Freaky Stories

Freaky Stories is a Canadian television series. It is an animated show about urban legends, hosted by two animatronic puppets, Larry de Bug, a cockroach, and his gooey sidekick, Maurice the maggot, in Ted's Diner - a 1940s-style diner setting staffed by Rosie the waitress (who is heard but never seen).

The series, described as "a Twilight Zone for kids," centers on the kind of myths and legends that are told as scary campfire or bedtime stories. Every episode always starts with and finishes with the phrase: "This is a true story, and it happened to friend of a friend of mine." And by the words of Larry, "Just because they never happened, doesn't mean they ain't true." Animation styles and musical scoring varied within each half-hour episode, incorporating 20 different looks in the first season alone. The short stories and changing styles were specifically designed to keep viewers' attention span.

Freaky Stories contains examples of:

• Beware of Hitch-Hiking Ghosts:
  • A man picks up a hitchhiking girl on the road; she disappears during the drive but leaves her jacket. The man goes to her house to return the jacket, but is greeted by a woman saying the girl died several years ago, wearing that same jacket.
  • Another episode (one actually set Twenty Minutes Into the Future, complete with hover cars) had the teenaged hitchhiker turn out to be a (non-evil) old hag.
• Eyeless Face: Maurice.
• Gasshole: Maurice the Maggot was continually farting. At one point he gets the "Maggot Flu", which is like the normal flu, except you also fart whenever you sneeze. That said, Larry the Cockroach was able to beat him at a fart-off.
• Hook Hand: The classic urban legend 'The Hook' was done as a Musical Episode.
• I Ate What?: Almost Once an Episode. Examples include a cheapskate siphoning from the wrong tank of an RV, a couple finding a corpse in their wine barrel, and an escaped convict blindly looting the contents of a fridge, which turned out to be storing things like medical waste.
• Missing Floor: One story story has an obsessive man trying to figure out the secret of a building's 13th floor. When he finally gets to it, he finds that the door to the 13th floor locks from the inside, trapping him with everyone else who had discovered it.
• Musical Episode: "The Hook"
• On One Condition: One episode featured a wealthy man who wasn't on speaking terms with any friend or relative and made a will leaving his fortune to anyone who bothered to attend the funeral. The only person to do it was an old woman who didn't even know him. She simply needed a bathroom and crashing the funeral was the only option.
• Organ Theft: Although they moved it into the future to slightly reduce the Squick factor.
• Rules of the Road: One of the episodes involves an incredibly picky police officer, who expects everyone to follow traffic laws EXACTLY. Naturally, once he acquires a Speed Gun, he begins pulling people over for even going 1 Km/h faster/slower than the posted speed limit.
• The Voice: Rosie the waitress