Hey guys! Welcome back to Geek Talk from the Basement, the series, where I take a geeky topic and write about it. Today I'm going to be talking about something that spans between books, TV and movies. A franchise that I almost missed out on when I was a kid. That franchise is Goosebumps by R.L. Stine.
The first Goosebumps book was published by Scholastic Inc. in 1992. It was the summer of 1992 to be exact, and I was in my summer vacation between years of Senior Kindergarten at OCTC. I was still reading picture books and comic books as my primary form of literary entertainment, and so I was a bit young to be reading these books. By the time I'd transitioned over to Greely Elementary School, the series was popular enough to get it's own TV series, though it would be another twenty years before it would get a movie adaptation. The books were a big success and by the time I was old enough to read them, the book series was almost over, and the TV series was done.
The first Goosebumps book I ever got was Night of the Living Dummy III, the third appearance of Slappy, the talking ventriloquist dummy that has become the mascot for the series. I got this at one of the Scholastic Book Fairs that my school's library held twice a year. I know I owned some of the earlier books in the series, but I think this was the only book in the main series that I got at the Book Fair.
At the same Book Fair, I also got the fifth book in the Give Yourself Goosebumps series, Night in Werewolf Woods. This series was the Goosebumps equivalent of the Choose Your Own Adventures books that had been popular in the '70s and '80s as well as earlier in the '90s. I don't remember much about this book, but I had a difficult time with the Choose Your Own Adventures books anyway, so I probably looked at this book once and never picked it up again.
I'll probably get into this a bit deeper as another topic, but part of the reason I didn't read any Goosebumps until I was older, was because my parents were very discerning when it came to the books, comics, TV shows and movies I read and watched. Not only because I have younger siblings, but also because certain shows, books, movies and comics are designed for a specific age group for a reason, and my parents abided by that kind of organization. And so, naturally, it wasn't until I had the ability to buy my own books that I was able to read Goosebumps. Hence why I was so late into the franchise. This also meant that I wound up not being into horror very much when I was a kid, and am still not today, as an adult. Again, that'll be a topic for another time.
As a result, I also never got into the TV version of Goosebumps. I think I saw the opening credits of the show a few times, and of course I knew about it because of the commercials I saw for it on TV, but I've never watched an episode of the show in the four years that it ran for. I mean it was on around the time that Animorphs and Big Bad Beetleborgs/Beetleborgs Metallix were on, but I think because I didn't read any of the books until 1999 or 2000, I didn't have much interest in watching the TV show, even though I'm sure there were a bunch of kids in my class who did watch it.
I also missed the movie when it came out in 2015. I saw commercials for it on TV, but I was basically only going to the movies with Brad at that point, and he wasn't interested in seeing it, so I ended up not going to see it. However, back in 2018, on Halloween, I watched it on Netflix. I enjoyed it for what it was, and it was an okay movie, but I think I enjoyed it more than I would've if Goosebumps had been a series that I'd gotten into when I was a kid rather than something that I was aware of, and had read a few of the books of, but generally wasn't into it the way I was into the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels, Animorphs, Bruno & Boots/Macdonald Hall, and The Adventures of the Bailey School Kids books.
I think it's impressive that while the original series is long over, R.L. Stine has continued writing Goosebumps over the years. There's five other series of Goosebumps that were published after the original series ended in 1997. I haven't done any research on these later series only that the second series, Goosebumps Series 2000 started in 1998, a month after the original series ended. Maybe I'll do a follow up on this post and go into the later series more as well as go over some of my favourite books from the original series.
That's it for today. I just wanted to come on here and talk about Goosebumps a little bit since it was everywhere when I was a kid, like how Animorphs was after that. It's not a series I was super into, but it was part of my childhood, like it was for many other kids who are my age and a little bit younger. I'll be back next week with more reviews and other posts. In the meantime have a great weekend and I will talk to you later.
No comments:
Post a Comment