It wasn't just me: Silly childhood fears

Looking up something or other on Google this morning, I found a reminder of a phenomenon of childhood I had previously thought unique to me, being the weird little kid that I was. I watched a lot of TV back then, much of it syndicated reruns of old prime-time shows like Hogan's Heroes, Petticoat Junction and Bewitched! For some reason -- maybe mainly because of the creepy music that usually accompanied them -- I used to dread seeing the logos of the production companies and TV studios that were shown at the end of some shows. The Screen Gems flying logo, for example, used to creep me out big-time, and the Bing Crosby Productions logo shot that ended Hogan's Heroes was another. And the Rankin-Bass logo animation after many classic holiday animated specials positively gave me nightmares. (Not all of them were bad, mind you; I actually kind of liked the Ubu Productions logo following one old sitcom ["Sit, Ubu, sit! Good dog!" "ARF!"]. And the one from Cheers with the tired producer shown going home late ["Good night, Mr. Walters!" "Uhhhh..."] was funny.)

Now I have found it wasn't just me being weird; apparently a number of other folks out there experienced this odd fear growing up. Whole websites are devoted to rating various production logos from movies and TV, with "scare factors" from none to nightmarish. (The SG logo seems to be a common worst offender, with some giving it nicknames like "The S from Hell" and "The Personification of All That Is Evil.") And YouTube has whole strings of them edited together by members, with commentary and sequences showing the evolution of some companies and their logos through the switch to color TV, decades of style changes and corporate buyouts. (The SG corporate name has lately been revived by its current owner, Sony Pictures, as a cinematic-film studio brand, with a much less unnerving, updated animation of the old logo, called by some "The S from Heaven.")

So I naturally wondered if anyone else on my friends list or in my LJ readership had dealt with this in childhood as well. Did these things bother you too? If not, what other odd things did you find scary as a child?

Another vote to get Rx-drug ads off the air

USA Today's website features this guest column by an MD who makes the best argument I've heard so far for reining in the drug companies' habit of spending millions to put an avalanche of commercials for expensive, still-under-patent brand-name prescription drugs on our radios and TV sets. Always glad to see another besides me beating this drum.