Bad To The Bone 25 Anniversary

the year was 1991. twin peaks had just been dumped by abc afterit’s low rated second season, and just as audiences were discovering their taste forweirdness, suddenly there was nothing to be found. thankfully someone heeded the call to fillthis void. it was time for a scruffy charismatic truthseeking brown haired investigator to team up with a feisty redhead to solve paranormalmysteries. uh, no. not that brown haired investigator and feistyredhead, i’m talking about new jersey transplant

marshal teller and his new best friend simonholmes. boy detectives who search out, catalog, andprotect their home town of eerie indiana from strange, otherworldly, and paranormal threats. this september eerie indiana celebrates itssilver jubilee (that’s it’s 25th anniversary for those who don’t know) and i can’tthink of a better way to properly kickstart my new show than by recapping and analyzingits entire one season run. so let’s get things started! hurry up and find a seat, because it’s timefor secret screening! eerie indiana may be one of my favorite tvshows of all time as i’m sure it is for

others, but the march of time hasn’t alwaysbeen kind to it. especially right now. as the show is set to celebrate its 25th anniversary,it's only dvd release is now over 10 years old and is completely out of print. making existing new and unopened copies sellfor as much as 145 dollars online! and that’s for a boring bare-bones set withno extras, no special features, no interviews, and a buggy half-hearted presentation thatlooks like something a grandparent could slap together in idvd. this slow fade from public consciousness iscompounded by its disappearance from streaming

services like hulu and netflix. and you still can’t buy the series digitallyon itunes or amazon! sure, you can dig up dingy and dank bootlegsof clips or full episodes on youtube or dailymotion, but without any real public visibility ora real push for a restoration bluray or dvd re-release from the rights holders, the showwill continue to disappear right before our very eyes. part of that disappearance may stem intrinsicallyfrom the shows initial failure, but i’m getting ahead of myself. for those who don’t know, eerie indianais the story of new jersey transplant marshall

teller, who was uprooted from his home ina “less safe” and “more urban” neighborhood, and relocated with the rest of his familyto eerie indiana, the statistically “safest place on earth”. but marshal knows that statistics can lie,and just beneath the pleasant surface of this town lies a weirdness magnet that brings inmajor league paranormal problems. thankfully he’s not the only one who notices,and makes fast friends with simon holmes. together they investigate the various mysteriesof the town. it was a prime time tv show that ran sundayevenings on nbc from september 15th, 1991 to april 12th 1992.

it only lasted a single season for a multitudeof reasons. for starters, because of the show’s fantasticalelements, and the choice to shoot on film instead of video, it was very expensive toproduce at the time. it would have needed to have been a smashsuccess right out of the gate to warrant a second season, which obviously it wasn’t. but why wasn’t it? this was a cool and creepy show that lookedgorgeous, hinted at a bigger story, and featured big name talent like the artistic directionof joe dante and the star power of omri katz. on paper, this should have been bigger thanthe superbowl.

what went wrong? well to better understand what went wrong,you need to understand the television and media landscape of the late eighties and earlynineties. this was a time well before on demand streamingservices and the small boom of home video and tv season box sets that allowed viewersto consume shows and serialized stories on their own time, and in a manner that allowedfor larger audiences to become accustomed to following longer interconnected storiesand deeper mysteries. serialized storytelling was nothing new atthe time, mind you, it was just frowned upon. especially in the world of network broadcasttv, which was episodic by design.

each episode needed to be self contained,because networks needed the freedom to rebroadcast episodes in any order they please. couple this with networks being, as always,afraid to take risks, and that forced shows like eerie indiana to push connective themes,continuity, and story arcs far into the background, so the show could be “friendlier” to newaudiences that might stumble into the show several weeks or months after it began airing. with most episodes hitting the reset buttonat the end, and with no major ongoing threat in the plot, the audience could come and goas they please. and as such, there was no urgency to keeppeople coming back from week to week.

but the biggest problem eerie indiana sufferedfrom was an identity crisis. it was a squeaky clean twin peaks with a family-friendlyfantasy/horror theme. nbc just didn’t know what to make of theshow or what to do with it. early on it was decided that this was a “kids”show, and that was how it was marketed and how it was scheduled. you see, back in the early 90s no one knewwhat a “tween” was, or how to market to them. to media makers of the time, you were eitheran adult who they knew how to market to, a mysterious teenager who only watched mtv,or a kid who liked toys and unchallenging

attention grabbing baby stuff. to be more specific, teenagers weren’t “teenagers”until they were roughly old enough to drive. somewhere between 17 to 19 years old. old enough to take the responsibilities ofindependence and sexual interaction, but still trapped within the nuclear family household. that means that - to marketing and contentcreators - anyone from one from 8 to 16 was exactly the same kind of happy meal buyingg rated audience demographic as their younger counterparts. this was made no clearer than in the schedulingof eerie indiana.

which, for some baffling reason, was lumpedtogether with a brainless disney channel-level young audience designed sitcom called thetorkelsons. the tonal difference was jarring. just check out this nbc advertisement fromthe middle of eerie indiana's run: “what happens to the one kid who forgetsto set his watch back?” “where is everybody?” “sunday, it’s a very eerie indiana.” “then, it’s the torkelsons! kirby getsan eyefull!” “oh no!”

“oh yes!” “noooooooo!” “it’s love, country style!” “oh, puke on my shoes!” “on a new nbc sunday!” airing these back to back is like showingamerican horror story right before disney’s stuck in the middle. the audience for one is not the audience forthe other, and both shows suffered because of it.

it wasn’t necessarily mismanaged at thetime by nbc. eerie indiana was just too new, too weird,and different than anything that had come before. to them, there was no “tween” audiencethat was seeking out more sophisticated “young adult” stories. it was the dawn of nickelodeon and in a timejust before snick catered to a tvy7 or tv14 audience. at the time, it just didn’t fit in anywhereon network tv, and so after just 19 episodes - only 18 of which actually aired on nbc - eerieindiana was cancelled.

but that’s not the end of its story. thanks to the newly launched disney channelwhich was hungry for content, in 1993 they started syndicating eerie indiana which introducedthe show to an even larger audience. it also was rebroadcast on encore’s wamkids network. a short lived cable tv station that painfullyshowcased that adults still had no idea what a “tween” is or how to make anything forthem. “my kids are outgrowing nickelodeon, andthere’s nothing on tv i trust!” “my name is carolyn. i’m 13!”

“i’m shocked by some of the things i’veseen.” “i need my guys! what to do with my life! shopping!” “i’m the last person she wants to listento.” “i want to be trusted to watch the kindof tv i want to watch.” “there’s no one thinking about what thisstuff is saying to my kids!” “and this is my declaration of independence!” “where are the values?!”

“somewhere between “cute and cool” liesthe impressionable years of 8 to 16. when kids decide who they are. when they begin to choose their values. when parents realize that “growing up”was nothing like when they were young. too often tv programmers tune out this awkwardage. more often, they need role models. information that makes sense of the world,and helps them face the future.” “instead, tv fills them with cartoons.” “how stupid do they think my kids are?!”

“they’ll put anything on that will justget their attention.” “it makes me angry!” “they send them the wrong message.” “it scares the hell out of me!” “this concerns me.” “can’t anyone provide a channel that’sa safe room for my kids?” “wam kids!” “the first and only commercial free educationand entertainment network dedicated to the neglected 8 to 16 year olds!

because the majority of parents say that tvdoes not reflect their family values, because almost all parents of young teens agree, there’sno channel that meets their kids needs.” “it would be nice if someone could providea channel with entertainment kids want to watch that we can trust!” “wam kids weekend entertainment zone!” “with the premiere of literary adaptationof the guid blyton adventure series, plus ellie and jules, sky trackers, “why shouldwe be the only intelligent life form in the entire universe?”, legends of the secrethidden city, “he found something!”, kerrisdale!, cybernet!, time exposures!, and eerie indiana!”

though the show had an extra heartbeat thanksto disney and wam, it mostly fell off the map. but elsewhere a storm was brewing. r.l.stine’s horror anthology, goosebumps,launched in 1992, and by 1995 it was blowing up. it singlehandedly launched the “young adult”book market and was highly regarded as the gateway into reading for countless kids worldwide. it was so popular in fact, that at the heightof the book series popularity, goosebumps spawned its very own live action tv show.

though not the first horror anthology forkids, (that honor goes to nickelodeon’s are you afraid of the dark, a topic for afuture secret screening episode) goosebumps did two things incredibly right: it was shoton video and done on the cheap in canada, and it premiered on fox kids saturday morningblock of kids programming that, thanks to series like the tick skewed to an older auidence. its first season was a blockbuster success,and fox was hungry for more content that fit under the spooky/weird horror anthology forkids umbrella that goosebumps created. in a spark of brilliance, fox was able topick up the rights to eerie indiana and began rebroadcasting the show as a “new” seriesin 1997.

because of the goosebumps bump and the tailormade all ages audience cultivated by fox kids on late saturday mornings, eerie indiana finallyfound the success it always deserved. the only problem was, it was six years toolate. by now the shows leads, omri katz and justinshenkarow had both grown up and everyone, from the shows creators jos㩠rivera and karlschaefer, to joe dante had all moved onto other work. but that didn’t deter fox from making moreeerie indiana. they bought the rights and tried to make thebest of them. so in tremendous haste fox slapped togethereerie indiana: the other dimension.

the framing device for this show was thatdue to a crazy cable guy installing satellite dishes all around town, the real marshal tellerand simon holmes are able to briefly communicate with their dimensional duplicates mitchellteller and stanley hope in the “real world” eerie indiana. in addition to the cross dimensional communication,the satellite dishes were causing an inter-dimensional rift and allowing the weirdness of the originaleerie indiana to spill into the new one. i wish i could say the show was half as interestingor well produced as that sounds, it was unfortunately a mess. it suffered from bad writing, bad casting,and it stunk of being nothing more than a

cheap and heartless rush job just propertyalive. though the strange similarities do explainwhy alex hirsch, the creator of disney’s gravity falls, has claimed that both serieswere a such a huge influence on himself as a kid and the show he created for disney. for more information on gravity falls i highlyrecommend all my other videos. suffice it to say, eerie indiana: the otherdimension only ran for 15 episodes in 1998, and much like the declining popular goosebumpstv show, it was cancelled and quickly forgotten. to this day clean copies are very hard tocome by. it was never released on home video, and asfar as i can find it only exists within a

playlist of uploaded vhs recordings on youtube. i’m still on the fence about reviewing theseother dimension episodes because i want secret screening to skew more positive than negative,because there are more than enough angry gasses wearing guys out there screaming terriblejokes about bad content. and that’s the backstory of eerie indiana. in the weeks to come i’ll be revisitingthe series for the first time in many years. i’ll be recapping the episodes and seeingif they still hold up 25 years later. given audience interest i might not reviewevery episode. i might just jump around and review the bestepisodes of the short series, but if the demand

is high i have no problem looking back andreviewing all 19 of these episodes! sound off in the comments below, and let meknow which you’d prefer! regardless of your choice, be sure to tunein next week when i tackle the pilot episode of eerie indiana, foreverware. thanks for watching, and remember to subscribeso you don’t miss my next episode, because you’ll always have a ticket for my nextsecret screening. stay weird.

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