Vegetable Soup

Surfing the blogosphere, I happened upon this top ten list of the weirdest, creepiest, freakiest children's television shows on the air today. Though I strongly disagree with the inclusion of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, author Matt Dinniman has put his finger on some of the most consciousness-bending nightmare-inducing kids' programming I've ever seen, especially his top 5 picks.

In the user comments that follow, there's a discussion of which shows should be in the top ten of all-time, and there's plenty of the usual suspects: The Bugaloos, H.R. Puffenstuff, The Banana Splits, Barney, etc. What's not on the list? Something lesser known than any of these, but leagues more disturbing: Vegetable Soup.

What's Vegetable Soup? According to Wikipedia, it was "an educational children's television program produced by the New York State Education Department that originally ran for 78 episodes from 1976 to 1978." Though produced for local PBS affiliate stations, it eventually found its way to stations like Nickelodeon and TBS. James Earl Jones and Bette Midler both lent their voices to it. So you might think this series had something going for it--and indeed it did. I'll be the first to admit it was a smart show, a highly versatile show (mixing live action, animation and puppets), and one of the first shows to make a point of celebrating diversity. As was evident in the theme song:

Come on along and join us
Come on along
We're gonna have some fun
Come on along and join us
In a little bowl of Vegetable Soup
It takes all kinds of vegetables
All kinds of vegetables
All kinds of vegetables
To make a Vegetable Soup

"All kinds of vegetables," so no matter what your heritage, gender, or nationality might be, and no matter what disabilities you might have, you can dive into the fun just like everyone else. It doesn't matter if you're a carrot or a turnip, all are welcome in the soup.

Now, you might be saying, it's a little odd inviting young children to be part of someone's soup, as it bumps up against a primal, Hansel and Gretel-esque "the witch wants to eat me" fear, but it's clearly well-intentioned, and the lyrics aren't half bad. As long as they aren't sung by anything too monstrous, I can't see the problem. Right. Meet the band:

This is not warm and fuzzy kids' animation. This is psychedelic, surrealist, Yellow Submarine-inspired, "hey kiddies, don't the freaky people, like, totally trip you out?" animation. Now imagine that you're six years old and watching these demonic squiggles kick out the jams while song lyrics are practically shrieked at you in some kind of weird, jazzy gospel blasphemy: "It taaaakes... AAALLLLL KIIIIINNNNDDDSS of VEGGGETTABBLLESSS!"

Deeply unnerving.

Now meet Woody the Spoon. Voiced by Bette Midler, Woody would shock you out of whatever terrified stupor the previous segments had plummeted you into by dancing around like a lunatic and demanding that you cook something. Make popsicles out of orange juice, your ice tray, and toothpicks! Get the celery out of your crisper! Go stick a banana in your oven! Two hundred fifty degrees! Don't forget to ask your mama first! Screeching at you, this spoon.

Here he (she?) is, teaching you about plantains:

Note the deranged smiles on the bowl and the, uh, whatever that floating face is.

But most disturbing of all: the "Outerscope" segments. "Outerscope" was a serialized puppet show about a multicultural group of kids who turn their clubhouse (or maybe just a bunch of old junk) into a rocketship and explore the universe with it. They meet aliens, have all kinds of adventures, and along the way they learn lessons about tolerance, friendship, etc. Not a bad premise for a kids' show. Just two problems with the idea.

First, the puppet children were incredible creepy. They had a certain "dead mannequin" quality, with weird, oversized hands. "Man hands" some might say.

Second problem: These segments are frightening just in their tone. Again, imagine you're six years old. You watch these dead-eyed big-handed (but otherwise likeable) puppet kids fly off into outer space and get lost. They try to get home, but each episode they just get further and further away. Everything goes wrong, one puppet kid sadly looks at the other and says, "I guess we're never going home." End of episode. Sleep tight, kids.

Vegetable Soup scared me silly when I saw it, and yet I couldn't turn away. Why did I keep watching it? And why do I remember it fondly today, nightmarishly weird though it was?

Comments

[Matt Dinniman]

Holy cow. I didn't think I'd seen that show until I saw the screen caps of the puppets. I was in kindergarten in 1980, so it had to have been around then.

[andrew]

I’m now having horrendous flashbacks, thank Nick! I had apparently completely wiped this show from my memory, but it all came rushing back when I read your post. The horrible shrieking spoon, the etiolated hippy singing freaks, the dead-faced puppet children and their rocket—I’m actually shuddering over my keyboard.

However, growing up in Canada, we had the most frightening of all children’s programming: witness the HILARIOUS HOUSE OF FRIGHTENSTEIN and despair.

http://www.frightenstein.com/

I also have vague memories of a one-off chilling cartoon diatribe about the benefits of the metric system presented as a nightmarish vision of a world where you would be isolated by using a different method of measuring. The title escapes me now. It was a kind of dystopic “Rip Van Winkle” tale of a man who wakes up in a world that has changed to metric and left him behind. A bit like what I imagine living in the US might be like…

[Ângelo Fernandes]

I like the Doodlebops expression "We want to eat your children." That's seems to be a good educative show ahahah

here in Portugal, only Teletubbies passed on tv, but we have our own "dubious" children programs.

My faverouties was He-man and The Transformers, and still are.
A few months I bought ONLY for 5€ The Transformers - The movie featuring the voices of Leonard Nimoy and Orson Welles. And if I'm not wron with some artistic help of Peter Chung.

I was affraid that today I was a bit disapointed, but hell not, I love it more, ahahah, I can't waith for the 2007 dreamworks vision in the new movie.

http://www.transformersthemovie.com/

ângelo

[Elizabeth]

I'm very glad I only ever watched Sesame Street and Barney when I was a little kid. Those puppets creep me out NOW.

[Nick Sagan]

Matt: 1980 sounds about right--they syndicated Vegetable Soup throughout the early '80s. That's a great list you have, by the way, and now I'm curious to check out The Shivered Sky.

Andrew: My evil plan worked! Now the nightmares return... That Frightenstein show is new to me, but I am indeed despairing. By "hilarious" I assume they meant "freak out triggering?" And we Americans are in complete denial of the metric system. Officially, I can't even pretend to know what that is.

Ângelo: That's the same Peter Chung who did "Aeon Flux" for MTV's Liquid Television? I had no idea he worked on "Transformers." How cool. Has Seth Green's "Robot Chicken" reached Portugal yet? It's a series of stop motion animation comedy skits using characters from old cartoons, comic books, etc. They've featured the He-Man and Transformers characters, and some of the skits are quite funny.

Elizabeth: You're one of the lucky ones. Bad as Barney was, at least the producers of that show kept the dead-eyed puppet kids out of it. *shudder*

[Ângelo Fernandes]

Yes he's the author of Aeon Flux. He on transformers had more a supporting role on the artistic development.

"Robot Chicken" I think not, as faar as I see not. But I guess a cartoon as this wouldn't pass by me misunderstading. I must check it on the web.

About Transformers, 2 weeks ago I found a comics magazine who mixed GI Joe with transformers. I just saw one number and it seems to be really cool.

Ângelo

[jiko]

A bit out of topic - but I remember watching Stephen King's It on TV when I was about 5. Not a good idea at all, and to this day I ignore his books despite his many acclaims + he shares the same birthday as me; and I still don't like clowns. In fact, I remember being scared of going to McDonalds after that show. So yeah. Scarred for life.

[Fred Wemyss]

Those drawings look like the work of Gerald Scarfe. He did the artwork for the Pink Floyd LP, THE WALL. He illustrated Hunter Thompson's books.
I'm only guessing, but if the show had the voices of James Earl Jones and Bette Midler, the producers could easily have wanted a cutting-edge artist to do the animation. They'd have picked Hieronymus Bosch if he'd been around.

[tollah]

does anybody own and would like to sell a copy of vegetable soup???the cartoon from the 1970s. I would love to buy them.

[MFEMF]

Oh, man!! Until I saw this posting I had forgotten what the puppets looked like!! For years my sister and I have been talking about the episode where the puppets take their spaceship to a place where everything you say means the "opposite" of what you actually say. The puppet kids told the people of this place that they came as friends; so these people took it that they were really enemies!! They got mad at the kids and I forget the rest, yikes!!!

[mexomorph]

**ANYONE looking for the Vegetable Soup show for personal viewing can contact me to obtain a set of the 1st complete season on 13 DVDs at a reasonable price. These were created from the original broadcast tapes, and are near excellent video, and good audio. I aquired these from a guy who made them from the tapes, and I paid his outrageous price to own them, but I believe everyone should have access to this bit of nostalgia, so I'm reproducing them at half his cost so that all you people that are dying to see the Outerscope episodes again, along with the rest of the 70's goodness from the show, can have them without feeling like you're making a car payment to do so.

Send an email to [email protected] if you want this piece of history for yourself, and your children, because there are some real lessons to learn from this show - I wish they still made this required viewing in elementary schools today.

[Moncrief]

Wonderfully evoked, Nick.

I recently did a post on Vegetable Soup, but I like yours better.

[valid username]

I've spend many years trying to forget these frightening images and the horrible nightmares that occured after watching each episode. I blame you for sending me back into therapy.

[kc]

"Brownfield" was the last name of one of the animators working on Vegetable Soup. In the late 70's early 80s's he lived in Brooklyn. This im 90% certain of.
I cant say where he is now, but I was a comic book fanatic - and good friend of his son "C----". I saw his artwork regularly.

Hos son and I were good friends at PS 214,in NY untill his family eventually moved.

-KC

[[email protected]]

I LIVE IN BROOKLYN NYC AND WOULD LOVE TO OWN THE VEGETABLE SOUP EPISODES. REALLY LOVED THIS SHOW AND REALLY WOULD BE GREAT IF THERE WAS A SHOW LIKE THIS ON NOW FOR CHILDREN.

[Dennis Recio ([email protected])]

On Outerscope 2:

I recall more vividly, Outerscope 2, which consisted of twenty-odd episodes of these kids in search of Tia Rosa and a golden medallion. What made it amusing and perhaps less frightening than the first set, Outerscope 1, was that they filmed the second adventure primarily in New York and its vicinity. Actor, Daniel Stern, (commonly known as the narrator for ABC's sitcom, The Wonder Years) played one of two villains trying to get hold of the gold medallion before our heroes could get to it. Eventually, the two villains, one male and one female, would snatch the medallion from a young girl (to whom it properly belonged) and tried to escape in the children's spaceship only to crash on some train tracks. The five kids, because they are supposed to be the "good guys", save the two creeps from being killed by an oncoming train. They return the medallion to the rightful owner and the kids go home. In the second series, consistent with the rest of the show, Outerscope embraced multi-culturalism, providing the kids with clues that would lead them to people of varying ethnic backgrounds. Nobody was ever demeaned for their ethnic heritage but instead, the focus seemed to be on providing children with tools for basic morality (e.g. the evils of stealing, etc.).

As Mr. Sagan writes, the first series of Outerscope was rather disturbing primarily because the stories presented us with five hapless children in constant danger. Their adventures throughout the first series managed to land them in serious trouble, particularly when they came across some very fastidious creatures on a planet who did not like litter. Apparently, filth was outlawed and for whatever reason, our five heroes would inadvertently make a mess and provoke the ire of the planet's inhabitants. What made the first series fascinating was the fascism of the country and how these five kids sunk deeper and deeper into trouble, just for creating a mess. Was it early socialization about the value of cleanliness? Perhaps.

Personally, I loved Outerscope but I also found the intercalary images between segments on Vegetable Soup frightening and beguiling at the same time.

Happily Gen X:

Dennis Recio
San Francisco, California

[Metric Mindy]

I'm just curious if anyone out there remembers a little PBS show about the metric system in the 70's. The catchy little theme goes through my head and I know it existed but I can find nothing about it on the internet. It featured humans and puppet type things teaching all the elements of the metric system in a variety of confusing ways. If anyone has any info about it, I would appreciate it.

I loved Vegetable Soup. But Outerscope did seriously give me nightmares. It was just a little too out there for me. Woody the Spoon I could watch for days. Perhaps that's why I'm such a fan of Aqua Teen Hunger Force as an adult.

[Brian Weatherley]

Metric Mindy, the show was called
Metric Series

38 15 minute episodes

(approximately 600 minutes of animation)

A series of animation programs designed to teach children, as well as adults, the metric system of weights and measures. The metric Series features a mild mannered character named Newton Joule who, when conversion problems arise, turns into the superhero Metric Man to teach children about liters, meters and grams. They learn the metric system is used worldwide, and that once understood, it is easier to use then gallons, yards and pounds.

[Sound Clips Billy]

Yes! I finally have been able to figure out this creepy show's name!

Watch an episode here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZeh2PLffPQ

[billy]

PS - Check out these tv show sound clips:

http://www.entertonement.com/clips?keywords=tv