Witch's Night Out (1978)

Witch's Night Out is one of my favorites. It's funny year after year, and it even has its own urban legend - some swear that, when the witch makes an exasperated noise early on, she's saying the infamous F word. 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 also 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; there's hardly a special that doesn't fit into one of those three.)

It's easy to bash this one 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," and "Rotten."

However, if you can look past that (or call it "distinctive" or something), this is a great special. The sharp writing makes it entertaining year after year, as do the performances. In fact, a good many of the people who made this were working on SNL or Second City - Gilda Radner is the witch, and Catherine O'Hara is Malicious.


"That's no fairy godmother!" cries Bazooie. "That's a wicked witch!"
"Okay," the witch grumbles, "so I ain't the Avon Lady."

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. It's also notable that the witch, while she DOES turn out to be nice, is at least actually a witch, not just a regular old geezer in a Victorian house. The very fact that it didn't go for Plot A in the slightest lends the whole thing a bit of an anarchic feel, as these things go.

"Witch's Night Out" hasn't been seen in a while, though there's a fairly recent VHS release out there. It can be a bit expensive, but it DOES pop up on youtube from time to time.


It's certainly seen more often, though, than its even less-known prequel, The Gift of Winter, a 1974 special which also featured the voice of Dan Akroyd. It 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," etc). But WNO fans may enjoy seeing a few more antics of the characters they've seen year after year.

This one 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, isn't it?

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.