Stine and his trusty dummy.Įvery Thursday night is family sharing night at the Kramers and Amy can’t stand it! She’s not talented like her older sister Sara, the great painter, and she’s not a goofball like her little brother Jed. Goosebumps was the perfect institution to learn such a thing and there was no better teacher on staff to share the chilling curriculum than Mr. I may have been afraid of Slappy, but out of the slew of iconic terrors the show had the ability to enlist, there was no denying that there was none other than this particular ventriloquist dummy that I was more excited to see made real.Īnd as I settled in with a mixture of anxiety, excitement and pride, it seemed that watching something scary was about a great deal more than being afraid. And again I felt that jolt of excitement that only a show bringing my favorite books to life could conjure. His mouth hung open in a grin and his eyes stared forward, not dead, not alive but somewhere in between.Īll too soon, I thought, those eyes would be on my screen.
The cover featured Slappy, sitting lopsided at the edge of a bed beside two stuffed animals looking rather unnerved.
As the title appeared in the trademark white Goosebumps font on the screen, I eyed the book of the same name sitting beside me, its lettering bathed in pink and green as though what had at one time been cute had skewed sickly and wrong. Stine unleashed his mass of pages into the blustery wind around him.
Beware the night book tv#
Of course, as I had every Friday night, still I found myself sitting squarely in front of the TV as the credits faded into a start and R.L. Could I handle it? Could I look on as a living dummy sprung to life in the night and worked his terrible will against a kid around my age, undermining not only her closest relationships’ belief in her but her belief in herself? The episode would be one of the first and only that I questioned my resolve to watch. The book puts and keeps Slappy at the forefront, serving as a far better establishing narrative for the dummy than the original might have to the unfamiliar, a choice that would ultimately help to codify the villain’s status in Goosebumps canon long term. Wood featuring Slappy as more of a supporting player, the show opted to use Night of the Living Dummy II to introduce the live action dummy to the world. But rather than adapt his first printed outing with Night of the Living Dummy, a book that revolves around a dummy called Mr. It did not take long for Slappy to show up in the first season of Goosebumps, only three months into the series’ initial run. All the while I wondered how they might ever escape Slappy’s plans to enslave them, controlling their actions with the knowledge that no adult would ever believe a kid’s claim that the real culprit was a dummy all along. Still, the thought failed to keep my nerves in check as I read about the evil dummy’s mischievous deeds and the poor kids being blamed for his actions. Still, I was drawn to Slappy’s story, feeling that when contained to the page, I would be protected from it somehow in a way that wasn’t the case were I watching it play out on TV. Having been traumatized by clips of Child’s Play (1988) at an early age, I was already predisposed to petrification by the hands of dolls big or small, so the thought of an otherworldly animated ventriloquist dummy had me in shivers well before I ever opened the book. He’s a wise-cracking, prank-prone and rather well dressed dummy who is far more intelligent than his empty wooden head might suggest, and with two books under his belt and a third on the way, it was only natural that Slappy the ventriloquist doll would finally make his way to the screen in 1996.
Beware the night book series#
The series adaptation later aired on Friday, Janu(runtime: 22 minutes).ĭespite its iconic cavalcade of creepers, crawlers and creatures which almost always go bump in the night, there is one formidable foe who consistently stands atop the swollen hoard of Goosebumps scoundrels. Night of the Living Dummy II was originally p ublished in May 1995 (Spine #31).
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