Goosebumps Episodes 1-5 (2023) TV Show Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? Happy Friday the 13th! Today I'm here to talk about the first five episodes of the new Goosebumps Disney+ series. There either will be very minor spoilers or no spoilers at all in this review since this is a brand new show. So let's get into it.

As I talked about in my review of the pilot episode of the Fox Kids Goosebumps TV show, I wasn't into Goosebumps as much as other people were at the time. The original book series began when I was only five years old, so I wasn't exactly the right age to be reading the books, and when the original TV show started in 1995, I wasn't allowed to watch it being that I had siblings who, when the show started, were the age I was when the books started being published. And while I've read a few of the original books and enjoyed them, I haven't read any of them in about 20 years, so I don't have as much attachment to the franchise as alot of other people do. Which is maybe why I was able to enjoy these first five episodes because they are so different from anything that Goosebumps has done before.

Like most modern TV shows, this show is serialized, which is not how Goosebumps has ever been. The books have always been mostly standalone stories told in a more anthology styled way, with the exception of the books, like The Haunted Mask, that had their own mini-series within the larger series. The Fox Kids TV show was like that too. With this show though, the first three are standalone in that they each focus on an individual character, with the other characters either not appearing at all or making only brief cameos. Then for the next two episodes, everyone's stories come together for a more traditional serialized approach. 

Something else about this show is that it's aged up from the typical 8 to 12 year old age group that the franchise has been aimed at since the beginning back in 1992. Which means that the people making it didn't intend to make it for kids. They intended to make it for the people who grew up with the franchise in the past. Which is nice because the scary stuff can be a bit scarier, and they can include mentions of drugs, sex, and alcohol, which obviously couldn't be in the previous versions. And that includes the 2015 movie and its sequel. From what I've heard of it The CW Nancy Drew series did something very similar, but, it being The CW they maybe took it a little too far in that more adult side of things. But I'm not here to talk about Nancy Drew. What I'm trying to say is whenever a show or movie or book series from when we were children gets rebooted or brought back, it's not going to appeal to modern audiences if it stays in that realm of what it was when we were children. 

One of the complaints I've heard about the Hulu Hardy Boys show is that it stayed too close to what the original books were, and Joe and Biff were aged down too much to appeal to modern day children, when they easily could've done what the syndicated TV show did in the '90s, and what the The Hardy Boys Casefiles did in the '80s and '90s, and kept Frank and Joe at the traditional, revised text, ages of 18 (Frank) and 17 (Joe), but had them tackling more adult cases. Which didn't happen this time around. 

Another example of this is Power Rangers. Children have been the target audience for the franchise for the last thirty years. While some seasons like Time Force, SPD, and RPM were slightly more mature than most other seasons of the show, it's mostly stayed targeted at children. And while that was fine in the '90s, and even in the 2000s, kids today aren't necessarily interested in Power Rangers as kids in the '90s and 2000s were. And yet, when they tried to age it up with the 2017 movie, adults, who hadn't already grown up with the franchise, and teenagers, even if they had grown up with it, just weren't interested, because of Power Rangers's reputation of being a children's show. Which is why I'm glad that Once & Always, while containing the cheesiness and tropes of the original show, aged itself up and didn't act like the original Rangers hadn't gotten older in the last thirty years, and they addressed Thuy Trang's death by having Robo Rita kill her character, Trini, at the beginning of the special. 

It's because of this dilemma that I'm glad that Scholastic and Sony made this new Goosebumps TV show for an older audience. Because, whether it's my generation, or the next generations after mine, if you're between the ages of 23 and 43, you remember reading Goosebumps, or seeing the Fox Kids TV show, at some point during your childhood. Even if you never read all of them or didn't keep up with the franchise after a certain age. And because this show was written competently, and acted competently, it's alot better than I actually expected it to be, and I ended up loving these first five episodes.

The cast is spectacular. I'm only familiar with four members of the cast of this show, aside from Justin Long. Isa Briones, who played various Soong type Androids, and the cloned daughter of a Doctor Soong, in the first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard, Rob Huebel, who played the sketchy 1980s salesman on The Goldbergs, Lexa Doig, who played the Avatar of the Andromeda on Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda and Talia al Ghul on Arrow, and Rachel Harris, who played Kes's mom on Star Trek: Voyager in the third season episode, "Before and After". Everyone else are actors I'm not familiar with. Of course, I haven't seen Justin Long in anything major or mainstream since He's Just Not That Into You came out back in 2009, so it was really great to see him again because, even though I've only ever seen him in a few movies, he was part of my late high school and college experience through the "Get a Mac" commercials ("I'm a Mac" and "I'm a PC") that Apple put out between 2006 and 2009.

The characters were pretty good. Though the teenage characters are your typical angsty TV teenagers, played by people in their 20s. Because we're back to that old chestnut once again. Then again I've seen high schoolers in my neighbourhood who look older than they actually are, so I guess it makes sense, but it's still weird. We have Isiah, the jock/quarterback, Margot, his geeky next door neighbour, James, his gay best friend, Lucas, the daredevil, and Isabella, the outcast.

I would also like to highlight episode 2, "The Haunted Mask". Mainly because the Mask, looked a thousand times creepier when Isabella put it on than it did when Carly Beth put it on in the original TV episode. Plus a few things that I said might happen if that book were to be adapted into a TV show episode today, happened. Go figure. 

Overall this was a pretty good start to the show. It's not the best show ever made, but I ended up enjoying more than I thought I would given that I didn't keep up with Goosebumps after the age of 13. If you're into scary stuff, and enjoyed Goosebumps when you were a kid, but didn't keep up with it beyond that, I recommend watching this version. I was actually on the edge of my seat for most of the show, which is good, because I wasn't able to predict what would happen next. Except for "The Haunted Mask" of course, but, c'mon, I've seen the original TV version, AND I reviewed it earlier this week. So it wasn't hard to figure it out. 

Alright my friends, that's it for me for this week. I'll be back next week with not as many posts as I made this week. I just had alot to talk about with this new Goosebumps show starting to come out, and unexpectedly finishing The Bacta War when I finished it. So until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.