I am fascinated with with the Satanic Panic of the early 80s. Partially because I lived through it but also as someone who isn't religious I found the whole "panic" to be very confusing.
Here is an article that covers part of it. D&D makes brief cameo.
A Brief History Of "Satanic Panic" In The 1980s
To get an idea of how serious people took this stuff here are a few other posts I made with links to articles and videos.
http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-to-z-of-witches-o.html, Turmoil in the Toybox videos.
Here is a direct link to the D&D video (starting around 3:30)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWcH7Vd-N_0
http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2014/03/friday-video-satanism-unmasked-dungeons.html
http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2010/02/wait-is-it-1982-again-more-anti-d-crap.html
And a few other videos I have watched, but not otherwise shared.
I LOVE that he used my Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of the cover of Dark Dungeons track. It is too bad that no more of this series was produced. I also got a kick out some of the picture of old D&D stuff. He had another series on his older account. https://www.youtube.com/user/Godlesspanther/videos
The first one is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPMtVjg636E (the production values are a bit low).
There is a playlist by another user of all these videos, warning there is a lot of crazy here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPMtVjg636E&list=PL641BF52EF9FA5963
I have to admit my own (at the time) anti-theism influenced my early D&D games. So lots of undead, demons and (you guessed it) witches. An immature reaction? Yeah. of course! But I was a teen at the time; by definition, immature.
It has though been fruitful in one respect, I have a ton of material that I wrote back then that I'd love to pull out sometime.
I remember it well, even wrote a letter to the editor decrying the panic. In the end it was all FUD and had no lasting impact on the hobby.
ReplyDeleteInterenstingly enough, here in France, we had our own Satanic panic against RPGs in the 1990, but it was not a Christian panic: it was a secular one. France has a strong secular culture, and roleplayers were less stigmatised as satanists than as cultists.
ReplyDeleteI used to have a one of the Frost's "response tract" to the old Jack Chick anti-paganism tracts. Probably long gone now (especially since I have no clue where it would be). But this post made me think of it.
ReplyDeleteBut I remember those days and all of the related panics of the era quite well.
D.