Retro Rundown: Goosebumps “The Blob that Ate Everyone” Episode

Well.

When the internet goes out for a bit, you find yourself watching an episode of Goosebumps on dvd. Now, I love the book series Goosebumps, most of them are pretty well written and then there are some that are just so bizarre that you wonder why they did/didn’t turn it into an episode and this episode review was one of them.

I am in that generation of Goosebumps being a huge, mainstream takeover, book wise and then boom, they make a television show out of the material. Some episodes are fun like The Haunted Mask, Stay Out of the Basement, One Day at Horrorland, The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight, or Night of the Living Dummy II. And then, like the one episode we’re talking about, falls into the category of pure “wtf”.

Based on the 55th book in the Goosebumps release, let’s talk about the tv adaptation of The Blob That Ate Everyone.

Oh this episode was a trip and a half into what is happening on my screen. The main plot is a kid, Zack, who loves to write horror stories, gets a “free” typewriter from a store with a, sighs, a token black “magical” character, giving him the typewriter which makes me more curious more about her and her store but clearly that’s the case. The typewriter seems to bring Zack’s words to life and with his friend Alex who immediately believes it, they have to stop a “blob” monster. 

Now, here’s my problem. I know there’s a budget within this series but my God, the “blob” was just so cheap looking and I was like who is afraid of this tiny thing? When we initially see this blob creature in the basement and it was just a portion of it, the practical effects looked fine but it was seeing the final form that I was checked out. I was checked out beforehand but that sealed the deal.

And also, the acting was not great. It wasn’t great at all and I can’t be picky about child actors but I’m sure there were better options out there. I didn’t mind the young actor who played Alex, I think she was the best out of everyone and whoever played Adam was yawn-worthy. I didn’t care about his character and when he was eaten, I was like “GOOD!” The characters aren’t that great, minus Alex.

I also thought the ending/realization of our main character having this “power” that HE was the one creating the stories, did we need the typewriter? Did we need the repetitive cuts of the typewriter writing out Zack’s words? I would assume as an audience member aka a child during this time, I understood the concept. It was unnecessary. It’s almost like this adaptation dumbed down the concept of the book to tv and I didn’t like that.

I have this book in my collection of horror novels, this was from when I was a kid so this book is old and worn and the big difference from what I remember is one, Zack is called Zackie, the blob eats MORE people than just Adam (lame but he also deserved it) and the blob is PINK and huge compared to that scrawny, yellow, puppet thing.

The coolest thing I saw in the episode was a vhs of Stepfather 3 (1992) in the video store scene. Yeah, that was a highlight.

“The Blob that Ate Everyone” of season 2 (episode 23) gets a good 2 out of 5 stars. If you skip this episode and head to the next which is “Night of the Living Dummy III”, I think you’ll have a better time with that.