Our theme for the month of October is “childhood fears.”
Being obsessed with Doctor Who as a pre-teen, I imagined that a number of monsters were haunting the dark corners of my bedroom growing up. I cocooned myself under my bedsheets to hide from imagined gas mask zombies and at times saw sinister cloaked figures in the outline of my closet door. Outside of the bedroom, I remember running through the dark to the basement light switch to spend as little time in the dark as possible, but before all that, at around six years old, I was afraid of sporks.
It’s an odd fear, but I can trace it back to one fateful night in 2005. Picture it: a darkened church basement, a familiar venue made scary by the change in lighting. Folding chairs were set throughout the room facing a projector screen, and off to the side sat a table of snacks. As everyone took their seats, the newest VeggieTales video began: Lord of the Beans.
The movie was an obvious riff on The Lord of the Rings, and due to my father’s love of the series, I knew the general beats of the story remained the same. I recognized changes like swapping the word “hobbit” for “flobbit” and renaming the wizard guide “Randolph,” but a lot of the other jokes went over my head, including that one of the elves who joins the journey was based on the elf from the Keebler brand cookie packaging.
Despite the darker tone of the lighting and music compared to the VeggieTales I borrowed from the church library every week, I enjoyed the first ten minutes. Then, the sporks arrived. As Randolph explains to Toto (Frodo but played by Junior Asparagus) the importance of the bean of power and the danger of the forces which gather to seize it, viewers see something molten pouring into a repurposed waffle iron. The sporks emerge a dark red with glowing eyes, described as unnatural utensils of evil, half-spoon and half-fork. I was terrified.
This was my first exposure to the existence of sporks (years later I would have the realization that the utensils provided with my school hot lunch were the monsters from this veggie tale), but even so I can’t figure out what scared me so much. Through the forty-four minute movie, the sporks get probably three minutes of screen time before they’re pacified by the smell of fresh-baked cookies (baked in a tree by the Keebler elf), but the threat of their appearance drove me to hide behind my chair for most of the movie, stealing glances at the screen through the holes in the chair’s back. In the weeks that followed, I worried I would have nightmares about them (though I don’t remember any actual nightmares).
While I still think of sporks as unnatural utensils of evil (they’re less useful than a spoon or a fork would be in pretty much every situation), I’m no longer afraid of them. This is probably due to the fact that actual sporks don’t have pointy glowing eyes. I don’t encounter them often anymore, since we have actual silverware in my office, but when I do, it’s a fun reminder of who I used to be, and the things I used to be afraid of.
