Back in the early to mid-'90s, I (and much of the rest of America's youth) loved R.L. Stine's "Goosebumps" series, which were as popular as Harry Potter in their day. To this day I still read them occasionally. Even when I was a kid I never found them all that scary (and when they got to "Series 2000", they took a huge nosedive very quickly), but they're entertaining enough and worth reading. When this show first came on the air, I used to watch it religiously. I haven't seen it in a good while, but I remember it well enough to give some sort of commentary.
The show experienced the same problem with the novels themselves: after two very spooky seasons of "regular Goosebumps", we had to go to "Ultimate Goosebumps", which relied more on sheer weirdness than genuine scares. A lot of the "Ultimate Goosebumps" eps were based off short stories from Stine's five or six "Tales To Give You Goosebumps" books, which each had ten stories of varying quality ("Old Story", "The Perfect School", the one with the ants, and "Click" I can name immediately). And the book adaptations ("Bride of the Living Dummy", "A Shocker On Shock Street") were VERY loose by that point. The older eps of the show, like "The Haunted Mask", "Night of the Living Dummy II", "It Came From Beneath The Sink", "Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes", "The Werewolf of Fever Swamp", etc., varied slightly from the book they were based on, but in general were very faithful to the stories. There were some later eps ("Welcome To Dead House", "Night of the Living Dummy III") that were very well done, but the best eps were in the first two seasons. The show isn't a whole lot to get worked up over (I'd recommend the original "Are You Afraid Of The Dark?" personally), but it isn't a bad waste of thirty minutes. But definitely read the books, at least #1-35, if you like these kind of stories.
Seven stars.
The show experienced the same problem with the novels themselves: after two very spooky seasons of "regular Goosebumps", we had to go to "Ultimate Goosebumps", which relied more on sheer weirdness than genuine scares. A lot of the "Ultimate Goosebumps" eps were based off short stories from Stine's five or six "Tales To Give You Goosebumps" books, which each had ten stories of varying quality ("Old Story", "The Perfect School", the one with the ants, and "Click" I can name immediately). And the book adaptations ("Bride of the Living Dummy", "A Shocker On Shock Street") were VERY loose by that point. The older eps of the show, like "The Haunted Mask", "Night of the Living Dummy II", "It Came From Beneath The Sink", "Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes", "The Werewolf of Fever Swamp", etc., varied slightly from the book they were based on, but in general were very faithful to the stories. There were some later eps ("Welcome To Dead House", "Night of the Living Dummy III") that were very well done, but the best eps were in the first two seasons. The show isn't a whole lot to get worked up over (I'd recommend the original "Are You Afraid Of The Dark?" personally), but it isn't a bad waste of thirty minutes. But definitely read the books, at least #1-35, if you like these kind of stories.
Seven stars.