Series / Eerie, Indiana

Home sweet home.

Eerie, Indiana was a nineteen-episode supernatural series that aired on NBC from 1991-92 (in prime time). It ran again on Fox Kids Saturday mornings from 1997-98 as part of their "No Yell Motel" block, which included a lot of scary kids' shows (Goosebumps (1995), reruns of the Australian kids' show Round the Twist, and Steven Spielberg's first animated project from DreamWorks Studios, Toonsylvania). The series could be described as "Twin Peaks meets The Twilight Zone told from the POV of a snarky 13-year-old version of Fox Mulder".

Marshall Teller, a transplant from New Jersey whose family has recently moved to the desolate town of Eerie, and Simon Holmes, an Eerie native, investigate the weirdness that inhabited the titular town. It would be easier for them if the town's residents didn't refuse to see themselves as anything but normal. Some of the more bizarre confrontations include such urban legends like Bigfoot and a still living Elvis Presley.

In 1997, following the series' rebirth on Fox Kids, Eerie was continued as a short-lived series of books that continued the story, allegedly just one year after the end of the original series. The books were met with mixed reviews and after just seventeen entries, the series was cancelled in 1998. Fox Kids also produced a reboot series Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension that aired for one season in 1998.

As of March 2023, the series is free to watch on YouTube, and one-disc collection on DVD is available through Netflix's DVD arm.

Compare Round the Twist, an Australian show with a similar premise, only with more ghosts, gross-out humor, and which is more light-hearted.

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This show provides examples of:

• Actor Allusion:
  • Simon's younger brother's full name is Harley Schwarzenegger Holmes. Christian and Joseph Cousins, who played Harley, previously played Dominic Palmieri in the Arnold Schwarzenegger film Kindergarten Cop.
  • In "Reality Takes a Holiday", the Adam Westing version of Mary-Margret Humes tells Marshall that she cried for days when she found out that her character was being killed off in Jake and the Fatman. The real Humes appeared in two episodes of the series: "I Ain't Got Nobody" and "My Boy Bill".
• Adam Westing: In "Reality Takes a Holiday", Justin Shenkarow, Mary-Margaret Humes, Francis Guinan, Julie Condra and Joe Dante each play an exaggerated (if not outright deranged) version of their real life selves.
• Adults Are Useless: Although a lot of the local kids are oblivious and useless too. And sometimes, the adults are in on the plot...
• Aliens in Cardiff: All of the insanity, some of which is nearly world-destroying, happens in a tiny town in suburban Indiana. Two episodes even deal with actual aliens.
• Alliterative Name: Melanie Monroe in "Heart on a Chain".
• Alternate Universe:
  • In "Reality Takes a Holiday", Marshall is transported to an alternate universe in which Eerie, Indiana is a TV show and he is an actor named Omri Katz who plays Marshall Teller.
  • Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension takes place in a different universe from the first series, as the title suggests. It's implied that this dimension was actually fairly normal until a traveler from the first universe introduced all sorts of kooky shit. Also, the main character's name is Mitchell Taylor instead of Marshall Teller.
• American Gothic Couple: In "Mr. Chaney", the parents of the 1979 Harvest King are dressed identically to the couple.
• Anti-Climax: Given the premise of "Reality Takes a Holiday", where Marshall gets a screenplay in the mail and his world devolves into a behind-the-scenes look at the actual show: Marshall re-writes the end of the episode to something more mundane and has to wait on set while the new pages are slowly photocopied by the writer's assistant, then delivered to the cast. When Dash tries to interfere, Marshall complains to the director, who calmly orders Dash to "clear Omri's eye-line". Dash is beaten by the rules of his own game and the script unfolds. Everybody goes to the movies. The End.
• Art Initiates Life: In "Who's Who", Sara Bob had this power due to an Eerie brand pencil. She first demonstrates this by drawing a picture of Marshall's missing bike (for a "lost" poster), but it instead creates a new bike. To escape her terrible home life, she draws Marshall's mother Marilyn as her own long lost mom and then draws a picture of herself with her mother, teleporting to her.
• Bank Toaster: In "The Hole in the Head Gang", one is stolen by the ghost of Grungy Bill in his first "successful" robbery of the Eerie Bank so his soul could finally rest in peace.
• Bazaar of the Bizarre: Mr. Radford's World O' Stuff.
• Be Careful What You Say: Literally. In "The Broken Record", Tod's father Phil claims that a Pitbull Surfers record of has been causing his son to act rebellious due to subliminal messages. When he plays it backwards, he does find out that the record has messages: it's his own voice and abusive words towards Tod.
• The Bermuda Triangle: In "The Retainer", Marshall and Simon discover that Eerie's town borders create the exact same geometric shape as the Bermuda Triangle.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: One episode had some kind of formula that eventually made ordinary ants grow to enormous size.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti:
  • In "Foreverware", it is revealed that a Bigfoot apparently finds human cuisine palatable enough to eat out of the Teller family's trash.
  • In "Marshall's Theory of Believability", Professor Zircon's assistant Claude meets a female one when he's planting the fake "space thing." It is wearing a large pink bow on its head.
• Bigger on the Inside: In "The Loyal Order of Corn", Ned's secret compartment in the Loyal Order of Corn Lodge is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
• Bottle Episode: "Scariest Home Videos" takes place entirely at Marshall's house except for a scene in a car.
• Braces of Orthodontic Overkill: In "The Retainer", Marshall's friend Steve Konkalewski is required to wear one for a while. It allows him to read the minds of dogs, who are revealed to be plotting the eventual overthrow of the human race.
• Brotherhood of Funny Hats: In "The Loyal Order of Corn", Edgar joins the Loyal Order of Corn Lodge, Eerie's version of the Loyal Order of Moose. The members wear hats modeled after corn stalks and new members such as Edgar are referred to as "seedlings." The kernel Mr. Radford is the nominal leader of the Order but its true leader is its long serving bartender Ned, who turns out to be an alien explorer stranded on Earth. He founded the Lodge in order to unknowingly enlist the humans' help in building a tachyon portal so that he could return to his own planet.
• Bystander Syndrome: The town's attitude toward Eerie's otherness. Lampshaded in "Mr. Chaney" by The Mayor himself:
  "This town — heck, this whole country — has a long... 'tradition'... of looking the other way: the Warren Commission, Watergate, Iran-Contra, the October surprise, Eerie's 'Harvest King'. The people don't want to know about this stuff. Because if they knew about it, they might have to do something about it."
• Call-Back: In "Zombies in P.J.'s", Mr. Radford seems to come across some familiar items.
• Character Narrator: The series is narrated by Marshall.
• Cheerful Child: Simon is almost always extremely happy and upbeat.
• City of Adventure: Eerie, home of the strange and bizarre.
• Clock Roaches: In "The Lost Hour", Marshall sets his clock back an hour despite the town's practice of ignoring daylight saving's time (Indiana did not observe it in 1991), and as a result has to face off against malevolent, trans-dimensional trashmen whose job it is to tear apart reality (in very close similarity to Stephen King's The Langoliers, published one year previously).
• The Computer Is Your Friend: In "The ATM with the Heart of Gold", Simon befriends the inexplicably artificially intelligent automatic Teller machine "Mr. Wilson", who returns his friendship by offering to provide him with "slush fund" money... composed of other people's savings accounts.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In "The Hole in the Head Gang", there is a 50% sale on Foreverware at the World O' Stuff. Later, Winifred Swanson, one of the women who used Foreverware in the episode of the same name, is seen at the bank with her little girl. She tells her daughter that they will eventually get a Foreverware container large enough for her piggy bank.
  • In "Reality Takes a Holiday", Radford can be heard singing "Hail To Thee, O Ears of Splender", the song of the Loyal Order of Corn from the episode of the same name.
  • In "Heart on a Chain", some of the students in Marshall's class are seen wearing the huge horn-rimmed glasses from "Just Say No Fun". They are also the ones who don't engage in or react to any disruptive behavior.
• Cool Gate: In "The Loyal Order of Corn", Ned came to Earth through a tachyon portal, arriving in Siberia in 1908. The portal broke down immediately afterwards. He founded the Loyal Order of Corn and encouraged the development of radio and television so that human technology would be advanced enough to build another tachyon portal so that he could return home. While investigating the portal, Marshall and Dash X accidentally send Simon to an ice planet.
• Crazy Homeless People: In "No Brain, No Pain", the crazy homeless man Chappie is rumored to an axe murderer called the Mad Whacker or Eerie's last living liberal. Marshall and Simon discover that he is in fact Charles Furnell, the smartest man on Earth. He invented the Brainalyzer in 1978 so that the knowledge and intelligence of brilliant people could be preserved for future generations. However, his wife Eunice Danforth stole it in order to fix the 1980 presidential election. To ensure that this could never happen again, Charles destroyed the Brainalyzer, scrambled his brainwaves and transferred his mind onto an 8-track tape of the Knack song "My Sharona". Even in his brain scrambled state, however, he retained enough knowledge to build another Brainalyzer.
• Creative Closing Credits: Most closing credits do have an aspect of the episode, but a notable one is at the end of "Who's Who" about a family who all have the middle name "Bob", even the daughter Sara Bob. The credits have everyone's middle name as "Bob".
• Crossover: Charles Furnell from "No Brain, No Pain" later appeared in the The Secret World of Alex Mack episode "BMX".
• Deadpan Snarker: Marshall is always ready with a sarcastic remark about the paranormal events that occur in Eerie or life in general.
• Dream Weaver: In "The Dead Letter", Tripp McConnell enters Marshall's dream in order to convince him to deliver his letter to Mary B. Carter.
• Dutch Angle:
  • In "The Dead Letter", multiple Dutch angles are used during Marshall's Dream Sequence.
  • In "Marshall's Theory of Believability", several are used in the scene in which Professor Zirchon tries to sell the "space thing" to Eerie.
  • In "Zombies in P.J.s", there is one when Marshall discovers most of the townspeople sleepwalking to the World O' Stuff to go on a shopping spree.
• Electronic Speech Impediment: In "The ATM with the Heart of Gold", the artificially intelligent ATM Mr. Wilson displays one.
• Elvis Lives: ...on Marshall's paper route.
• Embarrassing Middle Name In "Who's Who", Sara Bob is embarrassed by her name. Of course, this was Family Theme Naming as her brothers are Lou Bob, Moe Bob, and Bob Bob while her father is named Dad Bob. She even tries to change her name to Sara Sue.
• E.T. Gave Us Wi-Fi: In "The Loyal Order of Corn", the alien Ned encouraged the development of radio and television.
• Every Episode Ending: Marshall and Simon store an item in the secret evidence locker in Marshall's attic.
• Everything Fades: In "The Losers", the United States federal government has a black budget organization dedicated to "appropriating" the items people forget are sitting around their houses, forcing them to buy new things...and thus keeping the bloated American economy going strong. Easily one of the most believable concepts the show ever aired.
• Evil Laugh:
  • In "Foreverware", Betty Wilson, the evil neighborhood woman who has been retaining her youth forever, does a rather over the top one (complete with lightning strikes) when Marshall and Simon escape from her house.
  • In "Reality Takes a Holiday", Dash X does one after he and the Eerie, Indiana writer José Schaefer tell Marshall that he is going to be killed off.
• The Evils of Free Will: In "Just Say No Fun", Nurse Nancy has been traveling to schools all over the United States brainwashing children under the guise of an eye test. Her goal is to improve children's test scores and make them conform by eliminating their need for fun.
• Face on a Milk Carton: In "The Lost Hour", the Tellers see Janet Donner's face on a milk carton and realize that she has missing for exactly a year, since the last time that the clocks went back an hour. Marshall later enters a parallel dimension as a result of setting his watch back an hour even though Eerie does not observe daylight savings time. While there, he discovers that he can communicate with Simon in the regular Eerie through the face on the milk carton.
• Family Theme Naming: In "Who's Who", everyone's middle name in a family is Bob. Sara Bob, her brothers Lou Bob, Moe Bob, and Bob Bob, as well as their father, Dad Bob.
• Fearsome Critters of American Folklore: One episode of the re-tool revolved around a jackalope.
• First Kiss: In the first scene of "Heart on a Chain", Marshall has his first kiss with Melanie in the Eerie graveyard. Marshall then explains How We Got Here for the rest of the episode.
• Fictional Holiday: In "Tornado Days", Eerie celebrates the 87th annual Tornado Day in order to appease Old Bob, the tornado that hits the town on the same day every year. Syndi is chosen as Miss Tornado Day and wears a themed costume. However, on this occasion, Old Bob is not appeased as it interprets Marshall and Simon's refusal to attend the celebration as an insult.
• Five-Finger Fillet: In "Heart on a Chain", Devon does this in the classroom. When Marshall tells him to slow down, Devon replies, "Live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse." After Devon's heart is transplanted into her body, Melanie does the five finger fillet herself in the World O' Stuff and uses the same phrase.
• Former Child Star: Lampshaded in "Reality Takes a Holiday". Marshall, having been transported behind the scenes of Eerie, Indiana, runs off in the middle of make-up to prevent himself from killed off. When his on-screen sister Julie Condra wonders where he is going, the make-up artist says, "Where's any red-blooded teen star go when they get cancelled? On a crime spree."
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Thanks to a mid-season Retool: Marshall is Mulder Melancholic (minus the depression), Simon is a chipper Sanguine, Radford is as Supine as they get, and Dash is downright Choleric. Made obvious by the end of "Mr. Chaney".
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: In "Scariest Home Videos", a television remote control is revealed to contain the power to send people into the programs being televised at least, until the batteries run out.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: In "No Brain, No Pain", Marshall accidentally places Charles Furnell's mind (which had been stored on an 8-track tape of the Knack song "My Sharona") into Simon's body using the Brainalyzer. He is later able to reunite Charles' body and mind, leaving Simon's body vacant as his mind had been transferred to the tape. When Charles' ex-wife Eunice Danforth tries to steal the Brainalyzer, it is accidentally activated. She and Marshall switch bodies while Charles' mind returns to Simon's body and Simon's mind is transferred into Charles' body. Everyone is eventually restored to their rightful body.
• Free-Range Children:
  • Poor Simon is completely ignored by his parents, who constantly fight with each other. The Tellers become his surrogate family.
  • Likewise, Sara Bob's family in "Who's Who". Her dad is physically present but Sara Bob has to care for him as well as her hellion brothers.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Whenever there's text big enough to read that goes by too fast, you can bet there's a joke in it. A really fun example is in "Reality Takes a Holiday", when Marshall reads the shooting script for the scene he just walked out on. In the direction, it says Simon sits there, looking "orphanish".
• Funny Background Event:
  • In the final scene of "Heart on a Chain", The Grim Reaper is seen walking through the Eerie graveyard as Marshall, Simon and Melanie leave.
  • In "The Dead Letter", the headline of the November 9, 1929 edition of the Eerie Examiner is "Hoover to Nation: Don't Worry, Be Happy." This was less than three weeks after the Wall Street Crash.
• Fun with Acronyms: In "The Retainer", the gang goes to the dog pound... owned by the Canine Arrest Team.
• Genius Loci: In "Tornado Days", the tornado chasing NOAA meteorologist Howard Raymer has determined that the tornado Old Bob is alive, sentient, malevolent and has a very big ego. It sees Marshall and Simon refusing to attend the Tornado Day festivities as a sign of disrespect and brings the full force of its wrath down on Eerie in an attempt to kill them.
• Halloween Episode: In "Scariest Home Videos", Simon's younger brother Harley becomes trapped in the television on Halloween.
• Happily Married: Marshall's parents Edgar and Marilyn.
• Heel–Face Brainwashing: In "Just Say No Fun", Marshall and Simon turn the tables on Nurse Nancy by brainwashing her so that she laughs uncontrollably and endlessly when she hears the phrase "Womp-bomp-a-do-domp."
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Dash is a confused guy. His last two episodes confuse things even further.
• Hereditary Twinhood: Invoked in the "Foreverware" episode. The plot involves a family whose members have been sleeping in giant tupperware boxes to stunt their aging for three decades. The episode ends with the family accelerating the "spoiling" process instead slowing/stopping it, aging the twin sons thirty years overnight. When found doing work outside their house by someone unaware of the family secret, they pull a Pretending to Be One's Own Relative and claim that twins run in the family.
• Highly-Conspicuous Uniform: The collector for the Bureau of Lost—whose job depends on getting in and out of public and private places unnoticed—wears a bright orange outfit and cap.
• Holiday Episode: "The Lost Hour" focuses on Daylight Savings. Marshall sets his watch forward an hour despite town rules, and things get weird.
• Honking Arriving Car: Part of a punchline at the end of the episode "The Broken Record." Syndi spends much of the episode doing a ride-along project with Eerie policemen. Her parents wish she'd have a safer assignment, and in the last scene they are relieved when she tells them that she asked her teacher for a new project assignment... only for a truck horn to blare outside, cuing Syndi and her parents to her new ride-along project following the Eerie fire department in their firetruck.
• Human Aliens: In "The Loyal Order of Corn", Ned belongs to an alien species who, while very long lived, are identical to humans except for the presence of "+" and "-" signs on their hands, just like Dash X's. Ned admits that he does not know the meaning of the signs, which long predate his civilization.
• Human Popsicle: In "Foreverware", Betty Wilson's late husband created the most astoundingly effective tupperware in the history of mankind. She has been using Foreverware to keep both herself and her twin sons Bert and Ernie young since 1964.
• Human Sacrifice:
  • In "Tornado Days", the fake Mr. Radford and Sgt. Knight consider sacrificing Syndi, an innocent, chaste, unsuspecting maiden, to Old Bob in order to appease it.
  • In "Mr. Chaney", Eerie chooses a Harvest King every 13 years to ensure good luck and low taxes. The tradition dates back to 1914. Marshall has the dubious distinction of being chosen as the seventh Harvest King in 1992. It turns out that the previous six Harvest Kings were sacrificed to the werewolf Mr. Chaney. The town authorities claimed that all of them moved to Spain. Dash X prevents Marshall from being eaten by hitting the werewolf over the head with a log. Mr. Radford later cures Mr. Chaney of his lycanthropy by shooting him in the foot with a silver bullet.
• Hurricane of Euphemisms: In "Reality Takes a Holiday", Marshall learns from Dash X and the Eerie, Indiana writer José Schaefer that they intend to kill him off. When he asks what they mean when they say dead, he receives the following explanation:
  José Schaefer: I mean offed.
  Dash X: Snuffed.
  José Schaefer: Kicked the bucket.
  Dash X: Pushing up daisies.
  José Schaefer: Bought the farm.
  Dash X: Did I mention rigor mortis?
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: Seriously, "Eerie", Indiana? No wonder it's an Eldritch Location.
• Implausible Hair Color: Dash X is a teenager with grey hair.
• Imposter Forgot One Detail: In "No Brain, No Pain", after accidentally switching bodies with him, Eunice Danforth pretends to be Marshall and promises to give Dash X $1,000 if he stuns her old body with Marshall's mind inside of it. Dash is willing to go along with this plan until he realizes that the real Marshall doesn't have $1,000.
• Jerkass: Dash X, frequently implied to have a Hidden Heart of Gold. Until he tries to kill Marshall and take over the show in "Reality Takes a Holiday".
• Just One Second Out of Sync: In "The Lost Hour", Marshall sets his watch back an hour in spite of the fact that Eerie does not observe daylight savings time and becomes trapped in another dimension one hour ahead of everyone else in Eerie. The only other people in town are a girl named Janet Donner (who has been similarly trapped for a year), a strange milkman who is implied to be Marshall from the future and a dangerous group of garbagemen.
• Kid Hero: Marshall.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Happens to Sara Bob's family by her when she leaves in "Who's Who". Instead of her being treated like a family servant, she creates a muscular male caretaker who forces them to clean up the house before allowing them to eat. This results in a Mass "Oh, Crap!" for the family.
• Latex Perfection: Marshall uses a perfect disguise kit, pretending to be an IRS agent to defeat The Donald in "Zombies In P.J.s."
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The opening credit voice-over has the line, "A place so wholesome, so squeaky clean, it could only be found on TV..." However, this might merely be Marshall Telling some future reader of his journals (the viewer) that the place seemed like its veneer was straight out of a sitcom; given the show's nature, both are probably the case.
• Line-of-Sight Name: Dash X gets his name from the plus and minus signs on his gloves read from right to left.
• Luvvies: In "Reality Takes a Holiday", the Adam Westing version of Francis Guinan is very much a luvvie. He speaks in an affected Mid-Atlantic accent and continually talks about his experiences on the stage working with the likes of John Malkovich and Dustin Hoffman.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: "Heart on a Chain" is the only episode in the series that never answers its mystery. A shy, terminally ill girl named Melanie Monroe has a crush on a devil-may-care friend of Marshall's named Devon Wilde, who dies in a freak accident. A heart transplant from his body saves her. Melanie then begins acting increasingly bizarre (with a lot less self-control). It is left ambiguous whether Devon's personality has taken over hers (as Marshall believes), or whether guilt has made her not herself.
• Milkman Conspiracy: Milkmen play a subtle but significant role in the series, often appearing in the background or playing an (apparently) unwitting role in the events.
  • In "The Losers", Simon loses sight with the trunk in which Marshall is attempting to Trojan Horse his way into the compound, because his view is obstructed by a milk truck.
  • In "The Broken Record", Marshall and Simon's friend Tod McNulty tries to escape town to see the Pitbull Surfers by commandeering a milk truck.
  • Bertram and Ernest appear in a number of different roles after Marshall liberates them in "Foreverware", including as milkmen.
  • Likewise, the "serial impersonator" originally posing as Mr Radford appears later impersonating a milkman.
  • In "Heart on a Chain", Devon Wilde collides with a milk truck while skateboarding, as the milkman, among others, attends the scene of the accident. Devon is killed and his heart is transplanted into Melanie Monroe.
  • In "The Dead Letter", Tripp McConnell was hit by a milk truck and killed on November 9, 1929.
  • While this could just be a motif (the show is about suburban weirdness, after all), in "The Lost Hour", Marshall is rescued from the lost hour by a milkman, who implies that he is, in fact, future Marshall.
• Mind-Control Device: In "The Loyal Order of Corn", the hats worn by the members of the titular lodge are in fact mind control devices invented by Ned so that the wearers can help him build a tachyon portal so that he can return to his own planet.
• My Nayme Is: Marshall has disdain for his older sister for spelling her name "S-Y-N-D-I." In "Foreverware", he says that no one who spells their name that way should be allowed to drive a car.
• Never Had Toys: One episode had a toy factory owner whose Fantasy-Forbidding Father made him run the family toy business, but never allowed his son to actually play with any of them.
• No Fourth Wall: In "Reality Takes a Holiday", Marshall pulls an Eerie, Indiana television script out of his mailbox, and then suddenly finds himself behind the scenes of the show.
• No Immortal Inertia: In "Foreverware", Betty Wilson has been using oversized Tupperware to keep herself and her twin sons Bert and Ernie looking that same way they did back in 1964 (which she likes but her sons hate because being in seventh grade for all those years is a living hell). When the twins free themselves and their mom from the tupperware, they age 30 years overnight.
• Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here: Apart from Marshall and Simon, most Eerie residents ignore or fail to notice the "weirdness" all around them, and they continually believe the town to be the most "normal" and unexciting place on Earth.
• The Nudifier: In "Who's Who", Sara Bob uses her ability to manipulate reality using her art to make her younger brother Bob Bob's clothes disappear after he is rude to her.
• Number of the Beast:
  • Eerie's official population is 16,661 people. Like that comma actually does anything! 16,661 is also a prime number, and a palindrome— the smallest of what are known as Beastly Primes.
  • A blink-and-you'll-miss-it example in "The ATM with the Heart of Gold": when Simon types in his name as a PIN on the deranged ATM, the last three letters translate as 666 on the keypad.
• Only Sane Man: Marshall, who seems to be the only person in town who knows Elvis Presley when he sees him.
• Opening Narration: Marshall on his paper route exposits how Eerie is "the center of weirdness for the entire planet."
• Parent-Induced Extended Childhood: In the episode "Foreverware", identical twins Bertram and Ernest have been prevented from aging past the age of twelve for the last thirty years, thanks to being forced to sleep in containers of the eponymous time-freezing substance every night by their controlling mother. Worse still, said mother also sleeps in a Foreverware container. The episode ends with Marshall opening the twins' container, allowing them to do the same to their mother; overnight, all three of them age by thirty years, allowing Bert and Ernie to take on adult lives at long last.
• Population: X, and Counting: The town limits sign proudly mentions that the town's population is 16,661.
• The Place: The series takes place in the town of Eerie, Indiana.
• Pop Culture Symbology: In the episode "The Broken Record", an abusive father blames his son's decision to become a punk on Satanic Panic and this trope, with one record in specific (the one that provides the title, which was found by the kid shortly before changing attitudes) being the symbol of his hatred. He plays it backwards at the climax of the episode in front of many fellow parents and even the sheriff, and it do has a secret message in it, all right: a recording of his abusive tirades to his son.
• Premiseville: Eerie, Indiana, where the happenings are of an unusual nature.
• The Quisling: Dash X has a tendency to collaborate for the right price, though he never works out as he would like:
  • In "No Brain, No Pain", he assists Eunice Danforth capture her husband Charles Furnell and thereby gain access to the Brainalyzer. She gives Dash $1,000 to look the other way while she fries Charles, Marshall and Simon's brains. However, he has a change of heart when he remembers what Marshall asked him earlier: how would he feel if he was the one who needed help?
  • In "Zombies in P.J.s", Dash teams up with the Donald in his Subliminal Seduction of the Eerie townspeople in exchange for a piece of the pie. However, he switches sides and helps Marshall and Simon defeat the Donald when he discovers that he was never going to get any money.
• Read the Fine Print: In "Zombies in P.J.s", the fine print (which needs an actual microscope to read) of the contracts signed by the sleepwalking World O' Stuff shoppers states that the Donald will gain the rights over their souls unless they pay back all of the money on credit, which is impossible as they are forced to go on a shopping spree every night due to Subliminal Seduction.
• Real After All:
  • In "Marshall's Theory of Believability", Professor Nigel Zirchon has his assistant Claude plant a fake "space thing" in Eerie in order to fool the town's government into spending a fortune to buy it from him. However, it turns out that Claude never had the opportunity to plant the fake as he was frightened by a female Bigfoot. The "space thing" that the Tellers, Simon, and Professor Zirchon found was genuine. This is demonstrated when it lights up, levitates and returns to space. Simon manages to get a blurry photo of it before it disappears.
  • In "The Hole in the Head Gang", Dash X convinces Marshall and Simon that Hitchcock Mill is haunted by the ghost of the bank robber Grungy Bill using a "flying" chair attached to a wire and pulley, projecting his voice through a pipe to give it an echo effect and wearing a monster mask. When Marshall and Simon return to investigate further, they meet Dash and discover the truth. Dash then finds an old gun under the floorboards and accidentally releases Grungy Bill's ghost, which had been trapped in the gun for over 100 years.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: Applied In-Universe in "Marshall's Theory of Believability" when Claude asks, right before it starts to float and eventually flies off into space, where did Marshall and Simon found the "space thing" because the faked "space thing" he made "had more lights on it".
• Reality Warper: In "Who's Who", Sara Bob gains the ability to manipulate reality through her artwork when she begins to sign her sketches with an Eerie No. 2 pencil. The effects can be reversed by ripping up the relevant sketch.
• Real-World Episode: The final episode, "Reality Takes a Holiday", has this as its plot. Marshall is sent a script of the episode, and suddenly his home turns into the set of the TV show, with all the actors and actresses who play Marshall's family and friends, and everyone calling Marshall by his actor's name (Omri Katz). Dash X (who is aware that he's just a fictional villain) tries to have Marshall killed by writing his death into the script, but Marshall prevents it in the end by secretly writing his death out at the last second. After he yells "Action!" his life returns to normal.
• Retraux: In "Scariest Home Videos", the Deliberately Monochrome film Bloody Revenge of the Mummy's Curse emulates the style of the Universal Horror films, of which it is an Affectionate Parody.
• Rummage Sale Reject: Janet in "The Lost Hour" dresses this way - her outfit includes mismatched earrings, bright pink sneakers, and what looks to be a women's suit-jacket accessorized with dozens of pins and brooches. Justified because she's been living in the lost hour for a year with no parental supervision and has literally been rummaging through World O' Stuff for clothes all that time.
• Serial Spouse: In "The Dead Letter", Mary B. Carter tells the ghost of her one true love Tripp McConnell that she was married six times but none of them worked out as they weren't him.
• Short Runner: The series lasted 19 episodes.
• Shout-Out:
  • Several episodes reference movies, music and television shows, including Twin Peaks.
  • In "Foreverware", Betty Wilson's twin sons are named Bertram and Ernest, aka Bert and Ernie.
  • In "The Retainer", the orthodontist who fits Steve Konkalewski with the retainer that allows him to hear dogs' thoughts is named Dr. Eukanuba after the dog food brand.
  • In "The Losers", the items in the Bureau of Lost's possession include Charles Foster Kane's sled Rosebud from Citizen Kane and one of the pods from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).
  • In "Scariest Home Videos", Marshall's pet lizards are named Godzilla and Mothra.
  • In "Heart on a Chain", there's a moment when the camera pans past a spider's web with a fly caught in it. And in the background you can just make out a tiny voice calling for help...
  • Also in "Heart on a Chain", Marshall shows Melanie a radio that can only pick up broadcasts from the 1930s. This is a reference to The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "Static".
  • In "Tornado Days", Simon paints "Hasta la vista, Big Bob" on Howard Raymer's tornado rider in order to taunt Old Bob.
  • In "Mr. Chaney", Radford, Chaney and Chisel can't wait to get home and catch The Howling on cable. The Howling's director, Joe Dante, served as creative consultant for Eerie, Indiana and directed five episodes. He also appeared As Himself in the Series Finale "Reality Takes a Holiday".
  • In "No Brain, No Pain", the leather clad, gun-toting Eunice Danforth says, "I'll be back" after Marshall and Simon stop her from attacking the homeless man Chappie, who turns out to be her husband Charles Furnell. Dash X comments that he didn't know that there was a "Mrs. Terminator" and later refers to her as "Grandma Schwarzenegger."
• Show Within a Show: In "Scariest Home Videos", Simon's younger brother Harley watches Bloody Revenge of the Mummy's Curse.
• Shrunk in the Wash: The episode The Incredible Shrinking Stanley, in which Stanley gets splashed with special soap from the Eerie laundromat and starts shrinking.
• Soul Fragment: In "Heart on a Chain", when Devon forgot to Look Both Ways, he died and Melanie got his heart for the transplant she needed. She then proceeded to act like him, skateboarding recklessly and carving graffiti on the desks.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: In "The Retainer", Steve Konkalewski's retainer gives him the ability to talk to dogs.
• Spin-Off: Eerie Indiana: The Other Dimension which as the title implies takes place in another dimension of the series. By the time they made this the show, it was seven years after the original was canceled so they of course had to recast the characters. The gist of the show was that two new characters in this universe, Mitchell and Stanley, continue documenting the weirdness of their city after an encounter with E.I.'s original characters, Marshall and Simon via a TV set (they reused footage of the old show to make this happen). It lasted fifteen episodes.
• Spoiled Brat: In "Reality Takes a Holiday", the Adam Westing version of Justin Shenkarow is a rude, bratty child actor who touches his co-star Julie Condra inappropriately, tries to get his history teacher fired when she gives him a D and verbally abuses his mother when she doesn't sell stocks as he told her to do.
• Squirrels in My Pants: In "Scariest Home Videos", Marshall and Simon plan to go monster hunting on Halloween, until Marshall's dad's car breaks down. Because Marshall's mom was babysitting Simon’s younger brother, Harley, she now needs to go pick up Marshall’s dad, leaving Simon and Marshall to babysit Harley. Marshall asks if his older sister could do it, but his mom explains that she’s studying upstairs for a major test. Trying to make the best of the situation, Marshall plans to record Harley doing something incredibly stupid and send it to a show to make lots of money. Marshall plans to have Harley “pretend” to eat one of his pet lizards, only to have Simon scare Harley, causing him to fling the lizard into the couch. Frustrated, Marshall orders Simon to keep recording while he looks for the lizard. As he is bent over and the camera rolling, Harley walks over to the lizard cage and retrieved the other lizard. He then walks over to Marshal, who is still bent over looking for the lizard. Harley pushes Marshall's shirt up, opens his pants, and puts the lizard inside. Immediately realizing the lizard is in his pants, Marshall sits up to make sure it’s really in there. When he’s certain it is, he jumps up and begins running around the living with his hands in his pants trying to find the lizard. As he is doing so, Harley and Simon’ hows are both firing of laughter, are still recording. Marshall then runs upstairs and runs back and forth down the hallway, exposing is yellow polka dotted boxers. He then walks downstairs holding the lizard. He then tells Simon and Harley that the lizard made it all the way down to his sock.
• Step Servant: In the episode "Who's Who", Sarah Bob was a virtual slave who had to cook and clean and mend the clothes of her brothers and father despite being about 12 years old.
• Stock Unsolved Mysteries:
  • In "The Lost Hour", Janet Donner tells Marshall that there was a nice man named Mr. Hoffa in the parallel dimension for a while but that he eventually left.
  • In "Tornado Days", Howard Raymer believes that the tornado Old Bob is responsible for the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. Marshall recalls that a Lockheed airliner was found in Deadwood Park and suspects that it may be her plane. Simon wonders whether the old lady whom they always see jogging around town is secretly Earhart.
• Sticky Fingers: In both "Mr. Chaney" and "Zombies in P.J.s", Dash X can be seen at the World O' Stuff shoplifting a trench coat's worth.
• Stock Footage: In "Tornado Days", footage of numerous tornadoes is used to represent Old Bob devastating Eerie.
• Stupid Crooks: "The Hole in the Head Gang" focuses on the ghost of Grungy Bill, "The Worst Bank Robber East of the Mississippi" ("worst" as in "no good, incompetent"). According to Eerie legend, Bill was arrested twelve times (all for failed attempts to rob the Eerie Bank). When robbing the bank for the 13th time, he forgot to bring his gun, and ended up getting killed by the sheriff's posse at the Eerie Mill, where, rumor has it, Grungy Bill's ghost can be spotted trying to look for his gun. The rumor proves to be true when Marshall and Simon uncover Grungy Bill's gun and his ghost returns to attempt to rob the Eerie Bank for a 14th time. This time, he's able to get away with stealing one of the complimentary toasters the bank was giving away to anyone who opens a new bank account. Grungy Bill determines this to be a successful bank robbery and can finally rest in peace.
• Stylistic Suck: In "No Brain, No Pain", Syndi watches a Soap Opera called Todd and Donna which is badly written, dreadfully shot and features lots of Bad "Bad Acting".
• Subliminal Seduction:
  • In "The ATM with a Heart of Gold", Simon punching his name in on Mr. Wilson's Dial pad becomes 7-4-6-6-6 which is supposed to be the number of the beast after 74.
  • Subverted in "The Broken Record" when it's revealed that the backwards messages on Tod's favorite rock record are his father Phil's verbal abuse, which is what drove him to be a punk.
  • In "Zombies in P.J.s", the Donald, who is heavily implied to be a demon, uses subliminal advertising in television commercials to induce the Eerie townspeople into buying everything at the World O' Stuff while they are sleepwalking. In this state, the Donald has them sign contracts for their souls.
• Supernatural Hotspot Town: The small town of Eerie, Indiana is always attracting peculiar inhabitants and strange mysteries. The smart young protagonist generally investigates and solves said mysteries, but the series finale ventures into meta-terrority with a unique revelation.
• Super-Sargasso Sea: In "The Losers", Marshall and Simon discover that the Land Of Lost Objects is located in the center of the Earth and run by the US government. Notably, all those "lost" objects are actually stolen objects, to promote consumerism.
• Tagalong Kid: Simon is very much the tagalong kid to Marshall, who is about four years older than him, during their paranormal investigations. In "The Dead Letter", this is lampshaded during Marshall's dream when Simon says, "I'm tired of being second banana on this show." A confused Marshall asks himself, "What show?"
• Take That!:
  • Several per episode. These include an evil businessman who calls himself "The Donald" in "Zombies in P.J.s".
  • In "Just Say No Fun", Nurse Nancy, who brainwashes children to eliminate their need for fun, is a reference to the former First Lady Nancy Reagan.
  • In "The Broken Record", Simon is very taken with the Carpenters song "We've Only Just Begun". Marshall says, "Simon, we have a lot to talk about." He tries to convince Simon how uncool it is but to no avail.
  • In "No Brain, No Pain", it is revealed that Ronald Reagan was given the brain of MacGyver (quadrupling his IQ) so the Republicans could win that election. The same episode had Dash threaten to destroy Simon's brain by saying he'd make him "Vice-Presidential."
• Tears from a Stone: In the final scene of "Heart on a Chain", Melanie places the locket that Devon gave her on the statue of an angel near his grave. After she and Marshall leave, the stone angel sheds a single tear.
• Television Portal: In "Scariest Home Videos", Simon's younger brother Harley bites the remote control while watching Bloody Revenge of the Mummy's Curse. As Marshall and Simon had hooked a video camera up to the television, Harley switches place with the film's star Sir Boris von Orloff. Harley becomes trapped in the film while Sir Boris enters the real world.
• Theme Naming:
  • Marshall Teller and Simon Holmes.
  • In "Foreverware", Betty Wilson's twin sons are named Bert and Ernie.
  • Also in "Foreverware", the women who use Foreverware are Betty Wilson, Imogene Crocker, Beatrice Pillsbury, Winifred Swanson and Phyllis Stouffer. The first two are named after the food advertising mascot Betty Cocker while the others all take their names from food companies.
• Together in Death: In "The Dead Letter", Mary is reunited with the ghost of Tripp McConnell 62 years after his death. The next morning, she dies of a heart failure and happily joins Tripp in the afterlife.
• Trumplica: The evil-businessman villain in "Zombies in P.J.s" is named after Trump, though doesn't really look like him.
• Tuckerization:
  • In "The Retainer", a town in the vicinity of Eerie is named Schaefer, a reference to the series' co-creator Karl Schaefer.
  • In "Scariest Home Videos", the horror film actor Sir Boris von Orloff, the star of Bloody Revenge of the Mummy's Curse, is named after Boris Karloff, who played the title character in The Mummy (1932).
  • In "Just Say No Fun", the name of Marshall's school is given as B.F. Skinner Junior High School.
  • In "The Broken Record", the Pitbull Surfers are named after the Butthole Surfers.
  • Also in "The Broken Record", Syndi's full name is given as Syndi Marie Priscilla Teller. This is a reference to Elvis Presley's ex-wife Priscilla and their daughter Lisa Marie.
  • In "The Hole in the Head Gang", the ghost of Grungy Bill has been trapped in Hitchcock Mill for over 100 years.
  • In "Mr. Chaney", the titular werewolf is named after Lon Chaney Jr. who played the Wolf Man Larry Talbot in the Universal Horror films The Wolf Man (1941), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Dash X even refers to "those old Wolf Man flicks" after he, Marshall and Simon capture Mr. Chaney in werewolf form.
  • In "Reality Takes a Holiday", the Eerie, Indiana writer José Schaefer decided to kill off Marshall on Dash X's urging. He is named after the series' creators José Rivera and Karl Schaefer.
• The Tunguska Event: In "The Loyal Order of Corn", Ned tells Marshall, Simon and Dash X that he is an alien explorer who arrived in Siberia in 1908 through a tachyon portal.
• A Very Special Episode: "The Broken Record" is a rare, very well done, very profound example that actually realistically depicts parental abuse, its consequences, and to an extent, its causes.
• The Web Always Existed: Inverted — one of the weird things that Marshall collected over the course of the series was an old-fashioned radio that only played music from the 1940s.
• Weirdness Censor: Marshall's family is clueless about the oddities in town.
  • In "Mr. Chaney", his sister Syndi fainted after seeing a werewolf but rationalized she only saw a huge racoon as she woke up.
  • In "The Loyal Order of Corn", his parents Marilyn and Edgar assist a Human Alien named Ned in returning to his planet through a portal but they have no memories of this afteward.
• Weirdness Magnet: The Trope Codifier for youth-oriented series.
• Weirdness Search and Rescue: In "The Lost Hour", an old milkman saves Marshall from The Garbage Men in an empty, alternate dimension of Eerie. The milkman implies that he's an older version of Marshall.
• We Need to Get Proof: In an effort to back up their claims to any potential future readers, Marshall and Simon make it a point to take, and tag, at least one item involved in each respective adventure, and lock it away in a makeshift wooden safe-deposit box located in Marshall's attic.
• Wham Line: An interesting case from "The Broken Record", presented without the garbledness: "Tod! Turn that garbage off right now or I'm gonna throw that record player out the window, you hear me?!". For context: Tod's father Phil hates rock music and regularly verbally abuses his son, so when Tod became a punk, Phil initially thinks the rock music he listens to made his son into a punk, when really it was his own abusive words to his son.
• White Hair, Black Heart: Dash X, Marshall's mysterious Frenemy (bordering on Arch-Enemy by "Reality Takes a Holiday"), is a teenage boy with gray hair to make him look sinister.
• Whole Episode Flashback: "The Retainer" is told in flashback.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The Series Finale "Reality Takes a Holiday" is one to The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "A World of Difference".
• You Wouldn't Believe Me If I Told You: In "The Broken Record", Marshall's response when his mother asks him to tell her something that isn't scary.
• Your Favorite: According to "The ATM With a Heart of Gold", Simon's favorite dinner is Swedish Chicken.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: In "Zombies in P.J.'s", a strange PR guru called "The Donald" brainwashes most of the town into going on exorbitant shopping sprees, without going into the fine print on the credit rate.

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