Silent movies - Our Hospitality

I don't know if you are familiar with Lucky Luke, the hero of a Belgian Western comic album series that is very popular in Europe. One of the albums is called "The Rivals of Painful Gulch". The O'Timmins (with big noses) and the O'Hara (with big ears) families have been in a decade long feud without even remembering why. Lucky Luke is made mayor in order to end this feud.
The story was inspired by the historical Hatfield-McCoy feud in 19th century West Virginia/Kentucky.
You want to know what that has to do with silent movies? I'm glad you asked.
May I present to you "Our Hospitality" from 1923?

The plot (spoilers ahead)!

After his father John and James Canfield have shot each other, baby Willie McKay is taken to New York by his mother where he grows up without being told about the feud between the families (have you noticed the similarity of the names to the real names?), raised by his aunt after his mother's death.

That's Keaton's and Talmadge's first son
Jimmy, by the way.

Then, however, he gets a letter telling him to claim his father's estate in the South and he starts dreaming big (in fact it's just a small rundown hut).
Before he leaves, though, his aunt tells him about the feud.

On the train - "Onward sped the iron monster toward the Blue Ridge Mountains" according to the intertitle (always followed by Willie's dog!) - he meets a young lady.
The train ride is quite eventful. They have to remove a tramp, a guy hurls stones at the engineer who throws back wood from his fuel cart which is quickly collected by the guy, they have a very bumpy ride as the tracks are literally laid over trees and rocks, they have to move the tracks because a stubborn donkey refuses to move (of course he walks off after the train has passed), they derail and the train runs on the bare ground, and at one point the engine even loses the wagons and is suddenly behind them - and that's not all (I'm glad my commute wasn't like that).

Once arrived, we - but not Willie - find out that the young lady on the train is Virginia Canfield as she's picked up by her father and two brothers Clayton and Lee.
Later Willie encounters Lee who, upon hearing that Willie is a McKay, immediately tries to kill him without success and runs home to inform his father and Clayton. While they choose their weapons, Willie happens to see Virginia in her yard and she invites him to supper.

By now, all male Canfields go after Willie who has some very lucky - and funny -  escapes.
When he calls for supper, the Canfields are shocked to see that he's Virginia's guest. Neverless, Father Canfield tells his sons that they will have to grant him their hospitality because their code of honor ... but only inside the house while he's fair game outside of it. Overhearing them plotting, Willie asks the butler whose house it is.
From here on, Willie and the Canfields have an eye on each other as they just wait for him to leave the house and get their chance.

The parson is saying grace, but only he and
Virginia have their eyes closed ...

Luckily, it rains hard when the parson wants to go home after supper. He's invited to stay and Willie extends that invitation to himself, determined never to leave the house again. When Virginia learns that he's a McKay, however, she can't imagine a future for them.
Willie hopes to escape in disguise and the chase begins (which gives Keaton ample opportunity for his daring stunts).

Thanks to the parson, there's a happy ending as he manages to marry Willie und Virginia in time before the Canfields arrive at home and how could Dad resist the look in his daughter's eyes?

Now this was a movie I really had fun with!
I'm shamelessly going to steal a bit from Jim Emerson's review (link below, unfortunately it's only part of an article whose link doesn't work anymore).

"Among the things you will learn from watching Buster Keaton’s “Our Hospitality”:

● A novel method for easily collecting firewood.

● How to move a donkey away from railroad tracks, or vice-versa.

● How to improvise a boat.

● How to make a lady from a horse’s behind.

● How to put on a top hat in a low-ceilinged carriage (and why a porkpie hat is so obviously preferable).

In other words, the act of seeing this movie will immeasurably improve your life."

Keaton who loved trains set the movie earlier than the historical feud, so he could use a replica of the 1829 British steam engines Stephenson's Rocket. The train ride is my favorite part of the movie, it's hilarious. I had a hard time keeping the number of pictures for it down.
That doesn't mean, however, that the chase wasn't funny and actually exciting as well.
As usual, Keaton did most of his own stunts. Two of them got dangerous for him, once when a wire broke and Keaton was swept away in the water - as you can see in the movie because the cameraman had instructions to keep filming - and once when he was dangling over the waterfall and swallowed so much water that he had to have his stomach pumped!

There are a lot of sight gags, but no slapstick as that wouldn't have worked for a feature film that depended on its narrative that's based on tragic events.
This was Keaton's second feature film, but the first one had still been episodic. It was also a family venture. The producer Joseph M. Schenck was the husband of Keaton's sister-in-law, we have already seen baby Keaton, Virginia is Natalie Talmadge - still married to Buster at the time and pregnant with their second child - and the engineer is Joe Keaton, Buster's father.

A wholehearted recommendation from me!


Sources and further reading:

1. Jim Emerson: Our Hospitality: Buster Keaton and gravity. On: RogerEbert.com, Scanners, December 14, 2012
2. Jeffrey Vance: Our Hospitality. On: San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Essay. 2019
3. Hal C. F. Astell: Our Hospitality (1923). On: Apocalypse Later, November 19, 2023

Bookish pet peeves #3

Do you go by book covers when choosing what to read?
I have several pet peeves concerning covers. Some of them will actually drive me away if I haven't already decided to read a book because of a recommendation or because it's part of a series, for example.

One of them has been haunting me lately - the cover filled up with text. I'm not saying by any means that this is a recent invention, it seems to me, however, that it becomes more and more popular.
Of course, I understand that it's a matter of marketing.
Tell me what else the author wrote. Mention a book by someone else it reminds of. And if there is a movie, by all means make sure to use an image from it for the cover and tell me that it's now a major feature film with a big star, even better two.
If famous writers, reviewers or newspapers and magazines inform me how much they love a book without actually saying anything about it, I'm sure to love it too. Use words like "groundbreaking", "exhilarating", "impossible to put down". Oh, and let me know if it makes you cry or laugh, please.
Add some "stickers" and award information (not removable on physical copies of course) and I will love it even more.

There's just one thing - I don't. I'm not interested in what those people say, mostly because there's a good chance I don't even know them. I also don't want to know if the book is a some book club's choice or on which bestseller list it is, actually not even that it is a bestseller.
For me all of that is visually overwhelming. It possibly makes me dismiss a book without giving it a fair chance because it makes my brain explode a little. Enough for it to become a pet peeve, well, and even write about it.

As a post without a picture always looks a bit sad, but I didn't want to call out books whose covers I don't like (although I already had a list), I chose one instead that I do like. A title and a name. A bit old-fashioned, just like me.

Seriously, though, how important is a cover for you? Have you seen books you didn't want to read because of their covers, if so, for what reason?


By the way, if you write book reviews or blog posts about other book-related matters - even movies based on books - please check out "A Good Book and a Cup of Tea", a monthly bookish blog link party that I host together with Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and Lisa from Boondock Ramblings. You can find out more about it here.

10 on the 10th, erm, 11th - Cat Days of Summer

As you know, I don't like to post twice on one day, so I'm a day late for Marsha in the Middle's 10 on the 10th. I think you'll forgive me for that.
So let's see, what does Marsha have for us this month?

She's gotta be kidding me. Is that an evil laugh I'm hearing in the distance there? How could I keep it down to ten?
It will be difficult, but here you go - in random order as usual.

Cat herding. I still don't know what the company this commercial is for actually does (or did), but I couldn't care less, anyway. This is hilarious.



Looking at my hands, I know exactly who does this right now preparing for the next time I dare touching her without permission. Little hint ... she's black as well.

I don't think I need to say much about Franz Marc's "Die weiße Katze" from 1912. I love this painting.

From the collection of Kulturstiftung
Sachsen-Anhalt - Kunstmuseum Moritzburg
Halle (Saale)

It's pretty unbelievable that "Simon's Cat" has been around for 18 years already.
I still remember when one of our student helpers at work - who had a cat as well - said I just had to look at this video. We could both relate to this so much (minus baseball bat of course).



Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen didn't just include cats in many of his illustrations, he also sculpted cats.
We used to have a print of this poster he designed for the cabaret "Le Chat Noir" in 1896 on our wall. I wonder where it's now.

I follow Baby Corn on social media.
He's - actually, I'm not sure we even know all of what he is yet. He was surrendered to a city shelter as an orphan cat together with his two sisters at about three weeks old. They were normal size, Baby Corn wasn't. He's still small at over a year old, he's wobbly (cerebellar hypoplasia), he squints and he has a funny little flat top. He fights wind and corn and he's well traveled. And adorable.

Actually, Baby Corn is not the only cat with cerebellar hypoplasia I follow. There are also Elvis Westley and Nuggie, for example. If you wonder why, I used to have disabled pets myself.



Do you know "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers", created in 1968 by Gilbert Shelton? Then you also know Fat Freddy's Cat.

Bastet used to be a lion warrior goddess (still a cat, at least in parts) and later became the Egyptian cat goddess we usually associate her with today.

KS_aus_F (Katharina Surhoff) (GFDL)
via Wikimedia Commons
Statue at the Senckenberg
Naturmuseum Frankfurt

Medieval cats. Granted, many medieval animals look fantastic (as in a "too much cheese" fantasy), but the cats ... judge for yourself.

The cats from the cartoons of Scott Metzger, Mark Parisi - they also have other topics -, and Lingvistov. You see them and think, yup, that could be mine.
I follow Scott and Mark on social media and Landysh on Patreon (you can find old Lingvistov cartoons here), but am not going to share any of their cartoons here.
Instead I give you a caricature my animator friend made of me and the ex ages ago. Cat wearing a cat tee (I never had a nose like that, though!).

I hadn't planned to include my own cats because I knew going through their pictures would make me cry and it did, but I just couldn't leave them out. It would have felt wrong because of course they will always be my #1 favorites.
Afterwards I couldn't handle making another collage for the other family cats.

Quite the mix, isn't it? I bet tomorrow my list could be looking completely different and again the day after tomorrow.
Thank you, Marsha, that was (mostly) fun.
Did you notice something about the post?

Weekend Traffic Jam - Week 164

Welcome to the Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot!
My posts for the link up will go live on Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. EDT or, if you live in the future like I do, on Fridays at 3:30 a.m. CE(S)T.

Have you ever heard about estivation which is practically the summer version of hibernation? Does anyone know where I can apply for that?
Maybe if I disguise as a water-holding frog? "By burrowing, the stresses of temperature and water loss on the frogs are minimised" (according to Wikipedia). Sounds good to me!

Picture by Tnarg 12345, CC BY-SA 3.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

Are you ready for the weekend?

As part of the reboot, we will be featuring a different blog every week.
How about stopping by and saying hello? Let them know we sent you.

This week our spotlight is on Crafts a la Mode.

Linda from Crafts a la Mode says: "I am the crafter extraordinaire (on this blog anyway). I live with my husband, my son, David, and 3 or 4 nights a week our granddaughter while my daughter works - in a cozy cape cod style house in Connecticut.  We have four kids, two girls adopted from Korea and two ordinary sons. Ha ha  I like to decorate my house with all of the things I sew, paint, and craft.  When I'm not coming up with all of these great crafty, decorating ideas, I like taking care of my grandkids.   I like my grandkids... a LOT."

Marsha from Marsha in the Middle started blogging in 2021 as an exercise in increasing her neuroplasticity. Oh, who are we kidding? Marsha started blogging because she loves clothes, and she loves to talk or, in this case, write!

Melynda from Scratch Made Food! & DIY Homemade Household - The name says it all, we homestead in East Texas, with three generations sharing this land. I cook and bake from scratch, between gardening and running after the chickens, and knitting!

Lisa from Boondock Ramblings shares about the fiction she writes and reads, her faith, homeschooling, photography and more.

Cat from Cat's Wire has what she calls a jumping spider brain. She has many interests and will blog about whatever catches her attention - crafts, books, old movies, collectibles or random things.

Rena from Fine Whatever Blog writes about style, midlife, and the "fine whatever" moments that make life both meaningful and fun. Since 2015, she's been celebrating creativity, confidence, and finding joy in the everyday.


Here are some of my picks from last week's link up.

Amalia made me think of the sleepovers I had with my best friend many, many years ago.

Let's have coffee ... or even a cup of tea ... with Barbara who's back home after traveling.

Who wouldn't want to join Soma here at the lake?

Foxglove is such a beautiful flower (don't try to eat it, though) and Nicole has them in her garden.

Gail is showing us her festival finery.


Let's link up!

Guidelines:
This link party is for blog posts only. All other links will be deleted.
Please link only blog posts you created yourself. Please link directly to the URL of your blog post and not the main address of your blog.
Please do not link to videos, sales ads, or social media links such as YouTube videos/shorts, Instagram or Facebook reels, TikTok videos, or any other social media based content.
Please do visit other blogs and give the gift of a comment. 

Notice:
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We welcome unlimited, family friendly content. This can include opinion pieces, recipes, travel recaps, fashion ideas, crafts, thrifting, lifestyle, book reviews or discussions, photography, art, and so much more!
Thank you for linking up with us! 

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Silent movies - Bare Knees

If I tell you this movie is about a flapper going to live with her sister and her very reputable husband in a very reputable town, you can probably imagine what's going to happen. But can you really?
Today I'll be talking about "Bare Knees" from 1928.

First the plot (spoiler alert!).

We begin in the Longworth household on wife Jane's birthday, but her husband John is home late again - the fate of a County Attorney - while his best friend Paul has already been there for an hour.
Paul has given her perfume, John a stole (you can tell Jane prefers the perfume).

There's also a wire from Jane's sister Billie (Virginia Lee Corbin did a nice job) who turns up at the very respectable birthday party the same evening - a flapper from bob to bare knees.
The effect is amazing, from shocked looks to a few young men being very interested including Larry who works for John.
It's not just her outfit, though, that shocks the good people of Hanford City, it's also her flippant way of talking, her irreverence, and her gift, a diaphanous black negligee.

From then on, Billie's a thorn in her brother-in-law's side. She dances a Charleston at the party and leads the girls' baseball team into a game against the boys' team , all of them wearing short pants and tank tops and confusing the boys so much that they beat them 29 : 0 (funny, the newspaper article says that the girls won against the men). Of course she also smokes, drinks, and is a big flirt.
Jane lets her know she has never seen anything that vulgar, but when Billie has gone out, Jane longingly lifts her own skirt above her knees, not knowing she's seen by John.

Meanwhile, John has sent Larry to investigate the club ship "Ship Ahoy" and Paul tells him that Billie is there almost every night.
John reply is that he wishes she were like Jane because a husband doesn't have to worry about a wife like Jane. Then he goes to bed.
Plot twist!
As soon as John is gone, Jane is in Paul's arms!
While Jane is struggling in her marriage, Billie declines Larry's proposal "Marriage is like eating a mushroom ... you don't know if it's poison until it's too late."

Now things get a little confusing.
John tells Larry they will investigate the "Ship Ahoy" together.
Jane has asked Paul to meet her in one of the private dining rooms on the ship bringing along a travel bag to elope, but Billie has found Jane's note to John and is already there.
When John and Larry turn up, she claims that she's the one who wants to elope with Paul and Jane came to stop her which is of course a shock for Larry.

Are you still with me? Because now it's getting really weird. 
A big fire breaks out on the pier and while all the others make it out in time, Paul and Billie get caught in the fire. Neither of them can swim, though, so of course they decide to have some last fun and ride the rollercoaster which still runs with empty wagons.
Don't worry! Larry is already in the water on his way to save his love! Who is just crashing through the burning rollercoaster with her wagon. I wish the quality were better. That black "cloud" on the right? That's the wagon.
Don't worry! Larry is already in the water on ... yes, again, but we don't see how he saves both Billie and Paul. Not that Paul turns up again in the last scenes, so who knows, he might have drowned.

By now, John has found Jane's note, but has the maid burn it (wouldn't that be something you do yourself?). All he says to Jane is that a lot of women wear short skirts now and has she thought of bobbing her hair - and she falls into his arms.
Larry is visiting Billie and she reminds him of his proposal.
Happy ending all around (except for Paul)!

I thought the movie was off to a good start and quite amusing. I even liked the plot twist, who would have thought that of Jane?
The ending, though ...
I don't know that I would have had a great idea myself, but a fire and a rollercoaster? The only excuse I would have for that could be that it's symbolic in some way, but this isn't a deep movie, it's a flapper comedy.

It also was a little disappointing to me that Billie gave up so easily in the end. I guess that was to be expected, maybe she hit her head when they crashed into the water or she saw her life before her eyes and thought she needed to change something. I guess the main point is that I don't think she and Larry make a good couple. He's so boring. Will he be enough for Billie?

I could also really have done without Bessie the maid. No, that's wrong, I could have done with the running "joke" about her hurting feet and her walking around weirdly. My feet hurt all the time and I felt her pain, but it did absolutely nothing for the movie.

The runtime was a little over an hour, easy enough to handle and there were some charming bits (and nice clothes), but "Bare Knees" is not going to make it on my re-watchlist.

Tell Us About ... Dance

I have been asked if I'd like to participate in the Global Writing Challenge on the second Thursday of the month. This is the second time for me and I really enjoyed reading all of the posts about sunshine last month.
My posts will go live a little early (to avoid collision with the silent films), so if the posts of the others are not live yet, please check back later.
The current membership consists of Deb’s World, Suzy Turner, Within a World of My Own, Once Upon a Time Happily Ever After, Marsha in the Middle, Coffee and Cocktails at the Casa, and me. It's fun to learn how differently everyone interprets a topic.
You can play along and link up with us!
If that's too short notice for you, maybe next time? Here are the prompts for the coming months:
August - A Day in the Life
September - Poetry
October - Birthday
November - Superstition

Photo of German dancer Mary Wigman
by Jacob Merkelbach, 1922
Public domain via Wikipedia

The prompt for today was "Dance", chosen by Suzy.

Let me tell you right away that I have never been a dancer. I can't remember ever having been one of those children who hear a song on the radio or TV and immediately start dancing to it happily.
I had friends who took ballet classes early and later jazz dance, and once I was taken along to pick one of them up from class because we wanted to meet at her house afterwards and I was early. It was a world that was utterly strange to me, and I honestly never envied my friends for the experience.

Ballerinas Barbie and Cara from 1976
(Barbie and Cara swapped their outfits)

Peer pressure - aka my best friends - made me take the basic dancing class. Here in Germany, dancing schools have a long tradition with the oldest one existing since 1787.
Originally, classes weren't limited to dancing, however, they were also about manners, dress codes, and conversation. Of course, all of that has evolved and changed, even in my time already. Over time, the dress code has become less and less restrictive and new dances are being offered.
My own experience was, hm, meh (not just the dancing itself, but also the whole teenage mating dance ritual around it 😉). I just couldn't get into it and never contemplated going on to the advanced class (also called bronze today), much less silver, gold, and gold star.
As an adult I usually got around having to dance and mostly danced only at home with Merlin, Greebo or Ponder (sometimes even two of them).

That doesn't mean, however, that I hate dancing. I just want others who are so much better at it to do it for me to look at - classical ballet, musicals, tap dance, rock'n'roll, folk dance, I could keep going.
Those performances can be breathtaking, acrobatic, incredibly elegant, but also hilarious sometimes.
Here are just a few very randomly chosen examples for your entertainment. Unfortunately, the videos seem to show directly sometimes and sometimes they don't, also depending on your browser settings, so I always added the link in the description as well.

I can't condone kidnapping, but the barn raising dance from "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" - wow, just wow.

Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman dancing a Scottish reel in "Indiscreet".

Audrey Hepburn doing a kind of expressionist dance in "Funny Face"

Bobby Banas (who also was in "West Side Story") and others doing the "Nitty Gritty"

Whitey's Lindy Hoppers in "Hellzapoppin'". No words.

You may think about Bollywood what you want, but the dances are amazing, here "Dola Re Dola Re".

I learned about "eccentric dancer" Jack Stanford through a YouTube suggestion.

Or how about this incredible snake dance by Janine Janik and Christian Arnaut?

In the 60s there was a couple named Fern on German TV, with short lessons for classic ballroom dancing, but also for "play dances" for parties, like the letkis (spelled Letkiss in Germany) which is based on a Finnish folk dance or the Hoppel Poppel (not the East German recipe!) in this video.
It never fails to make me snigger.

Enough, enough!
Of course I could keep going and going and going, but I think I've proven my point. I like to sing along with a song, but the world doesn't need me to dance, there are other things I can do better and like doing better.
Sometimes you just need to know your limits.


Now let's see what the others have to tell us (Debbie is still travelling).

Suzy shares why dancing has meant so much throughout her life, and how one night on the dance floor changed everything forever.

Sally discusses why she can play music but she can't dance to it.

For Leslie, this month's prompt - dancing - brings lots of things to mind: a favorite memory, ballet, and a great Ginger Rogers quote.  Which will she write about? 

When Marsha was teaching, her students would beg her not to sing (she still did).  But, when it came to dancing, they were all for it. I mean, who doesn’t want to see their teacher make a complete fool of herself?  Read Marsha’s post to discover all the goofy things she and her class used to do!

Amy shares thoughts on dance through quotes and lyrics as pertaining to her life history thus far ...


And now you. Tell us about "Dance" and link up with us!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

From my children's book cabinet (and my DVD shelf) - The Eerie, Indiana series

"My name is Marshall Teller. Not too long ago, I was living in New Jersey, just across the river from New York City. It was crowded, polluted, and full of crime. I loved it. But my parents wanted a better life for my sister and me. So we moved to a place so wholesome, so squeaky clean, so ordinary that you could only find it on TV: Eerie, Indiana."

That's from the prologue of the first book in a series which is based on the 90s TV show for kids "Eerie, Indiana". That means I can't talk about the book series leaving out the show.
As there are 19 episodes, though, and 17 books, I picked just the first one of each for this post.

The book is called "Return to Foreverware", a nod to the first episode of the TV show called "Forever Ware". It's by Mike Ford who wrote nine of the books.

Let's begin with the TV show. How to describe "Eerie, Indiana" ...
"Statistically speaking, it's the most normal place in the entire country. Statistics lie."
Actually, the town is exactly what its name promises. "The King" lives on Marshall's paper route, people move strangely synchronized, a straitjacket hangs on a laundry line, and that's just the intro.
Marshall's mother works as a party planner, but being a busy lady she's not so good with her own groceries. How lucky when her neighbor Betty Wilson and her twins Ernie and Bert turn up with a solution. Mrs. Wilson's late husband has designed a series of vacuum sealed containers called Tu.... erm, Forever Ware.

As a little gift she leaves a bologna sandwich in a container, as fresh as it was when it was made. In 1974!
It's even more suspicious when one of the twins slips Marshall a note saying "Yearbook 1964" as the family leaves.
Marshall and his friend Simon check the yearbooks and find a picture of Ernie and Bert looking the same as now, so they decide to snoop around a bit.
They don't expect to see this, though ...

... Mrs. Wilson tucking the twins in, but these are not beds, they are giant Forever Ware containers!
I'm not going to spoil the ending (spoil, see what I did there?).

The book sees Marshall and Simon looking for a weekend job.
They answer to the ad of Mr. and Mrs. Stewart - James and Martha! - who seem to be stuck in the 70s, not only with their clothes, but also their furniture. They get asked to declutter the attic.
What's weird is that Mrs. Stewart seems to have an extra soft spot for Simon. The boys learn that the Stewarts had a son who died years ago - Rod(ney) - and Marshall can't shake the feeling that they'd like to replace him with Simon. But is he the first? Why do they find pictures from a birthday party that always looks the same, but it's a different boy every time. What happened to Rodney? And what's in the basement?
Then Simon suddenly disappears and the Stewarts deny having seen him although his bike is in their garage.
Will Marshall be able to save him and can someone help him doing it (spoiler: Ernie and Bert will)?

Omri Katz as Marshall (whom you probably know
from Hocus Pocus) and Justin Shenkarow as Simon

"Eerie, Indiana" first aired on NBC. Joe Dante of "Gremlins" fame directed several episodes and was a creative consultant.
From the start, the writers Karl Schaefer and José Rivera intended for the show to be more than merely for kids. I wasn't a kid when I first saw it although I can't remember when and where that was, and the mix of humor, spookiness, horror, science fiction, and innuendos drew me in very quickly.
In reviews it was noted that the show reminded of "Twin Peaks", "Edward Scissorhands", "Twilight Zone" - a seemingly "normal" town where there's a lot more going on underneath the surface than you would expect.

It certainly wasn't all fun and play. The second episode in which a boy finds that his retainer gives him the powers to read the minds of dogs who want to overthrow the humans is downright creepy to me, so much so that I often skip it, but I have also been traumatized by "Lady and the Tramp" (as an adult) or "Bambi".

Anyhow, as it's said in a lot of videos and articles, the show was ahead of its time. It was cancelled after 18 episodes were aired between 1991 and 1992 ending on an episode in which Marshall finds out by way of a script that his reality is in fact a TV show. Only in the re-run in 1993, the last episode was aired as well.
In 1997, the show was bought up and broadcast again and got popular enough again to not only inspire a spin-off produced in Canada (just as short-lived, but not as good), but also the book series. In fact, it gained kind of a cult following as you can also see from the many comments of people who had seen it as kids and still bemoan its short life.

Mike Ford writes on his homepage: "One day my editor called me and said, "We're doing these books based on this TV show, but none of the writers we know have ever heard of it." When she told me what it was, they probably heard me scream in space. I loved the show. And that's how I got the job."
I remember getting the books from the USA (at a time when postage was still affordable) and being called into the customs office. The lady asked me to show her the invoice and to her surprise, the whole stack of books had been so cheap that I didn't even get to the limit for having to pay tax.

"Eerie, Indiana" inspired other shows like it (the "Stranger Things" connection is mentioned a lot and Alex Hirsch said that his "Gravity Falls" (another one I'm a fan of) was "a blatant rip off of Eerie, Indiana") and still has its fans today, that's not a bad legacy.
You may recognize one or the other actor, by the way, for example "Gomez Addams" John Astin as the owner of the "World O' Stuff" store, a soul collecting René Auberjonois or young Tobey Maguire as a ghost.

How many people actually ever knew about the books or still do is difficult for me to say, I can't even say how I learned about them. Unsurprisingly, they are no longer in print, though.


Further reading:

1. Gwen Ihnat: Eerie, Indiana was a few dimensions ahead of its time. On: AV Club, October 30, 2017
2. Justin Young: Eerie, Indiana Paved the Way for Supernatural's Success. On: CBR, February 28, 2026


By the way, if you write book reviews or blog posts about other book-related matters - even movies based on books - please check out "A Good Book and a Cup of Tea", a monthly bookish blog link party that I host together with Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and Lisa from Boondock Ramblings. You can find out more about it here.