Learning Day: MONSTERS BE GONE! BEDTIME SURVIVAL KIT (Patreon)

For centuries, fear ruled the night. Children were ruled by shadows, and the horrors living within them. Then, in the year 2000, Brentwood Home Video released MONSTERS BE GONE! BEDTIME SURVIVAL KIT.

It looks like a VHS cassette, and it is, but it's so much more. Next to the tape, packed behind a block of styrofoam, is a whole monster hunting kit:

This humiliating debris tumbles out when you pick up the box. There's a night light that gives off an eerie orange glow, aggressively designed to take up an entire wall outlet. As backup, there's a vial of MONSTERS BE GONE! fluid, and a pump to wetly spit it on your monster problem areas. There is no documentation explaining what monsters this affects or how. The kit also includes a do-not-disturb sign for monsters, but enough hotel maids have seen me naked for me to know this will never work. It all looks like trash you'd bring home from a sarcastic bigfoot convention, and none of the tchotchkes are incorporated in the video in any way. MONSTERS BE GONE! is like a pile of plastic on its way to a landfill, but along the way someone tried to sell it to children as Dracula insurance.

MONSTERS BE GONE! wasn't the only product that tried to turn childhood fears into profit, but it might be the only one who did it as a Plan B. This thing was obviously meant to be a kid's series called Magic Al and the Mind Factory starring Butch "Eddie Munster" Patrick, but it was a disaster. A total piece of shit, which I'll get to, so they added the monster-proofing toys and repackaged it as this. Those three lines on the back of the box are your monster-hunting instructions in their entirety. Spray! Light! Sign! You've done it!

To be fair, the MONSTERS BE GONE spray bottle itself has some instructions. It tells you to shake well and spray it wherever you get monsters. There's no reason for it to be anything but goddamn water, but it has seven ingredients, leaves a soapy film, and smells enough like laundry to mention it. I'm not being cute. It really does have a chemical He-Man slime odor, and to make things worse, the fucking thing has the balls to say "CAUTION: Use only as directed." It's magical dumbshit juice, Brentwood Home Video.  You think the parents of the kid who drinks it are going to drop the lawsuit if your lawyer says, "Your child knowingly sprayed MONSTERS BE GONE on a location not infested with creatures. So until you can prove your child contained goblins, we are free from any and all liability."

Okay, now that my VCR is nice and wet, let's watch this cursed tape. This capitalism Frankenstein.

The very first thing in the video is a memorial to four people, and no one knew the first name of one of them. This is weird. Was there a terrible accident on set? Are these the four people we lost to monster attacks? I've never seen a kid's video open with "Four people died. We will not explain who they were, but we are dedicating this awful product to them that comes with everything you see here." All I know is, if you put my name at the top of an anti-monster video, I am coming back as a skeleton on principle.

It probably seems insane that Mandy Moore agreed to be in this, but she was cast over a year before her first album. After filming Magic Al And The Mind Factory, it took two years before it was renamed MONSTERS BE GONE! and crushed into a double VHS box with a tube of snake oil. And while you may know her as a charming pop star, that does not come through here. The director clearly told her, "Mandy, here's a seven minute voicemail my ex-wife left me after I got her sister pregnant. I want you to deliver every line precisely like this." This is her telling her little brother it's time to get back in the car:

This is real: I watched this with my 5-year-old daughter and she said, "I do not like her. Who is that?"

I told her it was pop sensation Mandy Moore, and she added only, "I do not like Mandy Moore." I'm telling you this because Mandy Moore is by far the best thing this video had going for it and it is all downhill from Mandy Moore.

Speaking of kids, the front of the box has a pull quote from Rosie O'Donnell who said, "I gave it to my son and it actually worked!" She did feature MONSTERS BE GONE! on her talk show, so I don't know if this line was a paid advertisement or the empty lie of a TV host filling time, but there's no way it's true. There is nothing with a chance of "working" here. If you solved your son's problems with a terrible kid's show and an unrelated fart spray bottle, it wasn't the boy who was broken, Rosie O'Donnell. The only difference between MONSTERS BE GONE! and telling your kid to shut up is $29.99 and slightly more fart smell.

The main character of the show is Mandy's little brother, Tazz, who is very afraid of monsters. It's all he talks about. They are real, and they are everywhere. He tells this to his family and directly to the viewer in the opening voiceover. So to recap, we open with an unexplained list of dead people, an official announcement that monsters are real, and Mandy Moore doing an impersonation of Mel Gibson getting the wrong sandwich at a Jewish deli.

Taz's family is moving into an inn rumored to be haunted, giving Tazz many opportunities to complain about monsters. He never wastes one. In broad daylight, miles from the nearest basement or closet, he can't stop talking about all the very real monsters everywhere. I never thought I'd say this forty seconds after watching her spit hate at a little boy, but Mandy Moore was right. If you see this coward boy, hiss in his shitty face.

There's no way Tazz could have known this, but there are actual monsters in the basement of the inn. An evil scientist named Professor Claudius Crawford Cloot, who delivers every line directly to camera like he's never seen a TV show before, has a huge creature-generating machine at the bottom of the stairs. Which means Tazz's family bought an inn without a single inspection. These idiots drove by a real estate sign outside an abandoned, shrieking hotel and said, "We'll take it!" Again, Mandy Moore's constant frustration is justified.

You might not be surprised by this, but the special effects of this 24-year-old failed TV pilot rebranded to be a night light accessory aren't very good. This also seems like a good time to mention Magic Al And The Mind Factory was lit exclusively by distant desk lamps and open windows. "There is no element of this production that isn't fucked," said the disgraced gym coach learning computers to make this CGI monster.

"This place used to be owned by my nemesis, Magic Al!" exposits Cloot right into the camera in a scene too stupid to describe. On his surveillance system, he sees Tazz headed into the basement, so he sends the CGI creature to chase him back upstairs. This is how he plans on protecting his secret-- with a mystical guard ghost that requires 24 hour monitoring. It sounds embarrassing, but you'll forget all about it when you see the ghost's fearsome powers:

On a diarrhea spray of fireworks, the monster charges at Tazz. "See, daddy? Monsters are real," my daughter says. This is extremely the opposite of what the box promised.

Tazz tells his family, but it's at least the 30th time he's nagged about real monsters today. "Who's in the basement?" they ask.

Tazz wisely leaves out the beautiful asshole sparkles, but he's otherwise terrible at describing things. "I don't know, but he's big, he's ugly, and he has long arms!"

Mandy Moore jokes, "Sounds like my basketball coach. Heh huh." Fucking what? It's the most haunting moment in this video about monsters, and no one acknowledges it.

Ignoring his daughter, the dad goes into the basement and comes back with an adult-sized trench coat. "Is this what you saw?" he asks.

Tazz thinks about it. "No, but that's what he was wearing." What!? No it wasn't. You dumbass. The creature was wearing a child's tennis skirt scorched from the sparks of its own butt propulsion. But seeing a random coat is enough for this little dumbass to convince himself it was all in his imagination. Tazz, are you telling me you talk about monsters being real at all times except right after one shits After Effects particles all over your face? Fucking idiot.

Anyway, he firms up his monster theories a couple days later when he chases his remote-controlled car into Professor Cloot's secret lair and gets attacked by a bigfoot.

It's hard to tell in this lighting. It might have been an orangutan? You know, maybe it was only a coat and I'm imagining things. Oh, wow. I may have been too hard on Tazz.

Tazz finds some rhinestones glued to a rough piece of lumber and it gives him the power of lightning. He can shoot electricity now! "For this to look good, we've got to time it just right," the editor told the special effects artist. "We didn't," he later responded.

Tazz tells Cloot, "GO AWAY! I DON'T EVEN BELIEVE YOU'RE REAL!"

What? I honestly don't know what to think. Does he believe monsters are real and humans are fake? The stated goal of the video is to help children keep monsters out of their rooms, but not by delineating between reality and imagination. They want kids to believe in monsters, but also believe they can keep them at bay with the magic of spray and door hanger. My daughter didn't know either. "This is too scary for little kids, daddy. This is one of the silly videos for your work," she said. So she had figured out what was going on, but not in a way that was helpful.

Now watching by myself, I see Tazz escape to another well-lit room and flop himself onto some piano keys. This frees Magic Al and Mr. Music from a painting. It sounds like I'm summarizing several minutes of storytelling, but that's how it happens. You already know everything about Magic Al and Mr. Music from their names, but Al does a magic trick anyway. Unfortunately, they film it from Al's point-of-view and we can plainly see how it's done:

Maybe they thought firing the lighting crew would be enough to hide all their other mistakes, but this one seems insane, even for MONSTERS BE GONE!. At least one person in that room should have said, "Oh no, you can't film this side of my hands or the coin doesn't actually vanish." Maybe this is the video's true goal? To destroy all sense of wonderment and hope monsters go extinct from habitat loss?

Magic Al, the man recently trapped in a painting by a monster master, asks Tazz if he's afraid of monsters even though he knows they're not really there.

Tazz replies, "Well, sometimes." God damn it, fuck you, Tazz. "Sometimes." There were exactly three seconds in the last week when you didn't believe in monsters, and it was when you were being literally attacked by them. I hate you so much, and if this is all taking place inside your imagination I hope Mr. Music pisses in your broken mind.

Magic Al starts to tell how Professor Cloot trapped them in a painting and warns Tazz it's "a long story." It's not. Add it to the list of things every character has wrong about in this piece of trash. Cloot saw a man with a magic machine, asked him how to use it, and trapped him in a painting. This tape worked on your kid, Rosie O'Donnell? Fuck him. Fuck you.

Butch Patrick, the only experienced actor on set, is somehow the worst performer on a cast of birthday magicians staring at the camera. He flubs every line. He is overacting in a way that made me look up his health conditions before I wrote any jokes. I didn't want to say he looks like he was being eaten alive by two warring crab armies only to get to the "1998--present: Violently Devoured By Crabs" part of his wikipedia.

Anyway, in this second flashback, Cloot tricks Butch Patrick by charging into his Willy Wonka place and saying, "I AM AN OBVIOUS MANIAC GIVE ME YOUR VALUABLE THING GOODBYE." So this is how Cloot came to acquire the magic dust we haven't seen him use. This video has no idea which questions it should be answering. Here's the only question I have: Rosie O'Donnell has definitely hit her son in the head with a shovel.

There's no reason to catch you up with what's going on. The rules have now changed to "only children can stop Cloot" and they do it by not being afraid of imaginary things. These fuckers show two flashbacks about real magic dust and real teleporting wizards and now the threats are imaginary? What are we doing here? Butch Patrick away!

In one final display of sorcery, I watch Magic Al place a laptop on a table and use his powers to summon a world wide web Internet website about himself. "Daddy, you said a bad word," a tiny voice tells me from the other room.

Tazz brings this to his sister to verify his story. "Wow, it was all real," decides Mandy Moore after seeing the non-interactive Real Media video on the vertically-integrated companion website to Magic Al And The Mind Factory, now known as MONSTERS BE GONE! BEDTIME SURVIVAL KIT. "This is proof of the real magic we need to believe is imaginary in order to stop it," she concludes, hoping you won't notice this latest unraveling of the premise.

Cloot is furious! His machine fueled by magic dust, no wait... nearby children's fear of the dark is losing power! He's going to get that Magic Al!

Wait, what the hell? To be continued!? This doesn't have an ending? Are you telling me this pilot you repackaged to grift toddler cowards is an unfinished pilot!? Under what circumstances would this be continued? No show has ever been not picked up as hard as this. When someone says your show might work as an accessory for a night light, that's worse than a get the fuck out of my office. This is... I mean, Jesus. Jesus Christ, Magic Al And The Mind Factory.

Oh my god, there's a commercial at the end for a hot new knockoff Elvira show starring Butch Patrick and an Elvira knockoff called 1313 Theater. Nothing has ever been more exactly what you're picturing than 1313 Theater. It wouldn't come out for two years, only featured Butch in 8% of the episodes and would get released under a different name. The only review on IMDB is a blurb definitely written by the Elvira knockoff, "Ivonna Cadaver," which says, "Well first off, Ivonna does NOT owe her entire career to Elvira, Elvira never had a career as a TV personality, she was a dancer and did "other movies", she was a figure on a TV screen, now in Her 60's is no longer anything like Ivonna." My mistake! So look for that!

They knew we'd want to see how they did both those incredible CGI shots, so they included an interview with Mike Murphy, the special effects genius behind the Pac-Man ghost wearing clothes that didn't match the script. This was shot five years after Jurassic Park. They are explaining ceremonial burial to us while we're building a printing press. This is like Ivonna Cadaver writing a book on how she came up with the idea of presenting horror movies and most of her tits at the same time. Oh, great. They're explaining makeup now:

Using creams and sponges, makeup can be applied to people. They weren't here, in Magic Al And The Mind Factory, but let's take a look anyway.

First, you apply a generous amount of brown to a child's face. "Hurr, I'm Karl Malone," Jimmy Kimmel would have said at the time.

Then you turn off all the lights, and that's it. The end. That's the video they sold as the cure to your child's teraphobia. We are told monsters are real. The man creating them has vowed revenge on us and remains at large. The main character has been turned into a wolf and released into the shadows. Your bedroom now smells like Skeletor's balls, and the only person sleeping well is Rosie O'Donnell's son. Good night.

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