5.10.2007

This was a children's show?

Seriously, you guys. I don't know why we weren't more terrified of this show at the time. Because looking at it now, we should have run for our lives.

Maybe it's the mostly black backgrounds, signifying that this show is taking place in some kind of vortex where no light dare show its face.

Maybe it's the super-creepy puppets with tall teeth and horrible hair and faces ripped from the very fabric of evil itself.

Maybe it's the overall sense of foreboding that comes from that echoing "Hall of Fame." *shiver*

Regardless, it was, and remains to be, a very strange show. But I guess it taught me about letters?

Thanks for the nightmares, Letter People!



P.S. And it was produced by KETC in St. Louis? I trusted you, KETC!

P.P.S. Check out this one for a Mr. X who talks like Jimmy Stewart and then the trippiest Letter People song EVER. No wonder it never made it to air.

8 comments:

Jake said...

Oh, man, thank you for this, Tim. As a kid I thought it was Paul Lynde who was doing an impersonation of Monty Swell , rather than vice versa.

raph said...

it's often difficult to be terrified of something that ISN'T REAL. even after all these years, i refuse to acknowledge your stop motion animation and home video as a real show. emeric's got my back on this.

tara d. said...

i've heard you talk about the letter people before, and i thought you were smokin' it. now i see it, and i feel like i'm smokin' it. WHAT IS THIS?!?!

Scott said...

Pfft. The letter people aren't so bad when compared to some of the crap I watched/read as a kid (for instance: who let me read IT in 4th grade?)

What really freaked me out were the Yip-Yip men who came out of the spaceship. I live in terror of Grey's to this day, experiencing over and over that same primal fear of alien intelligences.

Damn you Sesame Street! Damn you!

- Scott

P.S. And another thing. As long as we're talking about bleak, dark ideas from the land of Sesame Street. The Teeny Little Super Guy seemed to have a dark existence; relegated to being no more than a sentient decal on a cup in a barren world devoid of actual humans. I had these thoughts even as a child (with only a slightly smaller vocabulary).

Anonymous said...

Tim, I am going to be honest: I am worried about you.

This is a EXTREMELY far way to go to convince people the show is real. Your puppeteering is terrible, your puppets and sets are bad, and the voice-over which attempted to explain the low quality is amateur at best.

I appreciate that you don't want to lose this one, but Tim, be fair. We all know there are no letter people. A home-made puppet movie on YouTube doesn't mean that there are letter people. Stop lying.

Rob said...

ahem... "Oh no Emeric, you're entirely wrong. I remember watching The Letter People (a totally for real and not fake at all) TV show growing up. I can even describe it to you: They were letters... but they were people... and they were VERY scary. So see, Tim really wasn't lying. And he defiantly didn't pay Jake, Scott and I to agree with him as part of some elaborate prank."

on a side note, Scott: I got to give Sesame Street credit for an incredibly cheap way to make animated characters in "the real world" with Teeny Little Super Guy. I mean come on, WE could do that in a weekend if we were bored enough.

Anonymous said...

Tim, don't let the haters get you down. I remember watching this show as a kid too.

- Me

Wandering Explorer said...

Guys, I'm sorry. Testimonials from the people who probably helped Tim make the movie and anonymous assertions don't mean much to me. I also notice you indicated it was broadcast around St. Louis, which makes it so easy for you to explain why no one else saw the show as children.

If Raph weren't in the Virgin Islands, he'd totally back me up.