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We’ve been watching Eerie Indiana most of the day so far and now I’m half tempted to get the accursed Disney+ so we can watch So Weird again 👀

So far I’ve seen deputy Andy Brennan over and over again, recognized Tony Jay on voice alone in the mummy episode (I was like FROLLO?!), saw bby Tobey Maguire, and now Max Headroom lmao

Y'know, in addition to the initial shock of it starring Max from Hocus Pocus.

Jason Marsden now?! Gat dam

The Eerie Indiana Halloween episode with the great Tony Jay is always a must watch for me! pic.twitter.com/Pwn4cdJQjE
— Creed Stonegate III Lord Of The Dead! (@CreedStonegate) October 1, 2020

Tony Jay was so fuckin' great. You'd think he'd be phoning it in for these silly ass kids cartoons but instead he was bringing it. Going full THEATRE every chance he got. the world is a lesser place without him
— It's Dirk! (@DirkGrundy) August 30, 2020

what sort of world would it be without chairface chippendale or uh I guess Frollo in that disney movie (I haven't seen it), or Shere Khan. Or that time he tried to marry Lwuxanna Troi
— It's Dirk! (@DirkGrundy) August 30, 2020

Or how about that time he was a surfing mummy on Eerie Indiana
— Elaine Will (@ElaineMWill) August 30, 2020

I don't remember this, I will have to absolutely go find it on hopefully youtube
— It's Dirk! (@DirkGrundy) August 30, 2020

The brilliant Tony Kay played Sir Boris Von Orloff in SCARIEST HOME VIDEOS and voiced lots of other 90s kids characters like Frollo from ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’, Monsieur D’Arque from ‘Beauty and the Beast’, and Megabyte from ‘Reboot’! #eerieindiana #disney pic.twitter.com/5WQrcTgbB3
— Return to Eerie, Indiana (@eerieindianapod) April 14, 2020

Here’s some more episodes of Eerie Indiana.

In The Retainer, Marshall is trepidatious about visiting the dentist. Not suprising when his dentist is Vincent Schiavelli.

His friend Steve has a massive retainer that lets him talk to dogs.

They learn of a conspiracy among the town’s dogs.

The next episode is The ATM with the Heart of Gold. Marshall’s dad has created a friendly computerised teller, slightly reminiscent of Max Headroom.

Gregory Itzin plays the town mayor. He really is the go-to actor for untrustworthy elected officials, isn’t he?

Marshall’s friend Simon starts getting money from the ATM, because he’s nice to Mr Wilson.

In the next episode, The Losers, Marshall’s dad loses an important presentation. The search leads to some strange places, and an appearance by Joe Dante regular Dick Miller. Not surprising, since this episode is directed by Joe Dante.

Another Dante regular is Henry Gibson, who works in the Bureau of Lost.

Next, it’s America’s Scariest Home Video. It’s Halloween, which can’t be good in Eerie. Marshall’s younger brother is stuck in the TV, and the Mummy has got out, only it’s the actor who played the Mummy years ago.

Next it’s Just Say No Fun.

I’ve just noticed their school is BF Skinner High School – named after the behaviourist who invented the theory of operant conditioning, and the Skinner Box, an experiment where doves were trained to collect food from a dispenser. The dispenser would randomly deliver seed in response to buttons the doves would peck, but it was always random. However, the doves would develop momre and more complex, repeated behaviours in the apparent belief that what they were doing was key to the seeds being given.

Simon is given new glasses, and suddenly he’s boring and just wants to do schoolwork.

There’s a tiny bit of the end credits of Mork and Mindy before the next episode.

Then, an episode Heart on a Chain. A new girl, Melanie, joins Marshall’s class. She has a life-threatening heart problem, and is waiting for a transplant. And all the boys in class fall in love with her. She’s played bu Danielle Harris, possibly familiar to you as Bruce Willis’ daughter in The Last Boy Scout.

Marshall gets love advice from Elvis, who lives on his paper route.

It has a sad ending.

This is the last episode here. After this, recording continues with the start of Channel 4 News.

I am neck-deep in an "Eerie, Indiana" marathon. I adore this series. It was a weird depiction of early '90s Americana, similar to David Lynch's "Twin Peaks", but with a stronger paranormal and supernatural spin on it (think "The X-Files" for the pre-teen audience). Overall, it holds up really well, and I'm surprised at times by the caliber of the talent that worked on this series, particularly the cast, the writers, and the guest directors.

Fans of cult TV will recognise Tony Jay from Twin Peaks (1990/1) as Dougie Milford, as Baron Boris Von Orloff in Eerie, Indiana: Scariest Home Videos (1991), Star Trek: The Next Generation - Cost of Living (1992) and The New Adventures of Superman (1993-95) as Nigel St John. pic.twitter.com/Xv3l6pOVNT
— CharlesWynfordLodge (@2hrTV) November 9, 2019

Was reminded of the show, "Eerie Indiana," so I had to watch some early 90's weirdness. Spotting celebrity guests and kids that became celebs.
— Kiran Chicoine (@SoryuBlueDragon) September 29, 2019

In tonight’s brilliantly funny episode, Simon’s little brother manages to zap himself into a cheesy 1940s mummy movie, while simultaneously zapping the mummy into the real world. At least that’s what everybody initially thinks in Karl Schaefer’s delightful script. The mummy isn’t a mummy, it’s a long-suffering and long-dead actor, played by Tony Jay, who somehow found his afterlife consisting of an endless repeat of the same dopey film.

Our son completely loved it and howled with laughter at the midpoint revelations of what the heck is going on. Afterward, he told us how he’d love to zap himself into the original Godzilla. We asked why in the world he’d want to go someplace so remarkably unsafe. To ride Godzilla, of course. Why didn’t we think of that?

Eerie Indiana’s Halloween Episode #5 “Scariest Home Videos.” In this bts shot, you can see the director Sam Pillsbury and the DP Jonathan West conversing about where to place the cameras and lighting. The costume designer Melissa Binder is touching up Tony Jays mummification along with the makeup artist Camille Calvert. Justin Shenkarow and Omri Katz are standing by waiting for the shot to be set up so they can play out the scene.

So Mike's been on a "shitty documentary" kick lately - haunted wild west, true bigfoot encounters, that sort of thing - so our YouTube feed is just full of lo-res nineties "exposés" about various supernatural events. The latest one it kicked out was about spectral activity around Gettysburg, and guess who's doing the narration? None other than Tony Jay, aka Boris von Orloff, international star of stage and screen.

Okay, I’m going to start by undercutting my title: Eerie Indiana didn’t actually make me who I am. But it was still super important. It’s a little weird, but then again, so is the show.

Eerie, Indiana is a scifi/fantasy/horror kids show from 1991. It ran for one season (19 episodes). Originally on NBC, it was then syndicated on the Disney Channel from 1993-1996, before jumping networks again to Fox for a year in 1997.

I discovered this as a ten-year old so it hit me just when I was starting to grow my own pop-culture sensibility, but still had nearly all my media selected by my parents. Not that their choices were bad, just that nothing was self-selected. Nothing was mine or me. So when Eerie, Indiana came up it acted as a bit of a conduit. The show itself isn’t all that amazing, but it’s made up of countless priceless pieces.

You see, Eerie, Indiana was Joe Dante’s follow-up project after Gremlins 2. Dante’s directorships were Gremlins, Explorers (which I love), Innerspace, The ‘Burbs, Gremlins 2, and then this. That weird, not-quite-for -kids feel from Gremlins is kneaded and softened just enough to become a show for kids.

In addition to that, many of the plots are urban legends, Twilight Zone rehashes, or “strongly reminiscent of” Goosebumps books. And then there’s the cast. Main character Marshall Teller is played by Omri Katz, who will be recognized by many as the lead in Hocus Pocus. The rest of the cast is similarly filled with character actors and “oh, that guy”s. Jason Marsden, whose voice you’ll recognize if not his face, John Astin (Addams Family), Harry Goaz (Twin Peaks), Henry Gibson (way toomuch to list), Tony Jay, Tobey Maguire, Matt Frewer, Vincent Schiavelli, Danielle Harris, Rene Auberjonois, Claude Akins, Tom Everett, Ray Walston, Stephen Root. Seriously, just scroll through the IMDB cast page and you’ll find someone you had forgotten about but recognize. And those are all from a single season! That’s approaching Pete & Pete guest celebrity density. Stylistically there are creepy suburbs, twins talking in unison, and a bunch of low-key norm-core anxiety; the first episode could take place in the same world as Edward Scissorhands. Episode 10, “The Lost Hour”, is essentially Stephen King’s The Langoliers with daylight savings time instead of an airplane.

Does the show itself hold up? The episodes aren’t bad, but they aren’t fantastic. I have a feeling that without the aid of nostalgia the pace would be a bit slow, the production a bit too cheap. However, what this show offered to me in my childhood. What it gave me was a vocabulary for movies and television that I didn’t have. Up until now, I knew that horror was scary and comedy was funny. But Eerie, Indiana changed that for me. Suddenly horror could make me laugh, and comedy could make me feel sad. Suddenly endings weren’t always so happy, and there might not be a final act twist to fix everything. Sometimes death is a part of the story.

In episode 5, America’s Scariest Home Video, an actor is trapped reshooting a monster movie in a time loop for all eternity. The happy ending is more of happier ending, in that he gets to jump from horror to a nicer film. but he’s still trapped. It’s just a nicer trap.

In episode 7, Heart on a Chain, well, just read the episode summary:

Marshall and a classmate, Devon (Cory Danziger) fall for the new girl, Melissa (Danielle Harris) who needs a heart transplant. When Devon dies in a gruesome accident, Melissa receives Devon’s heart — and her personality changes almost overnight. Is Melissa acting out because she feels guilty over Devon’s death or does Devon’s spirit live on in his transplanted heart, which is now in Melissa’s body?

Yeah, I tuned into the Disney Channel to watch an episode where Marshall’s classmate dies, and then followed that up with a heart transplant for another kid. That is kind of astounding. This wasn’t a very special episode where Marshall and the Tellers have to deal with a far removed family member’s death. This was a classmate. To make it even stranger, that death wasn’t even the point of the episode. I mean, it allows the plot to move forward, but it’s not about the emotional fallout of Devon’s death, it’s about Marshall investigating just another strange occurrence, part of which just happens to be the death of his peer.

Episode 14, Mr. Chaney, is a suburban/rural sacrifice story. Episode 19 features rebellion against an abusive father. The show basically alternated between referential horror tropes and plots, and sinister concepts. There’s always something a bit horrific going on, wrapped up in a palatable and affable weirdness. If there’s one take-away from this show, it’s that it was magnificent at sublimating darkness into children’s entertainment. Which is Joe Dante all over.

What Marshall Teller’s time in this town showed me was that genres were less concrete than I thought, and that twists could come from style as much as plot. This all might sound a bit heady, but these were things I was absorbing in the back of my head. I looked forward to each episode, but I also had a tinge of unease when they started. I’d never actually looked forward to something that I wanted with anything other than anticipation, and I had to come to terms with both wanting something, and wanting to look away. That’s not to say that all of this was conscious. I was ten. These things were all happening behind the curtain of my awareness. But they were happening. While I wasn’t having these ideas, I was experiencing these feelings, and coming to terms with them was happening on a syndicated schedule.

If I’m being a little hokey, I might say I grew up in Eerie, Indiana. I didn’t. It was one season long, and once it fell off of Disney’s rotation I lost track of it for a long time. I never forgot it though, and I’d randomly remember certain pieces of it from time to time. It’s probably more accurate to say I grew up in Wellsville1, but I spent my summers in Eerie, Indiana.

Eerie Indiana: America’s Scariest Home Video / Heart On A Chain

This is the second time I pulled the “TV episodes count too” card, and I want to try to make it the last – because Eerie is a half hour show, I tried to pick two favorites. Despite taking place on Halloween, America’s Scariest Home Video is one of the more humorous episodes in the series, highlighted by a deadpan Tony Jay performance and the general idea of a bratty grade schooler replacing the monster in a 50’s horror b-movie and still managing to terrorize the female lead. Heart On A Chain is one of my favorites because the plot, where a young girl gets a heart transplant from a reckless male suitor and starts behaving like him and being unable to pursue any other romantic interests, feels like a classic urban legend. I also like how it’s one of the few episodes where, up until the ending, it’s left up in the air whether something seemingly supernatural is all in a character’s head. 3/5 / 4/5.

As the buzz wears off following our Richard Whorf love-fest, let us carry on, from the oddness of the early-60s to the oddness of the early-90s, where the epicenter of weirdness can be found in the name-appropriate...

Eerie, Indiana

So, this is kind of like your proto-Buffy, what with its mystery-solving and its acknowledgement that strange things are going down everywhere in Sunny- uh, Eerie, leading to supernatural stalls that must be mucked. Marshall Teller is an everykid who has been relocated from the Garden State to eerie Eerie (insert obligatory Jersey-bash here), and whose Mom would go on to live by a creek and become the mother of that insufferable bastard, Dawson. Oh, how we wish this series had been picked up instead.

As noted earlier, the 90s saw the media in the hands of those raised on the media of the 60s, so we're going to see a lot of carefully-trivial deep cuts and throwback-nods here; this caliber of adoration would eventually fuel a thousand fan-sites online, where liking things so much that you almost hate them has become the currency of the day.

But not here - not yet. Here is strange little bastion of early nerd-culture, a safe-haven that was needed for those of us who watched Universal monster pictures on AMC and sopped up the Bob Dorian-laced trivia about Jack Pierce's scar-tissue appliques and Lon Chaney Jr.'s sad dog-face before going out to look for Bigfoot in the backyard. Let's go there now, and let's pull the rope-ladder up after us - the other kids will never understand.

Space: Eerie, IN
Time: October 20th, 1991
Episode: "America's Scariest Home Video" Season 1, Episode 5

Now here's a show that gets it. Just look at these guys, suiting up for their Halloween adventure, just as star Omri Katz would do in a few years as Max on Hocus Pocus. They are itemizing like soldiers, synchronizing the watches of of their trick-or-treating supplies like they're fresh out of the castle break-in from Where Eagles Dare. But hey, look at this get-up:

Rubber crone masks, back in vogue! What was old is new again, except they are, by definition, still old (Richard Whorf, these masks are for you!). And as a true sign of the times, we're getting Bush 41 and Gorbachev, who were and remain pretty decent crones.

But then, we do catch further glimpses of Halloween '91 throughout the ep - please note the tasteful use of what we now recognize as Lambert Lanterns (#LambertLanterns), and just look how far mask technology had advanced from the days of Chip and Sudsy!

It's difficult to articulate to the modern audience just how much of a phenomenon America's Funniest Home Videos was at the time. You've got your ambitious stand-up, Bobert Saget, taking invaluable time from the Tanner's hugging schedule to host this weekly tribute to the idiocy of Americans. Hey, we all know that no matter what school of comedy you hail from, be it the Bob Newhart School, or the Richard Pryor School, or the Dane Cook School etc., I think we can all kind of agree... watching dudes get hit in the balls is pretty hilarious, right? I thought as much. So, count on the power of a sit-com star, the power of dudes getting hit in the balls, the realness of the ball-hitting, and the fabulous $10,000 cash prize, synergized with Coulier on America's Funniest People - whoo boy, you have entertainment for an entire nation's worth of families.

Anyway, young Marshall and his buddy, Simon, were of the perfect age to know a good scam when they see it, and so, try to videotape Simon's brother, Harley, doing something crazy so they can win that sweet Saget prize money. One thing leads to another, and the janky A/V set-up that was standard issue in this age before streaming is fried in a way that suggests Mom and Dad are going to be so mad when they get home.

This is because 1.) What did you do to my VCR, do you not know how heavy and expensive these are in 1991!? and 2.) Lil Harley - a king mixer if ever I've seen one - is trapped inside the mummy movie they'd been watching.

Whoops! And of course, due to the transitive property of entering a television world, if you are going to recast the Incredible Hulk with your pet cat, expect a Bill Bixby and/or Lou Ferrigno in your living room. We have this here, in the shape of said-movie mummy.

Surprised to the point of evacuating the house and smacking each other around, the boys anxiously follow some prospective trick-or-treaters back up to the Teller front door to see what the hell happens next. And who could be so wicked as to answer a rung doorbell on Halloween, I ask you?

What!? Why, it's Marshall's sister, Syndi, as played by Julie Condra. Now, J-Con is best known in my mind for portraying "Madeline" in what has to be a top-10 episode for The Wonder Years, "It's A Mad, Mad, Madeline World," in which she comes as close as any woman ever would to besting Winnie Cooper (Kevin, of course, was far too weak to deal with such a self-assured powerhouse, and so went back to wallowing in his broken childhood romance for many more seasons, the dolt).

Anyway, she does her big sister-thing to everyone involved, and because she's not a psycho, does not realize the mummy is an actual mummy. Classic older-sibling move. This eventually leads to the fellas capturing the mummy, only to realize he's not the actual mummy, but rather the famous actor Boris Von Orloff, played by Judge Claude Frollo himself, Messr. Tony Jay. "Hellfire" indeed, my friends!

They look on, stunned, as that little fucker, Harley, trashes the set of his movie and loves every minute of it. As do we, the audience.

Moments later, it's all over and the body-switch/TV-reality pseudo-science circuit is completed right before Mom and Dad get home. Well done, all round - they'll never find out!

In conclusion, check out this series, it was a weird little gem of its time for weird little people, and one that celebrated the weirdness of previous eras as well. I give it 10 out of 13 rubber crone masks

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Eerie Indiana

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froodle - chibikinesis on Eerie Indiana
froodle - CreedStonegate on Eerie Indiana
froodle - DirkGrundy on Eerie Indiana
froodle - Return to Eerie Indiana on Tony Jay
froodle - VHistory on Eerie Indiana
froodle - GrafOrlok22 on Eerie Indiana
froodle - 2HRTV on Tony Jay
froodle - SoryuBlueDragon on Eerie Indiana
froodle - Revolvy on fictional actors:
froodle - Ch. 99 - Reviews - Eerie Indiana E5 - 9/10
froodle - Fire Breathing Dimetrodon reviews Eerie, Indiana 1.6 – Scariest Home Videos
froodle - Behind the scenes photo from Scariest Home Movies
froodle - Marshall, Simon and Boris von Orloff
froodle - CreedStoneGate on the Halloween episode Eerie, Indiana
froodle - Boris von Orloff narrates Ghosts of Gettysburg documentary
froodle - The Chaotic Neutral: Things That Made Me: Eerie, Indiana
froodle - Mike K reviews Eerie, Indiana episodes: Scariest Home Movies/Heart on a Chain
froodle - Justin Zeppa reviews Eerie, Indiana's Halloween episode, Scariest Home Movies

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