were that muppets were fakes, usually pupets with someone's hand stuck up their butt or proped up on sticks. It was fun pretending they were real monsters, etc.
What really scared me was the McDonald characters. Ronald McDonald, I had nightmares about him really being a vampire who wore clown makeup to appear on cameras. In one nightmare he came to my school, I went to meet him before anyone else did, and found him putting on the makeup and wig, before he retracted his fangs and turned his eyes to look normal. He sent a bunch of Bat-Like Golden Arches after me, and the rest of the kids in my school got turned into Vampires or Werewolfs and went chasing after me.