David The Gnome Scares The Crap Out Of Me

Leave a comment

December 28, 2012 by mark81186

I’ve been feeling pretty nostalgic lately. Don’t know why, but I feel like this from time to time. My brother and I were talking about old TV shows from the 80s and 90s that we used to watch and one show in general stuck out to me. If anyone was a child in the early to mid 1990s, you might remember this show that they used to show on Nick Jr., but The World of David the Gnome frightened me as a child.

The thing is I don’t really know what about David the Gnome scared me. I used to watch it all the time at my grandmother’s house while I was being babysat. It could have been the trolls or maybe even the gnomes, but I don’t really know. The intro was like nails on a chalkboard whenever it played. The few piano keys at the beginning sent chills down my spine.

Face from Nick Jr. would lull me into a false sense of security before the show would air. He would do silly voices and make silly faces and then would say, “David the Gnome is next on Nick Jr. (Fanfare noise, then chuckles)”. IT’S A TRAP! NO! Laugh it up, Face! You bastard!

Apparently, this was a Spanish cartoon before the Weinstein Brothers (I know, weird) brought the show stateside and it had a lot of stuff that was edited out for American TV. You might be asking, “What could they possibly edit out from a children’s TV show?”, quite a lot actually. I was wanderclicking (definition: start on any Wikipedia article and just keeping clicking on random links) and ended up on the David the Gnome’s Wikipedia page where it listed some of the things that were edited for American TV. Things like Swift the Fox vomiting after ingesting some poisonous berries, David the Gnome performing surgery on a deer that ate some barbed wire or something, and a topless female gnome. Wait, what?! Nudity in a child’s show?! I guess Spain has very low standards for censorship, but I digress.  If the American version was edited, then the Spanish version would have REALLY scared the shit out of me.

The final episode I recently discovered and it is an incredibly sad episode even still. I guess gnomes can only live for 400 years and not a day longer, so, David and his wife decide to head to the mountains to die and David tells Swift the Fox not to come. Well, Swift says fuck that and goes anyway where he sees David and his wife turn into trees because I guess gnomes become trees when they die or something. So, Swift cries and mourns the loss of his best friend and walks away alone. On his way back home, Swift encounters a lady fox and seemingly forgets all about David. Lesson for all you kids out there: Whenever a loved one or friend dies, picking up ladies heals all wounds.

Anyway, this show scared me, but a lot of things scared me as a child. My report card in kindergarten said that I was “sensitive”, fast forward 21 years later (God, I’m getting old) and I’m pretty much the opposite. I can watch violent clips or movies and feel nothing, but as a child something a simple as David the Gnome and the beginning of “You Can’t Do That On Televison” scared me.

I sucked as a kid.