5 Family Movies and TV Shows That Were Almost Insanely Dark

What We Almost Got Instead:

According to the initial proposal for The Wizard of Oz, the movie we almost got would have eliminated all references to magic and given everything in the story a rational/depressing explanation.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Originally, Mervyn LeRoy and William Cannon wanted to do a dark, "realistic" retelling of the Oz tale, inventing the gritty reboot 65 years before Batman Begins, only with an even more disturbing Scarecrow. In their version, the Oz Scarecrow would no longer be a literal dummy filled with straw who needed to believe more in his own intelligence, but a flesh-and-bone human who was so stupid that he could only get a job standing in a field and chasing off birds.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

That already paints this proposed land of Oz as some miserable hellhole where desperate people take jobs previously reserved for inanimate objects. What then takes it into full-on dystopian territory is Oz's cruel and unusual punishment of criminals like the Tin Man, who in LeRoy and Cannon's draft was described as a "heartless" man sentenced to be locked in a tin suit of armor for all eternity. Dorothy was only supposed to meet him many years into his sentence, after he had softened and become kind, or in other words, had his will completely broken by years of being isolated from society for his unspecified crime.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Thankfully, The Wizard of Oz ended up going through more rewrites than a suicide note composed by a guy with multiple personalities, which is how we ultimately got the movie we all know and love, where the Tin Man's living nightmare of an existence is merely hinted at.

The Show You Know:

In 1994, CBS rolled out their supernatural drama series Touched by an Angel, which centered on how much God totally loves you -- which, as it turns out, is a lot. Apparently, God loves you so much that if it wasn't against some internal bureaucracy bullshit, he would make bacon appear in your mouth every time you saw a puppy. But for now, the best he can do is send angels like Tess and Monica down to Earth to help us humans deal with all sorts of problems, like a terminal illness or the loss of a loved one.

CBS

Those were admittedly some pretty serious themes, but they never distracted from the show's uplifting message that no matter how alone you feel, God is always there looking out for you, caring about you, trying to figure out the whole bacon and puppies thing.

What We Almost Got Instead:

Unlike the heartwarming series that eventually aired, the original pilot of Touched by an Angel, produced by John Masius, more resembled a PR smear campaign against Jesus' dad. The pilot reportedly opened with Monica (the younger, less-experienced angel) flying over the Pacific Ocean, and then suddenly crashing violently into it after God momentarily switched off her flying powers. Why? Because Masius wanted the show's God to be a bit of a "practical joker" who enjoyed tossing his servants into the ocean for shits and giggles.

CBS

The entire series was meant to focus exclusively on human suffering, and how it exists in our world because God gets bored easily and needs something to amuse him. So according to Masius, the reason why people get hit by hot-dog-shaped trucks, fall down wells, etc., is to help God get through another long day at the office. And the worst part is that in Masius' universe, not even death frees you from God's tyrannical grasp, because as his pilot explains, angels like Monica and Tess are humans who had died and gotten a life sentence of taking orders/wedgies directly from the great clown in the sky.

The only upside was that angels were also given the power over life and death, which was demonstrated in the pilot when Monica brought a dog back from the dead. CBS fired Masius and completely retooled the show after realizing that he'd basically sold them some bizarre crossover between Milton's Paradise Lost and Pet Sematary.

The show mainly focused on Arnold and his friends dealing with typical kid stuff, like unrequited crushes, urban legends ...

What We Almost Got Instead:

... creepy sexual predato- waaaaait, what?

So yeah, it seems that when Craig Bartlett was first developing the show, he wanted one of Arnold's neighbors to be a lawyer named Lana Vail who totally wanted to commit a bunch of penal offenses on Arnold's bathing suit area. She ... she wanted to fuck him, is what I'm getting at.

Nickelodeon

But of course, that's not how Bartlett described it. He claims he merely wanted to get some laughs out of the adult Vail having a crush on the 10-year-old Arnold and trying to get time alone with the boy by constantly asking him to do a bunch of favors for her. The comedy was supposed to come from how uncomfortable the entire situation made Arnold feel, which was also the reaction of Nickelodeon's executives, who respectfully turned down this proposal by, I assume, quietly staring at Bartlett until he left the room in shame.

Now, I'll be the first person to admit that Hey Arnold! doesn't get enough credit for tackling many adult issues, like when it was revealed that another one of Arnold's neighbors, Mr. Hyunh, was separated from his daughter during the Vietnam War and hadn't seen her in over 20 years. Also, I'm pretty sure that Arnold's best friend Gerald is in fact the result of an affair Marge Simpson had with Carl Carlson:

Nickelodeon

But none of those issues could ever be considered "unspeakably creepy," which is exactly what Lana Vail's character would bring to the table. Because as Bartlett himself finally figured out, an unhealthy obsession with a small boy is only funny when he and his stalker are roughly the same age.

Nickelodeon

The series focused primarily on John "J.D." Dorian (Zach Braff), a young man who split his time between working at Sacred Heart Hospital, bromancing Donald Faison, and waging a prank war on the facility's antagonistic janitor (Neil Flynn), because did I mention that this show had less drama than a Teletubbies Christmas special?

What We Almost Got Instead:

Creator Bill Lawrence has stated numerous times that if he'd gotten word that Scrubs was to be cancelled after the first season, he would have revealed that the janitor was actually a figment of J.D.'s imagination the whole time.

NBC, ABC

The janitor appeared all the way back in the pilot episode, where he accused J.D. of sabotaging a sliding door, marking the start of series-wide hostilities between the two of them. In the character's defense, the crazy custodian wasn't planned to be a real person, but something that J.D. kept hallucinating due to an undiagnosed brain tumor or his vivid, zany imagination. In any case, the planned reveal would completely change J.D.'s characterization from that of a lovable goofball to someone in desperate need of psychiatric help.

NBC, ABC

According to Lawrence, holding on to the Imaginary Janitor card was why no one really interacted with the character initially. But as the series kept getting renewed, the janitor was eventually upgraded to real-person status and series regular, with his lack of human interaction in Season 1 presumably explained by off-camera racist outbursts.

What We Almost Got Instead:

Back when Spielberg first started work on E.T. in 1980, the movie was called Night Skies and, appropriately, told a much darker story about murderous aliens that could kill with a single touch of their bony death-fingers.

Universal Pictures

The script for Night Skies was written by John Sayles, who came up with a straight-up horror tale in which a suburban family was being terrorized in their home by evil aliens who wanted them dead. Spielberg loved the idea and immediately went into pre-production, but midway through sort of changed his mind about the dark tone of the film. Perhaps he wanted to do something more positive with the whole concept of aliens after Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or maybe he sensed that there was something amiss about a movie that could be summarized as "the attack of the killer finger-bangers from space."

It was definitely the first one, though, because Spielberg loved Sayles' initial idea so much that he eventually took it, replaced the word "alien" with "ghost," and reworked it into the screenplay for Poltergeist.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Spielberg even claimed that the two movies were meant to be sides of the same home-invading coin. Poltergeist was about "suburban evil," while E.T. was about "suburban good" -- one was paranormal, the other extraterrestrial, but both dealt with scared middle-class people making contact with something they didn't understand, but which didn't speak Spanish this time.

One element of Night Skies did survive Spielberg's rewrites, though: the part about a good alien named Buddy befriending an autistic child. With a few changes, that blossomed into the plot of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which bizarrely came thiiiis close to showing E.T.'s pals trying to finger a bunch of kids to death.

Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a Cracked columnist and editor. Contact him at c.j.strusiewicz@gmail.com.