Small House of Everything

Small House of Everything

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

OVERLOOKED TELEVISION: EERIE, INDIANA

Eerie, Indiana, is a small town where anything can happen and where urban legends go to become reality.  Eerie is a town which has an annual Tornado Day picnic to appease "Old Bob," the tornado that threatens the town each year.  Eerie is a town where movie monsters emerge from the television screen, except these are not monsters -- they are actors cursed to repeat their roles forever.  Eerie is a town with "a pompous business man known as The Donald who brainwashes the town into buying on credit."  Eerie is a town where your next door neighbor (the one mowing his lawn) is an aging Elvis Presley..  Eerie is a town that ignores Daylight Savings Time and when you set your clock back an hour anyway you wake up in an abandoned town with garbage men who are trying to kill you.  Eerie, Indiana, is a town where a group of intelligent dogs plot to take over the world.

Eerie, Indiana, is not your typical American town. 

Marshall Teller (Omri Katz, Dallas, The John Larroquette Show, Hocus Pocus) is a teenager who moves to Eerie with his family to escape the crime and pollution of New Jersey.  Marshall's best friend in Eerie is Simon Holmes (Jason Shenkarow, Picket Fences, Hey, Arnold [voice work], Spidr-Man:  Into the Spider-Verse [voice work], one of the few normal people in Eerie.  Together they encounter the bizarre, the more bizarre, and the even more bizarre.

Eerie, Indiana was created by Jose Rivera (playwright and the first Puerto Rican screenwriter to be nominated for an Oscar) and Karl Schaeffer (playwright and current producer and showrunner for Z Nation).  Director Joe Dante (Gremlins, The Howling, Small Soldiers) served as creative consultant and directed five episodes. 

Eerie, Indiana aired for eighteen episodes on NBC from September 15, 1991 to April 12, 1992.  A (nineteenth and final) episode appeared on The Disney Channel when the show was syndicated in 1993.  Disney ran the show until 1996, after which Fox Kids took over rerunning the episodes.  Fox introduced a spinoff, Eerie, Indiana:  The Other Dimension, for one season in 1998.  In 2012 the original series moved to Hulu and Fearnet.

Critically acclaimed and with a growing fan base, the series spawned seventeen original paperback novels by various writers in 1997 and 1998.

Eerie, Indiana was a fun series that did not mind making fun of itself, even occasionally breaking the fourth wall.

Here's the first episode of the series, in which Marshall's mother hosts a Forever Ware party; Forever Ware being a product that can keep things forever -- including people.

Enjoyo.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opg5biLr9vg

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