The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

If you blinked and missed the combination gas station / convenience store, you missed the town. The place where Al Sioris had spent his retirement was even smaller than I’d envisioned it. In a way it was like he’d come full circle; he’d started out in a small town, traveled to New York City and Europe and Hollywood, and ended back in a small town. So small it didn’t even have a school or police station or fire department. It had one church, conveniently situated across from the gas station, and we made a right turn there as Betty Sioris had instructed over the phone.

The Sioris house was falling apart, but still more nicely maintained than most of its neighbors. As we pulled up in the driveway, a slight woman with a lined face and grey hair appeared at the front door. “You Mr. Greydon? I’m Betty,” she announced as we left the car. “Well, we better get on in. Rain soon.”

It started to rain as soon as we got inside...but I remember the time I spent in that old house as a golden afternoon.

After the end of the Crazy Caper Crew and failure of his studio, Al Sioris was penniless. He and his wife ended up moving back east—even this rickety house was almost beyond his means—and they spent his retirement living off her savings and Social Security. Al spent his remaining years dreaming of the day he’d be rediscovered and recognized as an unsung genius. For the past eight years or so since his heart attack, Betty had been alone in the house.

Betty showed us to what had been her late husband’s former study, now a storage space full of boxes containing everything Al had saved from his decades in the cartoon business. Having the vague idea that some of his old junk might be worth something to someone someday, she’d never bothered to throw any of it out. It had simply been collecting dust all this time.

Betty seemed to have no sentimentality about her late husband or his possessions; she was only interested in finding out if they were worth anything, and if so, selling them as swiftly as possible. She said so bluntly, in so many words. Betty always said exactly what was on her mind. I had the impression of someone who felt she had suffered a lot of damn foolishness in her life, and wasn’t going to let anything bother her now.

I think she was amused by our enthusiasm. Even more so when we declared ourselves fans of her husband and praised his work. The thought her husband actually had fans and admirers was inherently funny, but it takes all kinds...

Jody and I were beside ourselves at the sight of the treasure in the study. I didn’t attempt a comprehensive inventory of the collection, but I wasn’t an expert and that wasn’t why we were there. Mike would handle appraisal and purchase of anything we reported to him as a likely candidate. Our job was simply to find out if there was anything that looked as if it would be worth his time. Pretty soon, I was certain it would be—there was a lot of stuff there. Al Sioris had been a bit of a packrat.

Some of the photographs Al kept might have been worth something all by themselves. A lot of group pictures from different studios where he’d worked: Disney, Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, and others. There was one bald, stocky man common to all the photos... but he was never at the front, nor did he stand out in any way, except in the group picture from Al Sioris Productions. There he was, Al himself, and no surprise at all to see that he’d used his own face as the model for Master Mystico.

The artwork was more than enough to make a trip East worthwhile for Mike. Acetate cels, hand painted with the character outlines on the front and the colors on the back, covering the range of Al’s career. Some of these could be worth thousands; Betty was about to be rewarded for not chucking these in the trash. There were a couple of Freddy Moore nudes in pencil, which could have been studies for the female centaurs in Fantasia. There were drawings by Al Sioris, character sheets for the Crazy Caper Crew, which his animators would have used for reference. Some were too detailed to have been used in a cartoon: carefully drawn studies of Terry and Jackie and Honey, some clothed and some nude. To me, they were more erotic than photographs of real women would have been: I was looking at the source of my own sexual orientation and the basis for all my fantasies, right there.

Several boxes of books, but none of them were about cartooning or illustration or cinema as I’d expected. Instead, I pulled out a volume called Principles of Neural Science. One with the formidable title Accelerated Learning Via Tachystoscope, whatever that means. New Pathways to Piano Technique. The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard and Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Bryan Key, both long since discredited. Brave New World Revisited and Island by Aldous Huxley. Books by or about Mesmer and Erickson and somebody named Samuel Renshaw. A book about Patty Hearst. A book about someone named Candy Jones getting brainwashed by the CIA. Some of these were first editions and might have been valuable to book collectors.

Then Jody and I found his notebooks. Dozens of them filled with tiny, undecipherable scribbling, with diagrams and charts. The notebooks had obscure labels: “eye blink rates” and “superliminal perception” and one called “pareidolia”—it was mostly gibberish to me.

Behind me, going through another box, Jody let out a gasp. I turned to look, and wordlessly she handed me a thin bound volume with a dark green cover, pointing to direct my attention to the label. I read:

CCC114: “THE TV TRAP”

I looked at the production number in astonishment. There had only been thirteen episodes of the Crazy Caper Crew. This was the script for a new episode. Or more precisely, the next one Al would have made, had his studio not shut down.

I read it furiously. In the script, Master Mystico has disguised himself as the friendly host of a children’s show. As he explains to Honey, he’s using this new role to broadcast “special” cartoons to children all across the country. These cartoons are innocent on the surface, but have hidden visual cues that give the children his hypnotic instructions. Fortunately, the Crazy Caper Crew is tipped off when Terry’s little brother succumbs to the hidden messages. They rush to confront the archfiend, and he explains his evil plot.

BONGO But, like, man... why are you doing this to the kids?

MASTER MYSTICO Children grow up to be adults! They will remember me... remember the pleasure I gave them... remember the pleasure of serving me and obeying me!

(beat)

And one day, years from now, one of them will be a great scientist... or a businessman... or President of the United States! And on that day, I will take control!

And then he escapes. The childrens’ show is cancelled, never to be shown again.

There it was. Everything I’d suspected was right there on the page. Cartoons loaded with subliminal content and hidden messages. Visuals and sounds arranged in some intricate pattern to evoke maximum receptivity in the viewer. Everything designed to convey a secret message to impressionable kids like Jody and I. Teaching us hypnosis was good; hypnosis makes you happy, hypnosis makes you attractive. The greatest pleasure in life is to be entranced, relaxed, and obedient. And we grow up thinking like this.

Then one day, an old man who seems strangely familiar—we recognize him as being a hypnotically compelling master, without quite knowing why we feel this way—comes along and we follow his bidding. That was the dream Al Sioris had. Perhaps not everything had gone the way Al intended. I watched his cartoons and didn’t grow up longing to be submissive; instead I’d grown up wanting to hypnotize, to feel desire for the enthralled.

Could this very script have been the smoking gun that foiled the plan? Someone at the network saw this, saw what the Crazy Caper Crew was all about, and realized that Al was plotting to create an army of passive willing followers? I imagined this faceless interloper confronting Al one night: “Your scheme ends here, Al. We’re taking the show off the air immediately. If you just disappear, we won’t press charges... but you’ll never work in this town again, you sick pervert.” And a humiliated Al Sioris collecting all his books and notes and slinking into obscurity. It was almost tragic.

And then a chilling thought: what did all this imply about Jody and me? Were our feelings for one another real, or were they just conditioning we’d received from a bunch of cartoons we’d seen over twenty years ago?

While I chewed over these unsettling ideas, I overheard Jody in the kitchen with Betty Sioris. I walked over to the doorway so that I could see them as I eavesdropped. Jody was sitting at the kitchen table while Betty appeared to be putting a kettle on to boil.

Jody spotted me and smiled, then resumed talking to Betty. “I, uh, noticed your husband had a lot of books about hypnosis. Was that, um, an interest of his?”

“Oh yeah, he believed in hypnosis. I told him, you know there’s no such thing, don’t you? That’s just make-believe.”

“Uh? I don’t follow—”

“Look,” Betty said firmly. “I seen it. Those guys. They call a bunch of people to come on stage. Tell ‘em to do something or pretend something. The ones that do what they say, they keep. Ones that don’t, they send ‘em back to their seats. They end up with one or two people who’ll just go along with whatever they say. That don’t mean they’re hypnotized... it just means they’re the ones who are good at pretending and following instructions.

“But Al, he wouldn’t listen. Kept trying to find ways to hypnotize people, scientifically he said. Tried it on me, of course it didn’t work.”

“Really?” Jody looked stricken.

Betty nodded. “It was his big thrill. So I told him, Al, I said, you just find yourself whatever girls you want on the side, play your games with. Makes no never mind to me. So he was always finding girls he could pretend to hypnotize, and who’d pretend to be hypnotized, didn’t bother me. We had an understanding. I did what I wanted, he didn’t bother me with his nonsense.”

Absurdly, for a moment I felt scandalized. Old people! Having an open marriage! How dare they! I had to laugh at myself.

But this confirmed everything. Al Sioris had a fetish for hypnosis. He’d deliberately created a cartoon to indoctrinate others. To recruit others to share the same desires he felt. And he’d been found out, and been driven out of the animation business in disgrace, leaving us behind as his unfulfilled pawns. That had to be it. It seemed so logical. But I had to know. I stepped into the kitchen. “Betty... did your husband ever give any hint about why the show was cancelled?”

“Hint? Hint? He never stopped complaining about it for twenty years! It was doomed before it even got on the air. Everything had to be perfect, see, and work went so slow that he missed every deadline. And then they scheduled the Crazy Gang opposite the Ricky Richards Show... the most popular childrens’ show on TV! His little cartoon got slaughtered in the ratings!”

The website I made devoted to the Crazy Caper Crew gets a decent number of hits, but nothing spectacular. I put an episode guide there, the script for the unproduced fourteenth episode, some downloadable audio and screen grabs from the show, and a biographical essay I wrote about Al Sioris. That page includes a photo of Al and Betty when they were first married; sometimes I imagine she looks a bit like Terry, but that might just be a romantic whim on my part.

Betty sent me that wedding photo to show her appreciation. She was pleased at the money she made off her husband’s old junk. Mike in turn made out well selling off the memorabilia to collectors, so everyone was happy.

In another moment of romantic whimsy, I considered dedicating the website to Jody. But what would be the point? I have no reason to imagine she’ll ever see it. When she left me, she made it clear that her new man made her truly happy and fulfilled, in precisely the way she had once mistakenly thought I did. She seemed almost embarassed, the way a person might feel after going through the closet and finding an old tie-dyed shirt or a pair of flared trousers: oh my God, did I really once think these clothes looked cool? What was I thinking?

I keep remembering that moment in Betty’s kitchen when Betty told Jody there was no such thing as hypnosis in real life, and the wounded look on Jody’s face. Was that the very moment I lost her? When she lost “permission” to believe in hypnosis? Or did I never really have her at all? So many things she told me once have turned out to be false, it’s hard to tell if she even knew the difference between reality and make-believe...but then, isn’t that the very definition of a hypnotic state?

When we met her, Betty Sioris had been surprised that anyone still remembered an old cartoon she assumed no one ever saw; now I hear she’s trying to get a deal to have the Crazy Caper Crew released on DVD. I don’t know... somehow I don’t see them making a comeback. Not enough people remember the show for it to have nostalgia appeal beyond a small cult group, it’s neither good nor bad enough to be camp, and it’s too dated to appeal to modern kids.

But just in case, I kept the notebooks of Al Sioris for myself. Those might be too dangerous to have floating around. Here’s how I figure it: what if the show did make a comeback? What if someone else found those notes and tried to replicate his attempt to create a cartoon that makes its viewers long to be hypnotized? Better that I keep them under wraps. Or would it be enough simply to study the episodes and rediscover his techniques?

Parents, I give you fair warning. If your children become fascinated with a television show about hypnosis—passionately devoted to it, want to watch it over and over again—it might be that someone is trying to do it again. And if your children become well behaved and obedient and always do as they’re told... it might already be too late.