late 20th c. fears that seem to have disappeared from the public consciousness

Some of you may remember a post I wrote a while back about maladies that seemed so prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s but now, perhaps due to technological advancements, seem to have disappeared. I spent a good amount of time during my formative years worrying about falling victim to these afflictions. I've been anxious for a very long time, you see. Incidentally, I also believed I'd be un/lucky enough to encounter one of the monsters or eerie phenomena featured on In Search Of.

Currently, there's a commercial running that features some poor suit sinking in quicksand as his companions seem concerned only with making/investing/worshipping money. The first time I saw this ad, my brain nearly shortcircuited with a mess of memories. Quicksand! I used to be tortured by the thought that I may some day step into some and die a simultaneously slow and quick death. And I wasn't an anomoly. All my friends were tormented knowing that such a death trap existed in the world--despite the fact that we knew both tips for survival. One is "DON'T STRUGGLE." As you may well know, struggling makes you sink faster. The other tip, naturally, is to avoid any place quicksand can be found. We vowed never to find ourselves alone in any environment hospitable to the quicksand . . . though none of us knew which environments those might be. The woods in our backyards? The desert? The tropics? Central Park? I still have no idea where one is likely to find the sand of death.

So that commercial has got me thinking about all of these things, but also about the origin of my awareness. From where did I first learn of quicksand? Could it be from the episodes of Land of the Lost? Or at least one episode of Fantasy Island, as AP suggests? Perhaps from one of those Japanese monster movies I used to watch on Sunday afternoon? If anyone can relate to this post and/or remember how quicksand became a prominent feature of my generation's consciousness, please do throw me a bone. Or, a branch, I should say, keeping with the theme of "Save me from this gritty quagmire of death!"