childhood psychic damage memories

[faultychips]

Oh this is a very fun question. For myself, when I was like under 10 years old I watched a lot of television growing up, and during this period I saw multiple episodes of various TV shows centered around....mind control? More specifically mind controlling someone to the point where their entire personality and self changes. Though the only actual episode I can properly remember where this happened is "Beetle Romania" from Timon & Pumbaa (1995).
 
Along with other generally loaded material, the episode plot has Timon getting cursed and turned into a bug, then getting eaten by Pumbaa and then having to worm his way through his (cartoon-ified but honestly actually pretty nasty) guts to his head, where Timon messes with Pumbaa's brain and suddenly Pumbaa is soooooo smart and very smug and can do one million smart guy math equations. This doesn't happen in the episode (I just checked to make sure) but I also remember a continuation of this concept that I must have imagined myself, where Pumbaa becomes a college professor and leads a completely different life while Timon is trapped inside his brain and controls him from inside. This thought was enough for me to run and cower behind the couch so I wouldn't see the show anymore (instead of just turning the TV off. Naturally). Sometimes I wonder what kind of effects watching a show that actually went that far, like Invader Zim or whatever, would have done to my psyche. Though looking back on it, this episode is still a weird kids-show trope triple-whammy: getting transformed (in a scary and not cool way), small-ified body tours, and of course the mind alteration. Sometimes I wonder how it felt to be the people actually animating these...anyway, I found the whole episode on dailymotion here if you want to witness the whole thing yourself.

But yeah. I grew up with stuff like lavender town rumor videos when I was pretty young, but nothing from the youtube era scares like old TV does.