Erin Wright and Marty
Two "lucky" fans of the Shock Street franchise who get a sneak preview of the upcoming Shock Street theme park. Erin is the daughter of a special effects designer.
- Adaptation Name Change: For some unclear reason, Marty is renamed Josh in the graphic novel version.
- Agent Scully: Marty refuses to admit how terrified he is that these monsters might actually be real, to the point of saying "Your father can explain it all!" after he's nearly been dragged to his death by zombies.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Marty theorizes this as to why the monsters are acting volatile. Turns out to be true, but not in the way he thinks.
- Break the Cutie: They go into Shock Street as happy, wide-eyed fans and come out as frightened, shell-shocked victims. It's especially bad for Erin, who as far as she knows is being put through hell by her own father.
- Break the Haughty: Marty goes into the tour cocky and fearless and becomes slowly terrified by the horrors there.
- Creepy Twins: Not personality wise, but "creepy" in the sense that they're two identical androids slowly becoming corrupted.
- Daddy's Girl: Erin clearly has a happy relationship with her dad, which just makes the twist that much more depressing.
- Fangirl/Fanboy: They're both huge horror fans and are pumped to see every monster from the films up close. Of course, they were created to be that way.
- The Gadfly: Marty never passes up a chance to scare or tease Erin, and even fakes being eaten at one point.
- Girlish Pigtails: Erin in the comic adaptation.
- Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Erin clarifies that she and Marty aren't twins nor siblings despite how many physical similarities they share. This is especially notable in the comic version, where they look like the same character model in different outfits. The effect is slightly unsettling, especially when you realize they were built from the same model.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Their love of horror movies.
- Pintsized Powerhouse: In one particularly bizarre instance, the two defeat giant metal praying mantises by stomping on their front legs. This could be another clue that they aren't normal children.
- Related in the Adaptation: In Goosebumps HorrorTown her father/creator is Professer Shock.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: These kids are actually lifelike and sentient androids created as the ideal Shock Street fans by Mr. Wright. The problem is, they started to form lines of thought that weren't programmed, such as Erin's mother.
- Sanity Slippage: As their programming became corrupted, their line between reality and fantasy became blurred, to the point where Erin didn't even recognize her father. One wonders how far they would've fallen had he not taken them for repair.
- Turned Against Their Masters: In the TV episode, where they presumably attack their creator.Erin: Everything wants to live. Even robots.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Erin hates bats, which Marty teases her about.
Mr. Wright
Portrayed By: Eric Peterson (TV)
The main director and designer of the special effects and robotics in the Shock Street movies, as well as the upcoming theme park version.
- Abled in the Adaptation: He is bespectacled in the book, but seems to have good vision in the episode.
- Adaptation Dye-Job: The book has him with blonde hair and brown eyes. The episode has him with gray hair and blue eyes.
- Adaptational Jerkass: In the book, though he was a bit of a haphazard towards them, he still somewhat cared about Erin and Marty, and the story ends with him making sure that they got the proper programming they needed. In the episode, he is revealed to not actually care about the robots themselves, and was planning on having them unceremoniously replaced with newer models, but that doesn't seem to actually work out.
- Collector of the Strange: He collects unique Shock Street props for his incredibly festive office, including an original furry paw that Wolf Girl wore, which is kept in a glass case on a windowsill.
- Nightmare Fetishist: He has quite the fascination with anything involved in the horror genre, given his pride in his work for horror movies as well as his excitement for the upcoming theme park.
- No Full Name Given: Only his surname is made clear. His first name is not brought up anywhere in the story.
- Obliviously Evil: He doesn't seem to truly realize that designing insanely realistic robots that have feelings and putting them in mortal danger and distress is morally wrong on so many levels. He just sees them as advanced test robots for the new rides. This is especially concerning when he is making Erin actually programmed to believe that he is her father, only for her to have what would be psychological trauma during the ride that he helped make, but he simply shuts her down and takes her to be reprogrammed.
- Reed Richards Is Useless: Seriously, he can design, create, and program incredibly lifelike robots to be human as well as feel human. Yet he decides to use these skills to make robots to test rides at a theme park.
- Smart People Wear Glasses: He has big, round glasses with dark frames that hide his eyes. He is also a genius programmer of animatronics as well as a riveting designer of a theme park. This is averted in the episode, in which his eyewear are nowhere in sight.
- Troll: As Erin approaches him after a movie screening of a Shock Street film, he pretends to be distressed, and tells her that he has bad news. This was all actually just part of a joke. And he says that he got her again, and that she always falls for it, implying that he has done this to her plenty of times before.
- Uncertain Doom: This trope applies to him in the episode. It ends with him terrified and at the peril of Erin and Marty, planning to kill him because he wanted to have them replaced. It is unknown if he is able to escape from their wrath.
Shock Street Monsters
The Praying Mantis
Portrayed By: Brendan McMurray (Toadinator); Jason Hopley (Toxic Creep); Ron Stefaniuk (Piranha Person) (TV)
These are the various monsters and ghouls popularized in the Shock Street franchise. Erin and Marty think they're the coolest, but their admiration of the creatures starts to wane when they try out the Shocker Studios tour, and realize they may not be fake.
- Adaptational Badass: While the praying mantis in the original story is enough of a threat (but still barely enough to overpower the two child protagonists), the movie on the other hand turns it into a kaiju-like beast that flips over vehicles with its arms, and destroys a Ferris wheel by tackling its side.
- Alliterative Name: Mad Mangler, Sweet Sue, the Piranha People, and the Fabulous Frog aka The Toadinator.
- Ascended Extra: The giant mantis plays a far bigger role in the 2015 movie than it did in the book, where the main characters spend most of the film fleeing from it. It's in fact the second biggest threat after Slappy.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: There are giant praying mantises living in the Cave of the Living Creeps.
- Creepy Doll: Sweet Sue, a lovable baby doll that is actually a serial killer from Mars.
- Generic Doomsday Villain: None of the creatures encountered by the kids have any distinct personality or reason for attacking, other than they're monsters. Justified somewhat when you realize they aren't even real to begin with.
- Our Monsters Are Different: Oh so much. There doesn't seem to be a definite theme going with these monsters other than they all live on Shock Street. They vary from giant insects to mutants to serial killers to aliens to a weird mix of the three.
- Our Werewolves Are Different: There are three mentioned, Wolf Boy and Wolf Girl from A Nightmare on Shock Street, and the Wolf Crab, a bizarre wolf/crab hybrid from the recently released Shocker VI.
- Psycho Electro: Shockro, as noted by "Shockro's House of Shocks", and the Electric Eel Woman supposedly has this power when the kids mention her frying a bunch of teenagers.
- Red Herring: A Shocker on Shock Street appears to be about Erin and Marty discovering that the Shock Street monsters are actually real. It turns out that some of the monsters they've met were just animatronic robots built for the tour, and the rest were just hallucinations created by Erin and Marty's erratic programming.
- Serial Killer:
- The Mad Mangler, whose modus operandi is that he'll mangle any unsuspecting fool that walks by the lot he inhabits.
- Sweet Sue is a Martian serial killer disguised as a doll, but no one clarifies if she was a serial killer to her own people as well or if she just went after Earthlings.
- Toxic Phlebotinum: A number of the monsters are implied to have been created as a result of exposure to toxic waste. Case in point, there's the Toxic Creep and the Toxic Wild Man.
