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17 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :-
Ahh The Memories!, 17 October 2004
10/10
Author: r-downey1 from Belfast, Northern Ireland UK

When I was a kid my all time favourite show was the Goosebumps TV show and of course the books as well. Some of them really scared me and give me nightmares. My favourite character was Slappy the living dummy.

I'm now 16 and I must say that the show is not at all scary to me anymore as I've watched many far more shocking things since the Goosebumps days. We all agree that the show was made for children which we all were when we loved it.

This is a really good show for children to view, but when you get older its just plain funny. My favourite episodes and books are still Welcome to Dead House, The Haunted Mask, Ghost Beach, The Ghost Next Door, Night of the living Dummy 2 and A Night in Terror Tower.

I would overall give RL Stines Goosebumps 10/10 stars as a good young person's creepy show. It will always remain a classic to me due to all the little thrills RL Stine and his wonderful book series give me whilst I was growing up.

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15 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :-
I miss this show!, 14 July 2005
Author: huneysweet1 from United States

I used to watch this show a few years ago on FoxFamily (now ABCfamily) along with Eerie Indiana. Goosebumps wasn't intensely scary, just mysterious and suspenseful - it sure kept MY attention. Anyway, I guess you can only catch it on DVDs these days, as I do not believe it airs anywhere on television. All of the episodes are unique and, for the most part, have intriguing plots and endings.

So, in general, if you're looking for scarily satisfying shows to watch as a family, then Goosebumps is perfect. There are also movies that came out that are based on the old Goosebumps books we all loved to read. Good luck, and I hope you have as much fun watching the shows as I did!

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10 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
Clever Horror Series for Children, 19 September 2005
Author: bbSouthstreet from United States

Boy do I remember it well. Every Friday when I got home from school I would watch the newest horror story from the mind of R.L. Stine. And even though all I have left are old episodes on video tapes I still find it awfully clever. My favorite will always be the one with Slappy the evil ventriloquist's dummy. Slappy was always the scariest one to watch when I was a kid, after watching that I would get the willies and find it impossible to go to sleep. Other stories that would haunt my mind would be the Terror Tower, Fever Swamp, the haunted mask and welcome to dead house. For anyone who needs a good laugh or a good scare, R.L. Stine's Goosebumps is just the ticket.

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11 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
Stine TV, 22 January 2003
Author: Pimpin` Critic 69 from Your Critic of Critics

Back in the nineties, during the Pre-Potter era. My generation was being delighted by the works of R.L. Stine and his magnificent book series "Goosebumps." Between 1992 and 1995 I myself read some great ones like "Monster Blood," and it's two sequels, "Say Cheese and Die," "Ghost Bead," "Deep Trouble," and the greatest one of them all "The Haunted Mask." So obviously in 1995 when FOX Kids premiered this show I watched it. And Loved it! The show's adaptation wasn't very accurate but it was still entertaining and faithful to the novels. This was a great show, not scary but neither were the books. It's just a nice entertaining show from an entertaining series.

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12 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :-
What do you expect from a child's show?, 29 August 2003
Author: angelpie from Canada

When I was in the fourth grade the Goosebumps books became exceptionally popular. Every month when scholastic came out almost every kid would buy the latest book. When the TV show came out, I don't remember the excitement being at quite the same level.

Looking back at the show lately (I can't believe it still comes on), I can see why I wasn't such a huge fan of the show. When you are reading the book, you can imagine the monsters, make them as scary as you want (granted the books were mediocre at best). In the show, it was all displayed in such a banal way that the only people who can get scared are five year olds (and they probably don't get nightmares). What do you expect? Movies that are labeled horror movies don't even scare people anymore, we are beyond that. We know what to expect. Does anyone anticipate a children's show to break new grounds to scare us?

I don't know what I'm trying to conclude, but this is not a quality show and everybody knows that. It is however a children's show, and children's shows tend to be a little shabby. Except Arthur, now that's a good show!

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6 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
I eventually lost interest, but it was fun for a while, 28 August 2007
Author: Electrified_Voltage from Guelph, Ontario, Canada

For several years during the 1990s, R.L. Stine wrote and published many books in his "Goosebumps" series. I used to like to read some of these books, when I was around ten years old, and eventually, I discovered this "Goosebumps" TV show, which I enjoyed watching for a while. I eventually went off both the books and the TV series (late in 1997, when I was eleven years old), but I can't deny the fact that I was once a fan.

There's not much to say about the plot of this show. Basically, all I can say about it is that the programme was an adaptation "Goosebumps" book series, so the episodes were horror stories for kids.

For a while, R.L. Stine would pump out "Goosebumps" books very quickly, so quickly not all of the stories could have been that focused. This suggested that the author was money-hungry. Some of the stories you could tell were ridiculous just by the title, such as "The Blob That Ate Everyone". Since this show was an adaptation of the books, the cheesiness from the books (or at least from some of them) obviously showed here. The show may have had more problems that that (it has been too long for me to be able to tell).

Some might consider episodes of this show bad adaptations of the books. For me, it's been a while, and I don't know exactly how the two compared. I don't have as much memory of the "Goosebumps" books and TV show as certain others who were fans back in the 1990s, so I can't write the most insightful review. I do, however, know that I probably wouldn't think much of the show right now (I'm not sure about some of the books). Well, the books and the show definitely deserve some credit for how many kids they entertained back in the day, but I believe that "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" was a superior show.

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4 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Great Semi-Horror Fun, 12 October 2007
6/10
Author: John Crane from United States

Goosebumps was a very interesting piece of horror, in the sense that it was not scary for adults or teens but still pretty scary for 5-12-year-olds. I used to watch this while I watched over my friend's kid and I know everyone by heart, including the books. This series was made in Canada and featured a variety of semi-scary stores. These stores ranged from typical ghost in the attic, vampires, werewolves and mummies, however, there were some stories that were just plain "out there" (i.e. killer plants in a basement, real native American lychans). These stores were, at points, pretty suggestive for ages 7. They were pretty graphic (cutting a wrist and squeezing out green blood), pretty frightening (bug-like alien librarian eating crickets) and sometimes disturbing (Aunt and Uncle getting naked and putting on skinned werewolf skin).

The story usually included a teenager, boy or girl, and they would be subjected to horrible, life-changing events. The kids were good sports for this series and the acting by some of them was exceptional and some were a bit overdone/underdone. Outside of the horror fantasy problems they dealt with real life situations that I'm sure all of us could relate to in one way or the other. Ex: moving to a new neighborhood, family vacations, bullies, mom and dad issues and school problems). I think that R.L., for kids at least, did a so-so job of capturing the reality of teenagers and young adults.

For the most part, Goosebumps was not that scary for teens, adults and some varieties of young kids but to rate it a TV7, maybe pushing it. It was defiantly more of a TV10, though this is what I think. It was pretty scary for kids and it would be equivalent to showing a 10-year-old The Hills Have Eyes. I kind of enjoyed it when it aired on Fox Kids and I probably would watch it again, but I'm not in a hurry. I would recommend it to any young (8-12) kid who want to be a loyal horror fanatic.

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4 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Great show, loved the little thrills, 4 December 2004
Author: zebaurtiapixietish (zebaurtiapixietish@yahoo.com) from Florida

The Goosebumps show has been a family favorite (among the 20-somethings and younger) since it began. Though not extremely well acted or written, it was the best spooky little show of the time. My nieces and I tried never to miss an episode, but we missed a few, unfortunately. One annoyance for my niece was that there was some discrepancy about who starred as Will Blake in the "Werewolf of Fever Swamp" episodes-- Amos Crawley or Michael Barry (as listed in the credits). Minor annoyances aside, we eagerly look forward to future episodes being released on DVD. I can't wait to see the "Night of the Living Dummy" episodes again and I'm looking forward to seeing "One Day at Horrorland" (apparent precursor to the Escape From Horrorland CD-ROM game) for the first time. Wicked cool!

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4 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Former favorite of mine, 8 August 2004
7/10
Author: Hancock_the_Superb from United States

Back in the early to mid-'90s, I (and much of the rest of America's youth) loved R.L. Stine's "Goosebumps" series, which were as popular as Harry Potter in their day. To this day I still read them occasionally. Even when I was a kid I never found them all that scary (and when they got to "Series 2000", they took a huge nosedive very quickly), but they're entertaining enough and worth reading. When this show first came on the air, I used to watch it religiously. I haven't seen it in a good while, but I remember it well enough to give some sort of commentary.

The show experienced the same problem with the novels themselves: after two very spooky seasons of "regular Goosebumps", we had to go to "Ultimate Goosebumps", which relied more on sheer weirdness than genuine scares. A lot of the "Ultimate Goosebumps" eps were based off short stories from Stine's five or six "Tales To Give You Goosebumps" books, which each had ten stories of varying quality ("Old Story", "The Perfect School", the one with the ants, and "Click" I can name immediately). And the book adaptations ("Bride of the Living Dummy", "A Shocker On Shock Street") were VERY loose by that point. The older eps of the show, like "The Haunted Mask", "Night of the Living Dummy II", "It Came From Beneath The Sink", "Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes", "The Werewolf of Fever Swamp", etc., varied slightly from the book they were based on, but in general were very faithful to the stories. There were some later eps ("Welcome To Dead House", "Night of the Living Dummy III") that were very well done, but the best eps were in the first two seasons. The show isn't a whole lot to get worked up over (I'd recommend the original "Are You Afraid Of The Dark?" personally), but it isn't a bad waste of thirty minutes. But definitely read the books, at least #1-35, if you like these kind of stories.

Seven stars.

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1 out of 1 people found the following comment useful :-
Based on book series, TV show essentially a poor man's "Are You Afraid of the Dark", 19 April 2009
Author: anglophile19 from The Great Northwest

Being a 90's kid, it was impossible not to remember "Goosebumps", the kid-lit behemoth that dominated much of the early-to-middle part of that decade. A mash-up of classic spook tales and "Twilight Zone"-ish plot lines aimed at a wider primary school fan-base, it wasn't the most artistically inspired serial but it didn't really need to be, it's guilty-pleasure, page-turning allure helping it achieve then unheard-of success.

It was inevitable for the "Goosebumps" brand to venture into other markets, and one of them was television, and in 1995 the eponymous, Toronto-based TV series went into syndication. Borrowing the outlines from the books (perhaps unintentionally critiquing R.L Stine's admittedly uncomplicated work considering the fact little from the stories seemed to be lost in the condensed episode format), it was mostly just for devoted series fans and young like-minded viewers, as the obviously undemanding stories and typically hammy production values and acting (with a few minor exceptions) offered little for those beyond it's young target audience. The show was fairly solid overall in what it did, giving the audience exactly what it promised, but there weren't any episodes that we're particularly memorable, either. It essentially felt like a spin-off of "Are You Afraid of the Dark", another immensely popular spook-show-for-kids from Canada.

Like many shows featuring a pre-dominately young cast, today as an older viewer it's most fun to go scavenger hunting for future famous faces, and "Goosebumps" did provide a few that have found success outside of Canada: a young Ryan Gosling, cult favorite Katherine Issabelle and future Anakin Skywalker Hayden Christensen.

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