Little House of Horrors

Not long ago I realized that most of my childhood neuroses could be traced to my habit of watching "Little House on the Prairie." That program was an hour of sheer terror disguised as wholesome family entertainment. Every week someone died in a fire, went blind, got mauled by a bear or crashed over the side of a cliff in a stagecoach. Sylvia was raped by a mime, for cripes' sake! Mary, my favorite character back then, suffered an especially heavy load: blindness, loss of her school, dead baby, wimpy husband. No wonder I always expected disaster to be around every corner.

Now that I think about it, I watched a lot of trauma-inducing stuff back then. On TV, the movie of the week was usually some all-star disaster flick like "The Towering Inferno," "Airport '77," "The Poseidon Adventure" or "The Beasts Are In the Streets." At school we watched filmstrips where teen girls would fly through windshields courtesy of their drunken prom dates, or wind up dead at the bottom of swimming pools after popping pills at parties. And don't forget the bloodbath known as the Driver's Ed Accident Footage Festival.

Then I would go home to watch an "ABC After-School Special," where you were guaranteed to see at least one of the following per episode: incest, drowning, assault, suicide or Helen Hunt jumping out of a window while tripping on acid.

If anyone cares to do a study on post-traumatic stress disorder caused by viewing '70s and '80s TV, I will gladly volunteer to be your first subject. I promise you will get plenty of material for your research.e