A couple of years ago I wrote an essay titled "Choose Your Own Adventure For 80s Kids." ” It’s an essay about the collective fears those of us who grew up in the 80s felt, such fears including nuclear annihilation, Satanism, and board games, and it’s the first essay in my new book, Melt With Me.
But it began because I was thinking about quicksand, my favorite bad 80s TV trope.
Again, that is. Thinking about it again.
I think about quicksand perhaps more than is normal, but then again I don’t know what a normal amount of thinking about quicksand is. One quicksands a week? Two?
Anyway, I was thinking about quicksand, and the fears that got into me when I was growing up in the 80s. I asked on Twitter—remember when it was Twitter, and it was still gross but you could go there without hating yourself?—about fears other people had. It seems we were all afraid of strangers in vans, Halloween candy laced with acid (or razor blades), and the ever-present drug pushers in the park, which is probably where all the acid-laced candy came from.
The fear of strangers came from the serial killers of the 70s and the missing children of the early 80s, and the fear of Satanism came from books like The Exorcist, Michelle Remembers, and The Satan Seller. The fear of drug pushers in the park came from our culture, starting long before Nixon’s war on drugs but escalating along with it, so by the time the 80s rolled around we were being inundated with anti-drug propaganda to the point many of us believed a single puff of a “marijuana cigarette” would leave us eternally and hopelessly tripping balls. We would trip so many balls we would forget who we were, and sit forever-after staring out the window in some psych ward humming the same snatch of mindless tune (I swear I saw this exact scene in some anti-drug movie they foisted upon us in 5th grade, circa 1981 or so, but I can’t find it on all the interwebs because how do you search for “person staring out window and humming in some old film I once saw”?)
If you’re around my age I don’t need to tell you where the fear of nuclear war came from, nor that every night in 1983 the news covered our deteriorating relationship with the Soviets, whom we all thought were assholes, because they had their ICBMs aimed at us. I don’t need to tell you how many ICBMs we had, or whose asshole they were aimed at, or even what ICBM stands for, because—again, if you are like me, if you grew up in America and went to church and went to public school and said the Pledge of Allegiance with your hand held over your heart and watched the nightly news with your father and heard about how the world was going to hell in a handbasket and behind all the hatred was the big bad Soviet Union, that big pink blob on all our 80s-era maps—then you know that fear.
And I am going to guess you know about quicksand. How much of it there seemed to be out there, according to TV shows and movies. It was everywhere, like Chip and Joanna Gaines are now. People were always falling into that shit. Good guys. Bad guys. Good guys then bad guys.
I set out, in this Substack, to write about a few quicksand scenes I remembered from my childhood—the “Six Million Dollar Man” and “Batman” scenes, for example, or when Artax the horse dies in the Swamp of Sadness, which isn’t actually quicksand but quicksand-adjacent. I also wanted to talk about the ubiquity of quicksand in movies and TV shows of the time, but, upon doing some research, found that others had done the research for me.
So, here are some lists of TV shows in which quicksand played a part (some of these are before/after the 80s). Let me say also that I am vindicated—there was a shit-ton of quicksand throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s. A metric shit-ton.
I have edited this a bit; link to original list here: https://www.dellamente.com/quicksand/doc/qstv.htm)
1. Batman, the TV show. An episode with the Riddler where Batman and Robin sink into quicksand cake. In another episode Batgirl is thrown into a vat of caviar (quicksand-adjacent.)
2. Black Beauty/English TV Series - Episode: The Pit Pony. A teenager backups into quicksand after backing away from a pony that keeps advancing on him.
3. Brisco County Jr.- and his partner Lord Bowler are captured by pirates in the desert and forced to 'walk the plank' into a quicksand pit. Up to their chins and then some, they are rescued by Brisco's horse, Comet.
4. Dukes of Hazard. While running thtough the woods, Daisy Duke falls into quicksand and gets rescued by her brothers.
5. Fantasy Island - (TV Episode) One plot has a man who wants to find out about his father. This lands him in an Island prison. As he escapes with a guy whom he believes killed his father, the guy falls into very realistic, thick, grey quicksand and is rescued by the man and his wife just as Mr. Rorke shows up at the last minute.
6. Get Smart. At the end of an episode where KAOS has the giant magnet on an island, the bad guy marches Max, Agent 99, and the chief to a point where they start sinking in Synthetic-(99:"Synthetic-sand!?" Bad Guy:"It's kvicker than kvicksand!")Funny shots as they sink knee-deep, waist deep, chest deep, and then shoulder deep in sawdust/water.
7. Gilligan's Island. There is a LOST episode with headhunters involved where MaryAnn and Ginger are up to their necks in a mud bog, taking a mud bath. This episode doesn't show up in the official guide to Gilligan's Island, but it is confirmed!
8. Hercules: The Legendary Journeys - In one episode, Hercules is guiding a group of refugess through a swamp. While attacked by a giant, winged reptile, a young lady and her brother fall into a quicksand pit and are pulled out by our hero after going all the way under.
9. I Love Lucy. There's an episode with Jack Benny where Lucy shows him how they have made their vault impossible to be broken into. They stepped into dry looking quicksand together and slowly sink into it while talking.
10. The Incredible Hulk. In the second movie before the series began, Bill Bixby and this girl he's protecting step into quicksand (muddy water). He turns into the Hulk after he gets her out but can't get out himself. Baddies also fall in but get out with the help of their dogs.
11. JAG. The episode dealt with an investigation into a female marine recruit who was killed in boot camp. A pretty JAG lieutenant goes undercover as a recruit to find the killer. She ultimately does find the killer... sinking in quicksand and gets a full confession before pulling her out. The killer then shows her gratitude by pushing the lieutenant into the same bog.
12. Land of the Giants. Episode called "Manhunt." Giant is caught in quicksand and has the ship of the heroes with him. Slow quicksand, as almost entire episode takes place with giant caught.
13. One Life to Live - A group stranded on Barrington Island tries to escape from a mob family that owned the island. A woman crosses a clearing because she thought she saw a boat and stepped into quicksand....it lasted several episodes until she finally got pulled out.
14. Six Million Dollar Man- One of the first episodes. A girl needs her scientist/father rescued from evil types in the everglades. On the way in, Steve rescues her from some watery quicksand. At the end, leads them to the same spot, leaps over, and waits for them to spot him so they rush forward to their doom.
15. The Bionic Woman- After plunging in and pulling herself out, she pulls the same trick as above on the prison guards pursuing her.
16. The Fall Guy- Hunting for treasure in the Everglades, Heather Thomas falls into some quicksand.
17. Tarzan: The Series - While searching for his beginnings, Tarzan and Jane must cross a swamp. Jane falls into muddy quicksand and goes under. Tarzan rescues her.
18. PBS Wonderworks movie - title forgotten Based on the book 'Freckles, Boy Of The Limberlost' A boy working in a Pacific Northwest logging camp encourages his budding romance with a pretty naturalist by pulling her out of the quicksand into which she had sunk up to her pretty ankles.
19. Xena: Warrior Princes - In "Return of Callisto," Xena and Callisto fall into a quicksand pit after a running chariot battle.
This list shows screenshots from some of the same shows, and adds a couple more: https://reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-cult-tv-faces-of-quicksand.html
This blog reflects on the trendy quicksand scene in the 60s, 70s, and 80s: https://boryssnorc.com/2012/06/15/where-has-all-the-quicksand-gone/
This article confirms how dangerous quicksand was during this time:
But what I have learned as a writer is that the reason quicksand was on so many shows is that it was easy. Lazy writing, we call it, in the same way we all believed druggies handed out free drugs to any toddlers who happened to toddle by. That Dungeons and Dragons was so evil it would make you murder your parents, and that most kidnappings were carried out by strangers.
But kids do not understand lazy writing, or how it hurts them years later. As a child I was always on the lookout for quicksand while walking through the woods. Crossing a creek. Anywhere a bit of water touched a bit of sand, or dirt. I thought you could be swallowed up. Dead in a matter of minutes, unless the Six Million Dollar man happened to stop by and save you.
It seems there were many things to be afraid of in the 80s. Things that could kill you, or blow out your mind and leave you an empty shell humming half-remembered game show theme music, or the last bars of Fur Elise, or whatever that person was humming in that long-ago film I definitely remember watching about the dangers of drugs.
You see, fear gets inside you, like sand in your shoes. Like lice in your hair, or on your balls. And people were afraid. There were missiles beneath our feet, and launch codes circling the earth. There were serial killers and Satanists scouring the interstates of America. Men were walking into restaurants and opening fire, the same as they would soon start to do in schools, and Reagan was building a massive naval fleet to provoke the Soviets to war, or ruin their economy if they tried to keep up with our military-industrial complex.
Quicksand wasn’t real, but nuclear weapons were. And when your brain has to decide between focusing on the very real threat of the world being annihilated or the very fake threat of falling into. . .sand. . .then the mind tends to focus on the non-threatening thing.
At least that’s my theory. We believed in quicksand because we were always being told to watch out for what we couldn’t see. Like Satan-worshippers. Nuclear launch codes. The razor blade hidden in the Halloween candy. The stranger lurking on our street.
https://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/08/terra_infirma.html
But, as this article from 2010 points out, quicksand as a plot line got predictable. We just aren’t scared of it anymore. Maybe because we have grown up and gotten Google. Maybe because there are worse things to worry about, and we realized them as we grew up and witnessed war after war, hatred, bigotry, racism, sexism, school shootings, terrorism, both foreign and domestic, and the threat of nuclear war come again now that Russia—the last remnant of the old Soviet Empire—has invaded Ukraine.
What this means is that eventually we got tired of the quicksand trope. Or we grew up. We learned to face our irrational fears. We realized not everything we saw on TV was real.
We know now quicksand is not everywhere. It’s not even dangerous. Not in real life, not in the shows, where the heroes always got out, even if they had to leave their horse behind. Someone came along and threw them a rope. Someone broke a branch so they could climb out. They used their own wits and ingenuity or speed and strength to save themselves.
There were even a few episodes where they tricked the bad guys into the quicksand. The good guys jumped over and the bad guys fell in, and let me go on the record now to say those were the best episodes, when the bad guys who started all the shit ended up in the shit.
That’s how it should be.
That’s good writing.
Constantly living in fear can be debilitating. I’m so glad most people no longer pay attention to these things and that such lazy propaganda isn’t brazenly pushed anymore. It does no good for anyone to be always sceptical about their neighbours or people in a foreign country.
And piranhas aren’t particularly prone to biting people. It seems they typically use those massive teeth to nip off bits of the fins of other fish. Fins. Not even flesh.