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| Park Circus |
I was on Discord with some of my friends, where we talked about Christmas traditions. Some like to sing carols at stranger's houses, some use artificial Christmas trees and one person would eat KFC for Christmas dinner (yes, that's an actual thing in Japan).
One person, however, had brought up the forgotten tradition of telling horror stories during the holidays. This was something that would be mostly done in Halloween. Listen closely to the lyrics of
"The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year" by Andy Williams and there's a reference to that tradition.
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| A Christmas Carol, an example of a ghost story |
This made me remember a show that was known for telling scary stories about young children who would misbehave. No, it was not Goosebumps or Tales From The Crypt. No, this was Grizzly Tales For Gruesome Kids; a show that adapted the book series of the same name by Jamie Rix. The show ran from 2000 to 2006 on CITV and is regarded as one of the best shows on the network along with Horrid Henry and SMtv. To this day, the show is remembered for the right reason. It scared millions of British kids with its stories, I myself included.
So, in this article, I'm going to take a look back at this show, my memories of it and what episodes still keep me up at night.
It's 2010 and I'm with my cousins after school. We're waiting for SpongeBob SquarePants to air. At 3:30pm, Grizzly Tales is about to begin. So we decided to watch that before SpongeBob aired. We were introduced to a show like no other.
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| 'Sweets' - An episode from the 1st season |
Grizzly Tales starts with a schoolboy heading to a haunted theatre called the Squeam Screen, where he'll be watching the tale of the day. Then we are introduced to the storyteller of the show, Uncle Grizzly, played by the talented Nigel Planer (he played Neil in The Young Ones).
In the show, the intro and ending was animating was animated in stop motion, the stories narrated by Uncle Grizzly were animated in 2D.
The first story of the day was "The Spaghetti Man". It centres on a boy named Timothy who refuses to eat his food that his mother makes him. After many warnings from the parents, the Spaghetti Man arrives and turns him into lasagna. This was the gist of many episodes.
Every story, the misbehaving child in every story would meet their demise. In one story, one kid loses his eyelids because he did not want to go to sleep. In another story, two kids named Tanya and Peregrim are taken to a barbershop where their tongues are cut off because of their rudeness.
To tell the truth, "The Spaghetti Man" is mostly why I no longer refuse to eat Spaghetti.
The next episode of the two I remember watching was "Death By Chocolate". It centres on a girl named Serena who, unlike Timothy, loves eating chocolate. Her young sister, Ellie, becomes her slave so Serena can eat more. However, she eats a chocolate bunny with an egg that was dropped by a fly. After eating it, Serena becomes a fly and is swatted to death by her own sister.
Unlike the first episode, this episode didn't stop me from eating chocolate. It was probably my favourite episode; and from there, I was a fan and would watch Grizzly Tales almost every day after school along with Adventure Time, Gumball and Regular Show. Ah, childhood.
There were some episodes that did kind of scare me, proving that the show's premise was working. One of these was called "When The Bed Bugs Bite", where I had just put on the episode near the ending. I had no idea why the victim, Hannibal, was in the wrong and all I saw was that he had turned into a huge bed bug. For a few months, whenever my parents jokingly warned me about bed bugs before I slept, that episode would come back in my mind. Finally, I saw the episode and it was pretty funny, Hannibal was a biting fanatic, biting everything he can see. At the end, the kid deserved being turned into a huge bed bug.
Another episode that gave me the creeps was "The Bugaboo Bear". The episode focuses on a young girl named Emily who misuses her toy "bugaboo" bear in mean ways. In one night, the bear turns on Emily and turns her into a teddy bear version of herself; only for her to be misused by another young girl.
This episode scared me as a kid, which is why I still own my Sonic plush toy from 2008.
However, in 2006, the show was cancelled due to budget cuts at ITV, even though Jamie Rix was writing more Grizzly Tales during this time.
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| A frame from the Nickelodeon version of Grizzly Tales |
Fortunately, the show was revived in 2011. Nigel was brought back as the storyteller, now as a a different character named the Night-Night Porter and the location of the show became a dungeon for misbehaving children called Hot Hell Darkness.
Gone was the stop motion intros and in with 3D intros and outros. Even the 2D story animation had become more uncanny and strange; this was when flash animation was becoming popular in the animation industry. While a lot of kids enjoyed the new version, many fans of the original found it hard to enjoy, even if Nigel Planer was still narrating the show.
I actually enjoyed the new version of Grizzly Tales and even bought one of the new books to read at school, just before they were adapted into the new version of the show. My favourite episode of the new version was "The Nuclear Wart", where two twins named Jim and Terry would always fight over the smallest things. The more they fought, the bigger the nuclear wart would grow until it would eat up the entirety of Earth.
And so, Grizzly Tales For Gruesome Kids had ended after two stints. To this day, the show has become a cult classic for many kids around the UK. Whenever you and your friends ever talk about scary shows you watched as a kid, it's a probability that this show would come up and would cause many of your friends to remember stories that would still frighten them.
While many kids shows before Grizzly had dabbled in darker topics, Grizzly Tales was still a game changer, when it came to getting away with things that other kids shows couldn't. I mean, there's no way an episode where a boy, who refuses to eat his greens, is accidentally shredded by a combine harvester would ever be accepted in 2023.
Other shows that came after would take some inspiration from Grizzly Tales over the past two decades, including Gravity Falls, Infinity Train and even Black Mirror. The latter would take the most inspiration as every episode would tell a story on the dangers of technology and entertainment.
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| From Netflix |
For me, it was a show that turned me into a boy into a man...well, close enough. I did become a teenager. But overall, Grizzly Tales For Gruesome Kids was not just a fun cartoon about misbehaving kids learning their lesson, it was an experience for everyone that taught us the usual rules of living through spontaneous stories that would stick in our minds as adults.
A lot of people, including me, would love to see this show return to our screens. Maybe as a Netflix exclusive, maybe on ITV, maybe focusing on new stories or even tales on misbehaving adults.
It's just a question of when the show will ever make a comeback in these crazy times.
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