I wasn't that young when I saw "5000 Fingers of Dr. T", but it seemed a tiny bit weird for a "family" movie at a couple points.
I sought out weird stuff as a little kid, but ( looking back ) the stories that I liked weren't really all that strange, just pulpey.
I watched "Clutch Cargo" cartoons in the early 60's, where the characters' lips were made to move more realistically than the rest of their bodies.
They might pursue an invisible monster etc. in Clutch Cargo, but it was basically just an early version of "Johnny Quest". Race Banner looked vaguely like Doc Savage, and his voice sounded kinda like the original Space Ghost.
"Astro Boy" was made by the same people who later did "Speed Racer". That seemed a little weird, at the time, since I had never seen Japanese animation and humor before.
"Space Angel" reminded me of Sgt. Fury/Nick Fury with his burly Irish helper "Dum Dum" Dugan. The burly guy was called "Taurus the Bull" in Space Angel. Unlike Sgt. Fury it was set in outer space, as a change-up to Flash Gordon.
"The Mighty Hercules" was a cartoon about a hero who depended on something to energize him, just as Popeye depended on spinach. Hercules had a ring that could "power up."
In addition to such heroes, there were also damsels in distress and villains. Very little that was weird, though, as I look back.
"Beany and Cecil" and "Spunky and Tadpole" were two other cartoons from early days.
There was an old show that used real actors and actresses in it, about a knight called Sir Crustabread. That one goes so far back I can hardly even remember it. "Sgt. Preston of the Yukon Patrol" was another that used real actors.
Because of such shows, I was fascinated with phenomena like quicksand and haunted houses. I looked around my neighborhood for such, since I had heard that they existed but weren't in plentiful supply. When a character got temporarily frozen in plaster or cement, and was later rescued by being "broken out", I became fascinated by cement; and was seeing my old favorite Greek mythology character Medusa ( loved that snake hair ) again, as the company mascot for one cement company.
The weird cartoons I mentioned earlier had characters and scenery that would morph from one thing into another, and another had especially sinister cowboy villains. There was one about a guy with a horse ( or "horse fly" ? ) that had adventures in a head of hair, each hair being like a tree in a forest. There was a particularly ugly, scary old hag in it, too, as I remember; though she was portrayed as being comical.
I was able to track down one old cartoon I liked as being named "Mr. Hoppity Goes to Town", and I will get it one of these days.
