millennials, Like these are seared into my my cortex, so so evocative. But naturally, because these books were for kids, there were some constraints. Blood was green, not red. No kids were shown getting injured, no kids were shown getting killed. There were no weapons except for an executioner's acts in a night and tower. Remember that. Yeah. Jacoba said he only ever had to make one significant change to a painting of the publisher's request. On the cover of Revenge of the Law Gnomes. He said that one of the title characters was shown picking his nose, and at the last minute somebody said, I don't want to hear any blowback from teachers or moms or parents, let's just change it. But aside from that, they gave him his head, and uh, all of his designs are fairly iconic. I would say, yeah, he says a couple of them are still at um Hey on display in Scholastic. Before we get to the next part of this, I just want to drop that, as of at least two thousand eight, I dropped a ball. I didn't look updated sales figures. Stein's books have sold over four hundred million copies worldwide. Is there any kind of list of like most books moved by a single author, Like that's god to be. I know, Stephen King, I'm sure, James Patterson, Well, it's it's Shakespeare. Okay, Unfortunately it's bad that I'm almost like doesn't count. But yeah, best selling fiction authors. Oh no, he's on there. He is at least on Wikipedia's um. He's under Dean Kunts. He's under Wow, it's William Shakespeare. I get the Christie number two. That makes sense. Yeah, Danielle Steele is up there. J. K Rowling obviously, Dr Seuss, Tolstoy, Dean Koon's Horatio Alger, Rob Jovial Bob Stein, right under Nora Roberts and right above Alexander Pushkin. He's above Stephen King, though he beat out Stephen King. I can't believe both of them are under Dean Koon's. Yeah, something about that seems wrong anyway. Um, do you know what they're called piccolia brividi in Italy, which means little shivers? No, m that's what beautiful, if not slightly obscene. One thing that I find really sweet is that he would answer every handwritten snail mail letter he got from kids at the height of his fame. Not the ones that came in his emails, not the ones that were type but if some kid actually wrote him out a letter, he would answer it. He said, that's hard for kids. It's time consuming and hard to write a letter, so they deserve an answer. Every kid gets an answer. Oh did you ever write to anybody? Nope? Really nope. I wrote the Paul McCartney that's you did, eleven year old, and I got a form letter back explaining that if he answered everybody's letter, he wouldn't have time to make music, which fair soften the blow. Stein's favorite was a kid who wrote him a letter that read simply, in its totality, Dear R. L. Stein, I've read forty of your books and I think they're really boring. Did you write that? No? Uh, We're going to take a quick break, but will be right back with more too much information in just a moment. So with such insane sales numbers, of course, media adaptations were inevitable. Stein told Cinema Blenden, we had a movie deal to do a goose Bumps movie, like at the Height of goose Bumps back around there, and we actually had to deal with Fox to a movie, and Tim Burton was going to be the producer. We had a big meeting and I thought, oh, that'll be great Tim Burton and goose Bumps, it'll be great. We had a nice meeting with him and we had a great time. We talked about what we should do, and then nothing happened. How this always goes. He got involved in some Superman project that also never happens. Stein continued, he was gonna do Superman, and then we never heard from him again, and that was the end of it. Stein is referring to Superman Lives, an early reboot attempt for The Man of Steel post Christopher Reeves that was going to start. Nicholas Cage a Superman got as far as screen tests with Cage in the costume. You can google it. There are pictures of Nick Cave. Nick Cage in the Superman almost said Nick cave in a Superman costume. That's a very different that's a very different thing. That's finale was very much like that. Um. Yeah, and it died obviously. But even crazier than that was apparently Night of the Living Dead, Uh, Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Many of the Day, you know. But yes, iconic horror director George Romero was attached to a goose Bumps movie at one point. This was to have been produced by twenties Century Fox's Family Film division, and Romera's goose Bumps movie began with the Fox Family's vice president, Kevin Bannerman, who I guess thought he would do a great job with it. And um, there is this is awesome. There's a George A. Romero archival collection at the University of Pittsburgh. It's where he sent his archives when he died. Um, and this is in there. This is a letter from Romero to the Fox vice president from um. And it seems that Bannerman suggested a number of Stein novels goose Bumps books for him to read, and Romero picked Welcome to Dead House the first one. Uh. And he also reveals in the course of this letter that Romero had wanted to make films for younger audiences, and that he'd been a fan of goose Bumps, even having read several of them to his twelve year old son, Um. And he did pen a rough outline for this adaptation, which rough outline. It's basically a complete screenplay. It's a hundred page outline, Um, and it's out there for people to read. It's the plot is different. But and of course it's set in Pittsburgh. But it just never happened until I think, Yeah, I don't, I didn't. I don't give a about those movies. Well, I'll wave my hand in their general direction later. But I think it died until two eight. I think Umbia let the rights. Columbia acquired the rights to the film in two thousand eight, and then the Jack Black movie didn't even get made until like twenty So, yeah, they just let it die development. Hell baby. So now we must come to the goose Bumps TV show, which aired from October November. You said you didn't watch this, not at all. No. I thought it was like a watered down version of the Dark And it was in a sense, it was watered down because they wanted it to well I'm getting ahead of myself. Steve Leviton, the show's producer, told a site called Conventional Relations for their oral history of the show that he'd been producing a TV series called My Secret Identity with Scholastic, and after the contract for that shows up, Scholastic told him about the runaway success of goose Bumps at a meeting and gave him a few of the books. He flew back to Toronto and yes, like are You Afraid of the Dark? The goose Bumps show is a maple syrup and poutine drenched production of the Great White North, And he called them and he wanted to make a TV show. Leviton would go on to create Modern Family, Wow, and it's some other stuff including My Beloved just shoot Me Yeah, whoa Yeah, a young me's glimpse into the high paced, exciting world of magazine writing. My God made me want to write for a magazine. I didn't know that was a goal of yours. I just know, I just I think I've talked about this before. But like my sitcom, like my whole family loved the Simpsons, but like my sitcoms were not friends. I did not watch Seinfeld, I watched Frasier and mash and just shoot Me and uh Will and Grace. Three out of four of those are like top notch. Yeah, well, I mean it's just funny, like everyone and a lot of people our age are like friends or Seinfeld and I'm like, no, just watch a lot of Frasier and watched it. Just shoot me, um Leviton said. The first response was, I don't think we can make a deal with you because Fox bought the movie rights. It turned out Fox did not buy the TV rights, though, and oddly enough, he said, once we got the TV rights, Fox Kids Networks was our broadcast here. The show's writing team was led by Billy Brown and Dan Angel, and they had a deal with Stein where he could approve or reject every script based on their first drafts. So none of these got made without jovial Bob's stampud approval on them. Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna call him that forever. It's just too funny. Here you go. Early conversations concerned how this show would differentiate itself from Are You Afraid of the Dark, which hilariously entailed poaching writer, director, producer Ron Oliver from that show. So yes, this guy went over from Are You Afraid of the Dark to goose Bumps, um Leviton said, goose Bumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark were in the same genre, but goose Bumps always had an ironic, humorous tongue in cheeks self consciousness that Are You Afraid of the Dark didn't have. I'm glad we went in that direction because I don't think there would have been enough room for two completely similar shows. Sure, I respect that. I think that's why I didn't like the goose Bumps one's It always felt like it was kind of mugging and winking to the camera and trying to like, you know, like ached about comedian Okay, like as jovial Bob Stein intended it to be okay, yeah, fair, Okay, that's yes, like are You fred of the Dark? Every episode of goose Slumps required a new cast, which meant that, as Stein later told The Verge, they went through quote every Canadian kid there was. He added, I would do book signings here in the United States. Kids would be in line and they'd say, I'm an actor, how could I be on the goose Bumps show? And I would say, you have to be Canadian? And every time the kid would say what's that? And also like are you Fred of the Dark? A young Ryan Gosling appears in an episode of goose Bumps, and Hayden Christensen and On the World star Scott Speedman nineteen sixties Batman star Adam West also get start at one point that's a great get yeah. Excitement around the show was so high it went to production without a pilot, which is insane and unheard of. Leviton said, once we got the rights to do TV series, there were already a number of broadcasters interested in picking it up. They didn't want to see a pilot. They wanted to go right into production. Fortunately, they went into production with the Haunted Mask, which is one of the most iconic goose Bumps titles and one apparently inspired by Stein watching his young son get trapped in a Frankenstein's monster Halloween Mask hilarious. He's called it his best Halloween story and his favorite episode of the show. Um. The plot of the book is basically that Halloween Mask starts to take over a young girl's personality. She's having trouble removing it from her getting it offer, and it starts to take her over. She's just become like really mean, yeah, but the and this this one actually scared me because, like the mask makeup that they used on this is so good and so creepy. Um. We're talking earlier about some of the crappier goose bumps. Jovial Bob is aware of them. Uh, he admitted to THHR there's some bad ones. Not all can be great. I looked at go eat Worms recently and I was like, that's a horrible book. It's not good at all. There was another one that had a great evil dog on the cover called The Barking Ghost. That's a horrible book. I love that. He's not just like, yeah, it wasn't that great. He was like, no, it's horrible. It is a great cover. It's like one of the more freaky covers. Um The girl who played the lead in The Haunted Mass Catherine Long. She was a trooper for this episode. She spent two or three hours getting into the makeup for the mask and the pilot and that is her actual voice reading those lines. It was not a d art, it was not manipulated in post production. That is her actual voice doing the creepy monster voice. Oh and she bit into an actual worm for the shot in which her character bites into a worm hidden in a sandwich that was not fake. Apparently all of this added into an episode that was so scary. Fox rejected the initial cut, saying that they would not show its children. How did you bite into a worm? Wasn't? Where was the humane society on that? Like? Not not in Canada? Baby. I don't actually know that for a fact, but I assume. When the episode premiered on October, it was watched by almost eight million households in the US. It sold nearly three million copies when it was released on VHS the following year. Now, much like Are You Afraid of the Dark, production was essentially tasked with creating a new short film every week. A s FX production artist, Ron Stefaniek, who's gone on to work on stuff like Bride of Chucky, explained, we only had five days to build these things. We were building all the way through the day and all the way into the night. Then it was raced off to set and puppeteered by the same people. Sometimes the shooting day would go on for fifteen or sixteen hours, and then there'd be an hour and a half of celebrating after it was done. Then in eight hours, the whole thing starts up again. That went on for four years. One of the episodes that went above and beyond in terms of location at least, was the two parts Special A Night and Terre Tower, which was partially filmed at Toronto's Casa Loma, which is a Gothic revival castle built in the nineteen tents by eccentric, wealthy Canadian. I looked it up and I didn't feel like getting into the history of this thing. But the one architectural detail that has stuck in my mind since reading it was that it boasted an oven so large it could cook an ox, which I was like, I can only imagine that they they tested that. I was like, why is that the standard of measurement? Think of a bigger you can cook a whale, use your head, apply yourself. Um that that castle has been seen an x men, Strange Brew, Chicago, Scott Program Versus the World, and Crimson Peak, among many others. Other episodes were significantly more low tech. For the episode Bad Hair Day, which involved the talking rabbit, which was voiced by whose lines that anyway start calling mockery mockery yes, uh. Production took meetings with c G I artists, an animatronics team, and an animal wrangler, and the animal wrangler ended up getting the job and the talking rabbid effect was achieved by having him stand off camera and squirting the rabbit with sugar water, causing its mouth to move again. Where was the Humane Society on this one? I can't remember who's telling this story. It's either stefaniec or Um or Leviton, but he talks about this meeting where he's like they have three separate meetings. The c g I people came in and were like, all right, we'll do it this way, and it was going to be expensive and it was going to be coming in late because he was like that's just how the technology was the time. It was super expensive and they would never finish on time. And then the animatronics people came in were like, all right, I can build you this robot rabbit like blah blah blah blah blah and there, and but it's gonna be this amount of money. Then the animal wrangler came in. It was like, I can make that rabbit talk, how where do you where do you? Where do you need it? Just set it up and starting squirting sugar water into its face from off screen. Uh, you need a rabbit to talk. I can get you a rabbit. I get him. I don't ask questions. Now we get your rabbit. I get your rabbit bite three pm today. Now we must come to the true star of the series, the true king of all media, Slappy the Dummy Baby. Yes, oh my god. Yes. Slappy's book was Night of the Living Dummy, and he went on to appear in more books and media than any other goose Bumps character, including three episodes of the TV series, both movies, and he even got his own book series in two thousand and seventeen called Slappy World. What I Know where I didn't know that. Here's a quick sidebar on evil dummies in uh in media. Um, there's the Great Gabbo ninety nine, which is where the Simpsons get their their ventrilocust dummy from. Uh Danny Kay started knock on wood. Um, then we start getting into spooky dummies. The Glass I seven episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents the Dummy ninety two episode of the Twilight Zone Caesar in me A nineteen sixty four episode of the Twilight Zone nine six four is devil Doll. Uh, Sir Anthony Hopkins in ninety eight stars in Magic but based on a screenplay by William Goldman about an evil ventriloquist dummy. Uh. And then we get into stuff like the Puppet Show, which is an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Um yeah wow, And rounding out our evil dummy list, James Gordon a topical humor ah Man, well done, thank you, Slappy comes to life when a phrase caru mari o'donna loma MoU karano, which supposedly translates to you and I are one now, was precited. Yeah, much like how Chucky transfers his soul back and forth in the Child's Play franchise, which is great because you just hear Brad de Reef doing his Danny DeVito impression. He's like, grant me the power I beg of you. It's so funny. We've been watching a bunch of those is for Halloween season and Brad Brad dref tremendous actor, one of my favorites, but he is just doing Danny DeVito as in those early episodes, because you forget he's in uh one flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, so he must have gotten some he must have been. He had that Danny DeVito impression in his back pocket. Don't put the chuck. Uh. Similar to those movies by which I mean the child's play movies. Uh, Slappy was animated with a combination of p a tree and a young girl in a costume, which is always hilarious in the child's play movies because you get these really well done animatronics and then you just get like clearly they just like shoved a toddler in the wardrobe and we're like run down the hallway. But because he was Slappy was built like an actual ventriloquist dummy as an out of wood. He weighed considerably more than a normal puppet. So imagine having to be under like a table holding of ventriloquis dummy up for like hours at a time puppeteering it. That must have sucked. Um. They just have like arms like bowlers, or it's just running really thick arm like muscular arm um, or like the arm wrestling championship guys, like ungodly ripped and then just like a weak, normal normal arm um. So fanniek is often erroneously credited as providing the voice of Slappy. That is not true. He told Conventional Relations that the actual voice actor once called him and left him a rather snotty message blaming him for going around taking credit for the role of Slappy. So just one set the record straight. I actually don't even know the guy's name, so it sounds like he's snotty. Yeah. Sadly, the fates of both the book series and the show wound up becoming intertwined. Oliver said that after four seasons. He said, I think it ended because the book stopped selling a certain point. The sales dropped and they were like, well, I guess that's the end of that. Levit In, for his part, posited, I think what happened was Fox as a kid's network was coming to an end. A few years after it stopped being a kid's network, other things came along that were more lucrative for networks. Pokemon and Power Rangers were toys, that's big business. Goose Bumps was just a TV show, and even though we tried to get merchandise and going, there's just no defining character. There's no one look for goose Bumps other than Slappy. Uh. Jovial Bob was a fan of the show, but he uh he also liked the two movie, so I don't know. He might just be towing the party line. I don't know anything about those movies. Um, I don't care to our time. Well yeah, yeah, they're not really the focus here, and they apparently well reviewed. Um Jack Plaque plays a caricatured version of our old Stein in it. I guess he got Stein's blessing too, portray him that way. Um where a Jane jacket and leap around too. They they yeah, they smack of weaponizing millennial nostalgia to me, which is what we do. No, I take offense to that. We we cultivate new appreciation on what's already there. We try to We try to educate. We don't try to sucker people into buying something new. It was just done in the same flavor of some beloved classic movie or TV show. No, we would. We cultivate appreciation. And now, folks, stay tuned for our episode on Hocus Focus. Oh cipitated by Hocus Pocus too, available now to stream on Disney Plus Disney Check. Notcipitated by that specificated but a lot of people wanted to hear about that because it meant something to him. But even if it didn't mean something to I just wanted to hear you choke on your impotent rage. Um. Jovial Bob told The rap In that they were like seventeen or eighteen scripts being bandied around for that movie at one point. Though he may have been exaggerating, but he did single out the film's Danny Elfman score as be particularly noteworthy. So yeah, he would. Maybe he's a big Oino Boingo fan. I can absolutely see that. Um. And then the Fear Street series which came out on Netflix recently, so that's also brought old old old jovial Bob back into the spotlight. Uh, it was so he said, it was so graphic that it shocked him. But he said it was well, well staged and well directed. I didn't know where else to put this. Oh, maybe we should have it when I was talking about Stephen King earlier, but comparisons between the two of them were inevitable and uh but despite both being millionaire horror book authors, they only met once. And this is Stein talking to The Guardian. The one time I ever met him, four or five years ago. He never leaves Maine. We had a nice talk. I said to him, Steve, do you know that a magazine once called me a literary training brawl for you, and he said, yes, I know. He also said that at that point Steve gave him Stephen Stephen King gave him crap for using every single possible permutation of an amusement park whrror. He said, he's used up all the good ideas. That's all I got on goose Bumps. I I don't know anyone who who who who dislikes goose Bumps, who's coming against Yeah, it's right, Uh, you know they're not chaucer, but not everything has to be. And I really came away with from this with a a deeper, deeper, and more abiding love for jovial Bob Stein. He just seems like a chill dude. He's still in love with his craft, he still loves writing, and you know he's got the right view on it. I want to leave you with a quote from actually just June of this year, you told today what's most satisfying to me is the millions of kids who learned to read from goose Bumps and who learned to really enjoy reading. Now, on Twitter and everywhere, I hear people saying I wouldn't be a librarian today. If it wasn't for your books, I hear things like I wouldn't be a writer today. I just had my first book published. Thanks to you, or thanks for getting me through a difficult childhood. That's the most satisfying thing. You never get tired of hearing that. Good on yet, jovial bob folks, thank you for listening. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan around Talk. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of My 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 Heidel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. 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