This Nickelodeon bumper

*warning, flashing colors*

When I was a youngin’, this bumper for Nickelodeon was still airing. This was during its “Nick Is Every Day” era, since there was a point in time when Nick didn’t show kids programming every day of the week. You can imagine how my siblings and I felt seeing this creepy-ass promo for the first time after watching something like Rugrats.

We would run and hide behind the couch or even out of the room completely when this bumper came on. I mean, look at it. Seeing a weird-ass faceless mannequin walking towards you with strange music and flashing lights/colors doesn’t exactly make you feel like watching the rest of the promo with the pictures of happy kids. 

Watching it now as an adult, there’s still something unnerving about it. Compare it to the other Nick promos that were airing at that time. Some were weird, yes. But, all were colorful with happy, lively music and lots of orange. The mannequin promo was just creepy and jarring.

Aging backwards (Billy & Mandy and Futurama)

Technically, a kid isn’t supposed to be watching Futurama, but that didn’t really stop us, did it?

During the Futurama episode “Teenage Mutant Leela’s Hurdles,” the Planet Express crew is drenched in a therapeutic mud that reverses aging. Professor Farnsworth tries to fix it, but accidentally makes everyone de-age faster. This concept was horrific to think about; getting younger and smaller until you’re floating in your amniotic sac. Then, a painful reverse death where you’re just gone. And you’re completely alert and aware through all of it.

Since this is Futurama we’re dealing with, there are plenty of jokes peppered in about everyone getting younger, so it softens the blow. Also helping is the episode’s climax, where everyone reverses the de-aging process. All things considered, not too terrible.

But, “The Halls of Time” in Billy and Mandy gave me nightmares as a kid, and still freaks me out as an adult. During a tour of Father Time’s halls, Billy and Irwin sneak off and start messing around with the hourglasses that represent people’s lifespans. Father Time stops them and makes them put the hourglasses back before kicking them out. Suddenly, the group starts aging backwards. Mandy realizes Billy and Irwin put the hourglasses back upside down, and they need to set them right before they are unbirthed.

Spoiler alert: They all get unbirthed.

While there were a lot of jokes in this episode about messing with people’s lifespan (including bamfing series creator Maxwell Atoms out of existence), the jokes stop once Mandy realizes everyone is aging backwards. The music is also running backwards, but sounds weirdly tense and urgent. It’s like the music itself is acting as a countdown-to-nonexistence timer. Then, one by one, the group just disappears. 

I think probably the worst part is when Grim finally vanishes. While it is somewhat interesting that they made Grim an anatomically correct baby skeleton, with a cross-shaped hole in the skull where the soft spot would be, this grim-faced (pun somewhat intended) skeleton baby looking at the camera and waving goodbye to existence just makes the whole situation scarier.

The entirety of Jumanji (and the fucking commercial for the home game)

I think for a lot of 90s kids, Jumanji was one of their first exposures to the horror genre, despite it being billed as an adventure fantasy. A magic cursed board game causes the game’s hazards to become real. The main characters are attacked by hordes of pissed off monkeys, mosquitos that can break through glass, giant man-eating or poison-spewing plants, and a deliberately-made-bigger-and-scarier-than-normal lion. None of the danger will go away until someone wins the game, provided the players survive that long. One of them does not (at least until the timeline is reset).

A lot of people will say the scariest part of Jumanji is Van Pelt. Played by Jonathan Hyde, he’s a 19th century hunter who lives in the jungle and hunts the most dangerous game of all. The way he doggedly stalks the main characters and is basically invincible to all harm makes him the scariest thing to come from the game. 

But, wait, there’s more! As with anything that existed in the 90s, it needed game tie-ins. The Jumanji board game itself wasn’t scary, but the commercial advertising it definitely was. We had to mute the TV or change the channel when it came on because the drums and shouting were too scary for our little kid brains to handle.

This Fucking PSA about “Sniffing”

I think a lot of people who were growing up have at least one “that one PSA scared the shit out of me” story. For some, it was the “Snake” one, where a drug dealer slowly transforms into a snake-man. For others, it was the workplace safety PSA where a chef in a restaurant kitchen slips on some water and ends up getting boiling grease dumped all over her.

For me, it was this one. A little girl sits in her room, gloomily playing with her stuffed bunny. Suddenly, the room begins filling with water, and she can’t open the door or windows. As we zoom in on the girl thrashing, scrambling, and eventually floating lifeless, the voiceover talks about sniffing/huffing and how it deprives one’s brain of oxygen, almost like what happens when you drown.

I was so scared by this PSA, I basically blocked out the message. It wasn’t until I searched for “PSA girl drowning” on YouTube that I was able to understand the metaphor. If you had asked younger me what that PSA was about, I would not have been able to tell you. All I knew was there was a little kid trapped in her bedroom as it filled with water, and she wasn’t able to escape. I also knew that drowning was a terrible way to die. And yet there we were, watching a little kid drown to death just before Sailor Moon started.