When I was a kid I was not very into anything remotely scary. I stayed away from Halloween, hid whenever certain episodes of the Twilight Zone came on, and most of all judged certain books by their covers if they looked scary. I especially did this with the Goosebumps books. This is why it wasn’t until 6th grade that I even cracked a Goosebumps book, and that was the superhero book (if you’ve watched the even worse TV show you may recall this is the episode with Adam West donning his tights again) because it had a campy image on the cover instead of something scary like Slappy the dummy. Around this time the television show premiered on Fox and I enjoyed it a lot. There were some episodes I couldn’t handle, mainly because at that age I couldn’t recognize really bad CGI.
Since this time I have grown to enjoy spooky stories, watch horror movies without gore, and the Twilight Zone has become one of my favorite shows (though Talking Tina still terrifies me). While Goosebumps continued, I forgot about the series until the past year when I discovered the podcast Goosebuds.
On most episodes, hosts Paul, Dom, and Chad read each book in the series, starting with #1 Welcome to Dead House. While discussing the plot points and characters of the book, they have fun pointing out the inadequacies of R.L. Stine’s writing and deciphering which books were probably written by somebody else (given that the books came out each month), trying to understand why characters act as they do, examining the horror tropes, and most of all (which is most of the time) just fooling around.
The best part of Goosebuds is that it doesn’t only talk about Goosebumps, but other 90’s YA series as well. At the time of writing this (as I am hoping a new episode will be uploaded before this gets posted), the newest episode has the guys looking at the uber-long Animorphs series, one which I was devoted to long after I was much too old for it. Examining the books many of us grew up with makes what we read today even more epic, understanding those authors’ inspirations.
You can find Goosebuds online at http://goosebuds.libsyn.com, on twitter @goosebudspod, and on your favorite podcaster stalker.
But listeners beware, you’re definitely not in for a scare.