When I was a kid, there was this older kid named Ernie who introduced me to many great things. The board game Risk. The Mad Scientists’ Club (which I’ll get to some other time). And several groovy movies. Thank you, Ernie, wherever you are.
Ernie was very talented. One day I found him playing a strange sounding tune on the piano. It was the music from The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. In that movie, Don Knotts spends the night in a haunted house, and watches a pipe organ play all by itself. And there were bloodstains all over the keyboard. It was the most frightening horribleness and awfulness that he’d ever seen!
(The music was created by Vic Mizzy. He also created the theme music for the The Addams Family TV series and Green Acres.)
And Ernie was playing that same mad organ music! How cool is that!
Later on, we drew pictures with crayons. I drew a ghost outside on a hill. Which didn’t seem very scary. I asked Ernie to fix it, and he turned it into a casket opening up in a cellar. And it looked scary. He was very talented.
So what culturally significant stuff did your childhood friends turn you onto?
