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Anyone who grew up in the ’80s probably spent the better part of their childhood believing that the world was populated with nothing but creepy dudes in aviator shades trying to lure unsupervised children into vehicles with the promise of candy and puppies. No one bought into the pervasive child abduction hysteria of the decade harder than my grandparents, who got cable TV in order to keep me “off the street” and demanded that I lock the car door immediately upon getting in so I didn’t “get stolen,” as if I were a dufflebag full of unmarked bills.
Amid constantly being told that I’d never see “Mom, Dad, Grandma, or Grandpa” again if I accepted a ride from a stranger, I was a little hazy on what actually happened after the powerlocks clicked shut and the tires screeched. I remember a very special episode of Diff’rent Strokes presenting a best case scenario of abduction where Sam, the late addition ginger moppet, was kidnapped by a grieving father who was trying to replace his family’s deceased son by snatching a young Danny Cooksey. The jig was up when Sam managed to call home in a moment where he was left unsupervised near the telephone. I was smart enough to know that the Diff’rent Strokes scenario was a charitable view of what happened to most children who left for school in the morning and didn’t come home for dinner. I figured something worse than being forced into house arrest with another family happened to the milk carton kids after they disappeared, but my parents weren’t itching to fill me in on the harrowing details.
They apparently left that to the weekly episode of Unsolved Mysteries, which usually sandwiched a story about a kid or dying under mysterious or horrible circumstances in between such lighter fare as a story about a charming grifter fleecing a Southern socialite, two World War II-era lovers getting reunited after 40 years, and a whimsical ghost haunting a bed and breakfast. If there’s one experience that unites kids of a certain era, it’s losing countless hours of sleep while laying in bed mentally replaying host Robert Stack’s ominous baritone narrate “and that was the last time her parents saw her alive” over footage of a teen actress riding her bike down a dirt road. That discount John Carpenter theme song alone was probably responsible for me sleeping with a nightlite until high school.
I knew via parents, teachers, and various Stranger Danger PSAs that the world was crawling with CHUDs who wished to do me harm, but Unsolved Mysteries was the one outlet that told me what exactly that harm entailed, complete with crime scene photos, professional re-enactors, teary interviews with family members, and the guy from Airplane! striding across a darkened soundstage through a cloud of dry ice fog.
So, what happened to kids who wandered just out of the scope of parental supervision? If you’re a California teen, sometimes you end up dead on the beach after maybe getting into an argument with someone from your Renne Faire LARPing group or the pagan cult you’re trying to leave. Unsolved Mysteries was a product of its time, and it leaned heavily on the “satanic panic” hysteria every time the flimsiest opportunity presented itself.
If you were a couple of kids hunting in the woods of Arkansas and happened upon a drug trafficking operation, you were killed, and thrown onto train tracks under the guise that you smoked a lot of pot and just happened to lay down for a nap with your best buddy in the path of an incoming train.
If you’re a kid from Ohio, you get drunk at a party and then are found dead in a ravine a few days later. Your right shoe is missing and never found.
If you’re another kid from Mississippi you wander around the woods and most likely stumble on a Dixie Mafia drug smuggling ring. The people doing the thing you weren’t supposed to see shoot you in the head and stage it like a suicide.
In addition bolstering my anxiety about becoming a tragic child murder statistic, and causing me to break out into an Olympic time trial sprint anytime a driver pulled over to ask directions, Unsolved Mysteries introduced new and exciting dread into my life. Did you know that in addition to being snatched off the street by a kidnapper, you can get plucked straight off the planet by a UFO? Stack, an otherwise reasonable man, will gladly tell you all about people who have experienced periods of missing time only to recall getting probed by the “Take me to your dealer” alien once they went under hypnosis.
The prospect of opening my eyes in the middle of the night and meeting the giant black eyes of the alien from the Communion book cover was just one more worry that 10-year-old me didn’t need.
Even getting that saxophone wail of doom from the closing credits stuck in my head was enough to cost me a night of sleep. Granted, it’s the middle of the night and that spooky soft jazz outro lodged itself into my brain, so I might as well concede that anything approaching a reasonable bedtime is a wash.
