Ruin Your Childhood //Completed//

Casper The Friendly Ghost

The lovable ghost just wants to make friends, but always ends up scaring people's eyeballs out of their skulls, possibly leading to permanent retinal detachment. Like most forms of non-threatening entertainment, Casper the Friendly Ghost has silently persisted for decades even though literally nobody can remember ever watching the show. (A/N I remember!)

But before that, they were:

Casper, the Friendly Living Child. Really stop and think about the implications there. This is a dead kid, forever haunting the Earth, unable to rest. That's the protagonist for your children's cartoon: a tortured apparition who spends all of his time in a graveyard, hanging out behind his own gravestone.

It's all fairly disturbing and obvious once you stop to think about it, but Casper creator Harvey Comics won't cop to it: Its official stance since the 70s is that ghosts are simply supernatural creatures, like goblins, and friendly ghosts like Casper are born when two adult ghosts love each other very much. Except that explanation actually contradicts some of its earlier cartoons, like "There's Good Boos Tonight" (A/N Holy shiz! I remember this episode), in which Casper befriends a fox that is later killed by hunting dogs. Casper weeps over the fox's body and even puts together a little grave for it, but the fox immediately comes back as a ghost and they go right back to romping. That may be in competition withFuturama's "Jurassic Bark" episode as the most depressing cartoon plot ever, but it has absolutely no competition for Worst Lesson Ever Taught to Children.

And if he's just a friendly, untroubled spirit who has always been that way, then why, in some of the early cartoons, does Casper seems less "friendly" and more "clinically depressed"? Half the shows follow the same basic format: Casper tries to make friends, scares friends away, immediately tries to commit suicide. In his very first appearance, titled "The Friendly Ghost" Casper fails to win lifelong companions within the first couple of minutes, so his next step is to go lie down on a train track. He did the same thing in the comic book series, too: trying to off himself by jumping from a cliff, and then again by tying himself to a rock and jumping into the ocean. It all kind of makes us question how Casper became a ghost in the first place ...

But don't worry! The 1995 live-action movie puts all those concerns to rest.

It flat-out says his name was Casper McFadden and he died of pneumonia.

o-O Nu! Nu! Nu! Nu! xD I just ruined my own childhood.... xD Darn it me.