Eerie, Indiana

    This one is cheating in at least three different ways. Firstly: while what I watched for this is in fact the first episode of this show to be produced and aired this can’t really be said to be a pilot episode in any traditional sense. It takes a couple of minutes at the beginning to establish the premise but no more than any other episode would. Secondly: although airing in prime-time I think we can all agree that this is a kid’s show and after that Scooby-Doo nonsense I had decided to avoid doing any more of those this Halloween season. And thirdly: it’s generally speaking a comedy show that’s actually pretty funny. Those are hard to write about without a review just turning into lists.

    The fourth and actual way this is cheating is that I’m kind of cannibalizing my future self. At some point I’d like to take a broader look at the intersection of horror and children’s programming and I can already tell this show is going to be a pretty solid pillar in whatever theory I eventually build. In my defense the sheer number of formless movies and future-less shows I’ve made myself watch lately have started to wear on me and I just wanted to watch something fun.

I see what you did there, sign.

     And fun this show certainly is. Joe Dante rears his head again as creative consultant and occasional director for the 19 episodes that were eventually produced. The rest of the crew were mostly journeyman tv directors and writers going on to usually long and lucrative behind-the-scenes work in the industry. The cast was much the same, people who were in things that you’d recognize but not in roles that you’d really remember them from. The main character of Marshall was played by Omri Katz who would later have a recurring role on ‘The John Larroquette Show,’ which ... we’ll come back to some other time, and plenty of recognizable guest stars popped up in random roles.

    The show debuted in 1991 which was still in that part of the 90’s that was basically still the 80’s. Despite not being involved in any way the show had a very Amblin Entertainment/Spielberg air to it, a kind of anxious whimsy. Shots were just dutch enough and performances just a half-step up from normal enough to always make it noticeable that the titular town was a strange place indeed. Although only touched upon at the very end of the pilot the show was roughly episodic in nature. It remembered the events from previous episodes and featured little bits and pieces from them as background details.

    The premise was both great and simple: Marshall, his parents, and his sister move to Eerie, Indiana for his dad’s nondescript and open-ended job as a product tester. Much is made of the fact that Eerie is ‘statistically’ the most normal town in America. Along with his best friend Simon he investigates the town and its weirdness, including ghosts, magic videotapes, ‘lost’ hours of the day, secret societies, and the like. If this all sounds a bit ‘Gravity Falls’ it’s no coincidence. Creator of that show Alex Hirsch has stated that he drew a lot of inspiration from this show and basically imagined what it might have turned into if it hadn’t been canceled.

    The show does get a bit more dark than I was expecting. From the recurring motif of invasive crows attacking things and occasionally turning up with random eyeballs clutched in their beaks to a parent forcing their children to never age and stay in the seventh grade forever to apparently a later episode where a classmate straight up dies and has his heart transplanted into another classmate with spooky results, this used its prime-time slot to get away with stuff you couldn’t even on basic cable at the time.

    I’ve always thought that kids can not only handle scares more than parents give them credit for but that in the end it tends to benefit them. Nobody’s advocating a fifth-grade class assignment of the themes behind 1980’s ‘Maniac’ but who couldn’t use a great big dose of nightmare fuel from ‘Return to Oz’ around the age of seven? The key is to keep it divorced enough from their real lives that the scary things can be experienced and then they can go to bed with the nightlight on and that’s enough to get you through the night.

    There are some other strings to ‘Eerie, Indiana’s bow, of course. There’s some pretty obvious satire of suburban life, from synchronized riding lawnmowers to a fairly direct attack at the concept of the 60’s suburban mom. There’s a main character who is occasionally kind of a jerk but stays firmly on the good side of that “extreme” thing the kids were apparently into at the time. There are also near-constant references to older horror films and tropes to the point where you can almost see Joe Dante picking over the sets and putting in Easter Eggs just for him and his friends.

    Sadly the show never made it to a second season, though looking up the later episodes one might think that was for the best. A recurring character with an unknown past was later introduced and given the name of ‘Dash X.’ Apparently moves started to be made to retool the show around him, so perhaps we all dodged a bullet and avoided ‘Eerie, Indiana to the MAX.’ It eventually made its ways over to the Disney channel, among others, and still shows up in reruns from time to time. The re-airing on Fox Kids led to enough resurgent interest that a spin-off/reboot called ‘Eerie, Indiana: The Next Dimension’ aired in 1998 for 15 episodes. There’s much less nostalgia for this incarnation, though I’m sure it has its defender.

    For once I was able to just kick back and watch a show without having to pick it entirely apart. Had to break my own rules to do so but hey, they’re my rules. Soon enough I’ll have to watch something in some some way involving David S. Goyer (shakes fist) or Rutger Hauer (much more noncommittal hand gesture). I can add this to the still very small pile of shows I intend to keep watching. Is it really just this and ‘Brimstone?’ Hey, who knows, maybe ‘Dark Skies’ is gonna be amazing.