Heart full of napalm / stomach full of Flumps
@howfar That's got to be painful. From what I remember, Grandpa Flump's flumpet wasn't the ideal shape for soft tissues.
@DaveHiggins Haha. Weirdly I don't remember the Flumps animation. Which is odd, because it's seems to have been repeated a lot alongside all the children's classics I do remember (e.g. The Wombles and Paddington). I may have to address this gap in my cultural knowledge!
I was, in fact, thinking of the sickly marshmallow brand. But if I have to vore a stop motion puppet or two on my path to greatness, so be it!
@howfar That seems to be true of most people: I can remember that I watched the Flumps, but not any of the episode content.
It's like one of those conspiracy theories about people who've ended up in an almost identical parallel universe.
@howfar @DaveHiggins You guys talking about kid's shows you don't remember. You've both read this, right? If not, you should because it sounds similar to what you're experiencing.
There's another one about Sinbad staring in a film that is very similar to Shaq's Zazaam: http://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/internet/2016/12/movie-doesn-t-exist-and-redditors-who-think-it-does
@DaveHiggins @howfar Yes, I've seen that one as well. My favorite one involves the Beranstein bears and it has to do with how their name is spelled. I'm a victim of this one because I remember it being spelled differently than it actually was. Parallel universes!
@jlward @DaveHiggins My own Berenstain Bears is Scalextric. I was convinced for years that they'd changed the name from Scalectrix at some point.
@jlward @DaveHiggins I had not! To be fair, while Candle Cove sounds pretty terrifying, I don't think it could have terrified me more than the actual episodes of Doctor Who my parents allowed (encouraged) me to watch from the age of about 4, the novel The Owl Service, or the kids' TV drama The Moondial. Possibly the unbridled oddness of the media aimed at children from about '65 to '85 is part of what makes it such fertile ground for our collective imaginings.
@DaveHiggins @jlward My sister had a tea-towel designated for hiding behind during frightening Dr Who bits. I was nervous of going in the sea for years after the "haemovore" episodes (The Curse of Fenric), due to a lurking fear that those long marine vampire claws might pull me beneath the waves.
Of course, when we're thinking about terrifying alternate shared reality, let's not forget Ghostwatch. A quarter century on and I still can't watch clips of that without freaking out.
@howfar Ironically, Curse of Fenric is now one of my favourite storylines; that and State of Decay. So, I've made my peace with Dr Who vampires.
I haven't rewatched Ghostwatch. That was unnerving though. If I remember right, there were lots of complaints.
@DaveHiggins I do need to go back and rewatch the McCoy stuff. There was some really interesting story and character building, and Ace blew things up.
Ghostwatch's problem was that, although it was on after the watershed, and in a drama slot, it was advertised in a was that led lots of parents to let their children stay up. I think there was a piece in a medical journal some years after, about a couple of children potentially having PTSD as a result.
@DaveHiggins The comedy medical history podcast Sawbones did an episode about it last Halloween, which was pretty good: http://www.maximumfun.org/sawbones/sawbones-ghostwatch
@howfar I'd forgotten it was headed up by Michael Parkinson. That would have added to the air of reality.
@DaveHiggins I also just looked up that cactus Tom Baker. That's pretty creepy. Definitely sets of my trypophobia.
@howfar @DaveHiggins Yeah, 4 is probably too young for Doctor Who. I was around 9 when I started watching (Tom Baker era) and I loved it.
We had no idea who or what Doctor Who was. We just stumbled onto the show, jumped in, and started watching. We were so confused when Tom Baker died and changed into a completely different man. Seriously. We walked around the house for weeks trying to figure that out. And this was pre-internet so unless you knew someone in real life, you were out of luck.
@DaveHiggins @howfar the problem was exacerbated by the fact that I was in America. Doctor Who became a thing here, but this was at the beginning, So, it was still new to most of us over here.
@jlward @DaveHiggins Yes, lack of context would be particularly puzzling in re Who, because it's always been an odd show in many ways. Even with context, I think it's often misunderstood as a cult sci-fi show, when it's actually a sort of sui generis popular family fantasy. I have one IRL friend who I've had to mute on Facebook now that Who is back on, because he'll endlessly criticise it as if it should be Blake's 7 or something. It gets a bit wearing!
@DaveHiggins I think these cultural distorted/missing memory phenomena are probably revealing of how much of our experience (at least retrospectively) is a jointly constructed artefact. It's quite common to talk of having false memories of things our families tell us we did, but it seems more complex than that. Our retention of 'real' memories is so mediated by and (e.g. in the case of the Flumps) dependent on later contexts that the whole real/false distinction becomes problematic.