User Reviews

'An Old Story' was one of the more weirder episodes of Goosebumps. Even as a little kid it didn't creep me out, but it is very funny and slightly disturbing.

Tom and John are two typical nineties kids; their parents are absent from the story (probably filing for divorce), they're addicted to this old-looking video game and don't seem to want to go outside and they're afraid of their own aunt, Aunt Dahlia, who has been sent to babysit them. She looks more like their grandmother and Mrs. Roper from Three's Company. Anyway, it turns out that the boys are right to be afraid of her... she bakes them prune cookies! Prunes, oh the horror! Overnight, after eating the cookies the boys end up nearly deaf, with failing memories, gray hair... hair falling out... and wrinkles. Good ol' Aunt Dahlia suggests that it might be whatever shampoo they're using.

As the episode progresses, Aunt Dahlia turns out to be a witch who is pimping her two nephews out to two little old ladies for money. Well, that is scary, but not in a haunted house-type way. It's wrong on so many levels. Nevertheless Tom and John manage to escape it.

Watching this episode as an adult, I've only just noticed the flaws in it. Tom and John are brothers but look nothing alike, no do either of them look like their aunt. They both dress like typical kids in the episode, but when they get old, suddenly their wardrobe changes to old man outfits from the fifties (did they steal their dad's pants so no one would recognize them?). This episode used to be really funny to me as a kid... now it just seems incredibly silly and lame. It is for kids though, not for adults, so most kids could still get a kick out of it.

Possibly the worst episode of Goosebumps ever.

Not only does this story fail to whip up any scares, it is inept in every department and downright creepy (not in a good way).

The story revolves around a weird aunt/witch who is trying to deliberately age up her nephews so that she can marry them off to her old lady friends. Yes, you read that correctly, she is trying to marry off children to a pair of old ladies in exchange for cash. As if this wasn't gross and objectionable enough, the execution of the story suffers from terrible dialogue, erratic direction, bizarre dubbing and a horrific soundtrack. We all know Goosebumps was a low budget show intended for tweens but there's no excuse for the quality of the production here. The acting, always hit and miss in this series, is poor, particularly the aunt. She's all high camp, mugging to the camera with OTT facial expressions every time she gets the chance. I'm not going to drag the child actors on this occasion though, they didn't stand a chance.

This episode does get a solitary point for some impressive prosthetics on the young lads to make them look like elderly but this patently has led to them having trouble delivering their dialogue. The makeup is so heavy that many of their lines have been dubbed over, even when you can see their mouths aren't moving. The soundtrack is one of the worst I've ever heard, a cacophony of synthetic keyboard sound effects and nondescript musical cues. It's loud, relentless and intrusive, even drowning out some of the dialogue - how this got past the editing stage I will never know.

The paper thin story ends with an eye-rolling twist, that the boys can age backwards by eating baby food. Har har. Perhaps this would have been amusing if the rest of the episode wasn't an agonising experience.