User blog:MooseJuice/Moose Sez: Personal Nightmare Fuel

As long as I've been contributing to the site, I grown confident around everything creepy that the site had to offer; I've held staring contests against Suicide Squidward, I've smiled back at Smile.dog, and the terrible shrieking in Agamemnon Counterpart is my ringtone. Despite a fan of all that is creepy, there's a show I've seen that viciously stabs my child-like innocence. It's a show so unnaturally-terrifying that everything good in this world is sucked out. My guess is that not a whole lot of people saw this abomination as a child, which furthers my theory that everyone who watched this terror wrote their suicide note in their own blood. The late 90's version of Jay Jay the Jet Plane is the show you'll end up finding in a quick Google search. In a nutshell, the program was about horribly-disfigured lumps of CGI who learn valuable life-lessons, at the cost of your sanity. It featured live-action characters, which meant the actors had to envision a massive blue turd on the stretch of an invisible runway in nearly every episode.

The show may look harmless, but as kids’ shows go, it totally is. I don't remember a whole lot of these episodes, mostly because the CGI was too atrocious to watch. Nope, the real nightmare-inducing stuff came from its pilot series, which I saw on three separate VHS tapes. The tapes had a total of nine episodes of the first few adventures of Jay Jay the Jet Plane. Unlike its CGI counterpart, the shows were very much in the style of Thomas the Tank Engine and Theodore Tugboat, where as this show featured early live action models of each character. And there's your first problem.



As you may have realized, there's something horribly wrong with these characters, primarily in the face area. Good God, 46% of their faces are full of chin. Also, they're always tilted back and facing upward, as if the sky's going to open up and the nightmarish god that created them is going to crawl out.



Planes aren't the only ones severally deformed in this show: Take a gander at O'Maliey, the head of the airport:



This guy was sculpted out of mashed potatoes. Could you imagine being the mother of that thing? The moment you'd give birth to this guy, the doctor would panic and toss it back into your womb. Then he'd light you on fire.

The show's special effects were what freaked me out the most. I've never heard of a show that relied on so many damn effects during the length of only nine episodes. There were different types of lighting, different ways to make the planes look like they were flying, different styles of animation...it was all one big mess! My favorite effect was the one where they make Jay Jay fly by holding his tail end offscreen and throwing up some clouds behind him on a green screen. It looked so cheesy and there was no really way of avoiding it because it was in the opening credits.

There really wasn't a thing to use here for the later CGI adaption. I mean, ask yourself: if you were the head of TLC's Ready, Set, Learn programming, would you replay this crap? You've got a better chance of running a Say Yes to the Dress marathon (and for any smart-asses out there who knows about an actual Say Yes to the Dress marathon: I'll believe you if you tell me it exists, but please don't tell my mother about it.)

So as I've talked about, this show was very strange. Growing up with it scared the bejeezus out of me for years. It was like having three giant WTF's stuffed into video cassettes. There's a reason I deciding to bring this story here, though. To this wiki. From what I could dig up, this show was a bit like a "Lost Episode" pasta: it's almost hidden from the public eye, available on a video cassette, filled with bizarre imagery, and just plain mysterious altogether.

One more thing:

The last episode is always the scariest.

The last story on the last tape was called Snuffy and the Snowman. And I HATED it.

In the episode, Snuffy sees a large snowman at the airport and stares at it. Actually, two of the planes were staring at the snowman; Snuffy and an elderly bi-plane named Old Oscar. Looking back, this feels sort of weird to watch, because both planes become entranced by the snowman. It's a feeling you could only get if you saw the episode.

Anyway, Snuffy leaves with a group of his friends and fly to a look-out point to watch clouds (because airplane porn wasn't invented yet). As they each call out what the clouds look like, Snuffy looks up and sees this:



Sure, this may not be so scary, but something else happens: neither of Snuffy's friends see the snowman. At all. That's what really makes me feel uneasy: something that only one person (or plane) can see. How is this possible? It's never explained! Oh, and it's not like that snowman's going to stay up there forever or anything, by the way. After Snuffy's friends head back to the airport, the snowman grins at him and then floats down from the sky. Snuffy's not panicking, so it's safe to assume that the snowman at the airport was made out of hallucinogens and concentrated evil.

At this point, the nameless snowman asks (in a deep gentlemen's voice) if Snuffy would like to fly with him. Here's something else that's so unsettling about the episode: Because Snuffy is an airplane and has no idea what the definition of STRANGER DANGER is, he agrees. Just like that. No thinking about it, no weighing out the consquences of going to play with someome/something that he just ASSUMES is friendly, no nothing. He just takes off with the flying snowman made of clouds. Surprisingly, however, Snuffy doesn't get killed.

Instead, Snuffy sings a song that, up until this point, I had no real reason to listen to before. As I tuned in, I realized he was talking about his "magical eyes" and how wonderful it was to see all the things he could with them. So Snuffy's magic eyes can see flying snowmen, lumpy red cars, and decapitated dog heads? ...This has to be drug-related. There's no way a kid could imagine this crap. I refuse to believe it. I SHANT.

At the end of the episode, the snowman chases his hat into the clouds and Snuffy goes home. Oh, and DON'T TELL ANYONE ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED, BY THE WAY. It's not like you spent what could have been HOURS in a hallucinogetic state up in the sky.

As Snuffy takes off again, he meets up with Old Oscar, who not only knows the words to the "magical eyes" song, but has also heavily-implied to have seen the cloud snowman as well. Take a moment to take this all in: Only Snuffy and perhaps Old Oscar have seen the snowman, but no one else can. If Snuffy has magic eyes, then can Old Oscar have them, too? Was it that exact snowman or was it one of the other ones in the pictures above? DID ANY OF THIS EVEN HAPPENED?

Before we can even submit our theories to the science bureau, the snowman floats in, winks, and then flies away. End of episode.



And with that we come to the end of my rant on a really, REALLY weird show. It scared me before, and it still kind of scares me today. I understand that I can't really explain just how this show feels, so I'm inviting any and all readers to explore the episodes for themselves. I'm sure there's videos on YouTube and even more pictures circling around the Internet. If you want to see the episodes for yourself, then by all means do so. Just remember:

This is under your bed.

Probably...