Spooky Season continues! This time around, Adam and I are discussing the early 90s sci fi show, Eerie, Indiana. This is gonna come as a surprise to many, but I really don’t have a ton to say about this show. Not here, at least.
Though it premiered on NBC in the fall of 1991, I’ve found most folks didn’t discover Eerie, Indiana until it was picked up by Fox Kids, for a run in 1997. I know that’s where I was introduced to the show. And, by “introduced”, I mean “Saw some commercials during Power Rangers Turbo, and thought ‘Yeah, not for me’.” Eerie, Indiana was a half hour show about Marshall Teller, who moves to the titular town, only to discover it seems to be a hotbed of weird activity. It was kinda like The X-Files Jr., yet was tonally more akin to a watered down Tales from the Darkside. It was more of an anthology series than episodic with an overarching plot, though this aspect was added near the end, in a last ditch effort to retool the series. In any case, Fox Kids saw something in the series, as it was popular enough to spawn a spinoff, Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension, which ran for one season in 1998.
We discuss it in the episode, but one of my “icks” is when shit is weird just for the sake of being weird. That doesn’t fly with me. I need to know why it’s weird. Was the town built on top of an ancient Indian burial ground? Do fault lines intersect through the town? Is there some sort of paranormal nexus there? Give me something! And this isn’t just isolated to sci fi, as it carries over to any genre or property. This is gonna gain me some enemies, but Pee-wee Herman. What the Hell was his deal?! Was he a child in a man’s body? Was he mentally challenged? Like, when you go back to the character’s Groundlings origins, I kinda get it. Even when he debuted on The Dating Game I got it. But when they started marketing him to kids, and he got a Saturday morning show after Muppet Babies, I didn’t get it anymore. We grew up with this character that most of us would now be advised to report to the authorities, and nobody sees a problem with that. Hell, y’all need to keep the same energy you have for Michael Jackson. I don’t remember men, women, and children WEEPING when Pee-wee got off the plane abroad, but I digress…
It’s a fun episode, as always, and if I haven’t offended you by my Pee-wee slander, then I hope you’ll check it out here, or where all fine podcasts are found!
