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.

1999: Night of the Headless Horseman

1999 was really a banner year for us Sleepy Hollow fans - the best since 1979, and the three versions launched in 1999 were much better, overall, than the three from 1979. We had the Tim Burton movie, the Odyssey made-for-TV version, and, bringing up the rear, this made-for-TV Halloween special featuring the voices of William H. Macy, Luke Perry, Tia Carrera, and Mark Hamill.

The computer-animation here was not exactly cutting edge, even in 1999, and really just looks like a video game. It's hard to watch for a full hour, and the over-the-top performances of the voice actors just don't match up to the animated faces, which couldn't really capture much subtlety or nuance. Indeed, it's little better than watching a puppet show.

But beneath it all is a pretty good script - a fairly faithful adaption that plays up Ichabod as a comic buffoon and makes a lot of use of the other legends and folklore of Sleepy Hollow. There are some good visuals (though many borrow shamelessly from the Disney version, which isn't such a bad source from which to borrow). There's definitely a really good movie in here someplace. The script could have used one good punch-up and the visual, well....surely there was a better way to do this, right?

It's difficult to watch it without trying to guess what could have been done to make it better. The over-the-top performances would have looked fairly ridiculous in a live action drama (actually, it would have probably come off a lot like the adaptation in Once Upon a Midnight Scary). As my recent viewing went on, I found myself thinking that it sounded like a dynamite radio show.

Let's imagine that someone in 1930 had invented a device that automatically generated animated pictures to go along with a radio show. It didn't work for very many shows, so people continued listening to the radio as much as ever, but now and then there'd be a show that included pictures, as well. The pictures weren't perfect, but it was all neat to see. This is sort of an example of the pictures that would have been generated to go along with an excellent radio adaptation of Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I like it a bit better now than I did in 1999.

Bizarre, but fun. A VHS version was released, and hulu was streaming it last year.

My Top Ten Halloween Specials

I've never made a list like this, but I get enough traffic from people looking for the best specials or the top ten specials that I thought I'd write one up:

1. Witch's Night Out

A "special" in the purest sense of the word, Witch's Night Out creates a world out of nothing that exists for about half an hour, then is gone forever. It's sharply written, with funny jokes, and animation that may be a bit crude, but is also stylish and unique. Never released on DVD, though the copyright holders can be FIERCE about getting it taken down whenever it's posted anywhere.

2. The Halloween That Almost Wasn't

The best of live action specials, to my mind. Judd Hirsch clearly has a ball as Count Dracula. The "History of Halloween" lesson is a BIT less horrifyingly inaccurate than most of them. There's a blooper reel hiding in storage someplace - I'd sure like to see it!

3. Garfield's Halloween Adventure

This was THE special for my generation, and is surprisingly scary - the pirate ghosts at the end are legitimately spooky. This is always nice to see - so many cartoons are afraid to be the least bit scary.

4. Halloween is Grinch Night

Though the title alone makes it a "Halloween" cartoon, this is a cool one. The music is catchy, the autumnal atmosphere is dreamy and inviting, and Hans Conried, one of the patron saints of Halloween specials, does as good a job as anyone could replacing Boris Karloff as the voice of the Grinch. They never do say what will happen when the Grinch shows up in town on Grinch Night, but you can bet it ain't gonna be pretty.

5. Raggedy Ann and the Pumpkin That Couldn't Smile.

It takes most of the special for Raggedy Ann and Andy to decide to get a boy a pumpkin, get him a pumpkin, and bring it to him. Indeed, this special really takes its own sweet time for anything to happen. But the sharp, funny dialogue and comedic touches help it rise above countless other boring Halloween cartoons where the creepy old lady turns out not to be so bad, after all.

6. It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

The last of the major specials to continue airing regularly still holds up well, despite a distracting "World War I Flying Ace" subplot. The importance of Vince Guaraldi's note-perfect score cannot be overstated. 

7. The Devil and Daniel Mouse

This would probably rate higher if I'd grown up watching it - it's really much better than a few of these. But you can't underestimate how big of a role nostalgia plays in how much we love these things.

8. Disney's Halloween Treat

The first show I remember watching - in fact, I'm not sure I have any earlier memories of television at all. Just a compilation of earlier cartoons, but what great, spooky cartoons they are! 

9. Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolf Man

A made for video entry from a brief period when it seemed like they wanted to relaunch the Chipmunks as an all-Halloween franchise.  The Frankenstein entry isn't much to write home about, but the Wolf Man movie was fantastic. Fairly funny and with that wonderful Halloween vibe that I love so much.

10. The Halloween Tree

This animated adaptation of Ray Bradbury's novel gets a bit dull in parts, and the "history of Halloween" isn't entirely accurate, but it manages to make its point about why we (and many other cultures through history) celebrate death and horror every year. It's got the best creepy house on the edge of town in the business, and a daring, haunting ending.

Honorable mentions:

Ichabod and Mr Toad

Disney's own take on Legend of Sleepy Hollow is still probably the best (and most faithful) adaption of them all. This would be on top of the list if it wasn't disqualified for not being a true "special," just a movie that aired on Halloween a lot. I'm picky (perhaps "dorky" is a better word) about this kind of stuff.

Mr. Boogedy / Bride of Boogedy

These haven't really aged well, and "Bride" seems to be trying to cram a 13 episode season into a 90 minute movie, but the sheer number of letters I get from people who had nightmares about Mr. Boogedy speak for themselves. A nifty special that I'd like to see on a proper DVD release (though Disney has taken no interest at all in its 1980s back catalog in recent years).

Frankenweenie 

Tim Burton's early short film pretty much lays out the template and style Burton would use in most of his subsequent movies when he became a major director. 

Teddy Bear Scare (1998)

The Teddy Bear Scare (alternately known as The Great Bear Scare, not to be confused with the other special of the same name) is about pair of teddy bears, Benjamin and Wally, who come to life. The concept is not to be confused with Teddy Ruxben, Superted, or any number of similar cartoons that have come and gone over the years. The first lines of dialogue involve the teddy bears seeing their owners coming home. "It's about time," says one. "I could use a hug." Clearly, folks, we are in for some halloween horror here.

Since the writers had come up with such a highly original concept as teddy bears coming to life, and decided to make a Halloween special, they came up with the even MORE original concept of two kids, the bears' owners, believe that the old lady who lives in the creepy old house on their block is a wicked witch. The old lady is voiced by Margot Kidder and looks like Phyllis Diller.

Perhaps I'm being too hard on this one, which has been MIA for years until the good folks at halloweenshows.net encoded it.  I've been around the writing industry long enough to know that the best way to impress a producer is to say, "I've got a concept - there's this girl who wants to be a dancer, but her mom doesn't want her to. But then, she takes lessons anyway, and right before the big recital, the guy she likes convinces her mom to come and cheer her on. And she's just about to panic and blow the recital when she sees her mom there, smiling, and then everything is okay!" The entertainment business is FULL of guys who would think that was BRILLIANT. Or, anyway, guys who think it would be profitable. Formula sells. 

But, then again, Raggedy Ann and the Pumpkin Who Couldn't Smile took an equally bland concept and managed to make it witty and creative. Even The Great Bear Scare, which had  some SERIOUS production limitations blocking its attempt to launch a teddy bear-oriented multi-media property, had its moments. The teddy bears here suffer from a distinct lack of   personality. The Care Bears may have each been based around one single trait, but these ones never quite rise above seeming like a "Corduroy" knock off. One single trait would have helped. Maybe they got better in their later shows (episodes of The Secret World of  Benjamin    Bear were still being produced as recently as 2009; perhaps this just isn't a good  introduction  to them).

These kind of specials almost ALWAYS worked better when it turned out that the old person really WAS a witch or werewolf or time-traveling weirdo who could extract years from the burnt-out end of your life in order to spare the life of your friend.  Actually BEING one allowed the witch in Witch's Night Out to be about 200% more entertaining than she would have been if it had turned that out she was just a nice old lady who happened to use sentences that gullible kids could easily mistake of double entendres ("I'm sure you're just DYING to find out what I have in store for you…") like this one.  Maybe I'm just a sick, bitter old guy whose heart has died, but I really wanted her to ACTUALLY bake the teddy bear up in her brew, not just shamelessly make you THINK she was going.

Then again, this could have been a lot worse. There's nothing too offensively bad about the animation, the scenery is reasonably Halloweenish, with plenty of browns and oranges in the color palette.  Kids would probably enjoy it, if they're not too old to think living teddy bears are lame, and its probably aged about as well as could be expected.  When it first came out, it was just about exactly what you'd expect of it based on the description, and still is now. And the reason we watch about 80% of these shows today is simply nostalgia. If looking back at it just brings back memories, without making you think "Wow, that was way funnier than I realized when I was four," that isn't such a crime, is it?

In only 13 years, this show has fallen WAY into obscurity. As of today, if you type "Teddy Bear Scare" into google, you get a LOT more hits for episodes of Webster and Donkey Kong Jr that had the same title, despite that fact that, unlike this special, those actually pre-date the internet as we know it. This one seems to have been released on video with another adventure of the two teddy bears, Teddy Bear's Christmas,  and eventually spawned a series, The Secret World of Benjamin Bear, which is still aired in Canada, but is now almost completely forgotten. Like the series that spawned Which Witch is Which, these characters were successful enough to inspire a whole series of shows that don't happen to be the kind that you grow up and want to re-watch over and over again. Still, the "old lady the kids think is a witch turns out to be nice" is the most generic of all possible endings to a Halloween special, and this one, coming 20 years after the concept had been done to death, has certainly never developed a cult following of its own.

Witch's Night Out (1978)

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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. It's not promoting a toy line or comic strip. It's not a spin-off of a movie or TV show.

Only a handful of specials existed in a world of their own like this, and very few did it well enough to function as more than just nostalgia when you watch it as an adult. Perhaps moreso than any other Halloween special, WITCH'S NIGHT OUT is watchable year after year, thanks to its snappy script, unique visuals, and distinctly Halloweenish atmosphere. It was first aired on NBC in 1978 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, and one of fairly few that's just as good as you thought it was when you were eight.

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. 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.

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.

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 by the end. I'd say that at least half of all Halloween specials fit into one of those three.

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 (everyone except Bazooie, in fact) have names like "Small," "Tender," "Nicely," and "Rotten."

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 at the party are especially funny, with their mundane - and entirely realistic party banter ("they just don't put this kind of construction into houses anymore"), 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 seventy bucks).

Special notice should be given to the pacing of the story - in a feat almost unrivaled in the field of Halloween specials, Witch's Night Out doesn't seem too short or too long. So many half hour specials seem like they're cramming a 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 after turning Malicious into a fairy princess.

"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 (the copyright holders are pretty hardcore about getting it taken down when it's there), and VHS rips sometimes turns up on bootleg DVDs. 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 copies 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 1970s 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 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 synthesized score certainly dates it to the late 70s or early 80s).

Witch's Night Out 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. If you came to this website trying to remember a cartoon that you only vaguely recalled, and thought perhaps you really just dreamed about one time, odds are that it was this one. Like that elusive McDondald's we went into one time in Cedar Rapids (or was in Omaha?) that actually had pizza, it's become a legend that lives in our 70s/80s/90s  collective childhood consciousness. Everyone remembers it, but can't quite recall enough details to prove it was real. 

There WAS a video here, but every time I post it, or link to someone who does, or let someone link to it in the COMMENTS, I get "cease and desist" letters threatening to suspend by account after a complain from the copyright holders.  I HOPE this means they're planning to do something with the property, like a re-broadcast or DVD release. With so many channels and On-Demand options in the world, there's no reason it should simply sit in the vaults. A release on the iTunes store couldn't be THAT complicated, could it?

Mad Monster Party

When I think of Rankin Bass, I think of sickly sweet stuff like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Stuff like that.  But five minutes into their 1967 epic Mad Monster Party, we've seen a spooky old castle, a mad scientist who has learned to blow stuff up, and a song about selling your soul to the devil at a party. Awesome! This 1967 feature-length film was a theatrical release and ended up as a popular Halloween special on television for years.  With a script that was polished up by Harvey Kurtzman (of MAD magazine), it's ten times funnier than any other Rankin Bass special I've ever seen - and it's full of cool spooky scenes. Dark castles, graveyards, foggy streets - what more does one want?

That's not to say that Mad Monster Party is exactly a masterpiece. It works best at the times when you can see Kurtzman's involvement - when the sight gags are MAD sight gags, the celebrity cameras are MAD-style cameos. I wish there were more of them - it's almost hard to imagine now how anarchic and edgy MAD was to kids in the 1960s.  I don't know that MAD is really any less funny now than it used to be, but there's a lot more competition in the world of sardonic humor nowadays (who in the world would have ever believed that Cracked would be held in more esteem, at least online, in 2010?). LIke The Simpsons, it's just sort of outlasted its own edginess as its brand of humor, once so shocking and cutting-edge, is absorbed into the mainstream.

However, I hope I don't live to see the day when there's nothing shocking about Phyllis Diller and Tina Louise ripping off each other's dresses and having a cat fight.

A particularly interesting thing is how well it's aged; Mad Monster Party is loaded with circa 1967 pop culture references and topical humor. Boris Karloff pretty much plays himself.  Phyllis Diller totally plays herself (and frankly steals the show), even calling the monster "Fang," as she always called her husband in her comedy routines. There's a femme fatale said to be based on Tina Louise (the movie star from Gilligan's Island).  There's a mop-topped Skeleton band that I assume was a Beatles take-off (though they sound more like the Stones or the Who). There's a character based on Jimmy Stewart, and one based on Peter Lorre.  So by all rights, all this topical humor SHOULD seem terribly dated by now (I can't comment, but I hear that the first Shrek is really showing its age already). And yet, somehow, it doesn't seem out of date.  Maybe it's because Jimmy Stewart, the Beatles and Peter Lorre impressions are still popular now, more than forty years later, or maybe it's just that the groovy "period" vibe keeps it interesting during the slow parts (of which there are many).

I don't know how well little kids would like this today - it's full of references they won't catch and gets off to a slow-moving start (even though it's gorgeous to look at the whole time), with long stretches between jokes. And many of the jokes seem like they OUGHT to work, but they just don't quite seem to nail the timing. For perhaps the first time in my life, I almost wished there was a laugh track now and then (I can't help but wonder if it was written with one in mind). Like most feature-length Halloween specials, it probably would have worked better if they crammed it into a shorter running time.

If you saw this as a kid, this'll surely bring back memories - double the amount if you lived through the 1960s and can get a nostalgia trip out of the all the pop culture references. If you're seeing it for the first time as an adult, there's plenty to admire here, from the gorgeous visuals to the jazzy score, but it'll seem more like opening a time capsule than anything else. I wonder if one could take advantage of the peerless visuals and play it silently and play some particular rock album under it, like you can do with Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon, or Metropolis and the second Stiffs Inc album. 

The movie had a lousy run in theaters (some blame poor distribution), but became something of a cult classic through TV airings (some say that Tim Burton learned everything he knew about visuals from this show). A soundtrack album was released in 1998, more than thirty years after the movie came out, and, though early VHS copies were known to be made from crummy prints, recent DVD releases look stunning.  THe movie is still aired now and then on AMC and other such channels around Halloween - it's status as a "movie," not exactly a "special," seems to make it more attractive to re-air.

Flop though it was, it did spawn an animated prequel, the 1972 animated TV special Mad Mad Monsters. Stay tuned!

On Scooby Doo: Mystery Inc

Here's a cross-post from adamselzer.com while I work up an entry for MAD MONSTER PARTY:

The times have changed.

Long about 1993 or 94, I decided I wanted a Scooby Doo t-shirt. For the last several years, Scooby and the gang had kept a low profile. After the debacle that was The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo (a great idea for a series that didn't work out so well), the gang had last been seen in the self-deprecating Pup Named Scooby Doo, which I never quite warmed to. Since then, there'd been a couple of bad movies, with no sign of Daphne, Fred or Velma.  The gang had lost its way. The Mystery Machine was gone.

But I still wanted a shirt.

(behind the jump: a long analysis of the phenomenon that is Scooby Doo and latest series, which I love)

At its best, Scooby Doo was one thing that every other cartoon seemed afraid to be: spooky. Though the monsters got less creepy in most episodes after the second season (with a few notable exception, such as that blond witch and the headless horseman), the Scooby Doo shows I loved were high on atmosphere, mystery, and general creepiness. By the 80s, though, they were ignoring the mystery and going for the humor.

Can I just say right here that no one ever really watched Scooby Doo for the jokes?

Anyway, you could hardly ever even find the old Scooby shows on TV in the mid 90s, let alone any merchandise beyond the odd coloring book here and there. USA would air them now and then, and eventually they'd land on Cartoon Network, but we didn't have that channel in my town. I looked at every mall in Iowa, not to mention a few in Chicago and the massive Mall of America near Minneapolis. Scooby Doo t-shirts were simply not made.

But around that time, as the internet made everything old new again, it became popular to deconstruct Scooby Doo - usually to the conclusion that the kids were all on drugs. This always bugged me - of COURSE Shaggy and Scooby have the munchies. Dogs are ALWAYS hungry, and Shaggy never got to eat in those old episodes - Scooby always ate all of his food.  Another popular point to make was that we were never given any idea of why these kids were traveling around - were they deadheads?  Actually, they almost always say where they're going - it's usually either to see a rock concert or visit a relative.

But, of course, all of this probably helped bring Scooby Doo Revival that began with a pair of pretty-good straight to video movies, Scooby Doo on Zombie Island and Scooby Doo and the Witch's Ghost. The gang was back. The mystery machine was back. The monsters were spooky again.  And the shirts were everywhere.

But few long series have been as inconsistent, quality-wise, as Scooby Doo.  The show has some great episodes, and a lot of crap in between them. The live action movies failed to move me (though I kinda sorta liked The Mystery Begins last year), most of the more recent direct-to-video releases haven't done much for me, and the recent series, What's New Scooby Doo didn't really interest me much. I couldn't make myself get excited about Scooby and Shaggy Get a Clue, either.

But, hey - I didn't hang around on message boards bad-mouthing these shows or talking about how Hannah Barbera was "raping my childhood."  Those old episodes that pushed me into my life as a traveling mystery solver (well, sorta) are still out there - and easy to find on DVD if I want to reminisce.

So I just waited - sooner or later, new writers were bound to be in charge and were bound to talk the execs into letting them do something decent.

The new series, Mystery Incorporated, shakes things up a bit. In something of a retcon, the gang is now officially teenagers (instead of hovering around an undefined sort of late teens / early 20s vibe), all living in a town called Crystal Cove, which actively promotes itself as the most haunted place in the world.  The gang occasionally gets missives from a "Mr. E" who is gradually getting them through the mystery of the curse of Crystal Cove (and the mystery of whatever happened to the ORIGINAL Mystery Inc, a group who vanished some time ago). So far, I'm digging it. These underlying plots occasionally tend to take over the series (as they did in X-Files, but so far it hasn't really gotten in the way of the monster-of-the-week plots).  While most of the classic villains were pretending to be ghosts to scare people away, the world has changed: having a ghost doesn't lower your property values or keep tourists away. Now, the gang is at odds with the townspeople who rely on people thinking the ghosts are real for tourist revenue. 

Velma is now a ghost tour guide who gets in trouble for telling people that certain ghosts in the town's haunted weren't REALLY ghosts (a show after my own heart, clearly!).  She's been modernized a bit (and why not - who in the world still acts like Velma did in 1969?). Rather than simply seeming like she forgot to take the hanger out of her sweater all the time, she's sort of a hipster - a science geek who listens to indie rock. I think it's a very good way of doing Velma, really. I always liked Velma. 

The biggest - and most controversial - new development is that Velma and Shaggy have a thing going on - she and Shaggy treat each other terribly. She's always on him to straighten up and stop spending all his time with Scooby (she lays down the "it's him or me - choose!" ultimatum all the time), and Shaggy tends to treat her quite dismissively. The issue is clear: she's mature, and he isn't. It happens.  Honestly, it's probably the most realistic teenage relationship I've ever seen in a cartoon. Not the kind of thing I'd expect to see in Scooby Doo, but maybe that's part of what's been wrong with the show in most of its post-1970 incarnations.

Fred is also a bit changed - he comes off as kind of an idiot (though really he's just emotionally stunted) and obsessed with buildings traps. I like the traps angle. "Fred sees things different," Daphne tells her dad. "And he wants to catch those different things in his traps!"   He reminds me more than anything else of the version of Fred from A Pup Named Scooby Doo. As with Velma and Shaggy, one gets the impression that he'll grow over the course of the series.

Daphne is still pretty much Daphne, but she's not an airhead (as she's sometimes been portrayed). They leave most of the vapid-ness to her mom.

All of these changes would be for nought, though, if it weren't for two things: they're not afraid to be spooky again, and, for once, the humor is done well. There's never been a Scooby show where the jokes were quite as funny as they are in this season. 

And the references to earlier series are fun - there have been many references to Vincent Van Ghoul, Don Knotts and Cass Elliot were visible in a crowd scene lately,  etc. Most "Scooby" series have been self-referential and self-deprecating since A Pup Named Scooby Doo, but rarely do they do it entertainingly and without seeming too much like they were just going for self-parody.

The writers have created one heck of a set-up for themselves here. They've got a cool bunch of characters with room to grow emotionally (very rare for any cartoon, and certainly not something I've seen in Scooby Doo) and a dynamite premise in a world that lets them be both funny and scary without coming off as dumb. There hasn't been a Scooby Doo season I found so consistently good since season 2. They've even made me HOPE they find a way to bring in Flim Flam, Scooby Dumb, and maybe even Scrappy. If they can make me WANT to see Scrappy Doo, they must be doing something fantastic (you never meet anyone over the age of five who likes Scrappy much, but our tendency in the internet age to act like Scrappy is the anti-christ is over-the-top - maybe they can finally ret-con him into a sympathetic character! As much as I disliked him as a kid, hating Scrappy has been a running joke long enough that we should really throw the poor puppy a bone).

Now, I'm a guy who tends to dig ret-cons. I think they're inevitable in any series that goes on for decades. Sure, the way they went about undoing the last 20 years of Spider-Man was lame, but those first several issues after Peter Parker went back to being a single guy trying to make ends meet were my favorite Spidey issues in years.  And, though message board commenters seem to act like this has never happened before, they've ret-conned the Scooby gang many times.

Now, for perhaps the first time, they've done it in a way that's going to allow them to grow, instead of just heading into a corner and falling back into focusing on the comedy. Rather than a plain "make it relevant to the kids of today" ret-con, they make it feel like they're simply cooking in the kitchen they've built over the last four decades. For the first time since I was about 14, I really, really want to get a van and paint it up like the Mystery Machine. And for the first time in my life, I'm actually making a point of seeing every episode of a new Scooby Doo series.

I'll bet Mr. E turns out to be Red Herring.

(edit to add: last night's episode, with Harlan Ellison playing himself as the gang battles a Lovecraft parody, was like geek nirvana)

What's On This Year?

As usual, practically none of the specials on this site will be airing this year (except for IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN). TV Tango has helpfully sent in a list of what's coming up this year - it's heavy on ghost hunting shows (many of which will feature some friends and colleagues of mine).

Here's the list!