Before he found his niche as the creator of Alf, Paul Frusco made a series of puppet shows for Showtime that established him as perhaps the most accomplished of all Jim Henson imitators. The puppets in "The Crown of Bogg," his 1981 Showtime Halloween special, look a lot like less-evolved Muppets. The kingdom of Bogg looks a lot like Fraggle Rock, and the script, while a bit lacking in the pacing department, is full of funny one-liners that sound like Muppet show jokes. The look and feel of the special reminds me a LOT of those early Muppet specials, like "The Muppet Musicians of Bremen."
"The Crown of Bogg" is a strange special. In the underground kingdom of Bogg, King Mildew is just about to officially declare his son, Milo, the heir to the thrown. Milo is a bit unsure he wants the hassle, but the king apparently convinces him with a fairly unmemorable song, "On Top Is Best." However, the king's brothers announce a challenge, and The Three Wise Guys, a trio of Boggians who deal with this sort of stuff, declare that the crown will go to anyone who can retrieve the original Crown of Bogg, which has been gone for years.
The crown is gone, but known to be in a museum just above the surface, where it is said to bear a terrible curse (the nature of which is unknown). Anyone who went to get it before has never come back. With his brothers in hot pursuit, King Mildew and his son head for the museum, which is throwing a Halloween party.
There are plenty of parts where this half hour special sort of drags, but, overall, it's a very impressive attempt to duplicate a Muppet special. Many of the one-liners are really very funny. Most kids who saw this would probably assume that it was, in fact, the Muppets, which I suppose was probably the point.
"The Crown of Bogg" aired on Showtime in 1981, and was re-aired occasionally throughout the mid 80s. There was never a VHS or DVD release, but a TV rip hit youtube just after Halloween in 2009, bringing to light one of the most notorious of the "long lost specials." Enjoy!
Witch's Night Out is one of my favorites - it's a "special" in the purest sense of the word. Though a few of the characters had appeared in a "winter" special a few years before, this one-off show creates an entire world that exists for 22 minutes, then vanishes forever.
Only a handful of specials do this, and very few did it well enough to stand up to repeat viewings. Perhaps moreso than any other Halloween special, WITCH'S NIGHT OUT is funny year after year, thanks to its snappy script. It was first aired on NBC and was a staple on the Disney Channel around Halloween from 1983 up until some point in the 1990s. It's among the most fondly remembered of all Halloween specials that didn't involve an already-famous comic strip character.
It's also notable for having introduced "PLOT B" of Halloween specials.
PLOT A, of course, is that the "witch" in the old house turns out to be a sweet old lady who gives great candy to trick-or-treaters.
PLOT B, however, ends with everyone disco dancing. This is the one that started it all. Paul Lynde had already ended his special with a disco party, but this is the first time when it was really a way of wrapping up a plot.
(Plot C, for the record, is where there's a character who doesn't love Halloween in the beginning and changes his or her ways; at least half of all Halloween specials probably fit into one of those three.)
Disco endings would be a staple of specials for some time, lasting well into the 80's - even Strawberry Shortcake was not immune from Disco Fever in the 80s (years after the rest of the world had moved on, of course), but this was the one that started it all (though, to be fair, could could argue that it was virtually a tie with The Devil and Daniel Mouse, which has a disco party early on and ends with folk rock.
It's easy to bash Witch's Night Out for its animation - the characters, as you can see, all all monochrome. Some sources say they were originally all the same color, in fact, and the different shades were a later addition put in for later airings. And most of the characters have names like "Small," "Tender," "Nicely," and "Rotten." Then, of course, there's "Bazooie," who really doens't fit the mold at all.
However, if you can look past that (or call it "distinctive" or something, which you can), this is a great special. The style mixes well with the writing and makes it entertaining year after year. Clearly, a lot of talent went into this special (a good many of the people who made this were working on SNL or Second City at the time - Gilda Radner is the witch, and Catherine O'Hara is Malicious). The adults are especially funny, with their mundane (and entirely realistic) party banter, Goodly's enthusiam for prioritizing, delegating responsibilities, and creating definitive experiences, and Malicious's food (chocolate gefilte fish, garlic taffy apples, and other stuff that's probably now available at your local fusion restaurant for forty bucks).
Special notice should be given to the pacing of the story - in a feat almost unrivaled in the genre, it doesn't seem too short or too long. So many half hour specials seem like they're cramming an feature-length story into a shorter time frame. That's better than the hour-length specials that go on way too long, but still - there's something to be said for getting it just right.
A brief note on variations - many of the broadcasts edited a minute or two out, most notably the scene at the end where the witch turns Rotten into a saint.
"Witch's Night Out" hasn't been broadcast in a while, though there's a fairly recent (1995) VHS release out there. It can be a bit expensive to buy , but it DOES pop up on youtube from time to time, and VHS rips sometimes turns up on bootleg DVDs along with "The Halloween That Almost Wasn't." The DVDs and torrents are invariably rips of the VHS. They aren't in perfect quality, but, given the animation and style of the thing, I really doubt that a big remaster would make THAT much of a difference (though I'd love for them to prove me wrong). It's not like we watched this in crisp, sparkling Hi-Definition in the 80s, anyway. The VHS rips look exactly the way I remember it.
I'm counting it as a standalone special, but, technically, it's part of a two episode series; there is an even lesser-known prequel, The Gift of Winter, a 1974 special which featured some of the same characters (Small, Tender, Bazooie, etc), but was in most ways inferior to "Witch's Night Out." It's not nearly as smartly written, and the dialogue is VERY 1974 ("it's good to be free / it's good to be me" - that kind of stuff...interestingly, there are a couple of lines in WNO that seem to be making fun of this sort of 70s psychobabble). But WNO fans may enjoy seeing a few more antics of the characters they've seen year after year, and GIFT OF WINTER has the added benefit of counting Dan Akroyd among the voice cast.
Though not nearly as dated as The Gift of Winter, WITCH'S NIGHT OUT still belongs very much to its time - the title sequence has 1978 written all over it, and the disco song at the end (catchy though it is) dates it quite a bit. But that's part of the fun of watching these old specials, isn't it? Watching the same story in CGI would be a whole different kind of fun. And yet, visually, this thing is harder to date than most. You can look at most cel-animated specials from the late 70s and early 80s and just TELL when they were made. This looks like nothing else that was ever on TV. Indeed, the unique look sort of gives it a timeless quality (though the synthesizer music certainly dates it to the late 70s, early 80s).
Witch's Night Out, in any case, belongs in the collection of every fan of Halloween specials, and generates more emails than any other special on this site by a wide margin.
There was a video here, but the copyright owner asked that it be taken down - I hope this means they're planning to do something with the property, like a re-broadcast or DVD release.
This obscurity has been identified thanks to user comments on the post about Long Lost Special. Details on it are hard to find - it's not even listed at the IMDB. Most sites list it as being from 1991, though the credits say 1989. Watching it now, you can see why it faded into obscurity. The animation here is a notch about that of The Great Bear Scare, but just a notch. The script has its moments, but not very many of them. However, I'm surprised it didn't simply achieve cult status as "the one where the witch farts to get her broom off the ground."
I didn't see this one in 1989 - I don't think I would have wanted to sit through it. I was 11 that year, and this special was probably intended for pre-schoolers. It has that sort of vibe about it, owing parly to the keyboard and xylophone score. The Owl Narrator dominates the story and gives it a sort of "Reading Rainbow" feel.
The story concerns Jennifer, a green witch who was especially known for her green thumb - "her garden made her the most famous witch in all of witchdom." But the local pumpkins, who are a regular bunch of Goodfellas, don't like anything green (they sing a doo-wop song about it that occasionally morphs into a rap, for some reason - I guess that by 1991 you didn't see many street gangs singing doo wop on street corners - we as a nation were poorer for it). The pumpkins hatch a plot to turn poor Jennifer pink, and do just that. Jennifer is horrified to look "like a big piece of bubblegum" and flies off for help.
I should probably note that when she takes off on her broom, she does so by hitting a food pedal, like on a motorcycle. But it looks (and sounds) for all the world like world like she's launching the thing by farting really hard. (Scroll to the 4:15 mark in the second youtube clip if ya don't believe me). Had I seen this as a kid, that's probably what I'd remember the most. I can imagine them wheeling the TV into my kindergarten class to show us this one if we were good, like they did with Reading Rainbow, and we would have all grown up believing that witches get their brooms off the ground by cutting the cheese.
She goes to see Sherman the Shaman, who talks like Miracle Max from "The Princess Bride" and sort of looks like a grown-up, gray haired version of those things Professor Coldheart turned kids into in The Care Bears and the Land Without Feelings. He helps liven up the special, but can't help Jennifer.
The owl informs that the local witches that, since the moon is made of green cheese, she can turn green again by flying past the moon. It works. And that's the story. I gotta admit, the ending really did take me by surprise - I was SURE there was going to be a lesson about how it's okay to be pink in there someplace.
The Witch Who Turned Pink was clearly made on a very, very low budget - you can see where they cut corners all over the place. The script could have been a lot snappier, but it also could have been a whole lot worse (I especially like the mathematical formula that includes "Pumpkin Pi R Squared"). You can make cartoons for pre-schoolers and still be very funny - see The Pumpkin Who Couldn't Smile, for instance. This isn't nearly so funny or creative as that one, but I imagine younger kids probably enjoyed it. Especially the ones who've been wondering how to get a broom off the ground.
The VHS is long out of print, but a "filmed-off-the-tv-screen" version is now on youtube:
Here's a break from our regularly scheduled nostalgia to show off my efforts to share a few specials with my six-year-old stepson. TV is totally different for kids of his generation; TIVO is a fact of life, the idea of time slots seems unusual (I don't think he ever watches anything when it's first broadcast), and none of his favorite shows only come on once a week on Saturday mornings. I have a hard time sitting through most of the new programs he watches - but they're made for him, not for me. And he loves The Smurfs, The Muppet Show, Muppet Babies and Tom and Jerry. He did not, however, realize there was such thing is a Halloween Grinch cartoon - until now:
He loved it, btw. Couldn't get him to watch Witch's Night Out yet , though (given a choice, he went with a Scooby Doo episode about a witch instead).
Oscar Wilde's "The Canterville Ghost" is a hilarious novella about an American family who moves into Canterbury Manor, which has long been haunted by the ghost of Sir Simon, a man who killed his wife there. "It was purely a family matter," the ghost explains. When young Virginia tells him it is wicked to kill anyone, the ghost says "oh, how I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!"
When Columbia made a made-for-TV version of the story in 1986 (starring Alyssa Milano), they made a very interesting choice: they left out most of the humor in favor of presenting it as a straight-up ghost story that would serve as a regular Halloween specials for several years to come. (note: There's some debate as to whether this is the version Disney used to air, or if that was a more rare 1985 version.)
Even without the slapstick from Wilde's original, the special has a lot going for it. Certainly all of the elements of a good haunted house story are here - there's a spooky old castle in some part of the English countryside where the skies always seem gray and foggy. There are servants who tend to vanish into the thin air, and a blood stain on the ground that never seems to go away. The American family who moves in will own the castle if they can stay there for three full months. It's a terrific setup for a haunted house story, even if it WAS meant as a parody of them originally. Disney's version isn't without its humor, but it dispenses with the parody altogether and plays it straight.
It's very interesting to see Columbia trying to be scary instead of going for funny, even when being funny would have probably served the story better AND been more faithful to the original. In Wilde's story, the blood stain keeps re-appearing because the ghost is borrowing paint from Virginia to replace it. "It is a very difficult thing to get real blood nowadays," he explains.
As in the story, the family's daughter, (Virginia in the story, renamed Jenny here), tries to make friends with the ghosts. Virginia isn't really warming to her new stepmother, and asks the ghost to help scare her away. The ghost does his level best, and halfway through the movie, the family realizes that the ghost is real, not just the result of the servants trying to scare them away. As in the story, they make up their mind to try their best to live with the ghost until Jenny uses her tears to help Sir Simon find the solace of death.
Sir Simon in orb form. Hot damn, an "orb" that isn't just dust!
I suppose that I should really judge the special on its own merits, though, not try to compare it to the original. As such, it has a lot going for it, but gets a bit dull sometimes and, at nearly two hours, goes on far too long. But if you loved it and/or were scared of it as a kid, it's not one of those things that you'll rewatch only to be amazed by how easily amused/scared you were as a kid. I didn't see it as a kid, but I don't think I would have been able to sit through it, honestly. I would have been scared out of my wits by the scary parts, wouldn't have gotten most of the jokes, and wouldn't have made it through the parts that seem to drag on and on.
I highly recommend reading the hilarious original (it's a quick read) before watching it, just to get some use out of those comparing and contrasting skills you perfected back in English 101. It's on youtube now, of course. Here's the first part:
People who grew up in the 80s tend to think Mr. Boogedywas awesome, but Halloweentown, the Disney Channel's 1998 made-for-TV movie, sucked. Judging by the comments online, "children of the 90s" think Halloweentown was awesome, but that the movies the Disney channel is making nowadays suck. And so the cycle continues…
When I started this site, I wanted to avoid watching Halloweentown, but now that the movie has become THE Disney Channel Halloween Special for a generation, I decided to give it another shot. I'd only seen it once, years ago, and I thought it was awful. Watching it now, though, I realize I was just doing the same thing everybody does - instinctively hating stuff that was meant for the next generation after mine. In fact, Halloweentown is every bit as good as Mr. Boogedy or The Worst Witch. Like those, it's not very scary (to an adult) and the jokes aren't always funny, but it's perfectly entertaining, and people who watched it as little kids will get all nostalgic watching it again as teenager or adults. Was marketing nostalgia to teenagers always viable, or has our fast-paced internet era sped things up?
Anyway, in the movie, Halloween has come and 13 year old "weird stuff" enthusiast Marnie Cromwell is not allowed to go trick or treating for reasons her mother won't discuss. The truth is that she's a witch, but her mother has given up magic and wants to raise her daughters and son "normal." And she would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for that meddling grandma.
The family is a bit more "cartoonish" than the novelty-shop owning Davis family in Mr. Boogedy who seemed like they might have really been my neighbors in the 80s - but the Cromwells might as well seem a bit less realistic, seeing as how they're a family of witches. Marnie, the girl who is the hero of the story, is a cool character - she's weird (but not TOO weird), smart (but not TOO smart), and probably very relatable to regular girls everywhere. Her little sister is adorable and her brother is an annoying little git (girls who are heroes in movies and books aimed at Halloweentown's target audience almost ALWAYS have annoying little brothers, don't they? This one reminds me of Kenny, the little brother in Judy Blume's Blubber).
Grandma arrives and amuses the kids with tales of Halloweentown, a place where witches, monsters, and ghosts are real. After putting them to bed, Marnie overhears mom and grandma talking and learns the truth - she's a witch, Halloweentown is real, and something strange is going on there. People have been disappearing. With her adorable sister and annoying brother ( in tow, she stows away on the bus to Halloweentown.
Halloweentown is populated by some of the least convincing-looking monsters yet put to film. Most of the monsters look for all the world like people wearing Halloween costumes that they bought at K-Mart. The special effects here are a step above the ones in 80s specials, naturally, but the costumes sometimes leave a bit to be desired. Guys with pumpkin heads have perfectly normal human arms.
The first scene in town is probably all most people my age need to see before passing judgement on this one; most specials that didn't have the budget for costumes would focus more energy on art direction and just not have as many people NEED costumes. But that was impossible for a script like this, which required a whole town full of monsters in an age when mixing CGI characters with real ones hadn't quite come into its own (having Jar Jar in The Phantom Menace mix with human characters a year after this came out was a huge novelty at the time - remember?)
Halloweentown is in trouble because Kalabar, the mayor, is secretly determined to turn Halloweentown residents into some sort of unholy army to help him take over the mortal world. When he's not dressed as the mayor, he wears a hooded robe and has a face that, well, that kinda looks like a Skeletor wearing a potato sack mask. Actually, in a way, it ALMOST looks like a sandwich. Oh, how I wanted this guy to start yelling "Boogedy boogedy boo!" But, alas, the light he shoots out of his hands is blue, not green.
The movie is, as I said, better than most people of my age would like to think. Cheesy? Sure, but no more so than your average halloween special, and it doesn't seem like they're trying to stretch a 10 minute story into a 90 minute time slot, which is a pretty common problem in these things. It DOES lack the spookiness and atmosphere that the best specials tend to have (all you really have to do is show some brown leaves and people wearing jackets, ya know), but it's got some degree of action, comedy, suspense, and romance, and it might make you wish your grandma would show up and tell you YOU'RE a witch. Not as much as Harry Potter, of course, but still. I can see why kids would love it. And Marnie, who is a smart aleck when necessary, doesn't dress like a hooker (even on Halloween), and can identify heiroglyphics from the Book of the Dead, seems like a pretty good role model.
As was their habit in the early-mid 00s, Disney made several sequels. For a while there, Disney a a regular sequel factory, cranking out sequel after sequel to every movie they made, including whatever they could find from their back catalog. I hear they're going to start knocking that off now and go back quality over quantity. One can only hope.
But, partly because the sequels keep interest alive, Disney still airs this movie about 10 times a year. I would rather have them air this one 9 times some year and fill the extra couple of hours by re-airing some of the classics from their vault that they completely ignore. I mean, I'm fine with letting the generation after mine have specials of their own, but can't WE have digital quality copies our beloved old specials, instead of blurry vhs rips made from 20 year old tapes?
This movie teaches that magic is just wanting something bad enough, then letting yourself have it. If we want it bad enough, maybe Disney WILL crack open the vaults some year.
Or, we can just use youtube.
Halloweentown is there now, though I'd be fairly surprised if Disney doesn't take it down. Here's a playlist - just sit back and let it play!
Look out, folks - ol' hamburger face is back! In 1987, on the heels of their success with the hour-long special Mr. Boogedy, the Disney channel made a feature length follow-up, Bride of Boogedy. It's not as good as the first one, but it DOES have a lot going for it.
"Mr. Boogedy" ended up with Mr. Davis saying "there's no such thing as ghost," to which the disembodied voice of Mr. Boogedy replied "Wanna bet?" Given this, I don't really understand why Mr. Davis spends the first 45 minutes of "Bride of Boogedy," the full length of the first special, saying that the rash of recent Boogedy sightings are nonsense. When his daughter sees him, he says it must have been the paper boy. "In a pilgrim hat?" the daughter asks. "Well," he explains, "this is New England."
Actually, Mr. Davis's reluctance to believe in Boogedy is just ONE of the things I don't understand about "Bride of Boogedy," a movie where abandoned wax museums, graveyards, and gypsy fortune tellers come out of nowhere. Characters like the grave digger appear for no real reason, then disappear as quickly as they came. When people get possessed and start emitting green light, the family and townspeople just take it in stride (this is pretty standard - in REAL life, if someone saw a real ghost floating around and shooting green light, they'd run like hell and start wondering what this meant about life, the universe, and everything, which wouldn't serve the plot very well at all).
The first half of the movie - before Mr. Boogedy starts possessing people - makes very little sense. I'm not really complaining; even the scenes I didn't quite follow were a lot of fun to watch. In particular, the gag-shop-owning Davis family remains one of the most engaging families I've ever seen in a made-for-TV movie. They're very realistic, as families who get possessed by dead pilgrims go. They don't respond to situations the way real people would, of course, but, hey, it's only a movie. One that has Eugene Levy with a mustache. You know going into it that plot holes and cheesiness probably come with the territory, and the Davis family really does seem like a family that would have lived in my neighborhood in the 80s.
It almost seems as though the original intention was to make this sort of a whodunnit mystery, with someone in town PRETENDING to be Mr. Boogedy, then some cigar-chomping producer decided that Mr. Boogedy had to be in the movie after all, prompting a last-minute rewrite.
It becomes clear early on that SOMEONE is out to get the Davis family, and everyone in town is made into a suspect.:
- Mr. Lynch, the local general store owner (Eugene Levy with a mustache), clearly has it in for the Davis family. Their gag shop is stomping all over his plan to sell busted gags, and he's awfully upset that the town has made Mr. Davis honorary mayor of Luci-fest, the annual carnival, instead of him.
-The guy who runs the historical society (the role formerly played by John Astin) acts awfully suspiciously throughout the movie.
-Whoever used to own the wax museum vanished a long time ago, leaving one to wonder if he's hiding out as some sort of real estate scheme that he'll get away with if no meddling kids show up.
-Lazarus (the gravedigger who shows up out of nowhere and says "I'm Lazaurs. I dig graves.) almost HAS to be up to something.
-The gypsy fortune teller seems kind of suspicious, too.
-Uncle Elmer is rather upset that his brother, Mr. Davis, prefers to stay in the town of Lucifer Falls rather than taking the gag company's offer to make him Whoopee Manager of the East Coast.
-There are a couple of women in town who strike me as suspicious, too.
What we have here are the building blocks for a terrific little drawing room mystery that would have built up to the revelation of who was REALLY out to get the Davis family and making them think that Boogedy had returned. But all of this goes right out the window when Mr. Davis gets possessed by Mr. Boogedy halfway through the movie.
Possessed by the spirt of Boogedy, Mr. Davis starts to float around, belching green light and shouting "boogedy boogedy boo!" Uncle Elmer saves the day by showing up in a gorilla suit, making everyone laugh the curse away, and that could have been a reasonable end to the movie. But the magic cloak promptly vanishes, and Boogedy claims his next victim, the bitter My. Lynch. Having seen Davis possessed by Boogedy, he decides the reason Davis is so popular and successful is black magic, and steals the cloak for himself just in time to disrupt the town carnival.
Lynch intends to use the cloak to mess with the Davis family and drive them out of town, but ends up getting possessed by Boogedy, who regains his cloak and starts to run amok. The wax museum characters are brought to life and sent to wreak havoc on the carnival, leading to a regular Halloween that Almost Wasn't reunion as Dracula, the Wolf Man, and co. start terrorizing the popcorn vendors.
When Boogedy soars into town to wreck the carnival, Mr. Davis, as honorary mayor of Luci-fest, is honor-bound to confront him. Seeing Mrs. Davis dressed in a pilgrim costume, Boogedy decides that SHE must be Marion, his long dead bride, and zaps her with green light that gives her a Bride of Frankenstein hair-do, justifying the movie's title with only 6 minutes left in the movie - just enough time for the gypsy fortune teller to hold a seance and save the day, with help from the ghost of Jonathan, the little pilgrim boy, who shows up at the seance with all the information they need.
Where did the ghostly Jonathan get the information? Jonathan won't reveal his ghostly source. "He told me not to tell," he says. Was it Jesus? The Great Pumpkin? Most likely, it was someone telling the writers to wrap it up in the next three pages, no matter what plot holes they had to leave behind.
Now, don't get me wrong - I enjoyed this movie, even during the times when I wasn't entirely sure what was going on. The actors seemed to be enjoying themselves, and when you get the idea that a movie was fun to make, it sort of becomes fun to watch. But the movie is a bit of a mess. I can't really decide whether the 90 minute runtime (twice the length of Mr. Boogedy) made it too long or if it wasn't really long ENOUGH to develop the many threads of the plot. Maybe the original idea was to make Boogedy into a TV series, and they crammed all of their ideas for the first season into one movie.
But I'd still rather watch this than, say, Halloweentown. Not because it's BETTER than Halloweentown - it's probably not, honestly. But watching stuff from the 80s gives me that warm, nostalgic feeling, and I'll never get that same feeling from a movie that came out 10 years after this one.
Like Mr. Boogedy, the movie has never been given a proper release on DVD, though bootleg DVDs and torrents (all made from VHS tapes, usually taped from broadcasts rather than the somewhat limited official VHS releases) float around. See it right here via youtube!
Is there a special, or a version of Legend of Sleepy Hollow, that I'm missing? Just want to tell me I'm an idiot for comparing the halloween-hating woman on King of the Hill to Sarah Palin?
Text copyright 2006-2009 by Adam Selzer, all rights reserved. No videos are hosted on this site, and are not for sale on this site. The only ones I can take any credit for uploading to youtube at all are the Zombie shorts.
