31 Days of Halloween: Goosebumps

2023, Rob Letterman, Nicholas Stoller (Monsters vs Aliens, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) -- Disney

<inserted into the timeline after the fact; which also breaks the timeline because the final episodes air in November>

Herein I adapt the Kent 100-1-1-1 format for a TV show, and fill in some of the days of watching since the return from Vegas. Also, the series is on-going, so this will be pasted into the stream to fill in the blanks the Return, and the watching of TV has caused.

What 100: Letterman returns with another re-imagining of the Scholastic Books series, but for an older audience. His last time round was a movie starring Jack Black. If the movie was about pretending Jack was RL Stine, and having the monsters from his short, little books directed at kids, come to life, then the conceit is recreated in this series by having each episode centered on a single idea or motif, almost as if you were reading a stand-alone book. And yet, it is all drawn together in the popular streaming idea of something happening to a group of teens.

1-The Great: E03: Cuckoo Clock of Doom. Each episode does at least an attempt to tell a singular story within the confines of the greater story, that of The Biddle Kid taking revenge on the kids who killed him. This one gives us a mini loopty loo element, wherein James bumps his head against a clock, during the Halloween party in The Biddle House that kicks off the Bad Stuff, and notices he is stuck in a time loop. The twist is that every time he tries to leave the house, a duplicate of him wanders out into the real time stream, ending up with just less than a dozen alternate Darker Universe versions of him wandering around causing havoc. That is, until one of the kids discovers that even the minimal of violence against the dopples causes them to explode into green slime, that smells of Watermelon Jolly Rancher. It was just a fun episode!

1-The Good: E01: Say Cheese and Die! The setup episode.

Pacific Northwest, i.e. familiar faces from the Vancouver/West Coast stable of actors, town of Port Lawrence. We get the high school kids: Isaiah (Zach) the football god, his best friend and "one of 3 gay people in town" James, his next door neighbour and tenuous friend Margot, the weird girl, and "captain of the AV Club" introvert Isabella. Isaiah is reining popular kid, going to single handedly save the football team and be recognized by scouts, and intends on hosting a Halloween party in the town haunted house, which was being renovated by his father, after being inherited by the new English teacher, Mr. Bratt. The house is the Biddle House, named for a teen who died there in a mysterious fire in the 90s.

The ensemble cast is pretty good, and eventually includes another kid, the reckless Lucas, who for the most part are not cookie cutter kids all from the same social circle. But neither is any one of them an extreme of the iconic role they are to play. 

1-The Bad: E08: The fake ending episode. They find out who the "real Bad Guy" is, give chase and defeat him in a rather blasé episode focused on running around yelling a lot. I quite expected to say this was the end of the series, but then I saw there were two yet to run.

But also the climax focused on the most popular villain of the Goosebumps franchise -- Slappy the Ventriloquist's dummy. Apparently, because I never read the books, so I have no idea who he is. He is just an evil dummy who influences people into doing terrible things. So, the Biddle Kid's ghost is not the real Bad Guy, but the stupid dummy was. And they defeat him by tossing him over a cliff, and convincing the ghost to cut ties with the dummy. It all felt rushed and anti-climactic, which should have been more of a hint of there being more episodes.