Last time on the blog, we had quite the look at the UK airdates for the 1990s Goosebumps TV series, so you'd better go and read that now if you haven't already, or this post with a few follow-up details will make even less sense than it already does.
Friend of the blog Wesley Mead pointed out something pretty important -- there were also several VHS releases of the show in the UK, which the Goosebumps Wiki has a thorough and mostly accurate list of. And one of the most interesting things is not only that the two-parter "The Haunted Mask" is the first release... it came out six months before the BBC started airing the show! Wesley suggested that there might have been some kind of exclusivity phase which led to THM not being shown by the Beeb, but the fact that it never showed up at all in the years that the BBC had the rights to the show makes me think content issues are the more likely culprit. The second release was "The Werewolf of Fever Swamp", which came out a few months before CBBC aired it, but that's the only time such a thing happens -- the next VHS release ("Night of the Living Dummy III", another two-parter not screened by the BBC) happens after the BBC have finished airing all the episodes they're going to air for the first time, pretty much.
"The Haunted Mask II" was also released on VHS, so the remaining episodes that were never screened by the BBC and not released on VHS in the UK at the time is as follows:
1.10 Night of the Living Dummy II
2.10 Attack of the Jack O Lanterns
3.3 The House of No Return
3.16 Bride of the Living Dummy
3.17 Strained Peas
All one-parters, you'll note, since the UK VHSes only covered two-parters. (It's fairly probable these were later shown on the Fox Kids channel on BSkyB at some point after 2001, but I don't have precise details on those beyond my memories of the show's presence on that channel being heavily promoted in The Beano at the time.)
But to go back to something I briefly mentioned in the original post: Several of the TV episodes were novelised under the banner Goosebumps Presents in the US. I said those were printed in the UK last time, but this looks like it was an error on my part; what we got were "TV Specials", which were omnibuses of the original books with pictures from the TV series included. Let's take a look at one of them...
Oh, hello. Here we see the one containing "The Girl Who Cried Monster" -- with the (almost certain) reason the episode was banned in the UK prominently displayed on the cover, no less -- bearing the only half-true tagline "2 Goosebumps books as seen on BBC TV". That express mention of "BBC TV" makes me think these was some level of discussion between the publishers and the BBC (if only to make sure they could be published to coincide with the CBBC airings), but maybe the BBC hadn't had a chance to review the series for content yet and nobody was aware that they were going to end up not showing some episodes. The other TV Special containing a story not broadcast by the BBC featured "Night of the Living Dummy II":
If nothing else, this is worth talking about because there would've been quite a few children circa 1998 who would've been very confused by the existence of those two books.
The other TV Specials that were verifiably released were Welcome to Camp Nightmare/Piano Lessons Can Be Murder, Return of the Mummy/Phantom of the Auditorium and My Hairiest Adventure/It Came From Beneath the Sink!; all Season 1 episodes, you'll note, so perhaps Scholastic-Hippo anticipated the BBC broadcasting them in the original US order rather than the jumbled order we ended up getting? It's also interesting to note that we don't get "The Haunted Mask" amongst them, but we do get episodes 3 through 11 and 14-15 of the first season; maybe they already knew that one wasn't going to be broadcast, but not the others? Perhaps that makes the "VHS exclusive" explanation more likely than I previously thought?
And if you thought you already knew more than you could possibly want to about this subject, well...
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