Introduced to this show through a sibling who devoured R. L. Stine's books, I found I initially couldn't form my opinion of it since the first handful of episodes I saw happened to be based on the books I hadn't read (why is it the books you most want to read are the hardest to find?), but once I was lucky (unlucky?) enough to see ones based on the stories I'd read, my opinion was: the ones whose story counterparts I hadn't seen were decent on their own, but those based off of books I had were mediocre in comparison. All of them do seem pretty formula now in retrospect: an evil threatens but only the young protagonist realizes and has a difficult time making anyone else aware. The books are almost always formula in this point too - but Stine was phenomenal in spicing the stories up by conjuring up different humorous dialogue, explanations for the evil, or details to make it seem impressive to a kid. I found the books to be interesting but the show was never enough to scare even a 6-year-old, and I wondered why Stine was actually the host on this show rather than rejecting writers Billy Brown & Dan Angel and hunting for someone more faithful. The fact that (with a few exceptions that ran 2 episodes), each story was limited to less than 30 minutes (the commercial breaks which accounted for the "less than" were surrounded by fade-outs of some new terror arising - which, even the youngest viewer realized after a few breaks, would be a false alarm when it resumed) rushed the plots of stories I laughed and fascinated over in book form, giving no time to absorb the scares, other than the phony ones resolved in 60 seconds while the camera dimmed and returned. I appreciated significantly more those that ran 2 episodes for just under an hour, even with the fade-outs still causing boredom. The plots of these left on a cliffhanger after one episode and there was usually a better twist at the end. Also, since fewer action scenes were shown in most of the single-episode simpler stories, special effects were severely limited; I never found the antagonists as terrifying as they could be in imagination. Example: the book "Let's Get Invisible" doesn't instantly reveal who the being behind the mirror is, but the show has a dead giveaway as he wears a jersey with BACKWARD LETTERING - just plain cheesy! In the 3rd series, a large number of episodes were wasted not on books, but on short stories in his compilations Stories to Give You Goosebumps, which contained 10 boring stories (the one I tried and failed to read was the one never used to base TV scenes off of, but I'm sure the others were no better) which often provoked no fear even on the page - imagine how a screen adaption even weaker than their book basis would've been! No, the plot wasn't rushed; even worse - it was as though the while plot was shown but it was a rushed story to begin with! Ironically my favorite episode (along with a 3-part story I shouldn't mention; it wasn't based on a book) of which I've seen was one of these, "Click" - I doubt it was meant to be scary, but it did make me laugh expecting that the boy who exploited a space- and time-controlling remote could so easily be punished! I just wish I could punish the writers for such a weak adaptation, even to a kid, of a kid's favorite serial.
Review of Goosebumps
