I Found the '90s Kids TV Classic That Haunted My Childhood for Decades!

Have you ever had that sensation of remembering something so vividly and then realizing that it was something you’d dreamed? Have you ever spent hours browsing the internet for proof of something you were sure you’d remembered from years gone by, only to be struck by the realization that your brain made it up during an unexpected nap? It’s more common than you think, and it can be confusing as all hell. But it seemed so real, you think. How did my mind come up with something that hyper-specific if it wasn’t in some way rooted in the waking truth? You can go a little mad trying to disentangle dream from life. Ask me all about it. I have spent maybe 25 years or so wondering if this moment of nightmare fuel from my childhood was a dream. Guess what? It wasn’t!

Here’s some context. I often have very vivid and oddly detailed dreams. I can remember some things I’ve dreamt from when I was a single digit age, and I can recall them better than events that actually happened. I also have a habit of dreaming up entire sequels to films, TV shows, and books that I love (I maintain that I dreamt a better sequel to The Phantom of the Opera than the one Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote.) It wasn’t unreasonable for me to confuse something from my dreams with the many pieces of pop culture I ravenously consumed as a burgeoning geek, including the deeply age-inappropriate stuff that got past my parents’ checks. So, when I tell you I was bloody haunted by this maybe-fake TV show for years, I mean it.

I could remember two scenes vividly. Both involved an adult man who I recalled being coded as crazy and conspiratorial. I was sure he was the villain of the show. In one scene, all of his teeth fell out. That was terrifying, and frankly, it still is. I’m deeply unsettled by scenes of tooth removal, whether it involves evil dentists or mystical curses or good old-fashioned rot. None of the gnarly body horror in The Substance bothered me, but when Sue casually pulled out her teeth? I flinched. The other scene from my dreams was of the man writhing and groaning in pain, then pulling off his shirt to reveal… something. I wasn’t sure what. I couldn’t remember. I thought it was an alien of some kind, something that I would later categorize as Cronenbergian. As the years past, the image grew grosser and more upsetting in my mind. This is partly why I was convinced I’d dreamed it. there’s no way something like this would end up on a kids TV show I would have been allowed to watch at that time (although, in fairness, my parents were super lax about what my sister and I could watch, which is how we ended up watching David Fincher’s Se7en as a family when I was 11.)

Every now and then, over the decades, I’d try to google this show. Since I didn’t have a title or character names, I’d rely on random words and vague descriptors: alien back TV show kids teeth. Shockingly, the results from such googling were both unhelpful and occasionally upsetting. Nothing seemed to work, and as I entered my 30s, I just accepted that it must have been a particularly problematic dream.

And then I found it. This year. I finally got the googling right and a nostalgic subreddit directed me to the correct YouTube playlist and it was there! See, I’m not crazy! There was a creepy kids TV show involving someone losing all their teeth and having alien growths on his back! The ’90s, man.

The Journey of Allen Strange was a Nickelodeon show that ran from 1997 to 2000. It told the story of a young alien boy, stranded on Earth, who is adopted by a human family. He takes on the name Allen Strange and the form of a young Black boy. This was one of the series aimed at a slightly older audience than Nickelodeon’s most famous programming, which might explain how it was able to broadcast a form of nightmare fuel that haunted me for decades (but this is also the network that birthed Ren & Stimpy so they may have simply enjoyed ruining kids’ lives.)

Rewatching the show on YouTube, it’s pretty solid, a good blend of sci-fi, adventure, and teachable moments that sometimes gets saccharine but not obnoxiously so. One especially strong episode features Allen dealing with the reality of race, and of what it means for him to be seen as a Black kid in America. I could see this being some person my age’s childhood favourite.

But then there’s Phil Berg, the recurring baddie of the show and the bane of my memories. Played by Dee Bradley Baker, a legendary voice actor who you’ve heard in literally everything, he’s a conspiracy theorist crank with a hyper-local cable access show who is determined to capture Allen and prove to the world that aliens are real. Bad things usually happen to him, but it’s fine because he’s deeply annoying and nobody likes a tinfoil hat weirdo (remember when conspiracy nuts were mostly seen as harmless irritants and not planet-ruining terrors?)

In episode 11 of season two, ‘A Room of My Own’, Josh, the human kid whose family adopts Allen, does everything in his and Allen’s power to get out of going to the dentist. When he eventually has to face the music, he mercifully avoids the chair when Berg stumbles in with a ton of mouth pain. We’ve just seen him losing tooth after tooth with a bunch of sounds effects that sounds like someone crunching leaves under their feet. That’s the thing I remembered most from it all: the noise. Hey, is this what caused my phobia (weirdly, I am totally okay with going to the dentist)? And yes, the problem is aliens.

Jump forward to season two, episode 10, ‘Baby on Board’, for the next horror. It’s breeding season for Allen’s race and they’ve chosen Phil Berg as their vessel. And as he tears off his shirt in agony, we see the eggs growing out of his back, writing and squeaking and covered in goop. I have to give props to the Nickelodeon make-up team here, because this is pretty gnarling stuff for a low-budget kids show. Hey, it ruined my life well enough.

And so I can close the book on the great mystery of Kayleigh’s scrambled childhood brain and the power of nostalgia. I can finally move on. Or just pick at another scabbed over part of my psyche. Whatever works.