Freak Out! Large Marge Edition

When I was a kid, I got freaked out by a lot of things. Join me each week as delve into these moments and see if I still think they still freak me out.

I saw the trailer for Pee Wee's Big Adventure attached to whatever animated piece of garbage I dragged my parents to. (I think it was The Adventures of Mark Twain, which has another freak-out moment which I hope to get to in a future column.) Now, some quick back story, my parents saw Pee Wee live in LA a few years prior and his show was definitely not for kids, (HBO sometimes shows an old taped performance of his adult show from '81, which is similar to his current show on Broadway right now) so they were reticent to take me to see Pee Wee's Big Adventure. However, I begged, BEGGED, so much that when it came out, they took me just to shut me up. (Best parenting style ever.)

I loved it. He lived in a fun house with a breakfast machine. His bike was wicked! His day consisted of going to a joke shop and blowing a bunch of money!

Anyway, Pee Wee goes on a cross country quest to find his stolen bike and at one point gets into a truck with a lovely woman named Large Marge

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the ne plus ultra of freak out moments for young Mr. Wrong:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RryZV8NK9-Q

(The whole scene in not embeddable, but some brave soul made a supercut below.)

I remember myself screaming, but as it was told to me by my father, I actually froze in fear. Froze. But that's nothing compared to a few minutes later, when Pee Wee gets dropped off at the Wheel Inn and he tells them Large Marge sent him. The same music starts playing and the old man in the diner starts saying the exact same words that Large Marge used.

Now, I don't remember freezing on the first go round, but when the old man starts up, this is what I did in the movie theater:

1)Shrieked "Nooooooooo!" at the top of my lungs

2)Threw my soda at the screen (later finding out hit hit someone two rows away)

3)Ran sobbing out of the theater

4)Ran sobbing out of the building and into the parking lot

My dad ran and got me before I had a chance to see if I could run and sob the 30 miles home. (Yes, I did the distance calculation solely for this blog post.) He calmed me down, got me another soda and got back into the theater to see the rest of the movie.

A couple of years later, I taped it of HBO and watched it ad nauseum. However, it took me several tries to make it through without fast forwarding the Large Marge part.

Does it still freak me out:

Nope. I've come to love Large Marge and her terrifying tale. However, it's still going to be awhile before I can fully get through the clown dream: