1973: Pyramid Films Sleepy Hollow Cartoon

Well, here we have an odd cartoon short to add to the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" variants. The characters generally have the monochrome look of characters that you see in Witch’s Night Out, only they keep changing color. Ichabod is blue in one scene, then white in the next and orange in the next. It makes for an odd style. Ichabod’s long and spindly limbs make him look like a spider (which would actually an interesting way to portray ol’ Ichabod), and his chin and nose look like a couple of penises. Many viewers might be turned off just by the look of the thing.

But this faithful adaptation - including references to the “Indian wizard,” the “woman in white,” “major Andre’s tree,” and other urban folklore of Sleepy Hollow included in the original story but seldom mentioned in adaptations - has a lot a going for it. The spooky sequences are really cool, and remind me of the trippy sequence in A Boy Named Charlie Brown where Shroeder plays Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata. The marker and watercolor-style illustrations are genuinely ominous and may scare the heck out of little kids.

Less successful, though, are the sequences in between the scary parts, with montages of Ichabod singing, eating, and dancing. These just seem like bad Sesame Street sequences to me. Also, the bouncy country score under the “midnight ride” sequence doesn’t quite seem to fit with the visuals. 

Originally produced in 1973 (presumably as a film strip to be played in schools?) and shown on HBO in the 80s, this is an odd little entry to the Sleepy Hollow cartoon canon. Not the best version out there, but the “dark” sequences make it memorable. 

Now available on youtube: 

2010: Scared Shrekless

When it’s at its best, the Shrek series is pretty terrific - long before everyone on the planet was covering Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” it utilized the song to tremendous effect. Putting Leonard Cohen in a kids movie is downright subversive, in its way. Shrek 2 had a bar full of villains in which Captain Hook was playing piano “Little Drop of Poison,” a Tom Waits number. 

But less successful is the use of, say, Smashmouth. The Cohen and Waits songs, like Pee Wee King’s “You Belong to Me” (which was also used to great effect) have an “outside of time” quality about them that makes them fit into Shrek’s world pretty cleanly. Smashmouth, Neil Diamond, Ricky Martin, and some of the other artists whose works they utilized belong too much to our world. 

Perhaps this is why Shrek, though sucessful, never began as big an institution as I think it could have been, and why Monsters Inc, which the first movie beat out for the best animated feature oscar, holds up a bit better for me.  

Now, this isn’t to say that the Shrek movies aren’t funny - they certainly are, particularly the brilliant first one. But, then, there are times in each installment when they seem to fall back too hard on bodily function jokes and cultural references that make the first movie seem more dated than it should. Now, don’t get me wrong here - I’m fine with pop culture references in cartoons, books, whatever*. I don’t think they automatically make something dated at all, they just make it clear what year a given story is taking place in. When I read a book that takes place n 1964, even if it was written around that time, I want Beatles references. But perhaps those references only age well if they actually refer to things from the world in which the story takes place. Lifting them into Shrek’s fantasy setting doesn’t hold up as well. Also, though I’m by no means opposed to a fart joke or a poop joke, when they come up in Shrek, I just want to look at the writers and say “Come on, now - you’re better than that.” Some of them seem shoe-horned in to keep the kids laughing at a series where most of the jokes are probably going over their heads. 

But, hey. You do what you gotta do. 

I haven’t kept track of the series as well as perhaps I should have, but the delightful 2010 Halloween special - Scared Shrekless - makes me want to go back and make up for lost time. Presenting a sort of anthology in which Shrek and the gang try to top each other’s scary stories, this plays like one of the better Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror installments. The title alone shows that the writers here weren’t scared into being approrpiate first and funny second, though it did make me worry that I was in for an evening of poop jokes. But I needn’t have worried - even with such tempting bait for poop joke writers as three ogre babies in diapers (could there be a more tempting bait?), Scared Shrekless didn’t rely on the naughty bits or topical jokes - it just set out to be a damned fine Halloween special, and pulled off one of the best such things in the last fifteen or twenty years. 

Beginning with Shrek and his wife and young children trick or treating, Shrek ends up taking his usual pals - Donkey, the gingerbread man, Pinnochio, and the Puss in Boots - out to a supposedly haunted castle, where they’ll try to scare each other. Shrek, as an ogre, claims that he can’t be scared, because he’s the one who does the scaring. Ogres, he and Fiona, his wife, explain, are the kings of Halloween.

The first story is that of the Gingerbread Man, who tells of the night he went to see his baker, having been kicked out by his girlfriend (now there’s a life event that doesn’t happen in many kids’ shows) and demanding that the baker make him a bride. The baker is reluctant to use as much sugar as the gingerbread man calls for, but goes along with it, resulting in the creation of gingerbread woman, who immediately starts acting like a slightly older version of Elmira, the annoying clingy girl from Tiny Toons. Now, as a rule, I don’t think psychotic girlfriends are very funny (they sure aren’t in real life), but it was fun to watch the gingerbread man dealing with adult relationship problems in his high-pitched voice, and fun to watch the evil gingerbread bride coming back to haunt him after he (yes) kills her.

It was the part where he killed her that made me realize I was watching something much more in line with The Simpsons than, say, a Nicktoon (and not just because she dies just about the same way Bart and Lisa do at the end of Treehouse of Horror 5). People don’t usually get killed in stuff that’s aimed at kids - or, if they do, they generally fall to their death and die offscreen, so more sensitive children, perhaps, could imagine that they just landed on their heads and got a bump that made them change their ways (this would not have been me; I remember making my mother assure me, again and again, that the wicked witch from Snow White was never seen again after falling into that deep chasm).

From there, Scared Shrekless flounders just slightly - the segment in which Donkey is stalked by a donkey-eating waffle never gets a chance to develop, and the segment in which Shrek gives Gepeto parenting advice when Pinnochio gets possessed by his conscience devolves into “puke in the face / kick in the nuts” jokes. All in all, both of the last segments just needed more time. 

And so what we end up with isn’t so unusual - a Halloween special that seems to be wrong length for its script. But in a bit of a rare move, it’s one that I wish was longer; there was too much wild invention here to cram into twenty-one minutes, and the last ten seemed stuffed with the writers trying to get all their jokes in. And I couldn’t blame them. Scared Shrekless is funny, just scary enough that you know that they aren’t wussing out for the sake of the easily-frightened kids, and as gorgeous, visually, as any Halloween special ever produced.

The 2011 DVD is packaged with Thriller Night, another mini Shrek Halloween special, a five minute parody of the “Thriller” video that opens with Shrek running, screaming, from a screening of The Sound of Music. What follows is an excellent, almost shot-for-shot remake of the famous video, with Shrek in the role of Michael Jackson’s girlfriend. It’s pretty funny, too. 

* - maybe I’m just being bitter here - my own attempts to work Leonard Cohen references into a young adult satire, I Kissed a Zombie and I Liked It, earned me a number of reviews saying that they’d make the book “dated” in a few years; one reviewer said that I was foolish to assume that a teenage character today would know who Leonard Cohen was because he was popular when I was in high school (huh?). But some of the girls who didn’t know the Cohen songs responded to them, anyway - the quotes from the songs that got worked into the book (and were presented as Cohen quotes) show up attributed to me now and then. It’s kind of embarrassing. 

1985: Scrabble People in: A Pumpkin Full of Nonsense

When I was in grade school, they used to push the heck out of an annual Halloween party for younger kids that would be put on at the high school. The fliers they sent home with us made this look like a costume party for the ages, and I suppose I imagined it as being not unlike the party from the end of The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t. Or perhaps even the really wild party from Teen Wolf.

I finally managed to go in second grade, and was I horribly disappointed. After the costume contest, which I lost to a kid who had a fancy store-bought mask from Spencer Gifts, they sat us down to watch a movie using the old film projector. It started out seeming promising enough: a man said, “I hope you’re feeling brave, because we’re going into a very scary place.” So far, so good.

But that “scary place” was the average household, and the movie was half an hour of Bugs Bunny narrating tips for household safety. Boy, was I mad! They set us up for a good Halloween video, then show us a freaking safety movie. That night might have been the night I did the most swearing under my breath of my young life, an art I perfected later that year playing right field in Little League games that seemed to go on for years without anyone ever hitting the ball into right field. I was already mad that my mummy costume - a combination of a flimsy vinyl mask and a whole lot of toilet paper - had lost to some kid with a fancier mask, and now they’d pulled this crap on us. 

The Scrabble People In: A Pumpkin Full of Nonsense gives me a similar sort of feeling. It gets listed as Halloween specials on various lists of such things, and it was first aired on television on Halloween, 1985, so I guess it qualifies as a Halloween special. I feel bad for the poor kids who tuned in.

I started off with wonderful nostalgic feeling as I slipped the tape into the VCR (just doing THAT is almost nostalgic now) and saw the balloon logo for the Children’s Video Library come onscreen as the mellow keyboardy woodwind music played. This really did take me back to a whole world of similar low-end cartoons that I watched as a kid, but haven’t tapped for nostalgia yet. 

Then the show opened with two kids, Lulu and Tom, going into a pumpkin patch in their Halloween costumes, accompanied by an odd fellow named Mr. Scrabble who is referred to as their “friend and servant.”  He reminded me of Fred from Scooby Doo. So we had a nice autumnal background and kids in costumes talking about going to a Halloween party, and I was feeling nostalgic. So far, so good. Nice nostalgic feeling, nice Halloween atmosphere, and two kids going into a pumpkin patch with a guy who strikes me as a bit odd.

In my heart of hearts, I knew he wasn’t going out there to bury the kids in a shallow grave or anything, but I was all set up for a nice Halloween cartoon. Unfortunately, all references to Halloween and all of the Halloweenish atmosphere that you get in the first minute are over by minute two. At that point, the characters fall down a hole in a giant pumpkin that leads them into a strange town called Nonsense. In Nonsense, all the signs are missing letters, and what letters they have are sometimes in the wrong order (ie, the school sign says SCHL). Horrors!

In 1984, I suppose everyone was trying to launch their famous brand as a Care Bears-style multimedia property. Of all the companies that tried, the people from Scrabble probably did the worst job out of anyone. The “Scrabble People” were designed by the same company who made the Cabbage Patch Kids, and you can see some similarities; the Scrabble People look sort of like the Cabbage Patch Kids might have looked if the designers had done a really half-assed job. “Mr. Scrabble,” in particular, makes no sense to me - his relationship to these kids is never quite explained, leaving me with the uncomfortable feeling that he was some weirdo who took those kids into the pumpkin patch to perform unspeakable acts. 

Anyway, Mr. Scrabble and the kids find out that no one in town is allowed to read or write, because their evil overlord , The Muddler (who looks like a goofier version of the Mad Doctor from Mickey Mouse and the Mad Doctor, who was much scarier), has made such things illegal in order to make sure he’s always better than everyone else, since he can read and write. A great many of what jokes there are here are tasteless fat jokes at the expense of the Muddler’s daughter, Rotunda, who demands that Mr. Scrabble marry her. “Is there anything my fiance would like before he walks down the aisle?” the insufferable girl asks. “A very narrow aisle,” Mr. Scrabble replies.

From there, with the help of a princess in exile who knows how to read, the people of Nonsense learn that letters can be made into “their very own words,” and fight for what the back cover describes as “the freedom to read and spell.”

The freedom to spell. Now there’s something our founding fathers had on their minds when they crapped themselves to death of dysentery during the brutal winter at Valley Forge. I realize that some people spell stuff for fun, but did you ever wonder who came up with the idea of spelling bees? Who was the first person who said, ‘I know, guys, let’s all stand around and spell stuff!” What a nut that person must have been. 

Outside of the general nostalgia of watching a cartoon on VHS, the best part of this one, to me, was taking a certain delight in how alarmingly un-PC it all was in regards to the character of Rotunda. Now, Rotunda is not a nice person - when her father sentences a boy to a year in a dungeon for wanting to put letters on the signs, she lobbies for two years before falling through the floor (as she’s wont to do). She could almost be a fun villain with a few tweaks. But what’s shocking about her is how free the show is with the cheap fat jokes at her expense. Even at the end, when books are restored to the world and people are being nice to her, someone thoughtfully gives her a diet book. 

In the end, I felt bad for the kids who turned this on on Halloween, 1985, when it aired in a handful of local markets. They wanted a Halloween special and got an edutainment video that made no attempt at all to be scary. The animation was decent (I was amused that it looked as though it could have been made any time between about 1947 and 1987), but really, who cares? 

There are moments in the script when I can tell the writer wasn’t as bad as the concept forced him to be, so I wasn’t too surprised to look him (George Atkins) up and find that he had quite a list of credits, including episodes of Ducktales, Pound Puppies and The Real Ghostbusters, as well as The Bullwinkle Show. I’m more inclined to blame the producers for this one. A revision or two might have made this one pretty neat, in a Phantom Tollbooth sort of way, except that giving the Scrabble People something to do was probably a requirement, and those guys just dragged the whole thing down. 

Maybe I’m being too hard on it. Maybe I’m just mad about the ol’ bait-n-switch they pulled on me in 1988. The Scrabble People tried to entertain kids while teaching them stuff, which is a noble thing to try, and I suppose I wouldn’t have minded this, maybe I even would have liked it, if we’d watched it during class in kindergarten and nobody told me it was supposed to be a Halloween cartoon in the first place. The Scrabble People, in any case, never even got into our cultural vocabulary to the extent that, say, Sweet Pickles did. There were a few Scrabble People books and toys, but there were no more videos. All it did for me now was bring back those old feelings that I got when I was duped into watching that safety film after losing a costume contest to a little asshole in a store-bought mask.

And that Bugs Bunny thing they showed us? I believe it was a piece called An Ounce of Prevention. It’s never been released on video at all - only 16mm prints. Extant descriptions say that it showed graphic scenes of burn victims, which I somehow don’t recall at all, even though they were probably far more gruesome than any costume from that night.

1991: Ernest Scared Stupid

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…for he today that sheds blood with me shall be my brother…and gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accur’d they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day. -Shakespeare, Henry V Remember flipping channels? In the age of cable boxes and on-screen guides, it’s sort of a lost art. Now and then one would stumble across something fantastic, or something that seemed hilarious when paired with the last show you had one. Like when Beavis and Butt-head were flipping channels: “You’re sending that many men against Rambo? Well, you’d better bring a lot of (click!) zip lock bags!” Most of the time flipping channels was just a waste of time, but now and then you would come up with a delightful sort of “organic mash-ups.” Like the time I caught “St. Crispin’s Day speech” in which Henry V pumps his army up for battle on one channel, then flipped over and caught the big battle scene from the end of Ernest Goes to Camp.

Everyone I knew loved Ernest Goes to Camp, even though I don’t think any of us had ever seen any of the Ernest commercials that made him famous in the first place (I sure don’t remember any of them). After all, though poop jokes ruled the playground, very few kids shows in those days dared to use bathroom humor. Ernest Goes to Camp opened with Ernest looking into a toilet and going “eewwwww.” The 1980s was an era of summer camp movies, and Ernest stands out among them.

When it came out, Ernest Goes to Camp was sort of a go-to example when writers needed to refer to a bad movie. The Far Side had Siskel and Ebert watching it in hell. Perfect Strangers had Larry and Balki working as flight attendants (for some reason) unable to calm down unruly passengers with the promise of an Ernest Goes to Camp screening. 

But my friends and I loved it. When I got to middle school and met kids who’d gone to the other elementary schools in town, I found that they loved it, too. I like to imagine that it had more of an impact on my generation than any of us would probably like to admit. Maybe I’m just being crazy here, but there must have been people at Occupy Wall Street who had their first stirrings of anti-corporate sentiment watching Ernest and the Camp Kikiki gang take on the evil developers and construction workers with flying turtles and flaming eggseronious.

The movie was enough of a hit to spawn the Ernest Saturday Morning Show, which people seem to remember fondly. I shouldn’t really comment, since I haven’t seen an episode in 25 years and only remember bits and pieces, but I do remember a segment in which he played a vampire hosting a TV show, and some kid in the audience was hassling him to prove his was a real vampire. “What are you, from Missouri or something?” the vampire said. “You gotta see it to believe it?” I’d seen enough Missouri license plates in Iowa to know that Missouri was the “Show Me” State, but did kids from the East Coast pick that one up? I often think that being willing to tell jokes kids may not get now and then is a sign of a good kids’ show. He never had a Halloween special of his own, exactly, but the next two movies - which focused on Christmas and Halloween themes, respectively, - were probably made with holiday TV airings in mind.

Ernest Saves Christmas didn’t have the same magic as Ernest Goes to Camp, but I was still excited when Ernest Scared Stupid came out - I remember that it was the first movie I was ever allowed to see without any adult supervision. Twenty some years later the only thing I remember all that well is a bit in which Ernest is reading a fragment of a manuscript reading “Thou canst destroy the best with mi k.” The obvious missing letter was L, but Ernest assumed that the word was “Miak,” and took the gag a step further by actually finding a jar of miak. “Bet you didn’t think I could find it out of season!” he crows. 

Well, I also remember that there was a bit here about the “unconditional love” of mothers. This came out the same year as The Last Halloween. What was going on in 1991? Why were all the producers trying to tie sappy bits about motherhood into Halloween programming? Was it all supposed to be an anecdote to the supposedly anti-family sentiments people thought they saw in The Simpsons at the time?

Watching it now for the first time in years, it does spark a lot of synapses in my brain as bits and pieces come back (always a fun experience, no?) and I notice some familiar decorations on the walls in the classroom they show in the beginning.  I’m old enough now to know who Eartha Kitt was and particularly enjoy her portrayal as an old weirdo. But beyond that, well… the “troll” beast just isn’t that scary, or even that spooky. I think there could have been a great Ernest take on the “monster in the woods” motif (a motif dear to my heart), but this sort of falters in comparison to Ernest Goes to Camp. Banding together to fight an evil corporation just seems to inspire me more than spraying milk on an otherworldly beast, or even defeating it with unconditional love while an angry mob chants “kill him” (which might be slightly more touching if the thing’s head didn’t explode, but at least I didn’t learn any valuable lessons).  I’m also a bit bummed that all the leaves in this thing are green - despite the decorations on the walls in the school, you only occasionally get any real Halloween vibe from this, and I seem to remember more of it. Still, it’s perfectly watchable and some of Ernest’s lines are pretty funny. 

Ernest Scared Stupid is pretty harmless. It’s not exactly Henry V, but any one who turns on something with the word “stupid” right in the title ought to know what’s coming and not complain. Scared Stupid may not live as fondly in my memory as the venerable Ernest Goes to Camp. But, hey…at least no one was hurt.

1991: Claymation Comedy of Horrors

(newly rewritten for 2012)

Of all the people you've probably never heard of, Will Vinton may have had the biggest impact on your childhood if you grew up in the 1980s. Vinton is the guy who coined the phrase "Claymation," and was the man behind The Noid and the California Raisins. His Claymation Christmas special from 1987 is still fondly remembered.

In 1991, he followed it up with Claymation Comedy of Horrors, a thirty-minute piece starring Wilshire Pig and Sheldon Snail, a couple of original creations the studio developed (perhaps in order to launch a multi-media property of their own to go with their successful avertising characters). Wilshire was conceived as a a gruff, hustling pig not unlike a swine version of Rotten, the trashy guy from Witch's Night Out.  In the special, he and Sheldon find a map to Dr. Frankenswine's lab and spend half an hour poking around the castle, building to a climax in which a giant monster goes stomping around the countryside smashing sheep to the strains of "Climb Every Mountain." Though it was obviously conceived as a Halloween special, it was originally aired in May, 1991.

Visually, it's pretty nifty, and a couple of the jokes are pretty funny. But Wilshire Pig never quite took off as a hit character, and the special seems to have failed to work its way into my generation's psyche the way the Christmas special did. I don't get emails about this like I do for Witch's Night Out, Mr. Boogedy, or the others, and I can't imagine anyone getting the reference if I quoted a line from it on one of my ghost tours, like I sometimes do with Garfield's Halloween Adventure. A line from that one will always get a few chuckles of recognition, at the very least.

So, where did this one go wrong? Why didn't this one become even a cult hit? The most obvious answer is that they didn't air it as much as some of the others, but that's not really accurate - the Disney channel aired it as a Halloween special throughout the 1990s. The biggest problem is the script - while there are some terrific sequences here, it suffers from a less-than-engaging plot and a general sense that they're just not getting the timing or the pacing right for the jokes to work. It didn't make me want to go watch their Easter special from a couple of years later. Perhaps they should have followed the template of the beloved Christmas special and just done a series of Halloweenish musical numbers, but I get the idea not only that they wanted to try to get Wilshire and Sheldon off the ground, but that they wanted to use some ideas they'd been sitting on; on the Will Vinton web page there's some animation art for an aborted Frankenswine project that was in development from 1979-82.

This gets removed from youtube when it's posted, prompting the usual whining from people who think that putting up an "I don't own this note" should somehow trump copyright protection (I'm always amazed at how many people think I should be fighting the evil studios for the right to put up free download links to the cartoons they make). It's available on DVD in a collection with the Christmas and easter specials. The glowing reviews on amazon almost universally cover only the Christmas entry.

1972: Jack O'Lantern by Rankin Bass

“I smell a rat here!” says the witch.

“Oh, I do hope so,” says her husband, the warlock. “I’m famished!”

In 1972, Rankin Bass launched a series of animated shows entitled Festival of Family Classics, presenting cartoon versions of old folk tales and classic literature. One early episode, Jack O’Lanternt,” wound up being re-aired regularly as a Halloween special in many local markets. 

And in many ways, it’s a pure Halloween special. It wasn’t billed as a special episode or anything, but it does exist outside of any regular series and inhabits a world all its own as it tells the story of how Jack O’Lanterns came to be. 

Having already seen from Mad Monster Party that Rankin Bass specials had the capability to rise above their station (hey, they weren’t all Rudolph’s Shiny New Year, and even the corniest ones have plenty of things going for them), I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to like this one. Maybe there’s just a certain thing about any sereis with the word “Family” in the channel that makes me think something is going to suck. But this is a very solid half hour program with good jokes and fun characters that make up for its short-comings in the production department. In fact, it has the opposite problem of the Mad Monsters entries from Rankin Bass: it could actually stand to be longer. What a few dozen old Halloween shows and you’ll find that most of them could stand to be either longer or shorter; the ones that just aren’t as long as they could be are generally much more fun to watch than the ones that try to get 90 minutes out of what could have been an eight minute script.

Beginning with a couple of kids begging grandpa to tell them a story, the special goes immediately into a flashback of grandpa’s boyhood days on a farm, where he lived with his parents, his sister, a couple of cows, and Billy, their pet goat, “Who didn’t do much of anything except cause trouble.”

One day, their father told them (quite casually) that they’d probably all starve to death soon, because all of the crops were being stolen. Not by crows, he says, but by ghosts and goblins. Young grandpa was a smart lad, and wisely figured that they probably just needed a better scarecrow. To improve their old headless model, he carves a face into a pumpkin.

But this was no pumpkin - it was a leprechaun named Jack O’Lantern who had turned himself into a pumpkin seed to hibernate. As soon as the face is carved, he begins to talk in a thick Irish brogue, and confirms that ghosts, led by Zelda the witch and Archie, her warlock husband, have been stealing the crops to drive farmers off the land so that they can take it for themselves. With a sly chuckle, Jack hops onto the shoulders of the old scarecrow and begins to dance around. That night, he foils the Zelda, Archie and their ghostly minions at every turn.

This all seems like a Home Alone-style story of foiling would-be robbers until Zelda manages to capture the kids; she threatens to turn them into stone if Jack doesn’t leave her and Archie alone and give them his pot of gold (is it wrong that I like it when kids are actually threatened in these things?) Jack emerges in leprechaun form (which makes him look like an Irish Mr. Magoo), leaving his pumpkin behind and saying it’s the pot of gold. 

But Jack still has a few tricks up his sleeve….

The animation here is about a step above what you see in The Great Bear Scare - basically a moving slideshow. It’s a bit annoying at first; enough so that I wished they’d just done a slideshow with voices over it. But I got used to it quickly, and found this one to be rather enjoyable. The production values may have been pretty low, but the script is shart. Jack, with his broad Irish brogue and expressions, is fun to watch, and his rivals are terrific - Archie is a wimpy old warlock who calls to mind a Victorian undertaker who happens to fly on broomsticks. Zelda is, like most witches in cartoons, a feisty woman given to wisecracking - she reminded me of the witch in that Donald Duck short, Madame Mim from The Sword in the Stone, the witch in Witch’s Night Out, and so many others). It’s a style of witch that never seems to get old, though.

Despite the low budget, people who grew up watching this and track down a copy today won’t be shocked by how bad it is; quite the contrary, it’s really a nifty little special, lifted above its production limitations by a good script. 
It's been uploaded to youtube by the folks at DTV5, who have remastered it into looking like an episode of CBS Storybreak, complete with commercials. I'm not sure WHY they made it into a Storybreak (or why the commercials come from both Chicago and New York stations from various eras), but it's neat!

New Stuff Coming Soon!

Hi, everybody!  Autumn is rolling around again; any day now Trader Joe's will be bringing back the spiced cider, my ghost tour work load will go from 4-6 tours per week to 10-14, and the traffic on this page will skyrocket. 

I get about 99% of my traffic in October, so that's why I do most of my posting on this site. I expect a few new posts this year, and I'm trying to replace multi-part youtube links with single files wherever possible.  I still will not be posting download links to most shows; that isn't legal and saying "I don't own this" doesn't make it so; a few copyright holders in particular are vigilant about getting stuff like that taken down, and I want to keep this page going. 

There will, however, just be a FEW new posts, for the simple reason that I'm running out of stuff to add. I could branch into reviewing Halloween episodes of Perfect Strangers, as I did with a few cartoon series, but I don't want this page getting too bloated, to be honest. I want to keep the focus on that wonderful art form that is the Halloween special. I've got just about all of those covered now. 

If you really want to hear more out of me, I do frequently update the The Chicago Unbelievable blog , which talks about history and ghostlore in Chicago. I'll have three new "e-singles" on those topics out via Llewellyn Press on October 1st. I also run a blog called Playground Jungle, which all about tracing the history of songs and rhymes that we all learned on the playground as kids (most are a lot older than we thought), though at this point the site is growing more from comments than anything I could add myself. 

The Midnight Hour (1985)

The Midnight Hour is a made-for-TV movie from 1985, back in the days when stretching the "Thriller" video into a 90 minute feature seemed like a good idea. Levar Burton stars as a hip young teenager who has moved from New York to a small New England town to serve as the love interest to the local black girl, whose great, great, great, great, great grandma was a witch.

After breaking into the town's Witchcraft Museum and stealing a scroll, the local teens head to the cemetery, which keeps a few fog machines running 24x7. After the witch's descendent reads a curse from the scroll, the group takes off before they can see the dead rise from their graves.

The Simpsons would later condense pretty much the exact same plot plot into an eight minute Treehouse of Horror segment, and this movie probably could have been cut to the same length without anyone missing much. Some people LOVE it, but I kept waiting for it to just stop trying to be a serious horror movie and embrace its inner cheesiness, which never QUITE happened.

Trying to explain the plot beyond this is sort of a fool's errand - I tried to write up a description, but I kept having to end every sentence with the phrase "for some reason." Like, is the witch a witch, or a vampire? Is that one zombie a werewolf, or just a really hyper hairy guy?  And how come most of the zombies look like zombies, but the 1950s cheerleader seems so well preserved? And why shoe-horn in the "history of Halloween" lesson that, like most such things, is so painfully inaccurate?

Still, the move has its moments - the "dead rising from their graves" scene is really nifty, if a bit over the top (why shouldn't it be over the top?), and I laughed out loud at the scene where Levar burton splatters his mummy costume with ketchup and raw eggs.

Let's see, we've got milk, soda, purple stuff...ooh, ketchup! All right!

The soundtrack - featuring a bunch of classic rock songs and even a bit of The Smiths (who weren't classic rock yet in 1985) - is really good, and every now and then, whenever people get the radio on, we hear some narration from legendary DJ Wolfman Jack. For a minute, I thought they were going for an American Graffiti thing where Wolfman Jack sort of narrates the teenager's lives over the course of One Night That Changes Their Lives, but the concept sort of fell apart. Also, American Graffiti firmly takes place in 1962, and this movie can't quite decide if it's 1985 or 1955.

Early on, the Wolfman Jack angle had me thinking that this movie might have just been one rewrite away from being a pretty dynamite picture, but by the end, I realized there were TWO good movies stuck inside the script - there's a campy, self-aware zombie comedy and a poignant film about a ghost who gets one night to fall in love. However, the movie as it stands is a little of both but not enough of either. In the end, the curse is broken and the zombies/vampires (which have now absorbed half the town) vanish. They never do tell whether everyone in town is now dead or if breaking the curse turned them back to normal. If they're all dead, the one surviving character takes the fact that all his friends have died, along with the ghostly girl he met a few hours before, remarkably well. Dedicating a song to you on the radio from beyond the graves heals a LOT of wounds.

"We need to make wax from those bones. It's the only way to break the curse." "No kidding?" - actual dialogue.

Maybe it's just my own prejudices speaking here, but  I'm inclined not to blame the writer (William Bleich) for the movie's shortcomings. Maybe he had to write it overnight. Maybe it got chopped up by the ABC executive brass (the plot is RIDDLED with what appear to be the stitches of subplots that never materialize, like the fact that in addition to a notable witch-hanging, the town recently had a serial killer in its midst). Maybe they blew all their money getting the rights to the music (which must have cost a fortune).  Or maybe Bleich just knew that something like this met all the requirements for a made-for-tv project that year, which meant a much better paycheck than writing something more MFA-approved (though he now teaches MFA level screenwriting at Northwestern).

And maybe I'm being too hard on it - it has a bit of a cult following today, and is really quite well-remembered for a 25-year-old made-for-TV movie. But I committed one of the ultimate sins when it comes to Halloween specials - I first saw it at the age of 31, not 10.