TV horror-fantasy for children as transnational genre: Round the Twist, generic subversions, and quality Australian children's television
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the 1990s, the horror anthology series became a popular mode of children’s television, influenced in large part by the Canadian-US series Goosebumps (1995–1998) and Are You Afraid of the Dark? (1990–2000), two live action children’s series popular across many Western countries in the 1990s. This chapter examines Australian fantasy-horror television series, Round the Twist (ACTF, 1989–2001), exploring how its narrative and aesthetic devices both resonate with and deviate from the exceedingly popular Canadian-US series Goosebumps and AYAOTD? Unlike Goosebumps and AYAOTD?, which were funded and produced by for-profit production companies and cable channels for children (Cinar/Nickelodeon and YTV/Fox Kids, respectively), Round the Twist was produced by Australian non-profit production and policy hub the Australian Children’s Television Foundation (ACTF). As a result, Round The Twist presents a particularly complex example of fantasy-horror television for children that reveals much about how Australian approaches to children’s entertainment differed from those in North America in the 1990s.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".