Halloween Specials.net - Rescuing Halloween Cartoons from the Dustbin of History!

The Midnight Hour (1985)

2011-10-07T16:36:00.001-05:00

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

2011-10-03T03:41:00.022-05:00

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

2011-09-26T08:30:00.000-05:00

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)

2011-09-16T09:03:00.003-05:00

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)

2011-04-26T02:03:00.006-05:00

Our most popular post - updated!

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

2010-10-25T08:20:00.004-05:00

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

2010-10-20T07:10:00.001-05:00

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?

2010-10-09T11:53:00.001-05:00

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!

1992: Ghost Watch

2010-10-04T03:28:00.004-05:00

In 1992, ghost hunting TV shows were not yet common. I had to settle for In Search Of reruns, Sightings (when it was on, which was sporadic) and the occasional paranormal episode of Unsolved Mysteries that sometimes showed up between episodes about missing people.

Now, nearly 20 years later, ghost hunting shows have fallen into a formula: take a group of people consisting of guys with tattoos who say things "Dude, that place is $%^&ing HAUNTED" and flakey-looking women who talk about "energy" a lot. Have them "debunk" something early on so you know they're serious, and have each of them say "I was a total skeptic until…." Etc. I can not even count the number of times I have been asked to say "Dude, that place is #$%ing HAUNTED" or "I was a total skeptic until..." It's almost as often as news articles have made Ghostbuster references.

The Ghost Watch Team pre-dated the recent slew of ghost hunting shows by over a decade

Now, having worked in that field (see my book, YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD GIVES ME THE CREEPS), I have enough experience with these shows to know that it's not really the ghost hunters' fault ; they're mostly a good, honest bunch of people who aren't nearly as nuts as they sometimes look on the shows. But they aren't the ones who EDIT the shows. The editors might show them hearing that some room was an embalming room, but NOT the part where they find out that that isn't true. Most viewers WANT that formula, not a serious investigation, and networks, who know that being honest is hardly the way to make a buck, or even any friends, in the ghost hunting field, oblige. The guys who want to stay on their air usually wind up going along with it after a season or two. (Btw - have you all seen that new Scooby Doo series where Velma is a ghost tour guide who gets in trouble for being honest about "ghosts" who turned out to be fake? Love it!).

But enough ranting - let's get on with the show! In 1992, years before such shows became common, the BBC aired a faux-documentary Halloween special called "Ghost Watch." Presented as a live paranormal investigation of a poltergeist, the first half seems very much like a standard ghost hunting program, but in the second half, a poltergeist named "Pipes" sort of takes over, killing a couple of "characters" and gaining enough power to wreak havoc across the U.K.

The word "banned" is tossed around a lot now - go to youtube and look up all those cartoons from World War 2 that no one airs anymore, and they're invariably listed as "banned.". They aren't "banned," really - people just say they are so they can whine about political correctness in the comments (which is how jerks claim victim status). But with "Ghost Watch," we have a Halloween special that the BBC actually DID ban.

You see, though it was all recorded well in advance, it was presented as a live show of events that were actually happening, and,like "The War of the Worlds" before it, many viewers didn't realize that it was all staged, and a number of them panicked. Something like 30,000 calls came in to the BBC, who responded by putting a 10 year ban on airing the program. It has not been re-aired, even though the ban expired in 2002.

Some of the camera work makes it fairly obvious that it's staged (not to mention the 'written by' credit and the fact that it WAS Halloween), but it's honestly more realistic than most ghost hunting shows that try to pass themselves off as real (and believe me, some of them aren't even close - many even say "for entertainment purposes only" in the credits). It's also a lot funnier - I particularly like the part where the roaming reporter doesn't realize the camera is hot, and makes an offhand joke about interviewing the Headless Horseman. "Where do you put the mic?"

If we ignore the controversy over "Ghost Watch" and stop worrying about whether the faux documentary was realistic, what we have here is a really terrific little Halloween special. It's at once a nice, spooky little 90 minute movie, and a really funny parody of 1992-era ghost documentaries.

I particularly enjoy the Token Skeptic, who shows up to act like a dick and is abused accordingly (a cliche of these shows that survives to the present day). You can just tell that the guy is biting his tongue to keep from blaming everything on "swamp gas." In fact, he shows a good example of the dilemma of the skeptic on these shows: he clearly believes that the young girls are faking the ghost to get attention, but how do you actually SAY that without looking like a total jerk?

The Token Skeptic, looking appropriately smug and wiener-ish

The BBC may not actually SHOW "Ghost Watch" anymore, but it is available on both VHS and DVD. It does pseudo-science as well as any other ghost hunting program, and, while it makes no actual pretense of being real, it's also funnier, scarier, and more entertaining all around than most of them.

1994: Tiny Toons - Night Ghoulery

2010-09-29T04:38:00.000-05:00

"It was said that Daniel Webfoot was such a great speaker that he could win a case against the devil himself. Me? I'll take my chances with Jacoby and Meyer." - Babs Bunny in the intro to "The Devil and Daniel Webfoot" segment.

Something happened to TV animation in the early 1990s - maybe it was the success of The Simpsons or the Disney renaissance that began with The Little Mermaid, but studios suddenly seem to realize that cartoons could be smart, funny, and of higher quality than most of them were in the '80s. Suddenly, cartoons were awash with more sophisticated humor, meta-references, jokes about network executives, and parodies of books and movies that the writers knew full well that kids wouldn't get. It's as though the writers had been set loose to do as they wished after years of working under Draconian constraints of network execs telling them to dumb it down (believe me, most people in high places in the entertainment biz REALLY don't think kids deserve much credit).

In fact, that's pretty much exactly had had happened. While there were plenty of quality cartoons before 1990, quality was not the order of the day. Writer Paul Dini makes no apologies; when asked what he says to people who claim He-Man, on which he was a writer, was a half hour toy commercial, he simply says "He-man WAS a half hour toy commercial. Selling the product was the sole reason…though occasionally we could slip in a good story."

Some years after He-Man, Dini was one of the main writers on Tiny Toon Adventures, a series that, to me, seemed to have been sent down from the comedy gods. This was FAR more intelligent humor than we'd been getting in most of our after-school cartoons. Looking back on it today, though, it hasn't aged nearly as well as Animaniacs, its successor. By comparison, Tiny Toons seems like Warners Brothers (which hadn't run an animation studio at all for a decade when the show launched) is dipping its toe in the pool into which it would jump headlong for Animaniacs, just to test the waters. I don't watch old episodes today and sit in awe, like I often do with Animaniacs. That said, I still find myself quoting Plucky Duck all the time - like, every time I get on a "elelator." Or when something underwhelming happens and I can't resist saying "Oh rapture! Oh pure joy! Oh for the love of Norman Rockwell and the Lettermen!" (as Plucky does in the wonderful How I Spent My Summer Vacation, which holds up MUCH better than many of the episodes).

Anyway, production on Tiny Toons ended in 1992 to allow the studio to focus on Animaniacs, but the show stayed on the air in re-runs, and in October 1994, a new Halloween special, Night Ghoulery, was aired in two parts, featuring several short vignettes, including "The Tell-Tale Vacuum," "The Devil and Daniel Webfoot," and a Hound of the Baskervilles parody. Some of them are more successful than others, but this is a high-quality special, with great, stylish animation, a specially-rewritten theme song, and sharp writing. It was eventually released on VHS, but there's no DVD release.

I don't remember seeing the special at all in the 1990s, but watching it now it seems much better than most of the other Tiny Toons episodes I've rewatched in recent years (which, again, aren't BAD, they jsut haven't aged quite as well as I might have thought). By the time this special went into production, the writers would have been working on Animaniacs for some time. Maybe a bit of the spirit carried over? I particularly enjoyed "Devil and Daniel Webfoot" and "Night of the Living Dull," as well as Babs Bunny's introductions to each clip, while the Elmyra segment wasn't any more watchable to me than any other Elmira segment ever was (though the cameo by The Brain was a nice touch). I know Elmiora is SUPPOSED to be annoying, but man, her segments are always grating. And the "Elmiras Round the World" song WILL get stuck in your head. Seek out old episodes of this program at your own risk!

No DVD release is planned, but there's always youtube:

Part 3 opens with "Devil and Daniel Webfoot."

Halloweentown

2010-08-14T14:42:00.002-05:00

People who grew up in the 1980s tend to think Mr. Boogedy, Disney's mid-80s made-for-TV movie, was awesome, but Halloweentown, their 1998 TV offering, 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. See how this works? It's part of how we deal with becoming culturally irrelevant as we grow up.

When I started this site, I myself wanted to avoid watching Halloweentown at all cost. I'd only seen it once, back in high school, and I thought it was awful. But now that the movie has become THE Disney Channel Halloween Special for a generation, I decided I had to give it another shot. Watching it now, I realize that I was just doing the same thing everybody does: instinctively hating stuff that was meant for the next generation of kids after my own. If you first saw it as a teenager, it wasn't meant for you. It's not as good as a Pixar movie (or of any movie that's meant to entertain both kids AND adults and succeeds), but 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 teenagers or adults, which is about as much value as we can really ask for out of most of these things. Was marketing nostalgia to teenagers always viable, or has our fast-paced internet era sped things up?

I feel like the family in this movie is a bit less realistic than the novelty-shop owning Davis family in Mr. Boogedy who seemed like they might have really been my neighbors in the 80s - but maybe it's just because the Davis kids were kids in the same era I was, and the Cromwells are just as realistic in their way. But, then again, the Cromwells are a family of witches, so realism probably wasn't a real goal for the producers; I feel like it was more of a common thing to go for realism in kid movies in the 80s - no movie ever portrayed a family quite as realisitically as E.T. (a movie that film snobs don't seem to have rediscovered), and it was fairly common for kids in movies in the 70s and 80s to swear (see The Goonies and The Bad News Bears). The Cromwells seem more like, well...the kind of family you always see in Disney Channel movies. They have problems, but no...grit.

But that's no real crime, and 13 year old Marnie Cromwell, 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).

As the movie begins, Halloween has come and Marnie, a "weird stuff" enthusiast, is not allowed to go trick or treating for reasons her mother won't discuss. The truth is that she was born to be a witch, but her mother has given up magic and wants to raise her daughters and son to be "normal." And she would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for that meddling grandma.

Grandma arrives on Halloween and amuses the kids with tales of Halloweentown, a place where witches, monsters, and ghosts are real. After going to bed, Marnie overhears mom and grandma talking and learns the truth - she's a witch. She also hears that 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 ever put to film; most of the monsters look for all the world like people wearing Halloween costumes from K-Mart. The special effects here are a step above the ones we got in our '80s specials, naturally, but the costumes leave a bit to be desired. It might have been less noticeable if they'd kept them all in low light, surrounded by fog, but Halloweentown is a surprisingly sunny place.

The first scene in Halloweentown 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 kinda makes him look like Skeletor wearing a potato sack mask. Actually, in a way, he 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. Did they really not have the budget for a fog machine?), 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 did, of course - Halloweentown is no Hogwards - 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 on sight, seems like a pretty good role model. My biggest gripe is simply the general lack of an autumnal, Halloweenish atmosphere that I find so important to these things.

As was their habit in the early-to-mid 00s, Disney made several sequels. For a while there, Disney was a regular sequel factory, cranking out sequel after sequel to every movie they made, including whatever they could find from their back catalog.

And, 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!

1982: Disney's Halloween Treat / A Disney Halloween

2010-08-14T07:10:00.004-05:00

Brief update: as of June 2010, a "remastered" version (VHS rip made with a better copy and better equipment than previous ones) is now on youtube.

When "A Disney Halloween" premiered in 1983, it was spookier than most people realized - Hans Conried, the voice of the magic mirror, had already been dead for over a year. The magic mirror was a voice from beyond the grave!

This anthology of Disney clips introduced a generation to such clips as "Donald Duck: Trick or Treat" (featuring the venerably June Foray as the witch) "Lonesome Ghosts," "The Old Mill," "Pluto's Judgement," and that thing with Donald Duck and the Gorilla. It also, using that Fantasia clip featuring Chernobog the Demon dancing to Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," taught us that classical music could be just as evil as heavy metal. No wonder you hear so much more about this one nowadays than its companion, "Disney's Christmas Gift." To the chagrin of Disney fans everywhere, it's never been remastered and put on DVD. Perhaps it's just as well - if they DID put it back out, they'd probably re-edit it to include more recent material. 1970s and 80s nostalgia is not something Disney is that concerned with at the moment - they've also never released their terrific 1980s made-for-tv movies on DVD.

There are two versions of this - "Disney's Halloween Treat," the one that I remember seeing on TV in the early 80s, which was narrated by a live action talking jack-o-lantern (which my brother and I called The Great Talking Pumpkin), and the later, longer verison, narrated by the Magic Mirror (voice of Hans Conried, who is also the voice of Captain Hook, not to mention the Grinch in "Halloween is Grinch Night" - Halloween Special royalty!). This version was retitled "A Disney Halloween" (though it still used the "Halloween Treat" song in the intro); it was usually tagged on to a collection of clips of Disney villains.

Other than the framing devices, the specials are more of less the same: a compilation of spooky, Halloween-oriented Disney shorts. And almost every clip's a winner. The part about the "mean chapter in history" that talks about superstitions in the later version is especially nifty - what are these clips from?

Having reviewed both versions recently, I'll say without much hesitation that, except for the title screen, the later, longer version is a lot better - just having the "mean chapter in history" section gives it a major edge. The narration is a lot better, too - the talking pumpkin special effect in the first version just isn't very special at all - it's not even a very good puppet. No wonder they replaced it for the later TV airings. The later version is the one that should get a DVD release, with the talking pumpkin bits and original opening mixed into the "special features." They could even throw in the Jonathan Winters stuff from the "Halloween Hall o'Fame," which is essentially "Disney's Halloween Treat version 1.0."

In 1984, there was actually a version 2.2 - "Disney's Haunted Halloween," an 8 minute thing about the history of Halloween made of various old Disney clips giving the history of Halloween customs (crediting most things to the Druids, which isn't exactly accurate) and giving a lot of hardcore Halloween safety tips. They make it look like the Great Talking Pumpkin (from version 2.) is the narrator, but I'm about 90% sure they just overdubbed new dialogue over the old footage of the pumpkin puppet (Goofy's dialogue in the clip is all just new dialogue over old clips). There's a video down below.

There is, for the record, a version 3.0 - 2004's Once Upon a Halloween, which is a very cool anthology on its own terms. There're probably a couple of others in between that I'm missing - it's hard to imagine they'd go twenty years without putting out another villain/Halloween anthology.

BUT, both versions 2.0 and 2.1 are now on youtube; here's the opening of each:

INTRO / PART 1 (talking pumpkin version - Version 2.0)

INTRO / Part 1 (later, Magic Mirror version with michael Eisner intro, titled "A Disney Halloween" - version 2.1)

Part 2 (with The Old Mill)

Part 4 (with the awesome "mean chapter in history" portion)

Disney's Haunted Halloween - "the Disney Halloween clip show version 2.2."

http://test.skimlinks.com

1938: War of the Worlds

2010-05-24T07:35:00.002-05:00

Decades before "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" and the golden age of the cartoon special, Halloween Specials were a regular feature of the radio shows of the 1930s and 40s. Jack Benny, Charlie McCarthy, Fibber McGee and Molly, and, well, just about every major show did a special Halloween episode at one time or another. By the far the most enduring of these was the Mercury Theatre's Halloween special of 1938 - "The War of the Worlds," a dramatization of HG Wells' novel that sent terrified listeners running into the streets and made Orson Welles a legend. I suppose I should classify this as a "halloween-themed episode" rather than a special, but, well, it's just too...special.

Orson Wells - then still in his early 20s - had been taking the theatrical world by storm - people are still talking about his version of "Julius Caesar" set in fascist Italy, as well as his "Voodoo Macbeth." In 1938, he and his company, the Mercury Theatre, were given a radio program on CBS. Every week, they dramatized a story from the world of classic literature.

For the episode to be broadcast on October 30th, they decided to take things a bit further than a plain dramatization. Rather than simply acting out the story of a martian invasion, they would act out fake news reports for the first 2/3rds of the program.

The show starts out sounding like any other dull radio program - listeners who tuned in a minute late would have missed the opening announcement and thought they were hearing a dance band broadcasting from a New York hotel (such broadcasts were common at the time). But the music was interrupted frequently by reports of mysterious flashes seen on the surface of Mars, then of a strange meteor falling into New Jersey, then of live reports on a space ship opening up and containing murderous martians, who have come to take over the world with heat rays and poison gas.

For listeners in on the joke, it probably sounded pretty funny - the way they keep cutting back to dance music interludes between stories of a spaceship landing in New Jersey early on is hilarious. But to listeners who tuned in a minute late, and hadn't checked a schedule to see that it was supposed to be Mercury Theatre on CBS, not some dance music show, and who had never heard of a fake news broadcast, it was hard to tell that it was all an act. Stories of mass hysteria among the listeners are now generally said to be exaggerated, but some of them certainly were fooled into thinking that Mars had invaded earth, destroyed New York, and landed in St. Louis, Chicago, and other major cities.

The radio station was flooded with calls, and some say that the police and army phone lines were clogged with people offering their services. Roads leading to Grover's Mill, NJ, where the ship landed, were said to be jammed. In Orange, NJ, some guy was reported to have run into a movie theatre and shouted that Earth had been invaded. As far away as Indianapolis, a guy was reported to have run into a church screaming "New York is destroyed. It's the end of the world!" The newspaper reports may have been based on rumors and hearsay, but the FCC launched a prompt investigation of the script and the broadcast.

So, were these guys running out into the streets to protect their family from martians serious? Most probably weren't. On the night before Halloween, how would YOU react if some guy ran into a movie theatre and told you that Mars had invaded? Would YOU leave the theatre? I wouldn't. Plenty of people, even at the time, thought the panic was all just a big joke. After all, it was Halloween. The Chicago Tribune wrote "Of course, its being New Jersey explains much."

A couple of years after the broadcast, when HG Wells and Orson Welles happened to be in the same city, a radio station arranged for them to have a chat on the air. Wells had seemed very annoyed by the whole thing in the UK papers the day after the broadcast, largely because of the liberties taken with the story, but was totally charming talking with Orson. He pointed out that it wouldn't have been very funny in England, where the specter of war was looming over them all the time, but that it sounded like good fun for Americans. Of the panic, he said "well, haven't they ever heard of Halloween? Americans always pretend they've seen ghosts on Halloween!"

But it's totally conceivable that many people would have fallen for it; I remember that in the 1990s, some radio station in Des Moines re-did the broadcast, using their own reporters, and rewriting the story so that the spaceship landed in a local park. At least one person called the station to ask "my god, what's going on down there in Des Moines?"

Today, you can download the original broadcast (and, indeed, almost every episode of Mercury Theatre) right here, along with a recording of the HG Wells/Orson Welles chat (during which Wells very graciously goes out of his way to let Welles plug the new movie he was working on - Citizen Kane.)

The Crown of Bogg (1981)

2009-11-08T10:11:00.003-06:00

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 throne. Milo is a bit unsure he wants the hassle, but the king convinces him with a fairly unmemorable song entitled "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 issue, 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 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 that night.

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. It does have a vibe similar to a lot of the really early Muppet specials, like "The Muppet Musicians of Bremen."

"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!

And, in the news...

2009-10-22T15:25:00.004-05:00

A brief break from specials to throw in a bit of news: here we have a woman that reminds me of the woman from the Halloween episode of King of the Hill. Only she's trying to ban one of my books, not Halloween.

Mother Wants Book Banned From Idaho Library.

The Witch Who Turned Pink (1989)

2009-10-08T08:19:00.007-05:00

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:

Indoctrinating my stepson...

2009-10-07T18:06:00.002-05:00

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).

The Canterville Ghost (1986)

2009-09-26T08:32:00.012-05:00

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 special 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 the fog is always rolling in. There are servants who tend to vanish into the thin air, and a blood stain on the ground that never seems to go away. 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. She 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 back then. 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:

Bride of Boogedy

2009-09-20T09:27:00.008-05:00

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!

Long Lost Specials

2009-09-19T08:08:00.007-05:00

I get emails all the time from people who are trying to track down a certain special that they remember from years before, but just can't find. More often than not, that special turns out to be Witch's Night Out, and everyone ends up happy.

But, impossible though it seems in this, the age of the internet, a few specials seem to have vanished into the ether, and no amount of googling has turned up any information on them. Here are a few long lost specials - if you have any information about them, please post to the comments - and leave YOUR long lost special requests there, too!

LONG LOST SPECIALS:

"BOO!" (title uncertain) - an SNL type show featuring Dracula, the Wolf Man, etc, doing comedy sketches. It opened with Dracula saying "Dead, from television city in Transylvania, it's BOO!" One sketch had Dracula rising in his coffin, stake in chest, saying "and these are my friends?" This aired as an aternoon special in Philadelphia in the early 80s - it could have been a local thing.

Update from Steven: the title was something like Bootacular

"The Great Bear Scare (90s version) - not to be confused with the 1980s Ted E. Bear feature, this was aired at least once in the 1990s on cable. It dealt with a girl and her teddy bear suspecting that some old lady in the neighborhood was a witch. In the end, she turns out to be a nice woman who gives great candy to trick or treaters (bet ya didn't see THAT one coming!) (UPDATE: The title was Teddy Bear Scare, though it was broadcast on cable at least once under the alternate title).

??? - a special aired on the old Family Channel involving a talking owl in a wizard's hat and three singing pumpkins in fedoras. Witches were involved. FOUND! - The Witch Who Turned Pink

"The Crown of Bogg" FOUND!

Identified specials that I don't have:

CBS Story Break: The Monster's Ring - an episdoe of CBS Storybreak from 1987 featuring an animated adaptation of Bruce Coville's book of the same name. In it, a boy wanders into one of those stores you see in books and cartoons a lot, where a weird old guy is selling treasures and monkey's paws and such-like things for ludicrously low prices. You've never seen the store before, and when you go back the next day, it'll be a barber shop. In this case the boy gets a ring that turns him into a werewolf-like monster for Halloween. A lot of people remember this, but no copy has yet turned up.

"Jack O'Lantern" - an early 70s episode of the Rankin Bass "Festival of Family Classics" series. It's easy enough to find on VHS, but doesn't seem to be on youtube yet. Hint hint.

"The Wickedest Witch" - video clips and summaries circulate for this 1989 special, but it, too, is not going around on torrent sites or youtube. Again, hint hint.

Looking for a special yourself? Have any information on these, even if it's just a vague recollection of one of the long lost specials? Found one online? PLEASE, leave a comment!

Monster Mash

2009-09-16T08:41:00.008-05:00

Plots based around the idea that traditional monsters are funny now, not scary, have been done before - most notably in The Halloween that Almost Wasn't. I'm surprised it took so long to pit the classic monsters against the modern, gruesome alien slasher type monsters.

MONSTER MASH, a special that debuted on the WB network in 1999, opens with a skeletal dog telling the backstory: after the classic monsters got famous and started appearing in things like "The Monster Mash" song, they stopped being scary and had to become regular entertainers. Dracula may have been the first president of the Ghoul Guild, but now he's reduced to appearing on "Foolish Monster Tricks" on some sort of Letterman knock off.

Drac, the Wolf Man and Frankenstein's Monster are summoned to appear before a monster court, where the prosecutor (the Grim Reaper) says that they're out of date - the new generation of Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger type monsters are more effective. And, anyway, these guys are old; Dracula has false fangs, the Wolf Man has plenty of bald patches, and Frankenstein's monster has a soft spot for babies. They are given the chance to scare one regular family to prove they've still got it; if they fail, they'll be sentenced to an eternity of appearing at birthday parties, while the slasher flick monsters take over the scare business.

The gruesome slasher monsters today are, as the Wolf Man here describes them, "monsters created by toy companies, rather than arising spontaneously from folklore or mythology, reflecting Jungian archetypes filtered through the collective unconscious." Actually, plenty of the modern monsters probably arise from archetypes filter through the collect unconscious, too, but the point stands - "classic" monsters and "modern" monsters are two different kinds of fun.

The classic monsters are sent to pick on a family of real goobers called The Tinklemeisters. Their son, Spike, is a boy genius who never speaks, but whistles (the song they sing about him reminds me of something from Rocky Horror. In fact, all of the songs sort of have a "Rocky Horror" vibe about them). Unable to scare them by cutting into their reception with their old movies, the monsters kidnap the family and take them back to their castle, where they succeed in scaring everyone except for Spike. The new monsters are brought in to finish the job, leading to a battle royale pitting the classic monsters against the modern ones.

The Tinklemeisters sort of straddle a line between being entertainingly annoying and just so annoying that you wish the chain saw guy would just do his job. The dad is sort of like a fat Rick Moranis, and the Mom reminds me of someone from The B-52s (or the aunt in Bobby's World). They adults are kind of funny in their tackiness. The kids sort of bugged me.

The animation here is above average, and the songs aren't too bad, either. The script moves along at a pleasant enough pace, despite the fact that the pun-filled script probably misses more than it hits - humor-wise, most of it reminds of a run-of-the-mill Saturday morning cartoon from the 90s. There are a couple of good lines - when Dracula tells the Tinklemeisters they're going to a castle in Eastern Europe, Mr. Tinklemeister excitedly says "maybe we'll get to visit one of those towns without any vowels!"

MONSTER MASH is sort of a missed opportunity - kids will probably enjoy it, but watching it as an adult, it seems to me that, even though I really enjoyed it overall, there's something missing. There was clearly a pretty decent budget behind this, and the writers throw out enough good jokes amidst the bad ones that I suspect that there were some producers at DIC keeping them from really going nuts and having fun with this story.

I almost think the animation might be TOO good - a more "distinctive" looking style might have given this the edge it needed to rise above being "just another hour-long cartoon." Watching it, I have to wonder if "Witch's Night Out" would be so revered if it looked more like a normal cartoon. Would "The Halloween That Almost Wasn't" work at all as a cartoon? Maybe this one could have become a real cult hit if it were live action and played up the camp.

However, now that the show is about 10 years old, maybe a whole generation who grew up watching it will remember it as fondly as I remember the shows from the 70s and 80s. Hell, there are plenty of people who remember Halloween with the New Addams Family and Once Upon a Midnight Scary fondly, and this is WAY better than those. Indeed, while I normally don't recommend reading youtube comments, which tend to make me weep for humanity, the comments on the one clip of this currently available are full of people who grew up watching this movie and love it.

Anyway, you can get Monster Mash on the double-sided Monster Fun Pack DVD, along with the terrific "Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolf Man," the mediocre "Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein," and a handful of Archies episodes. Retailing for less than ten bucks, this is a bargain.

Of particular note - under the credits, there are country, punk, and metal versions of "The Monster Mash," with voice-overs by the producer complaining about them, which is pretty funny.

Here's one of the songs:

The Devil and Daniel Mouse

2009-09-15T08:28:00.008-05:00

Dan and Jan Mouse are a couple of folk singers struggling through the late 1970s, when folk was passe, in this Canadian special that deserves to be rediscovered. When Dan and Jan are fired from the last folk club in town, Jan sits down and says "I'd give ANYTHING to be a rock star."

On cue, the devil arrives with a contract in hand, which he asks her to sign in blood. She signs without waiting for Daniel, who has gone to pawn his guitar, and is soon singing dance rock songs with her new band - Funky Jan and the Animal Kingdom. The disco party comes in the FIRST act of this Halloween special.

Of course, any idiot ought to know that a devil's bargain is a fool's bargain. After Jan sings a terrific, apropos song called "Can You Find My Soul" at a concert, the devil arrives to collect his due - under the terms of the contract, on midnight of the night of her greatest triumph, Jan is required to render up her soul.

Given until midnight to say her good-byes and come to terms with her own shortcomings, Jan runs into Dan, who is still playing folk and demands that the devil give Jan a trial. The devil calls a jury including crooked record execs, agents, and bitter former singers. Dan, who finds that he has a natural talent as a lawyer, closes with a song, "Look Where the Music Can Take You" (his singing voice was provided by John Sebastian of Lovin' Spoonful).

I LOVE a good Faust story, and I can't believe this animated adaption of "The Devil and Daniel Webster" slipped under my radar for so long (it WAS Canadian, and didn't attract much notice here in the states). This is a a standalone special with a decent visual style, a good script that doesn't pussyfoot around, and TERRIFIC music. It's not afraid to be scary from time to time, either. I wish it'd been feature length; the 25 minute runtime just doesn't give it a lot of breathing room. The story comes off as a little bit rushed, but many of the scenes are great. I also like that they managed to do it without getting even slightly preachy about religion, which I was afraid was going to happen in any cartoon where the lesson was not to mess with the devil. As it turns out, the lesson is "music can save your soul, and a song from the heart beats the devil every time," which I just LOVE, and which would actually tick the religious right off.

There are a couple of other Halloween cartoons that take "The Devil and Daniel Webster" as an inspiration - in The Pinky and the Brain Halloween Episode, the Brain challenges the devil to rhythmic gymnastics instead of a trial. The Simpsons did it in Treehouse of Horror IV, probably the best of the series, when Homer sells his soul for a donut. Both of those are fairly brilliant, but there's something to be said for playing the story straight, too. So many cartoons are afraid to be scary - this one isn't exactly terrifying, but they certainly decided to give the kids a little credit.

The piece was one of the first couple of cartoons produced by Nelvana, a Canadian company which went on to produce several Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake cartoons, as well as the "Ewoks" and "Droids" series, among other notable cartoons from the 80s and 90s, up through the present. The look of the weasels and birds in the show, along with the progressive values expressed, made me think that maybe, despite being Canadian, they also did The American Rabbit, the forgotten mid-80s feature that, now that I think of it, has kind of a Canadian feel to it (it's not a political movie, exactly, but it's FULL of left wing in-jokes about the evils of big businesses controlling the means of production, the virtues of workers getting organized, etc. The kind of stuff that would probably be easier to get away with in Canada) (yes, I know that most critics HATE The American Rabbit, but I have a soft spot for it).

But, anyway, seeing as how Nelvana had nothing to DO with The American Rabbit, I'm veering way off topic. "The Devil and Daniel Mouse" was broadcast as a Halloween special in on October 22, 1978 on CBC in Canada, then released on VHS in the 80s. Their success with "The Devil and Daniel Mouse" led Nelvana to do a feature length rock cartoon, Rock and Rule. A slightly trimmed version of "Daniel Mouse" is on the DVD as one of the "special features" - it's missing about two minutes.

But the full, untrimmed version is on youtube!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Here's a "making of" documentary that's almost as long as the short! Oh, how I'd love to see a "making of" for some of these other specials, too!

Once Upon a Halloween

2009-09-15T03:47:00.001-05:00

In 2004, rather than just putting "Disney's Halloween Treat" on DVD, Disney decided to try putting together a new Halloween anthology - "Once Upon a Halloween." One can hardly blame them - obviously, if they're going to put out an anthology that includes a compilation of villain clips, they're going to want Gaston, Scar, and Ursula in there more than they want that jerk butler from The Aristocrats.

So this is another Halloween anthology that I assumed would just be a few of the same villain clips, plus maybe a few from the 90s. I'm pleased to say I was wrong - this is one cool Halloween special.

THe framing device here is the Wicked Witch from Snow White (seen only in shadows in CGI sequences) talking to a talking cauldron. Halloween has come, and she asks the cauldron's help to enlist all of the other villains to help her take over the holiday.

First of all, the cauldron explains its origin - it's one of the cauldrons one owned by the three witches from "The Black Cauldron." "THE BLACK CAULDRON!" Perhaps Disney's scariest movie, but not one that they usually want to acknowledge the existence of. Here, it's the first clip. Next up comes one of PISTOL PETE. It ain't scary, but I love that Disney is using these old clips instead of the same predictable ones. Next up are a handful of other villain clips (new and old), including a long scene of the zombie soldiers from "Black Cauldon."

I still wish they'd put the early 80s "Disney Halloween" on DVD, but if you're in the mood for a solid Disney Halloween anthology, not just a nostalgia trip, this one should do the job nicely.

First 10 minutes:

Marc Summers' Magical Mystery Tour

2009-09-14T16:36:00.007-05:00

Usually remembered as Nickelodeon's "Magical Mystery Special," the official title was "Mark Summers' Magical Mystery Tour." The half-hour piece was produced by Nick in the mid 80s and broadcast occasionally around Halloween for the next decade or so - often several times per year.

Apparently, the good folks at Nick were just SURE that Summers could do something besides just hosting Double Dare - and perhaps Summers himself was bugging them to let him do something that didn't involve getting messy (which he hated). This was their attempt to help him branch out. It's a reasonably entertaining show to watch - it's a bit corny, but that's no real sin. Over time, the corniness of these things becomes part of the charm. As the century progresses, there's a good chance that 80s/90s cheese will age better than Victorian melodrama did.

The plot (such as it is) concerns Marc and three kids on the way home from a movie, discussing whether the special effects were real magic or not. Remember when it was fun to wonder how they did things in movies? I don't have any beef with CGI, but "making of" documentaries suck now.

Anyway, their tire goes flat during a thunderstorm and they wander up to a spooky old house/theatre/castle hoping to use the phone. Oh, how I wanted them to find Dr. Frank-n-furter inside.

A sign outside the door advertises a magic show by John "Gomez Addams" Astin (who was in Mr. Boogedy around the same time and Eerie, Indiana a couple of years later). Just before Summers and company arrive, Astin is seen storming out of the place in a very brief cameo, having quit his job as resident magician.

The house is full of secret passages, mysterious pianos, and other neat tricks - it reminded me of the castle they find on Scooby Doo in my favorite episode, the one with the ghost that looks like a guy wearing a sheet and turns out to be a magician who's wanted in several states. I wouldn't have complained if they spent the whole special just wandering around the house, getting spooked by all the weird stuff in the house and enjoying the ambience.

However, the plot only takes up a few minutes of the special, the vast majority of which is given to magic shows put on inside the house by Lance Burton and Tina Lenert, who apparently lure unsuspecting visitors into the house just so they can show them some tricks. Marc Summers vanishes into a phone booth, only to be replaced by a skeleton, then re-appear to do a magic act of his own. This is more of a magic special than a halloween special, except for the shots of the house with lightning flashing.

There are several mysteries left at the end:
1. Who are these kids, and what is their connection to Summers? (They were all TV actors at the time, and apparently play themselves, but I would've liked a bit more backstory).
2. Was that a house, a castle, a theatre, or what?
3. Why did John Astin quit his gig as a magician there and storm off?
4. When Summers disappears in a phone booth and is replaced by the skeleton so he can go learn magic tricks, didn't he say "you know, Lance, I'd love to help you scare the kids, but I need to keep an eye on them, not let them wander around a spooky house by themselves. They must be scared out of their wits!"
5. Why were the kids scared of everything that happened EXCEPT for the piano that played itself, which they thought was awesome?
6. Who fixed the tire? And how was Summers able to drive all the way up to the place with a flat?
7. You can't copyright a title, but didn't they worry about having the same title as a Beatles movie (which made about as much sense as this). To avoid confusion, this special is generally referred to as "Magical Mystery Special," making it another entry in the grand list of Halloween Specials Who Can't Keep Their Titles Straight (along with Casper, The Halloween that Almost Wasn't, A Garfield Halloween, Halloween is Grinch Night, etc).

But these are all plot points, and the point here isn't the plot, it's the magic shows. The magic shows are pretty neat, but they go on too long. Not a great special, but I've certainly seen worse. I would have liked to see John Astin stick around - I got all excited when his name came up in the credits, and then he was only there for five seconds at the beginning!

In any case, it was a hard special to find for years, until it magically appeared on youtube in 2008:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

I Kissed a Zombie and I Liked It Shorts (2009)

2009-08-02T20:01:00.013-05:00

Permit me a bit of shameless self promotion. Running a blog about Halloween specials isn't exactly a full time gig; my day job is writing books. In January of 2010, Random House published I Kissed a Zombie and I Liked it, my ninth book. It's sort of a Halloween special of my own (in book form). (update May 2010: Disney Channel Original Movies has optioned the film rights; wouldn't it be something if it really did turn into a Halloween special?)

In the world of the book, vampires and zombies have been known to exist for a few years - Megamart, a discount retailer, was found to be raising the dead to work as zombie slaves in their stockrooms, and, in response, vampires came out of hiding to lobby congress to outlaw undead slavery. Now, people have gotten used to having the undead around, but dating a "post human" is a HUGE status symbol among teenage girls, and, as a result, even guys who would normally be wearing backwards abercrombie hats are going for the goth look. Every magazine is running stories about teen girls' dangerous desire to date a vampire who will 'convert' them. Every girl wants to convert* - except for Alley Rhodes, who says "dead people have no reason to live."

But then she meets Doug, a more sincere goth who sweeps her off her feet when he sits in with The Sorry Marios, a lousy local band. But after they start dating, she comes to realized that he's not a goth at all - he just LOOKS like a goth. That pale skin ain't makeup...he's just been dead for three years...

Anyway, to promote the book, I made a handful of short films: a "trailer" for the book and a few other shorts presenting vignettes about zombies and vampires as they're portrayed in the book. They're not really a Halloween specials by the standards I normally hold for this site, but indulge me, won't ya?

Check out ikissedazombie.com for more cool stuff, and pick up the book at your local book store!

The Last Halloween (1991)

2009-06-23T21:01:00.011-05:00

By 1991, the half hour Halloween special was a dying breed, as home video sales made it a better bet for companies to make feature length specials (which were an easier sell than shorts in the stores - half hour specials are almost padded with other cartoons on VHS releases) . But Hanna Barbara made a stab at one with this - "The Last Halloween," one of very few such specials to feature space aliens. William Hanna himself does the narration. The special effects are terrific, but the whole thing is a bit of a mess, plot-wise. Plot holes are almost inevitable when you try to create a whole world and tell a story inside of it in 22 minutes, but in a superior special, they don't really bug me much. In this one, I found myself asking "what the hell?" a few too many times

The young hero here is furious, for some reason, that his sister always wears the same costume for Halloween (it was made by her late mother). After nearly getting killed herself by a car after leaving her candy in the street (for some reason), the two kids are terrified by an old lady (Rhea Perlman) who warns them not to be seen trick or treating near her place that night. Naturally, she lives in a crumbling old Victorian manor.

Now, the town looks great. There are brown leaves and Halloween decorations and kids everywhere. Just watching it makes me thirsty for a good cup of cider. A few minutes in, it looks like we're in for a painstakingly standard "spooky old lady' special with above-average visuals. But then the flying saucer shows up.

After being teased with the saucer, we find out that the candy store owned by the kids' family is about to close, which will make this the last halloween in town (for some reason). But their grandfather, the owner, tells them that their late mother believed that anything could happen on Halloween (perhaps she was a fan of "The Worst Witch.")

Then come the aliens, which look ALMOST cgi. I'm very impressed. This special represents a colossal leap forward in special effects. Unfortunately, the special starts to go down hill, plot-wise, once they show up. As is fairly standard practice for ghosts and monsters in these things, they wander through the streets among people who assume they're just kids in costume. This guys do NOT look like kids in costumes. They look like miniature clay dinosaurs and talk like they were written by guys who wanted to steal some of the Ninja Turtles' thunder.

The martians have come to collect candy. They help the kids to save Halloween, both from the candy company closure AND the creepy old lady (who, at least, turns out to be just as creepy as she seems, though she doesn't get enough screen time for me to figure out what the point of having her around was or what the deal was with her, other than wanting to write in a part for Rhea Perlman).

This probably SOUNDS awful. And in some ways, it is - every time anyone mentions the dead mother, you can prepare yourself for a really sappy speech about motherhood. "Mothers are more beautiful than fairies." Stuff like that. (The punch line here should be "until they become mothers-in law!" Am I right, stand-up comedians from the 1950s?).

However, if you can ignore the bad parts, there are plenty of genuinely funny moments here - even the line about fairies sets the martians up to think a boy dressed as a fairy (for some reason) must be a mother. People who saw it in the early 90s remember it fondly, and kids today would probably enjoy it if they were to release it on DVD. Even as an adult watching it for the first time, I got a kick out of it, despite its' myriad problems. This is not one of those specials you'll track down only to marvel at how easily amused you were in 1991. It's very much a "kids" show, but there's no shame in that. Outside of the sappy stuff (did they plan to make this both a special for Halloween AND Mother's Day?), the worst I can really say is that this whole story feels rather rushed - I would have liked to see more of the creepy old lady and get a better feel for her backstory, motivations, and all of that. It's a shame it wasn't an hour long - and there are plenty of specials I wouldn't say that about. Some of them could've stood to be a lot SHORTER.

This was REALLY rare for years, as it was never released on video. Thank goodness for youtube!

Halloween Hall of Fame (1977)

2009-06-23T20:24:00.006-05:00

Before there was Disney's Halloween Treat (or its later incarnation, A Disney Halloween), there was a mid-70s attempt at a Disney anthology Halloween show that aired as an episode of the ongoing "Wonderful World of Disney" show: "Halloween Hall o' Fame."

It featured Jonathan Winters, a mainstay of 1970s comedy variety shows, as a security guard patrolling the Disney studios. At the beginning of the special, he and his dog wander into a prop room and Winters does am engaging little prop comedy routine with all the stuff he finds there. It's all fun and games until Winters comes across a crystal ball housing a live action talking pumpkin (which is also Winters, albeit in a pumpkin suit) that reminds me of the moon from that old silent "Voyage to the Moon" flick. Winters seems somewhat unfazed to find such an entity in the prop room. It's Disney, right? You have to take magical stuff in stride when you work for Disney (or, anyway, that's the way I like to imagine it) (though i can now tell you that the paperwork when you sell them film options is a little less than magical).

This talking pumpkin has some eerie powers and threatens to "turn the place into a vacant lot" if Winters doesn't let him hide out until midnight. After all, it's Halloween, which, the pumpkin describes as "just the dumbest thing I ever saw....there's nothin' scary about it." In the old days, he says, they had REAL ghosts and goblins.

The debate between Human Winters and Pumpkin Winters acts as a framing device (not the worst in the business, but far from the best) for the Halloween shorts - fully half of the special is taken up by Disney's take on "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which is shown nearly in its entirety. The other three shorts, "Lonesome Ghosts," "Pluto's Judgement" and the one with Donald Duck and the witch, also appeared in both versions of Disney's Halloween Treat.

This is one of those specials where, if you loved it as a kid, you'll probably like seeing it again, but if not, well.... the prop comedy routine is very funny, but if you want a Disney Halloween anthology, the other two are a better bet. No offense to Jonathan Winters, but there's no shame in coming in second or third when when one of the OTHER narrators in a framing device is a magic mirror voiced by the great Hans Conried.

See also: Monster Memories, which has a shot of Winters getting into makeup (and looking just THRILLED).

Halloween is Grinch Night

2009-06-08T02:57:00.010-05:00

This fairly little-known sequel to "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" came out in 1978 as a TV special, featuring Hans Conried as the voice of the Grinch - Seuss fans might recognize his voice from his role as Dr. Terwilliger in The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, a Suess-written film from 25 years before. The Grinch here sounds EXACTLY like Dr. T, and it works. If they had to replace Boris Karloff, who voiced the Grinch in the Christmas special, Hans* was the way to go.

Anyway, on to the special, which is one of my favorites....it's worth noting that the only mention of Halloween in "Halloween is Grinch Night" is in the title (indeed, starting in the late 90's, it was released under the name "It's Grinch Night," leaving Halloween out altogether, perhaps to avoid offending the 700 Club crowd). However, the events portrayed here clearly take place in autumn. Grinch Night, perhaps, is the Whoville equivalent of Halloween. Pardon my lack of knowledge of Who culture.

Apparently, every now and then, environmental evidence points to a coming "grinch night" in Whoville. A soursweet wind is detected in the air, the gree grumps start a-growlin', the hackencracks starts yowlin', and every one is warned to stay indoors, for the Grinch will be coming down from Mount Crumpet (alias "The Euphemism") in his "paraphernalia wagon" (boy, don't you wish you had one of those?).

Exactly what will happen when the Grinch gets there is never made clear, but you can't bet your sweet bippy it ain't gonna be pleasant. In one song, Whos claim they wouldn't go out on such a night for a dollar and fifty cents (which was more back in the late 1970s than it is now, of course).

Eucharia, a young bespectacled Who, decides to take matters into his own hands, and enters the Grinch's wagon to see a real freak-out of a spook show with cool music to match, effectively stalling the Grinch. By the time he emerges from the wagon, the sour-sweet wind has died down, leaving the Grinch with nothing to do but turn around and go home. "Well, I'll be grinched," he says. Add this to snugglepupping on the list of terms and phrases I'm trying to bring back.

The visual style of HALLOWEEN IS GRINCH NIGHT is a bit more sophisticated that the Christmas special (albeit a bit less stylized, perhaps), but it's unmistakably Seussian. The music, while not spawning any hits that still get a lot of radio play nowadays, is pretty catchy, too. It was written by the great Joe Raposo, who is best known for his work on Sesame Street in the 70's. Most of it is sung by those same studio singers who appeared in just about every animated special and movie in the 1960s and 70s (or, anyway, it SOUNDS like the same group). You know the kind - it sounds like that same mixed chorus that sang songs in "Snoopy Come Home, "Charlotte's Web," "The Lorax," etc.

The special may not be as well-known as its predecessor (we will surely not be seeing a live-action version any time soon, which is our loss), but it's as watchable today as it ever was, and deserves to be re-discovered. It may very well be my favorite Halloween special, in fact. My first band named its album Grinch Night Wind, and I was still mentioning "sour sweet wind" in songs I wrote a decade later. That's how much I like it. It may not be considered a landmark of Halloween specials by most people today, but it was sure a landmark for me.

This was aired on TBS, TNT and the Disney Channel many times over the years, up until about the mid-to-late 90's, but it hasn't been aired in a while, to my knowledge. It is available on DVD as part of the Dr. Seuss 4 pack linked on the left, in which it's relegated to "also-ran" status behind Green Eggs and Ham. You can, however, watch it right here:

PART 1:

PART 2:

PART 3:

* -
Incidentally, Hans also appeared in The Great Bear Scare, a rather inferior Halloween special, a few years later, and was the voice of the magic mirror in the later versions of Disney's Halloween Treat (as well as doing the voice of Captain Hook, who appears in the "Villains" anthology that accompanied it). Truly, this man was an icon of Halloween Specialdom. If I ever start a religion based around this stuff, there'll have to be a Feast Of St. Hans.

Doug's Halloween Adventure

2009-02-11T17:23:00.004-06:00

"Doug" was a cartoon that lasted for most of the 1990s, first on Nick, and then on Disney, who gave it a bit of a revamp. It wasn't side-splittingly funny, or edgy, or particularly creative, and it wasn't loaded with pop culture references for the adults, and has never really become one of those "cult" cartoons. But there was also nothing offensively bad about it, and I imagine that, as 90s stuff becomes as big as 80s stuff in a few years, there will eventually be a minor Doug revival. There are worse things that could be revived; "Doug" was always entertaining, in a not-too-challenging sort of way, and was occasionally very funny. I enjoyed watching it all through the 90s, though re-watching a few episodes lately didn't really do much for me. It hasn't aged as well as some of its "classic nick" contemporaries, like "Pete and Pete."

The Halloween episode is said to have been advertised as a regular Halloween special. It concerns Doug and his blue friend, Skeeter, going to Funky Town, the local amusement park, to ride Bloodstone Manor, a Haunted Mansion-type of attraction that is rumored to be so terrifying as to be dangerous. Rumor has it a couple of guys rode through once and all that came back was their shoes.

Doug, Skeeter and local no-goodnik Roger get stuck in the ride and Doug has to overcome his own fears to help Roger, escape. It's not a bad episode, but I would have frankly preferred just to have a detailed walkthrough of Bloodstone Manor, which looks like a really bitching ride.

Once Upon a Midnight Scary (1979)

2009-02-11T12:57:00.007-06:00

Vincent Price in a Halloween special. Man, what a wonderful idea! Why weren't there more of those? Nobody ever played "evil" quite like Vincent Price. Unfortunately, he never seemed shy about attaching his name to inferior products and films. When asked why, he once said "because I am tremendously fond of eating." Gotta respect the honesty.

Our sensibilities regarding what's scary and what isn't have changed over the years. You never see guys in cowls and capes with cartoonish evil laughs in scary movies any more. In fact, half the time, Price's mannerisms come off not so much spooky as, well, really, really...flamboyant. You know what I mean.

Here, in this made-for-TV special from the late 1970s, he sort of splits the difference between evil and flamboyant as the between-segment narrator, introducing three stories based on books and making a few subtle suggestions that the viewers go read the books on which the segments were based. Each segment ends with Price saying some variation of the phrase "was the ghost real? You'll have to go read the book to find out!" Even Ramona Quimby, Age 8, thought THAT was a pretty lame way to get someone reading.

In many ways, this thing plays like one of those after-school specials that were common at the time; visually it looks very much like them, in fact, and the lessons about reading are so pervasive that I half-expected Captain O.J. Readmore to show up.

Anyway, there are three segments. The first is a scene from "The Ghost Belonged To Me" by Richard Peck (an author I recently heard giving "kids today are stupid because they don't speak Latin" keynote speech at "kid lit" event). It's a rather unsuccesful piece; it's clear they're trying to cram a lot of story into a five minute slot. It does have one thing going for it, though - when the ghost first shows up, she's awfully spooky. However, as she whines and acts emo enough to give Moaning Myrtle a run for her money, she loses some of her spookiness.

Next up is perhaps the clumsiest of all takes on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Ichabod looks as though he was supposed to be playing Riff Raff in Rocky Horror, but took a wrong turn at the intersection, went to the wrong theatre, ended up in a community production of Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He acts really, really spastic. And, while most adaptations have to expand on the story, this one trims it down. There's a short scene where Ichabod flirts with Katrina and gets threatened by Brom Bones, then a LONG scene where Ichabod rides home, talking to his horse, giving a sort of play-by-play of the ride (which is not that exciting). Then the headless horseman shows up and ends up throwing his head (a regular, flesh and blood head) at Ichabod. But was it a real head? All they find the next morning is a smashed pumpkin. What happened to Ichabod? You'll have to read the book!

For the record, Price is being sort of a dick here, since the book WON'T tell you what happened. Sure, Washington Irving made it pretty clear that the horseman was Brom Bones in disguise and that the "head" he threw was a pumpkin, but it actually sort of leaves it open-ended (the evidence is pretty overwhelming, but is not considered conclusive by Irving or the locals).

Both of these short pieces are pretty bad. I would say that the acting was bad, but that isn't really fair - the actors simply play as through they're on stage, not TV, with exaggerated voices and gestures. Still, a lot of this reminds me of nothing so much as Troll 2. ESPECIALLY the eccentric wizard in the next segment, who reminds me a lot of Grandpa Seth.

The real showpiece of the special is the long(er) adaptation of John Bellair's perennially popular The House With a Clock In Its Walls. It, too, sort of seems to be skimping on atmosphere, and the script is dismal. As with the others, they spend a lot of time showing the characters talking to themselves. It's better than the others, mainly on the basis of being MUCH longer, giving it a bit more breathing room. Still, this cool book deserved better. Some studio with a big budget could probably do a really wicked version of it.

I've had a few emails about it, but this is not one of those specials that spawned even a minor cult following; it never had a very wide release as a video, and probably won't be on DVD any time soon. There's a reason for this, of course: it's not very good. Even at its best, it tends to seem like b-rate community theatre. It's a shame, really - a Vincent Price Halloween special OUGHT to be one for the ages. But this gives the impression that it was thrown together very quickly on very little budget; most of the budget was probably spent on the handful of blue screen effects.

The (somewhat rare) VHS version includes a few previews for other shows, mostly in the form of what appears to be just the opening couple of minutes of the shows themselves. Most of them look distinctly unenticing. Some look okay, actually, but I imagine they were made by the same place that did this one, so I won't be buying them.

Still, it's probably good for the nostalgia factor, even just on the basis of having that "after school special" vibe. Just seeing things in that style can bring back memories for those of us who grew up watching them.

More of it is gradually showing up on youtube. Here's the full, 25 minute House With a Clock In Its Walls Segment (with Vincent Price's nice speech about imagination):

Intro:

The New Misadventures of Ichabod Crane

2008-10-08T17:56:00.007-05:00

Well, heck. I don't know what to do with this. It's a 25 minute cartoon from 1979. It was made before the video market really existed, but was never aired on TV, as far as I can tell (some say it was, but no one seems to have an airdate or anything). It WAS apparently released on 16mm, which I guess makes a "home video pioneer." Did they intend for it to be shown in classrooms as a special treat for students around Halloween, back in the days when we still had filmstrips in classrooms?

For lack of a better idea of how to classify it, I'm going to list it as both a Halloween Special and a Sleepy Hollow variation. It's one of the strangest variations on the the story I've ever seen.

It's not really a sequel, as the title implies, as there's no hint that the events of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ever happened. I suppose I should call it a "re-imagining." When the Headless Horseman steals a chest full of gold coins at the beginning, the town of Sleepy Hollow elects Ichabod Crane, local supernatural expert, to find the Horsesman and get rid of it. Crane sets off, with Rip Van Winkle in tow (bringing in the protaganist from Washington Irving's other enduring hit, who here looks and acts about like Yosemite Sam). Together, along with Washington, a horse voiced by Pat Buttram (whose voice you will recognize from a hundred cartoons featured a grizzled old westerner - or that scene in Back to the Future 3 where a grizzled old cowboy warns Marty that people will call him a coward for the rest of his days) they find out that the horseman is actually a witch named Velma Van Dam in disguise. Plot-wise, it kinda reminds me of the 1999 Tim Burton version of Sleepy Hollow.

Visually, and sound-wise, this thing reminds me of one of the first couple of Care Bears specials - The Land Without Feelings and The Care Bears Battle the Freeze Machine. The characters kinda have the look of the humans in "Freeze Machine," and it has that weird organ music that you always hear in late 70s/ early 80s cartoon. The jokes here aren't very funny, with one major exception: when Velma says "I haven't had this much fun since last Halloween, when I turned the trees to stone and watched the woodpeckers beat their brains out!"

The Headless Horseman himself (herself?) looks particularly cool, though, and the opening sequence is terrific. If you dig Halloween cartoons, pick this up - you can usually find it cheap on VHS - just for the opening sequence. No one will blame you if you skip minutes 3-25, though.

Now on youtube (new links):

Tales from the Far Side

2008-10-04T13:14:00.004-05:00

In 1994, Gary Larson's comic strip "The Far Side" got its first TV special outing, Tales from the Far Side, which was shown as a Halloween special on CBS. True to the nature of the strip, it's bizarre, surreal, and funny.

More than perhaps any other special on this site, "Tales from the Far Side" is really more for adults. There's almost no dialogue in the whole thing, just a series of sound effects, spooky music and barnyard animal noises. As one would expect from The Far Side, there are plenty of cows, farmers, personified insects, and kids - the stuff that formed the "cast" of the comic strip.

There's no plot, per se, just a series of short vignettes featuring a lot of gags taken right from the strip - a bird scoops some roadkill off the street with a spatula, a gang of rowdy butterfly hunters drive by with a giant butterfly tied to the windshield, etc. The first vignette, after the title sequence, features insects watching "The FLy" as the in-flight movie on a doomed airplane. Others include "The Bacon Bunch," a Brady Bunch parody that's MUCH funnier than The Brady Bunch. Some are Halloween themed, and nearly all at least feature SOMETHING getting killed. I have to wonder how outrageously bizarre it would seem to people who had never seen the comic strip and didn't know what sort of humor to expect.

This special, moreso than any other on the site, is a true original, and a real work of art. Hard to find for years, it became a sort of a cult film for a while there (and still is, though it's easier to find now). A longer follow-up was screened at several film festivals in 1997 (after the strip had been retired) but never got an airing in the US.

It can be purchased on DVD, along with its 1997 follow-up on The Far Side Website.

Bugs Bunny's Howl-o-ween Special

2008-09-20T11:41:00.007-05:00

Loony Tunes must have been hard up in the 1970s, what with Chuck Jones off working on things like "Raggedy Ann and the Pumpkin Who Couldn't Smile" and all. Throughout the 70s and 80s, they released a whole bunch of "specials" that chopped together bits and pieces of old cartoons and used a little bit of new footage in attempt to make one big new cartoon. This 1978 special is one of those.

None of these cut-and-paste specials are THAT fondly regarded by Loony Tunes fans, but Bugs Bunny's Howl-o-ween special seems to be regarded as particularly awful. Cut and paste jobs are never that good of an idea; the old Looney Tunes shorts were quite ridigly 6 minutes long, and were built to work as 6 minute shorts. Cut 'em up, and you lose the whole rhythm. One of the beautiful things about Looney Tunes, and most great comedy, is the way it all flows together. Like the way Daniel Pinkwater describes Laurel and Hardy - you can tell what's going to happen, and it DOES happen, and the beautiful thing is that everything that happens happens exactly at the second when it SHOULD happen.

This special wouldn't be so bad if they just played the shorts on their own terms and presented them as separate shorts, like Disney's Halloween Treat (which was also cut up some of the clips, but doesn't suffer as much for it). Instead, though, the Loony Toons people tried to edit the chopped up clips into one big movie - one big movie where the characters' appearances change from time to time, and Broom Hilda's house rarely looks the same twice - with a bit of new footage that was supposed to connect them and create something of a coherent plot. I SUPPOSE I can just say that witch's houses ARE probably known to change shapes at random from time to time, but, still. I hate to think the Warner execs were sitting at their desks, chomping cigars and saying "they'll never notice!"

Featured cartoons include "A Haunting We Will Go," "Transylvania 6-5000," "Bewitched Bunny," "A Witch's Tangled Hare," "Hyde and Tweet" and "Hyde and Hare." If you used to watch this all time and feel nostalgic watching it now, then don't let me stop you, by any means. But as specials go, it's hard not to wish they'd just show the original shorts uncut. The easiest way to watch this is just to ignore the fact that there's supposed to be an overall storyline and enjoy the gags on their own terms. I will, however, give some props to introduction, which is pretty cool and has that "halloween atmosphere" that I prize so highly on these things. Other than that, if you're not nostalgic for this particular special, just go find the original shorts.

It can now be watched online right here.

The Flintstones Meet Rockula and Frankenstone

2008-09-18T17:20:00.011-05:00

After the Flintstone's long prime-time run and subsequent descent into Saturday mornings, The Flintstones was resurrected as a series of hour-long specials and other TV movies around the late 1970s that would continue sporadically for years. Some of them, like "Pebbles and Bam Bam Get Married," were pretty bad. Others, like "A Flintstones Christmas Carol," were very good (the Christmas Carol variation was really excellent, even keeping i mind that it's hard to do Christmas Carol badly - the script was a very clever take on it that managed to be a story on its own AND a very faithful adaption - a neat trick, but I digress).

Quality-wise, the 1980 hour-long halloween special "The Flintstones Meet Rockula and Frankenstone" falls right about the middle. It's not bad, but there's nothing terribly remarkable about it. The animation is better than what the show had in the 1960s, but, other than that, it's just a long Flintstones episode with monsters in it.

Here, The Flintstones and Rubbles go on "Make a Deal or Don't," an imaginatively-retitled stone-age version of "Let's Make a Deal," where they win a trip to Rockula's castle in Rocksylvania, a dreary country even by stone-age standards, where they'll attend a Monster Bash - a sort of stone-age disco - which Fred and Barney attend dressed as Dracula and Frankenstein (I'll just use the modern names, okay?) There, they stumble on Frankenstone, a monster created by Count Rockula, and bring it to life. I don't THINK I saw this as a kid, but perhaps I did. It would explain why I used to think that Dracula created Frankenstein's monster.

Frankenstone's Monster awakens Count Rockula, who has been asleep for five centuries. Since it's a costume party, no one knows that they're real monsters until Rockula turns into a bat. Panic ensues. Soon, all of the guests are gone, except for The Flintstones and Rubbles. Wilma is wearing a Bride of Rockula costume, and is quickly mistaken for the real thing.

After that, it's nonstop hijinks as Rockula tries to make Wilma a widow by having Fred killed.

As a halloween special, it's just okay. However, it's not BAD, either. It's certainly a damn sight better than The Flintstone Kids Meet Frankenpebble, made less than a decade later, and I especially enjoyed the ending. A must-have for Flintstones fans, and not a bad thing for Halloween fans to have, either, but hardly an essential special to own. Whether you ought to have this depends a lot on two things:

1. Whether you watched it enough as a kid to get nostalgic.
2: Whether you realy like the Flintstones to start with.

I don't THINK I ever saw this as a kid, and I'm kinda lukewarm on The Flintstones. I don't dislike 'em, but never went out of my way to watch them. By the time I was a kid, they were just vitamin spokesmen to me, y'know?

It comes and goes from youtube. Here's part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly

2008-09-18T08:59:00.004-05:00

This video was available only at McDonalds, but seems to be an attempt to turn Mcdonaldland characters into a new Nicktoon - the characters here look like they ought to be in Rugrats or Hey Arnold. It's not really a Halloween special - just a vaguely Halloween-themed episode of a six episode series that you could buy with a happy meal. So, technically, it's not a special. In fact, this cartoon is not very special at all.

"Silly" is the operative word here, not "scared." The plot involves Ronald, Birdie and the gang going camping in the Far-Flung Forest, singing irritatingly catchy songs along the way (written by the same guys who made most of the Rugrats music, and, strangely enough, formed the core of the band Devo. This is not their best work). However, once they get into a haunted house, things pick up. There are secret passages, riddles to solve, and other neat stuff. This might have actually been a lot better if the characters had been someone OTHER than McDonalds people.

And you know what? Maybe I'm just bitter. I was really, really hoping that the mad scientist in charge of the haunted house would turn out to be that professor guy who used to hang around McDonaldland in the 70s and early 80s (rumor has it Mayor McCheese showed up in one episode). But it wasn't. It was just some guy. The scenes in the haunted house have some cool things going on, though, so I shouldn't be so harsh.

The most Halloweenish thing about it is the cover art; indeed, this is probably the video on this blog that is the LEAST required viewing (heck, stories go around about parents getting kids to behave by threatening to make them watch this), but completists who have to have a copy can find it online for under a buck without too much trouble.

Interestingly, a good decade or so before, there was ANOTHER thing called "Ronald McDonald Scared Silly" - a 30 second commercial that was in every way superior to this "special." Here it is!

And here's another McDonalds commercial - watch to the end, and you'll see an add for "Boo Buckets." I had the orange one in my basement for YEARS.

And, just to prove I know my McDonalds, here's a link to a poem I wrote: Howl (for Mayor McCheese).

And, if you're curious - the cartoon starts after a 3-4 minute intro.

The Paul Lynde Halloween Special

2008-09-18T07:28:00.005-05:00

I missed the 1970s by about six months. Rare is the time that I feel like I really missed all that much.

For instance, I have yet to see an episode of one of those "comedy variety" shows that were so popular in those days that I actually find entertaining (not counting the Muppet Show, of course, which was really more of a satire of the genre). But one thing I'll say for The Paul Lynde Halloween Special is that it's nowhere near as excruciating as, say, the Star Wars Holiday Special from a couple of years later. Of course, few things are.

Paul Lynde was funny as hell, but there was always something weird about the guy that probably kept him from having a series of his own that achieved mainstream popularity. He may have been a regular "center square" on Hollywood Squares, but his persona and voice made him seem more like a wacky sitcom neighbor than a sitcom star. Still, the guy deserved more than a co-starring role. Giving him a comedy variety Halloween special rather than an actual series probably seemed like a natural in 1976.

Being a variety show, the special features a whole cast of people who more or less made a living as variety show guest stars in the 1970s, along with a couple of particularly interesting guests. For instance, Maragaret Hamilton reprises her role as the Wicked Witch of the West, the role she'd made famous nearly forty years before.

But the show is best remembered today for being the national TV debut of KISS. The band must have been a fairly odd choice for a goofy show, since, while it's hard for those of us born AFTER Kiss Meets The Phantom of the Park to imagine, this was a time when people genuinely thought that KISS was scary (the way people in the late 90s were actually scared of Marilyn Manson). Putting them into a show like this was downright subversive.

Halloween specials were still sort of a novelty in 1976 - only a couple of others had been made, and the tropes of the genre (the old lady in the spooky house turning out to be nice, someone who hates halloween coming to love it) were still not yet in place. And yet, this one almost instinctively knew where the genre was heading: it ended with a disco party, which would go on to become "Ending B" in Halloween specials over the next few years, when the genre really came into its golden age. In fact, you might say that this was the Halloween special that started it all....

Here're some clips:

1. Paul sings a Halloween version of "Kids" (only in segments on youtube right now, for some reason)

2. KISS interview segment (which is pretty embarrassing) and "King of the Night Time World" (which rocks)

3. The Disco Ending! Note Kiss looking down, glaring disapprovingly. Who knew they'd go on to write "I Was Made for Loving You?"

Which Witch is Which?

2008-09-17T20:32:00.006-05:00

Surely the Charlie Brown gang has the most holiday specials in the business, but in the 80s and 90s, a pair called Buttons and Rusty - a cartoon fox and bear - tried to break the record, coming out with a different special every year, each covering a different holiday, starting with Christmas in 1983. They eventually hit most of the big ones, though this is the only one I've ever seen. Honestly, I don't know who these guys are. Were they mascots for some restaurant or something?

Well, I have no idea. They barely even have a wikipedia entry (compared to, say, every other cartoon series from the 80s, most of which get massive entries).

I remember having this on tape as a kid, but I never managed to watch it all the way through. I tried to sit through it so I could review it for this site and came up similarly short. Kids who were into shows about critters who live in the woods around a trailer park might've liked it better, but I kept on expecting that, despite the fact that it was a halloween show, someone was going to give a speech about Jesus. It has that sort of vibe about it. THe Mormons WERE one of the sponsors of the airing the tape I have is from. Their commercial had an upbeat jingle.

Anyway, it's all to do with a park ranger (a regular character in these specials, I guess), throwing a halloween party and explaining the nuances of the holiday to a fascinated Buttons and Rusty, explaining along the way that "city animals are different from forest animals," which is why buttons and rusty are supposed to stay away from the trailer park (which is what they call "the city," I guess). I think they might be going for something political here. I'm not really sure. But as a city person, I get very annoyed by this notion that country people automatically have more "values" than city people. The fact that they pushed this idea in the cartoon bugged me so much that my favorite part of watching this special this year was the fact that the copy I saw had commercials for Panini sticker albums. I loved those things! I had the Hulk Hogan's Rock n Wrestling album, and almost all of the stickers for it. And the He-Man one, I think. Why haven't THOSE made a comeback as an 80s collectable? Every other fad from those days has.

All whining aside, the title song in this special is pretty catchy. Oher than that, though, this didn't do much for me when I was a kid, and doesn't do much for me now, either. I can't even fall back on the "cool, Halloweenish atmosphere," because there's not even much of that here.

Well, you can't win 'em all. Sometimes I have to just say "I'm not the target audience for this, and never was. If you like this kind of thing, you might enjoy it. Or you would, if you were a kid." Something about it just rubbed me the wrong way. I'm glad I finally found a copy so I could put up an entry on it for this site, but I'm equally glad that I got it over with and won't have to watch it again.

Raggedy Ann: The Pumpkin Who Couldn't Smile

2008-09-17T19:43:00.010-05:00

"Why couldn't I have gotten work in a pie or something?" asks the poor pumpkin. "I'm a failure. I can't help it. That's the way I was carved." And he cries - his tears are pumpkin seeds. Nice touch. Chuck Jones, the Looney Tunes director, directed this special, and there are times when it shows.

This was one of a couple of Raggedy Ann specials that were made in the late 70s, when Ann was being "branded" as a mulitmedia licensed character. A few years later, guys like Strawberry Shortcake and The Care Bears would overshadow her in that arena when they raised "multimedia licensing" to a fine art.

I haven't seen her other specials, but it's almost a shame Ann got shoved aside, because, while I'll admit I expected to really hate it as an adult (I only vaguely remember seeing it as a kid), this special turned out to be awfully funny - thanks, I assume, to Chuck Jones, who realized that just because he was writing a sickly-sweet show for little kids didn't mean he couldn't be funny. The people who wrote "Casper Saves Halloween," "Which Witch is Which," and any number of other C-list specials would have done well to take note.

Anyway... far away, on the other side of town from the lonely pumpkin in the introduction, Raggedy Ann and Andy are almost as sad as the pumpkin because of a nearby little boy named Ralph whom they've never seen smile. He has no reason to - he lives with an aunt who happens to be a real pill. The aunt's house is an old Victorian, and she dresses and acts as though she's been in there since it was built. She won't let Ralph go trick or treating, and, when kids come to trick or treat at her house, she runs them off and shouts "can't you find honest jobs?" Her voice is instantly recognizable as that of June Foray - Hazel the Witch in "Donald Duck: Trick or Treat," "Witch Hazel" in various Looney Toons, Mother Nature in the Smurfs, the old lady who owns Tweetie Bird, etc. She's also the voice of Raggedy Ann. Her voice is all over the specials on this site.

The Raggedy pair try to come up with plans to make Ralphie smile. Andy suggests accusing the aunt of income tax evasion. Ann, who is not nearly as funny as Andy, suddenly shouts "Pumpkin!" to which Andy replies "Pumpkin? What do you mean 'pumpkin?' Heh. You're always yelling 'pumpkin.'" Life at these guys' house must have been strange.

The two hit on the notion of bringing the poor boy a pumpkin and go to work (with the help of a skateboarding stuffed dog who would have been far more at home in the 80s). The last pumpkin in the patch is still sitting on the shelf, beating down on himself so loudly that even the nearby mice get fed-up and leave.

So, that's act 1. Act 2 and Act 3 consist entirely of Ann, Andy and the dog getting the pumpkin and bringing it back (which is kind of hard for dolls who aren't strong enough to lift a jack-o-lantern.) It's not a terribly involving plot - each scene moves along at a very, very leisurely pace. There's no suspense for even a second.

Luckily for the viewer, Chuck Jones was involved not just as director, but as a writer. If the plot lacks any twists or suspense (and it does), he made up for it by having some pretty clever dialogue, mostly on Raggedy Andy's part. It's though Jones said "well, I have to write a show about talking dolls that will appeal mainly to the under 6 set. Might as well make the most of it." And, being Chuck Jones, he got away with it (I can easily imagine getting notes from the producers telling writers to dumb the script down, make the plot even MORE generic, etc. - that happens all the time when you're working for hire on something for kids).

This isn't to say it's as anarchic or clever as an Animaniacs episode, or even Witch's Night Out," but the people involved in this clearly had fun about as much fun as they could with the gig. It may be faint praise, but this is probably the best of all possible Raggedy Ann halloween specials.

Consider this dialogue:

Raggedy Andy: "Why don't we just take someone else's pumpkin?"
Raggedy Ann: "You can't make someone happy by making someone else sad!"
Raggedy Andy: "Ever try it?"

Or how about this:
Ralph (on the trick or treaters): But it's Halloween, aunt Agatha! They were just having fun!
Aunt Agatha: That is no excuse, young man, for threatening honest citizens....be a good boy, and tomorrow we'll go to the museum and look at the rocks.

What do you know - trick or treating CAN get you accused of taking part in a rumble, just as Sally suspected in It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!

Sure, I got bored at times while watching this special as an adult. The song at the end is pretty forgettable (it's the polar opposite of the disco ending songs that were popular at the time), but the funny moments seem all the funnier in a special like this, and make it worth finding a copy of, though it's pretty rare these days.

It's now on youtube:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Halloween with the New Addams Family

2008-09-15T17:20:00.003-05:00

In the late 1970s, ABC decided to cash in on the popularity of Addams Family reruns by getting the cast back together to make a crappy Halloween special and seeing if it generated enough interest to restart the series.

Okay. "Crappy" probably wasn't part of the original plan. But quality clearly wasn't one of their bigger concerns. The special they made was in bright, vivid color (which just doesn't work for these guys) and shot on video (which just doesn't give it the right atmosphere). Unable to recreate the original set (most of the props had been stolen when the first series ended), they settled for building an entirely less interesting one. Sure, there are graves outside, but the new place just doesn't seem ver spooky.

They brought in a guy who was actually a Munsters writer to do the script, and for a while when I watched this, I thought he was still secretly playing for Team Munster and trying to sabotage this show. But I came to realize that it's not really the script that's the problem so much as the directing and the editing. The timing is all wrong for most of the gags. The pace of the special is howlingly dull. A different director might have made this script work with a better set and a better budget. The cast was still in good shape - there's no reason why they couldn't have done a pretty good new series in the 1970s with Wednesday and Pugsley as young adults.

But, well, that wasn't the result here, and the new series wouldn't come around until the 90s. In fact, rather than having Wednesday and Pugsley as young adults, they brought in two new kids, Wednesday JR. and Pugsley Jr, to handle all the jokes Wednesday and Pugsley would have had before - it seems the producers were determined to make this pretty much the same show, with the same jokes, as it was in the 60s, only, well, not as good. Still, the special is fondly remembered by people who used to watch it before going trick-or-treating. A show doesn't have to be good to inspire nostalgia, just as books and movies certainly don't have to be any good to become cultural phenomenons.

Here's the first part, which should be enough to satisfy your curiosity. The rest is on youtube, as well.

Casper's Halloween Special (or Casper Saves Halloween)

2008-09-15T09:52:00.004-05:00

Now, this one just plain sucks. I'm not really being fair by saying that, since it's intended not for me, but for toddlers, who will probably enjoy it. And, watching it today for the first time since the mid 90s, when I caught it on TNT of TBS or one of those, I enjoyed it a LOT more than I expected to. I was about 14 when I last saw it, and judged it as harshly as any 14 year old would. Half a lifetime (to the month) later, it's not as bad as I remember. I still had some trouble sitting through it, though. I had A.D.D. back before it was cool. This doesn't suck anywhere NEAR as much as The Wacky Adventures of Ronald Mcdonald" halloween episode. But watching THAT is worse than reading youtube comments.

In this 1979 special, Casper, the annoyingly cute ghost who lives in a cool house that emits bats periodically (a la the house in the Scooby Doo intro), Casper comes to save Halloween for a bunch of orphans. While it went under various titles, the title card says "He Ain't Scary, He's Our Brother." It's been released on video under that title, as well as "Casper's Halloween Special" and "Casper Saves Halloween." It's not the only Halloween special that can't keep its own title straight, so I won't hold THAT against it.

Anyway, Casper is all excited to go trick or treating, since people will think he's a REAL boy in a ghost costume, while the other ghosts in the house want to go "spooking" (why can't ghosts like that ever show up on the ghost tours I run?). While trick or treating, Casper runs with a group of orphans who plan to trick or treat in rich neighborhoods, since the rich people will have better candy. Being orphans, these kids haven't seen a lot of TV, so they don't know that the best candy will invariably come from the spooky old lady who lives in teh spooky old house on the edge of town and is rumored to be a witch. This being the 70s, before the whole business of scaring parents about poison candy started going around, the treats they get include a lot of fruit, cakes and other homemade, non-wrapped candy.

The orphans wander the streets, singing a song that goes "Halloween is the most when you play like a ghost /and you're going trick or treat!" They get turned away from the rich people's houses ("You're not from this neighborhood! Go someplace closer to home!" says the snooty butler, who is probably a big time racist. "We don't have a home," says one of the orpans, who apparently don't count the friendly orphanage as a home). The ghosts show up to spook the orphans, the police aren't very nice, and Casper himself has trouble fitting in with most trick or treaters. But the orphans like him, and he helps save the day. The orphans - who are awfully cheery, even for cartoon orphans - end up getting candy.

This special has be re-released SEVERAL times under various names, usually packaged with a handful of other Casper episodes (some Halloween related, some not - a great many on one release, in particular, seem to be set in space). That this one has been released so often when more deserving specials languish is a real shame, if you ask me.

The whole thing was on AOL video a while ago, but seems to have vanished from the internet for the moment.

Beware of Mr. Boogedy!

2008-09-15T09:27:00.015-05:00

In the 80s, the Disney Channel was THE place to see Halloween specials. A few, like Garfield and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, continued to get some airplay on the networks, but Disney was the king of Halloween for a while there. They even made their own. Some, like Tim Burton's awesome "Frankenweenie," were regular trademarks of quality. Others, like "Mr. Boogedy," were just solid family entertainment.

The movie takes place in the town of Lucifer Falls, which may be the best name for a town with a haunted house in it ever. The family bought the house from Devil May Care Realty - talk about your predatory housing markets! Would YOU buy a house from Devil May Care Realty? I would. They sound like the kind of outfit that might actually give me a mortgage.

Funnily enough, saying "not really haunted" could get Devil May Care in trouble. In some states, if a house is even rumored to be haunted, that has to be listed as a pre-existing condition.

The plot here involves a family who owns a novelty shop (leading to plenty of built-in gags about fake vomit and stuff, though it never goes so far out of its way to be funny that it forgets to be scary.) The family moves into a house in Lucifer Falls , where there won't be any competition for a novelty shop. A guy named Neal (John Astin, the original Gomez Addams, who SHINES in this role and played a similar role a few years later on "Eerie, Indiana.") is waiting for them when they arrive, spooky as you please and saying he's from the chamber of commerce.

Neil warns them that the house is, despite what it said on the sign, haunted by The Boogedy Man, a colonial-era ghost who is given to shouting "Boogedy!" and shooting green light at people. The mother and father make the most of it, even though the kids are upset. And they should be - even if the place ISN'T haunted, it's still the kind of town where you might come home and find the creepy old guy from the chamber of commerce poking around in your living room.

The Boogedy man has chased several families away from the house like this. This annoys me - as a pro ghost investigator myself, I respect ghosts' right to exist (if they do), but not their right to push people around. Once you're dead, it's time to stop taking up space. If you want to float down a hallway or hang out in the basement, it's no skin off my back, but the first time my audio recorder picks up a ghost telling me to get out (which seems to happen to me a lot less than it does to people on TV), that ghost is getting it right in the kisser.

The family in this is pretty cool - a fairly realistic portrayal of a family, which isn't something you see every day in tv movies. Except for all of the funny nose glasses, they seem pretty much like normal people who might have lived on your block in the 80s. The kids aren't thrilled with the house or the town, but set about exploring before they even unpack. While the boys go off ghost hunting, the teenage daughter laments "I'll bet nobody here ever heard of Bruce Springsteen!" (in New England? ha!) The spooky house comes complete with lots of old stuff - enough antiques that the sale of them could probably cover the cost of the house. The daughter is the first to see The Boogedy man - she describes him as having a face like a sandwich. I wouldn't be the first to suggest that the ghost was Mayor McCheese.

Naturally, the dad assumes it was just Neal from the chamber of commerce playing a joke on them. But Mr. Boogedy is real. Soon, he's showing up to everybody, and Neal explains that he's the ghost of a pilgrim who hated jokes and sold his soul to the devil to get a magic cloak. THis is NOT a ghost who is going to want to live with a family that sells novelties, and he begins to do his best to scare them away. His favorite trick is to shout "boogedy" and shoot green light at them.

This is a WAY above-average ghost show, finding a good balance between spookiness and silliness. I wasn't allowed to watch it in the 80s; my mom thought it would be too scary for me (plenty of people have told me they had nightmares about it). I DO remember the commercials showing Mr. Boogedy shouting "boogedy" and shooting green light out of his fingers; he reminded me of The Emperor from "Return of the Jedi" (to whom he bares more than a passing resemblance). But watching it now doesn't bring back memories for me - it's just an above-average made-for-tv disney movie to me, and many of these specials are useless without the nostalgia factor. I enjoyed this one, though. It doesn't have the humor or visual style of, say, Frankenweenie, but it's solid family entertainment. If I HAD seen it as a kid, I'm sure it would make me awfully nostalgic to see it again. As it is, though, I can enjoy it on its own terms. If "Mr. Boogedy" has a major flaw, it's that it tries to cram a feature-length story in about 45 minutes. Soon after this, they'd abandon specials in favor of straight-to-tv/video movies like Halloweentown, which eventually replaced this one in the Halloween lineup.

This classic haunted house special still attracts a wide following today, and many are dying for Disney to just release the thing on DVD already - or at least put it up online as a digital download. The fact that ANYTHING is out of print in this day and age is just silly. However, Disney seems pretty uninterested in putting ANY of their made-for-TV things from the 20th century out on DVD.

The 45 minute special even spawned a sequel, "Bride of Boogedy," that was more than twice as long as the original and featured about half of the original cast (others were replaced with mixed results). There are enough threads to the plot in the sequel that I suspect they were planning a tv series, but ended up just doing a movie.

This tends to get removed from youtube pretty regularly, but here it is(working as of June 09). Filmed off a TV set, so the quality isn't great, but it works for nostalgics or the curious. If you want it in better quality, torrents of VHS rips float around freely, especially around October, and bootleg DVDs (again, VHS rips) show up from time to time.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Here's a compilation of Mr. Boogedy doing his stuff:

Frankenweenie

2008-09-15T08:55:00.003-05:00

A year before he made his directoral debut with "Pee Wee's Big Adventure," Tim Burton directed a half-hour black and white film called "Frankenweenie" that ended up being a regular Disney Channel Halloween special for a while throughout the late 80s and early 90s.

In it, a young boy (the kid from Neverending Story) enjoys making monster movies starring his dog. One day, he rolls a ball into the street for the dog to chase. In the street, the dog is killed by a passing car. The kid gets the idea to bring the dog back to life after doing experiment with electricity on dead frogs in science class.

This is unmistakably a Tim Burton film - the cars look like Tim Burton cars, the gravestones in the opening look like Tim Burton gravestones. And Tim Burton probably understands what makes Halloween Halloween better than any other director. The plot here isn't all that exciting, and it's not very funny or scary, but the visuals are so wonderful that I don't care in the slightest. Watch it and you can clearly see that the director is the kind of guy who could go on to make the best-looking version of Sleepy Hollow in history.

I remember watching this, and kind of enjoying it, when I was a kid and the Disney Channel aired it. I don't remember being knocked out by the kooky visuals at the time - it's not the kind of thing your average kid notices. Maybe the whole world seemed like this to me back then, so the show didn't seem that remarkable. I don't know.

But the stunning sets, costumes, and visuals made this an expensive film to produce - the black and white short cost a million bucks to make, and Disney, feeling that it was too scary for young viewers (which didn't stop 'em from airing it) fired Burton for wasting their money. Burton is now said to be working on a full-length stop-motion version. Disney might not have made money on this, but just LOOK at it! They could afford the money it cost. If you've got money like Disney has money, you might as well pour it into high quality products like this without worrying so much about profitability. That's my stance on the issue, and I'm sticking to it. Quality is more important that profitability in the long run. People still watch this one because it's still good. They only watch crappy-looking specials like "The Great Bear Scare" if they're completists or something, though I imagine that "The Great Bear Scare" made more money when it was first released (the same year as this one). This one certainly has a big following on youtube. The Great Bear Scare does not.

Here's the whole thing in youtube, PLUS "Vincent," the stop motion short that Burton made at Disney (with the voice of Vincent Price)

Part 1: (note Shelly Duvall as the mom)

Part 2:

Part 3:

VINCENT:

The Worst Witch

2008-09-14T12:09:00.004-05:00

This made-for-HBO movie hit the airwaves in 1986, a real boom year for Halloween specials, and became a Disney Channel staple. Really a movie, not a special, but Halloween Special fanatics revere it as a model of cheesiness and "so bad it's good" charm. It's really not THAT bad, honestly. It's rather entertaining on its own terms.

It's fondly remembered for two major reasons:

1. Nostalgia. Plenty of people remember enjoying this movie as kids. Of course, kids will watch pretty much anything, really. ANyone with kids knows that kids LOVE plenty of stuff that really, really sucks. This is better than the Halloweentown series that Disney eventually replaced this with in their Halloween lineup, but it's not exactly a great film, even as "kids movies" go. However, the oh-so-80s special effects and music make me feel like a kid again, which is half the point (in some cases, the whole point) of watching old Halloween specials. And, heck, even if it's not great, at least it never gets particularly dull, either. There are plenty of far shorter specials that I have a harder time sitting through.

2. Camp value. There are "good" bad movies, and "bad" bad movies. Few specials, good or bad, are as much fun to watch as this one. It's not just Tim Curry's presence that makes me feel that they should be showing this in theatres at midnight and encouraging the audience to shout back and throw things at the movie. Fairuza Balk's presence doesn't hurt much, either. It's cheesy and campy and just screaming for audience partici....pation. If one of our local revival theatres in Chicago starts showing this and encouraging audience participation (and why not? They've done singalongs of Mary Poppins and The Little Mermaid, both of which I attended), I'd be there with bells on. Maybe they could make it a double feature with Rocky Horror.

The plot concerns a young girl at a school for witches (which some have likened to Hogwarts, naturally). The special effects have "1980s" written all over them, and Tim Curry has a music video in the middle of it. What's not to like, other than the fact that the songs aren't that great (though they ARE rather catchy), the plot isn't that involving, and the jokes aren't that funny?

The best line is saved for last, as Tim Curry, a real big shot in the witch world, tells our young heroine that "you're not the worst witch in school anymore!" What a compliment!

Still, camp value fanatics and 80s nostalgia people shouldn't miss this. After Harry Potter made people remember it, The Worst Witch actually became a TV series about 20 years after the movie came out. I haven't seen it, so I won't comment.

Here's Tim Curry's totally rad music video, "Anything Can Happen on Halloween."

And here's part one of the whole thing, with the "growing up isn't easy" song.

The Adventures of Pete and Pete: Halloweenie

2008-09-14T11:29:00.002-05:00

This 1990s Nickelodeon show is one of my favorite shows of all time. Few have ever done suburban surrealism quite so well, and I can think of very few shows, movies or books that influenced me as much as a writer - when I'm stuck on a project, one of the best ways to get started again is to watch some episodes of this. In the DVD commentary, they say they wanted the show to be "funny, sad, strange and beautiful" and that it should have a sense of "ragged glory." I want ALL of my work to be like that. I framed that phrase above my desk. I've even thought of getting those words as a tattoo. Will McRobb and Chris Viscardi, the creators, are real heroes of mine. The original 60 second shorts alone qualify as some of the greatest television I've ever seen. My favorite is "What Would You Do for a Dollar," which, regrettably, wasn't on the DVD releases. Nickelodeon rarely airs shows quite this good anymore (nor did they back then, despite what some nostalgics will tell you), though I DO dig Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide. Fun stuff, that.

But, all praise aside, this show was hit-and-miss. The first two seasons had some brilliant episodes and some not-so-brilliant ones, and the third season really only had one particularly great episode. And this Halloween episode, despite being from the show's "golden era," isn't one of my favorites. Some fans of the show think its the finest episode; maybe I just have my hopes too high from the inviting combination of Pete, Pete, and Halloween. That said, it's still better than the vast majority of Halloween episodes reviewed on this site, and should be considered essential. Certainly it's among the top "halloween episodes" of ongoing series, particularly "kids" shows.

In this episode, Big Pete has decided that he's too old for Halloween, while Little Pete is attempting to break the world record for trick or treating. This all leads to a big showdown with The Pumpkin Eaters, an anti-Halloween gang led by Big Pete's biggest rival, "Endless Mike" Helstrom, who are trying to recruit Big Pete to join their number and start smashing pumpkins. Brilliant, but maybe not as brilliant as episodes like "Yellow Fever" and "Sick Day."

The episode, however, was based on a 60 second short, in which The Petes, plus Artie (The Strongest Man... in the World), take on Hat-Head, a solitary pumpkin smasher whom Big Pete compares to Mussolini and Darth Vader. The short opens with a funeral for Little Pete's smashed pumpkin, after which, all of the non-evil kids in the neighborhood munch candy corn for energy and "track Hat Head's trail of destruction all the way to the state line" where they turn their arch-enemy into a jack-o-lantern. It's brilliant stuff. Sixty seconds of surrealism that's all heart.

Part 1 (the only part I could find online):

Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein / The Wolf Man

2008-09-14T11:14:00.005-05:00

Long about the year 2000, between the great era of the Alvin and the Chipmunks 80s series and specials and the time of the live action CGI feature films, there seems to have been an attempt to launch Alvin, Simon and Theodore as a regular Halloween brand. A whole album was released of Halloweenish songs (including a really fun, faithful take on "The Time Warp"), and, prior to the dull "Alvin and the Chipmunks: Trick or Treason" in 2003, in the late 1990s there were two direct-to-video movies, in which the Chipmunks meet Frankenstein and the Wolf Man. They were remarkably different in content and tone; one would think they came from different eras. They also differ in quality; the Wolf Man installment is terrific; in fact, it's one of the better Halloween cartoons of all time. But the Frankenstein entry flounders.

They're really movies, not specials, but I'm classifying them under "specials" anyway, because at least one of them deserves some recognition. And they're both on a single DVD release that also includes the above-average "Monster Mash."

In Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolf Man, a new neighbor has moved into a note-perfect spooky house in the Chipmunks' town, and Alvin, presented here as a horror movie freak, is having nightmares about the wolf man. The new neighbor is a weird guy who seems rather wolf-like. Spooky neighbors inspiring halloween rumors has certainly been done before, but it's done pretty well here. The whole thing has a terrific "Halloween" feel about it. You can look at the shots of the neighborhood and tell that it's October, a little detail that can add so much to a halloween special (even specials where the plot makes no sense and the jokes aren't funny can be fun for me to watch if they get that atmosphere right).

Meanwhile, Theodore is trying to learn to be scary for his upcoming role in a school production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Alvin was set to play the role, but, during rehearsal, he mixes some chemicals that cause an explosion that nearly wrecks the auditorium. This forces authorities to yank Alvin from the show.

Somewhere along the line Theodore is bitten by a werewolf and starts "wolfing out" (as those of us who watched the Teen Wolf cartoon used to call this particular bodily function). The werewolf turns out to be the spooky neighbor (hot damn, a neighbor who really DOES turn out to be spooky), and Theodore cures both of them by biting him. I didn't know that you could cure werewolves that way (it's awfully convenient, huh?), but, hey, I ain't complaining. Much. I get the idea that there's a lot of backstory that just didn't make it into the movie - maybe there should have been a novelization.

This is about as good Chipmunks cartoons come, featuring above-average animation, a coherent and engaging plot, decent music, and the Chipettes, who didn't show up much between the 80s series and the 2009 CGI sequel.

Meanwhile, the Frankenstein entry just isn't quite up to snuff. Alvin turns into a monster, but gets better in time for the group to perform at an amusement park (a sure sign that, in the 90s, their career was in the crapper). The animation isn't as good, the atmosphere just isn't there, and the script is far weaker. Skip this one, and watch the Wolf Man one. They're on the same DVD.

Clip:

Are You Afraid of the Dark (season 3): The Midnight Ride

2008-09-14T10:17:00.001-05:00

This well-loved Nickelodeon/CTV series took on most of the great horror stories at one point or another - and they often did a pretty good job of it. They don't scare me much anymore, but when I was younger my friends and I tended to find them pretty spooky - we'd keep ourselves from getting scared by making fun of the episodes as we watched them. In particular, I remember that we used to keep track of how often they said "Sorry," with the good ol' Canadian "sore -ee" pronunciation. Thanks, CTV.

This one features a kid named Ian (who looks remarkably like a young Ichabod Crane) moving to modern-day sleepy hollow, where he's "initiated" into the town by going across the infamous bridge (here called "the Bridge of Souls") on Halloween night to retrieve the Headless Horseman's pumpkin head. He knows perfectly well that this isn't a real Halloween tradition, as the local gang of toughs (dressed as Pirates for Halloween) tell him, but he decides to do it anyway.

So off he ventures into the misty woods - woods are pretty generally misty in these shows - where he crosses the old bridge (which, in this version, isn't covered) and finds a jack-o-lantern, glowing green from a glow stick (maybe his saying "nice touch" here is a nod to the Garfield special, and maybe it isn't, but I prefer to think is is). Naturally, the bully jumps out with a scythe, scaring the bajeezus out of our intrepid hero.

Then, off in the distance, we see the REAL headless horseman. This is pretty standard business - most adaptations at least start out with Brom (or some other bully) dressing up as the horseman before the real one shows up.

Then, things get interesting. A pale-faced ghost of Ichabod Crane shows up, asking for directions. Back in town, the horseman shows up again, chasing Ian around. Initially, he assumes that it's just the bully again and goes for a confrontation, but, no, this is the real thing. They gave Ichabod directions, changing the story, and leading the horseman to look for a new victim. This leads to the titular midnight ride, in which Ian and his new girlfriend outrun the horseman on their bikes. The horseman vanishes in a really cool blaze of flames as Ian runs across the bridge.

One of the better minor adaptations, really.

Berenstain Bears: Trick or Treat

2008-09-14T10:15:00.001-05:00

This comes from one of the later incarnations of the Bears' TV show. Like For Better or Worse, it's had many. There were some early specials, a saturday morning series in the 80s, and this newer series, distinguishable by the bluegrassy opening music, in the 90s.

The Trick or Treat episode deals with the cubs wanting to stay away from Widder Jones, the local scary old lady in the scary old house. As if you couldn't guess strictly by the premise, she turns out to have the best candy in town. It doesn't get much less creative than "the witch turns out to have the best candy in town" plot when it comes to Halloween specials.

However, this one has some fun getting around to the climax, as teh cubs enjoy the sights of Bear Country around Halloween and talk about the rumors they've heard about Widder Jones. It expands a bit on the book version of this particular story, if I remember that one correctly. It may not be all that creative as plots go, but it's still fun to watch. As happens in so many of these things, the Halloweenish atmosphere saves the day.

Beavis and Butt-Head: Children of the Cornholio

2008-09-14T10:14:00.000-05:00

This hour long episode has a lot to recommend it - the animation is an improvement over the early episodes (which may be said to take some of the fun out of it).

One knows, of course, what happens when beavis eats the candy he gets while trick or treating - he becomes The Great Cornholio. All goes well until he stumbles into an old barn, where a homicidal maniac hangs him up on a hook and then hacks him to bits with a chainsaw. I hate it when that happens.

This is about what you'd expect from a Beavis and Butt Head cartoon. It's rude, it's crude, and it's really very funny. Sure, these guys were idiots, but people who complained about them sort of seemed to be missing the point. This was not a show that promoted stupidity - it was a show that showed how stupid people raised on MTV would grow up to be. Their comments on the videos made for some of the sharpest satire of the 90s.

As Kevin Smith has noted a decade ago, MTV really should go back to showing more messed up puppets and screwed up cartoons. It was popular even years ago to note that MTV had put videos on a back burner (even Butt Head once noted, circa 1993, that MTV "used to show music videos, but now they just show pictures of people snow boarding) or something to that effect. But there were still a few hours of videos in those days. Now, it's just modelling competitions and shows about rich brats. Music only turns up in the middle of the night. People raised on MTV (and other such pop culture) in the 80s and 90s might have turned into Beavis and Butt Head, but what of the kids who watch it now? Can we afford to buy them all sports cars in this economy?

As Halloween specials go, this one is a change of pace. There's no "local witch who turns out to be nice" OR disco dancing or ANY attempt to be kid friendly. It's funnier than most of the others, and, while it doesn't have much of a "halloweenish vibe" to it (the kind you get mainly by having a lot of colorful leaves in the background), it's still a lot more watchable than, say, The Smurfs "The Littlest Witch." If you're doing a marathon viewing of Halloween shows, it's a good one to throw into the mix when you want something that's actually funny, not just nostalgic fun, after a handful of bad ones.

Sleepy Hollow (1999, Tim Burton)

2008-09-14T10:13:00.000-05:00

Now, before this came out, I was a serious Sleepy Hollow purist. After all, the closer previous versions stuck to Irving's story, the better the result. So when word came around that Burton was making a version that would upset purists, I was skeptical, to say the least. Still, it was Burton. I had hope.

That hope grew stronger when the first still photos were circulated. It became apparent that, though the movie was going to be a travesty, it was going to be the coolest travesty EVER.
Indeed, the storyline had very little to do with Washington Irving's story - there's a headless horseman, and there are characters with the same names as the characters in the story, but that's pretty much it. Ichabod goes from being a superstitous schoolmaster to a decidedly scientific police inspector sent to investigate some murders in Sleepy Hollow. Most versions of the story have the horseman turn out to be real, but this one really takes it a few steps further.
The mystery plot is fun, and Ichabod is a fun character (Johnny Depp shines here), but it's the visuals that make the film. Few, if any, horror movies have ever looked so beautifully creepy as this, with the damp autumn pallet, the gorgeous costumes, and the best beheading scene in all of cinema, for my money. Great shots are everywhere. Burton was far more inspired by the Disney version than the original manuscript, and I'd say he made the right choice.

I still maintain that the ideal Sleepy Hollow movie lies somewhere in between - the look and feel of this one with a storyline closer to the one in the Will Rogers version. Still, this movie was enough to bring me away from being a Sleepy Hollow purist, and that's saying something.

The Trailer:

Claymation Comedy of Horrors

2008-09-14T10:12:00.002-05:00

One of the last standalone half-hour specials to be made (at least to date), and it's generally a forgettable one. The story deals with some claymation animals digging through a haunted castle, looking for Frankenstein's Monster.

Visually, I must say, it's spectular. While not as gorgeously autumnal or Halloweeny as some of the great cartoons, it's just about the best looking Halloween special ever - quite a switch from the low production values that are a hallmark of the genre.

I'll admit I haven't seen this one in a while - maybe I need to give it another chance.

DTV Monster Hits

2008-09-14T10:11:00.003-05:00

This late-80's special edition of "DTV" was only aired once on network TV, to my knowledge, and never released on video. It aired as a prime time special on 10/30/87; I seem to remember watching it at my neighbor's house. I was in first grade. Ah, memories. For many years, it was known as exceptionally rare - having a VHS tape of it (grandma taped it for me and found the video at her place 20 years later) made me a real king in the world of Halloween specials. Now, of course, it's on youtube for all to enjoy.

DTV was sort of Disney's answer to MTV, taking classic songs (mostly rock n roll oldies) and making videos for them out of clips of old shorts from the Disney vault. It was a good way to put their classic material to use (rather than just letting it sit in the vault, which is pretty much what they do with it now).

The special featured some vaguely Halloween-oriented pop songs set to classic Disney animation, including the obvious picks (Monster Mash, Thriller) and some less obvious (ELO's Evil Woman, Pat Benetar's You Better Run). Then, having scared you, it wishes you away on an "up" note - The Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams." Remember when that song WASN'T Scary? Was there ever such a time? It was a sort of creepy song, in a way, even before Marilyn Manson did it.

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FAQ

2008-09-14T10:09:00.011-05:00

Which Halloween specials are the best?
Frankly, which specials are the "best" depends heavily on which ones make you feel the most nostalgic. Most of them aren't exactly great art. But some of them ARE pretty fantastic, and my own list of "essentials" would include:

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
Halloween is Grinch Night
Witch's Night Out
The Halloween That Almost Wasn't
A Disney Halloween
Garfield's Halloween Adventure
Frankenweenie
The Halloween Tree
Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolfman

Most of these, of course, are the specials I watched as a kid. Your mileage may vary.

Who are you, anyway?

This guy. By night I'm a tour guide (and sometimes a ghost investigator) for in Chicago, and by day I write books for a living, including YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD GIVES ME THE CREEPS, an account of my life in the ghost busting biz, and I KISSED A ZOMBIE AND I LIKED IT, a satire of the paranormal romance genre that has taken over YA literature. I had a bunch of Halloween specials on tape as a kid, and in college I started trying to fill the holes in my collection.

When I was a lad (in the 80's), many of these specials came on every year, and Halloween was a big deal around my town - we all wore costumes to school on Halloween, read ghost stories in class throughout October, and planned our costumes for weeks. My hometown, Des Moines, has a peculiar custom in regards to trick-or-treating: before you can say "trick or treat," you have to tell a joke. Nothing elaborate - usually something along the lines of "whats's the largest pencil in the world," "why did a man put his car in the oven," or one of the other riddles we learned from The Floppy Show. It wasn't until years later that I learned this was uniquely Des Moines-based custom; when I moved to Atlanta as a teenager and heard kids simply saying "trick or treat," I thought "No jokes? What are these kids? Savages?"

Halloween was not as big a deal in the south, where I moved as a teenager - the schools didn't dare have Halloween parties for fear of trouble from the religious groups, many of whom are under the impression that Halloween is a Satanic holiday. I heard stories about how trick or treating and jack-o-lanterns came from Druidic celebrations that involved sacrificing virgins and stories that witches sacrificed kids to the devil using razor blades hidden in candy. All of this was nonsense - the whole story of kids getting razor blades in candy is largely an urban myth(certainly no one ever died because of it), and, while Halloween has certain similarities to various other holidays (Day of the Dead, Samhain, All Saints' Day, All Hallows' Eve, Purim, and so on), most Halloween traditions have distinctly 20th century origins with few traces of any religion. There are a lot of stories about the origins of trick or treating, but the truth is that it was started up by school boards in the 1930's as a way to keep kids out of trouble on Mischief Night, the traditional night to soap up windows and overturn garbage cans. Sure, Halloween customs may be similar to certain pagan traditions, but no more so than your average Christmas or Easter customs. I think the similarities are mostly coincidental.

But the horror stories of Satanism persist, and I can't help but wonder if they're part of the reason that they just don't put many Halloween cartoons out anymore. That's probably a stretch, I know, but in this age of 500 channels, you'd think more would find their way onto the air every year. Instead of putting on Halloweentown 10 years a year, why not put it on 9 times and air Mr. Boogedy once? One day, perhaps they will. Until then, we'll always have youtube.

What determines what makes something a halloween special, vs a tv movie or halloween-themed episode? Why not just lump them all together?

I'd rather list specials like "Witch's Night Out" and "Halloween is Grinch Night," which existed apart from a weekly series as a separate genre from, say, the episode of Pound Pupppies in which they go trick-or-treating. But the line, I must admit, is blurry. I qualify things as "specials" on the following criteria:

1. They are the length of a "special," (30-60 minutes) not a TV movie.
2. They exists outside of a regular weekly series OR were released in some way other than just as a regular episode of a series (ie: special prime-time airings of Saturday morning shows, hour-long specials of half-hour shows, straight-to-video episodes that weren't aired on TV, etc).

Some may disagree with my classification of some shows, but hey, that's okay. It's not exactly life-and-death here. I'm pretty flexible on #1, especially on things made starting in the late 80s, when the home video market really took off. As tapes got cheaper to buy, producing full-length TV movies, instead of half hour TV specials, made better economic sense for most companies, since movies were an easier sell than shorts on the home market, so feature-length "specials" became the norm.

When I first compiled a list of specials in the late 90s, I thought my list was fairly complete. By the time I first put this version of the page together in 2006, I really thought I'd covered just about everything. But more specials keep appearing out of the sands of time, and I've started being a lot more lenient on adding "made for TV movies," especially considering that The Disney Channel treated their TV movies as regular Halloween specials for years.

Why don't you put up links to the Halloween episode of Cheers/Dharma and Greg/Friends etc.

I'm trying (mostly) to keep the Halloween-themed episodes of weekly shows to the cartoons, at least for now. Ever since Roseanne started doing a Halloween show every year, a great many sitcoms have followed suit (Roseanne didn't START the custom - it was standard practice in the radio days - but she revived it). I have my hands full with just the cartoons, and I'd rather focus on them. A few live action standalone specials deserve notice on here, like the Paul Lynde one, but that's different. If you want to see more Halloween-themed TV that doesn't really fit in around here, check out the Ghosts of Halloween blog.

Will you sell me a copy of _____?

I don't sell these things, and I don't do much trading. When I can (ie, when it exists and the copyright holder doesn't contact me to object), I've put up links to places where you can get the shows - quite a few are even on youtube nowadays. That said, I do need the following:

-The Wickedest Witch (late 80s TV special, live action)
-Anything on the list of Long Lost Specials.

If you remember a show that I don't have here, by all means, let me know! Plenty of people have sent me emails asking about shows that sound terrific, but that I've never heard of, and that no one can quite identify them (many of them were probably local productions, a relic of 20th century tv that barely exist anymore). Add a comment to the list if you have any information about these.

Why all the WRITING? Why don't you just put up the videos?

When I started the page, streaming video hadn't come into its own. Practically none of these specials were online when most of these reviews were first written. Now, I sort of use this sort of writing as a warm-up for work. In other words: I just like to. It gives me a chance to write about the role of nostalgia in how we judge art, my annoyance with ghost hunting TV shows, the things I love most about October, and other stuff about which I like to ramble.

The Fat Albert Halloween Special

2008-09-14T10:08:00.010-05:00

Fat Albert Halloween Special. Don't those words just make you DROOL? The very idea of the Cosby Kids having a Halloween adventure sounds wonderful. Unfortunately, this isn't one of your a-list Halloween specials. It's fun and all, but not one I reach for year after year.

In this prime-time special, Halloween time has come for the Junkyard Gang, and everyone's all set to trick-or-treating. When the costume store kicks them out, the gang comes up with "home-made outfits." A few of them talk about the Old Lady Bickwell who lives in the house by the cemetery, where she's given to "creeping around and acting all weird."

Now on DVD:

"She's no weirder than other old women," says Fat Albert.
"That's the problem," comes the reply. "All old people are weird!"

It soon becomes clear that they gang is not just out for candy. As on of the Cosby kids says: "We're gonna have a great time tonight, scaring old dudes!'

Ah, the true meaning of Halloween!

The gang then proceeds to a spooky old graveyard, where they sneak around, causing trouble. After some preliminary hijinks, they head off to scare old Searchlight Johnson at the movie house, then old Mudfoot Brown, and then the old lady Bickwell. As you can probably guess, things don't go too well. Searchlight catches them up to no good in the theatre and throws them out. Mudfoot Brown steals most of their candy. But Old Lady Bickwell turns out to serve the best Halloween candy in town (as the creepy old ladies in these things always do).

When I started collecting Halloween specials, this one was very tough to get - it hadn't been aired in years, and had been out of print on video for a good decade. The only copy I'd ever seen was at a Video Warehouse in Des Moines in the late 80s - and I didn't rent it. I finally found a copy on ebay around 2002 - and it wasn't cheap even there. Nowadays, it's a lot easier to get. I've even seen it on youtube in its entirety - including commercials, which are half the fun - but it seems to get taken down a lot.

Note: my video of this features a voice-over from Bill Cosby explaining that the show was made in a different time, when trick or treating was safe. "Sadly," he says, "the times have changed." Well, whether it's really less safe now is debatable, but it can't have been too acceptable at any time for kids to go galivanting around a graveyard like this, and it was never a good idea to let kids wander the city streets bothering guys named Mudfoot or Searchlight. The only difference may be that back in the olden days, they hadn't figured this out yet.

Then again, I can see that things have changed. I used to walk a good mile to school - when I was six or seven - without adult supervision. You don't see many kids doing that these days. I don't know if the streets are more dangerous now (I doubt it) or if we're just more paranoid now (certainly) or if it was just never a good idea in the first place (probably), or if it's more to do with the fact that towns today are built on the subdivision system, with no sidewalks, and no way for kids to walk to school (without question) but I'm not here to editorialize on this. I'd say that trick or treating is as safe now as it ever was - the question is how safe it ever was in the first place.

This one comes and goes from youtube - the copyright holders are pretty vigilant. BUT it's now available on DVD.

Here's a 1985 Halloween Safety short!

For Better or For Worse Halloween

2008-09-14T09:56:00.000-05:00

What do you know? They have Halloween in Canada!

There've been a handful of cartoon series based around this strip - the Halloween episode, which takes place around the time Michael, the son, is 14 or so, is from the early 90's incarnation.

The plot deals with Michael's attempts to avoid a bully around Halloween, and features a fairly bad song (is "come out, come out, the goblins are out!" something kids yell at Halloween in Canada?).

This special isn't required viewing, but one should note that the bar is set pretty high here - other comic strips that have had Halloween specials include Garfield and Peanuts, both of which went down as legends in the annals of Halloween Specials. This one doesn't quite live up to it, but you can't blame 'em for trying.

The Flintstone Kids: Frankenpebble

2008-09-14T09:55:00.000-05:00

As young Fred fixes a doll, he imagines himself - in a black and white scene - as Dr. Frankenstein, building an enormous doll named Frankenpebble, who identifies itself as a man, despite the fact that he's wearing a dress. If you ever dreamt of seeing a giant guy in a dress and curlers calling Wilma his girlfriend, you've come to the right place. Otherwise, this one's pretty expendable.

The only episode from the old days that I remember dealt with drugs and a Michael Jackstone concert - I think it was a prime time special. And Jackstone was probably quite a bit scarier than Frankenpebble.

Garfield's Halloween Adventure (1985)

2008-09-14T09:54:00.005-05:00

Before Garfield had his own saturday morning series, there were a string of specials. Everyone I knew watched them every time they were aired. It's probably difficult for kids nowadays to understand just how HUGE Garfield was among elementary school kids in the 80s, now that he's fallen out of favor with most comic readers.

It's Garfield's own fault, though - his strip had a great supporting cast in the 80s, but it eventually became little more than Garfield sitting around, talking to Jon and maybe squashing a spider (though it's gotten better lately). Some say this is the result of the strip getting TOO popular - after all, the jokes have to be translated into dozens of languages, which sort of limits things like wordplay.

Anyway, there were about a dozen animated specials, and the best known of them probably remains "Garfield's Halloween Adventure," which was first aired in 1985 under the name "Garfield in Disguise." It was the first of the specials that wasn't based on the Garfield strips themselves, and featured a handful of catchy songs (the Pirate song, in particular, will stick in your head mercilessly) as Garfield and Odie, dressed as pirates, went off in search of "candy, candy, candy."

FINALLY ON DVD:

At one point, they sail off to an island (which, conveniently enough, is in row-boating distance from their neighborhood), where they meet a spooky old man who tells them that the house is haunted by pirate ghosts who buried a treasure under the house a century ago, vowing to come back for it that very night. And there's no use running, for "they know who you are!"

The old man then runs off with their candy, leaving them to fend for themselves as the ghosts (which are a lot scarier than anything one would expect to see in a Garfield cartoon) come to the cabin to claim their treasure.

The show won an Emmy in 1986, and went on to be a perenniel favorite for over a decade on television - it was about the last of the great old specials besides "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown" to be aired annually on one channel or another before disappearing - for a while, a VHS copy could fetch pretty good money on ebay. Today you can get it on youtube or buy it on DVD, but, as countless others have pointed out, watching a recording just isn't the same as watching it on TV and knowing your friends are all watching, too (though the whole "everyone watched it" bit might just be nostalgia talking; I seem to recall having to talk one of my friends into watching it instead of "The A-Team" one year).

This is the one special that really stands to fight against "It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" for the title of "the" halloween special, if only due to its longevity. Certainly they've both lasted longer than other comic-strip oriented specials. I think it's time we brought this custom of Halloween cartoons for comic strips back. I want my Zits Halloween Special, please!

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PART 2:

PART 3:

The Real Ghostbusters: The Headless Motorcyclist

2008-09-14T09:53:00.000-05:00

The Real Ghostbusters become the second cartoon characters to come across an ancestor of Ichabod Crane after the Scooby Doo crowd - in this, his great-something granddaughter relates the story of Ichabod, throwing in a new addition: Ichabod escaped the horseman and started a family, but twenty years later, the ghost returned. Today, he still appears, only he's traded in the horse for a motorcylcle. I wonder what the ghostly horse is haunting nowadays.

So, anyway, they pack up the group, get a grip, come equipped, grab the proton packs on their backs and then split, as they were wont to do.

According to wikipedia, some say that this show rivaled "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" in popularity, which I think is an odd thing to say. I think that this show was a good deal BETTER than TMNT, and that the toys were a LOT cooler, and the Ghostbusters cereal was a LOT better than any ninja turtle-related food, and, honestly, I didn't like the turtles that much even back then (in fact, at times, I really couldn't stand them), but this show never came close to TMNT in overall popularity - at least, not at my school. It's a shame, because, as these things go, the writing was really very good an there was a lot of creativity behind the shows.

Here's the episode!

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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (TV movie with Jeff Goldblum - 1979)

2008-09-14T09:51:00.004-05:00

Jeff Goldblum as Ichabod sounds like a very good idea - but, well, it isn't. The visual look of the whole thing is very bland, having Ichabod end up with Katrina just doesn't work, the other variations from the original are a bit corny, etc. Some variation from the text is necessary in order to make a 20 page story into a feature-length movie, but there's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. This one takes a lot of wrong turns.

This version is fondly remembered today, but mostly by people who haven't seen it in a while. It has its moments, but, overall, it's best watched for nostalgia. Then again, they DO get fairly creative in their deviations from the text (which all versions need to do to stretch the story out); it's the first version that I know of to portray Ichabod as skeptical of all the superstitions, which is something of a variation from the text, and was done a lot better by Tim Burton a couple of decades later. I WILL give props for including a scene in which Ichabod claims that, given the way the world spins, we're upside-down half the time without even knowing it, which is in the original text but rarely makes the movie versions.

As for the horseman itself, they go the more-or-less standard route of having someone dress up like the horseman, but there's ALSO a real horseman running around. Not a bad way to go, I guess. But the main benefit of this is that, if you're watching severla versions in a row, the differences in this version make it sort of refreshing. Like the Burton version, it concerns itself more with being a decent movie than following the book (which a purist like me might argue with, but which is, in all honesty, a fair enough choice to make when adapting a story that isn't really long enough to fill a 90 minute time frame.

Made for TV in the late 70s, aired on Disney (natch) and released on video in the 80s, this is a pretty hard-to-find version nowadays, though you can pick up a video on ebay fairly cheaply - and it's worth doing so just for the the awesome cover. Frame it and put it on your wall.

Now on youtube!

The Great Bear Scare

2008-09-14T09:50:00.008-05:00

This Ted. E. Bear adventure was an animated version of a book - and is probably better experienced as a book than as a cartoon. The animation is hard to describe - there was no "in betweening," so it looks more like a slide show than a cartoon. Clearly, this was not a big-budget production, and it's pretty much forgotten today (though it somehow ended up on Comcast On Demand in 2008.

The plot details the fears of local bears that monsters are coming to town. "Most bears," says a reporter, 'seem to the think that the monsters will come from nearby Monster Mountain." Yeah, they're a perceptive lot, those bears. One rebel, Ted. E. Bear, takes it upon himself to journey to the mountain and teach bears that monsters will leave you alone if you're not afraid of them.

I vaguely recall seeing this on TV in the mid 80's, and found a video version of it some years later. Annoyingly enough, the video said it was an hour long. The cartoon itself was only about twenty minutes long; the rest of the video was padded with Popeye cartoons that had nothing to do with Halloween. It's probably just as well (sitting through 20 minutes of this thing is hard enough). Sometimes I think they just don't give kids very much credit.

You will, of course, notice that this "let's not give the kids any credit for having any taste" approach did not lead to Ted E. Bear becoming an enduring cult figure or anything. He hasn't been heard from in years. He was voiced, interestingly enough, by Tommy Smothers, who a decade earlier was one of the hippest, smartest comedians around. I'm sure we all know that kids aren't that picky when it comes to quality in their cartoons - hell, plenty of cartoons from the 80s that were total crap are still riding high on nostalgics and getting modern revamps - but that's no excuse to make something suck.

But, in the midst of bashing the show, I should note that it has its merits, too. The vampire is sort of fun, and the monsters have some entertaining dialogue. I wouldn't look for this to be back on the air or on DVD any time soon (though it DID come out of left field to show up as a Comcast On Demand Choice in 2008), but it's worth having if you're a collector.

NOTE: There is ANOTHER special called The Great Bear Scare that I've seen once - it's something to do with a teddy bear and a girl thinking a neighborhood woman is a witch. The ending is pretty predictable. No idea where to find that one now - throw me a line if you run into it. I can't even find any information about it online these days.

Available cheap:

Youtube clip:

Hulu!

The Halloween Tree

2008-09-14T09:47:00.011-05:00

I'm not sure if this special, featuring the voices of Leonard Nimoy and Ray Bradbury (author of the book on which it's based) himself, was made for video or made for TV. In any case, it was released on video in 1993 and was a late 90s staple of cable TV around Halloween.

Like much of Bradbury's work, it veers into hammy nostalgia at times, but Bradbury had a way of evoking that Halloween/October vibe like few others can (know who did it best? Dickens*). THE HALLOWEEN TREE starts as a dose of plain sentiment but quickly gets stranger, as friends of a dying boy, Pip, travel through time, learning the history of the various holidays and customs which were similar the modern celebrations of Halloween. The show doesn't really claim that these customs are what Halloween is based on, just that they served the same purpose in past societies that Halloween serves in ours: facing death so it loses its power over us. Sometimes it's fascinating, sometimes it's scary, and, frankly, sometimes it's a little bit dull.

It's a shame that it drags a bit in the middle, because it starts out brilliantly, with the best Spooky House on the Edge of Town in the business, and a genuinely spooky old man residing inside it - finally, a spooky old man who actually DOES turn out to be a creep!

In fact, this is probably the scariest Halloween special of them all. And the most educational, despite the fact that Bradbury doesn't always get the facts right in the historical stuff. Don't get pagans started on his description of Druids (which isn't the worst one out there, honestly, but the fact is that we know next to nothing about what kind of guys the Druids were. Not a single Druidic document survives, and most contemporary accounts were written by Roman conquerors who were probably trying to make them look bad). Bradbury/Moundshroud suggest that the Druids had no "powers" at all, but acted all spooky so no one would mess with them. It's a reasonable guess, but it sure didn't scare the Romans.

But for one thing, in particular, THE HALLOWEEN TREE deserves a lot of credit: the ending (which I won't spoil), is just about the best ending of all the Halloween specials, and certainly the least predictable. Bradbury may have been sentimental, but he certainly didn't pull any punches. Suffice it to say that the ending certainly doesn't involve Moundshroud, the weird old guy in the spooky old house, turning out to be a sweet old man who gives away great Halloween candy, and it certainly doesn't involve a case of disco fever, though it WOULD be hilarious to see Moundshroud do the New York hustle.

This came out a few years too late to be noticed the same way other Halloween specials were - by 1993, most of them were no longer being aired regularly, especially not in prime time or on networks. It's a shame, too. This (especially edited down to fit an hourlong format) would have ranked among the best of 'em. Cartoon Network aired it for a while in the late 90s, and probably for a while thereafter. There was a VHS release in the 90s, but it's never been on DVD (the torrents and DVDs that you run across online are VHS rips).

Now on youtube!

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Part 6:

Part 7:

Part 8:

* - see, for instance, the first few chapters (and the Miss Havisham scenes) of Great Expectations, the chapter of Bleak House where Mr. Krook spontaneously combusts, etc. Halloween wasn't nearly as much of a "thing" in Dickens' day, but no one did "spooky" quite like him.

Okay. I'll stop playing "Captain Readmore" now. Thanks for your time.

The Headless Horseman (1922 silent film with Will Rogers)

2008-09-14T09:46:00.005-05:00

The first full-length attempt to turn The Legend of Sleepy Hollow into a movie was often said to be a failure in that nobody could imagine Will Rogers as a northern schoolmaster. It's worth noting that, when this came out, Will Rogers was one of the biggest stars in the country, and was considered an American icon. Everyone knew his act, and everyone at least had a general idea of what he sounded like. The guy made 71 movies before 1935!

These days, it's not so hard to imagine him as Ichabod Crane, since most of us really DON'T know what he sounded like, or, if we did, we can imagine him outisde of his usual shtick. He's as good an Ichabod as any other live action version, despite the general lack of lankiness. He doesn't look the part, but he plays it pretty well.

There are some REALLY cool scenes here - there's an early one showing a a ghostly form with a skeleton hand leading a horse through a churchyard as Crane is told the story of the headless horseman. It's not as spooky as, say, a German Expressionist horror film (man, would I have loved to see those guys take a crack at this story), but it's spooky by the standards of the day. Then there's the scene were Ichabod walks among the graves between services at church, entertaining the ladies by making up funny epitaphs, which isn't really in the book, but would have fit right in.

Ichabod is portrayed as hilariously vain and full of himself, shocked when the local yokels show a lack of respect for an educated man. All versions have to mess with the character of Crane to stretch the story out, and this one plays up his vanity. Other than that, it stays remarkably true to the original, leaving very little out. To this day, I don't think a single other version has used so many scenes and gags from the original story. Why, they even call the party a "quilting frolic," and the horseman actually turns out to be Bones, not a real horseman (the only movie to do either, really). After a while, though, it veers into new territory - Ichabod is accused of witchcraft, and narrowly avoids being tarred and feathered (a process which was MUCH more painful and deadly than we generally think of it as being today*), which is a pretty interesting way to fill time.

Of course, it suffers from some limitations - most of the movie isn't all that visually exciting, given the subject matter. And it spends WAY too much time showing dull shots of people talking -which are all the more dull, since you have to wait until the title card comes up to see what they're saying. If you're a reasonably fast reader, you can probably do fine watching it on fast forward most of the way through.

Still, this version stays truest of all versions to the original, and probably does the best job of coming up with new material to fill time for the story.

* - for more information about tarring, feathering, and the late 18th century, see The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History!

Here's a 51 minute version - about 20 minutes shorter than the one that goes around on DVD, and with a jazzy score that starts out sounding cool, then gets a bit irritating after a while. The time difference MIGHT just be due to speeding it up or something. That happens sometimes with these silent things.

The Hollow

2008-09-14T09:44:00.000-05:00

A present-day sequel with a descendant of Ichabod who is supposed to be 16 but looks 26. There are times when this isn't much more than another young adult horror film, with a lot of predictable scenes, but it's still fun for fans of the story, since the writers clearly read the original text enough to throw in some in-jokes (such as setting the scene in Knickerbocker High School).
With better sets, a higher budget and some revisions to the plot and script, this could have been a real corker of a movie. There have been surprisingly few sequels over the years. As it stands, though, it's just one of those made-for-tv movies that seem to be made to be forgotten.

Note: this wins the prize for the cheesiest looking Horseman by a longshot.

Clips:

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad

2008-09-14T09:43:00.002-05:00

Disney released their version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow on a split-bill with an adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, but the Disney Channel used to show the Ichabod segment by itself aorund Halloween pretty regularly. Disney, wanting to make a movie of the story, got around the fact that the source doesn't have enough material for a 90 minute film by just not making it a full length version - in a VERY rare case of Disney sticking to the source.
Narrated by Bing Crosby (who also sings most of the songs), this is the version most people are familiar with - and they could hardly do better. While it drags a bit in the middle, it's the most entertaining portrayal of Ichabod (showing him as a bit of a buffoon, afraid of his own shadow, with a frame only a cartoon could provide).

The songs are very good - "Ichabod, Ichabod Crane" is good, and "The Headless Horseman" song, which Brom Bones sings, is fantastic - how can you dislike a song with lines like "he swears to the longest day he's dead / he'll show them that he can get a head," and "demons take one look and moan / and hit the road to parts unknown." The presence of songs at all is the main point on which it veers from the original - in fact, it's about the only version to take advantage of Crane's voracious appetite, which is in the original story, but rarely in the movies.

Interestingly, in addition to the Bing Crosby version, the venerable Thurl Ravenscroft (a Disney regular and voice of Tony the Tiger) also recorded a swingin' version of the Headless Horseman song that you should absolutely own - it has a few different lyrics:

And Kay Starr did a swingin' version of her own -

Anyway, visually, this version was absolutely unrivaled for fifty years until the Tim Burton version came out (Burton was inspired more by this version that by Irving, perhaps instinctively grasping that it's the headless horseman and the atmosphere that make this story cool, not the Urban vs Agrarian parable), and even now, the midnight ride is head and shoulders (if you'll excuse the pun) over every other version. Spooky as all get-out.
One question, though, remains: is this version of the horseman real, or a guy in a costume? There's a scene where Ichabod looks down the neck of the thing and apaprently doesn't see anything, and I really, really doubt Brom Bones could pull of the kind of riding the horseman does here without being able to see. I think it's real.
This was aired so often (minus the Toad portion, which is also very good) around Halloween that it could almost be considered the first Halloween special.

INTRODUCTION

2008-09-14T09:41:00.004-05:00

It just doesn't seem like Halloween without a viewing of Garfield's Halloween Adventure, Witch's Night Out, or Halloween is Grinch Night. There was a time when these were aired yearly, and it wasn't that long ago.

Alas, though we now have roughly 10 times as many tv channels as we did when I was a kid, most of the great old Halloween Specials have been swept under the rug of pop culture. Tossed into the dustbin of history. Hurled over the brink of relevance. Whatever. Many have never even been released on VHS, let alone DVD.

For the most part, Halloween specials stopped being made in the late 1980s. Many people had cable by then, so a TV special wasn't as big of a deal as it had been before. More importantly, the home video market had taken off. Suddenly, the annual airing wasn't your only chance to see any given special. At the same time, it started seeming like a better investment for companies to just make made-for-TV movies instead of half hour specials. Full length movies tended to sell better than 22 minute specials on the video market. But as the shows stopped being aired and VHS went out of date, most of the Halloween specials got lost along the way, surviving only in our memories, our VHS storage bins, and (eventually) on youtube. Relatively few of these have seen an official release on DVD.

With this site, I hope to compile some reviews and information about all of the great specials - as well as the great Halloween-themed episodes of various cartoon series (the line between "Halloween episode" and "Halloween special" can get a bit blurry, as you'll see), as well as some of the made-for-tv or straight-to-video Halloween movies that have come out over the years. And, while I'm on the general subject, I'll review the many versions of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow that have been released over the years (a special interest of mine).

The site has grown a lot; as of 1998 it was a little text file on tripod that I wrote up during class in high school. In 2006, it was fully revised and expanded into a full-fledged website. In 2008, it was moved over here into a sort of a blog format and a LOT of video clips were added (we've come along way since 1998, when I couldn't find a jpg of "Halloween is Grinch Night" for the life of me).By the end of 2008, I thought I'd covered pretty much everything (not counting Halloween episodes of live action sitcoms, which I've generally avoided so far), but more and more specials keep popping up. Now I don't have many new specials to add (I don't think so, anyway), but I go through and revise entries now and then. I'm also writing books for a living now; one of them has actually been optioned by the Disney Channel and just might turn into a Halloween special itself one day.

So pour yourself a cup of cider, break out the candy corn, and come look around! I hope these shows bring back as many good memories for you as they do for me!

Legend of Sleepy Hollow - iWerks cartoon - 1932

2008-09-14T09:40:00.000-05:00

A silly little cartoon version - not a bit scary and not all that funny, but notable for being the last version, to date, to have the Horseman turn out to be Brom Bones, not a real ghost.

Here it is:

King of the Hill Halloween

2008-09-14T09:38:00.001-05:00

One of the better episodes of a fine series, this deals with a woman, Junie Harper (who reminds me a LOT of Sarah Palin) coming to Arlen with the intent to ban Halloween on the grounds that it's a Satanic holiday. After passing a curfew on Halloween night, she opens a "Hallelujah House," where kids can see real-life horrors, such as the theory of evolution, and getting AIDS from kissing. I can see Palin doing this. I really can.

These "Hallelujah Houses" really exist - in fact, they're a pretty big deal in some places. They're designed to scare the green crap out of you until you become a Christian and stop celebrating Halloween, which strikes me as a bit manipulative. See the FAQ for a bit more on my thoughts about this sort of business, but please don't send me emails saying I'm going to Hell. I have enough of them.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: INTRODUCTION

2008-09-14T09:36:00.001-05:00

Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is not a book, it's a short story, relating the tale of Ichabod Crane (as told to a fictional story teller named Deidrich Knickerbocker) over the course of all of 20 pages. You can read it in about half an hour.

It's a pretty dry story - there're only a few words of dialogue in the whole thing - but something about the story of Ichabod Crane being chased off by the Headless Horseman has had such a lasting effect on western culture as to inspire countless movies, TV shows, and plays. Headless horsemen rule.

Like many of Irving's best works, the story makes use of a lot of local legends and superstitions common in the small towns of the American Northeast in the early 19th century - a time when small towns were really comparatively isolated communities (today, Sleepy Hollow is a just a suburb of New York), with their own legends, lore and beliefs. The story is presented as a pretty-straightforward story that has been touched, over the years, by these superstitions and stories.

I suppose you can deconstruct it down to being a story of urban vs. rural mindsets, in which the educated man is made a fool of by countrified rubes. The urban/rural theme is, of course, still relevant, as it has been since the dawn of time. There's also a wonderful blend of humor and spookiness in the story, with a setting in an old rural village - reading the story, you can practically see the red and orange leaves, and practically taste all the food (most good adaptations have a scene or two that really makes you hungry as the Sleepy Hollowans gather for a harvest feast at tables veritably groaning with roasted turkey, beef, hams, pumpkin, vegetables...mmm....). But the fact remains: the story has stuck around because headless horsemen are cool.

CHARACTERS:

Ichabod Crane - an educated yankee who comes to Tarry Town (Sleepy Hollow) to be the schoolmaster. He's known for his appetite, fancies himself to be quite the singer, and carries around a book of Cotton Mather's history of witchcraft in New England. Most versions portray him as either the tragicomic victim of a mean coquette or as a gold-digging jerk who thinks he's better than all of the hicks. You can do either of these without really veering from the text.

Katrina Van Tassel - daughter of Balthus, the wealthy farmer, and a known coquette. Today we'd call her a tease.

Abraham "Brom Bones" Van Brunt - leader of the "sleepy hollow boys," a local gang of pranksters. Usually portrayed as sort of a villain, but he's well-liked around town in the book. He's a prankster, but he's just a mischief-maker, not a bad guy
.

PLOT:
Ichabod goes after Katrina, and one night, after a quilting frolic (generally portratyed as a Halloween party, since the attendees gather around the fire to tell ghost stories after eating), he declares himself to her, and is then chased off by the headless horseman, whose tale was just told at the "frolic."

Now, rumors go around that he was killed, and that his spirit haunts the graveyard, but (though he sort of leaves it open in the end), Irving makes it fairly clear that the horseman was just Brom Bones in disguise, chasing away his rival, and that Ichabod was still alive, working as a lawyer and a politician far away. Of course, he also implies that Katrina turned Ichabod down, and had just been using him to make Brom jealous the whole time - so the chase was just Brom really rubbing it in after he'd already won.

However, one thing that nearly ALL versions that have been put on film or TV have in common is that the Horseman turns out to be real - sometimes they also have Brom dressing up as a horseman, but it always seems to turn out that there was a real one running around too.

For years, the rule of thumb was that the closer one stayed to the original, the better it would be. That all went out the window after Tim Burton took his turn, but I think the world is still waiting for a really great full-length version of the original story.

Trivia: while the story is not based on a true story, there was a person named Ichabod Crane. He was an army guy who knew Washington Irving, and he was pretty ticked off when he read the story. He's buried on Staten Island; local teenagers sometimes drink at his grave.

More Trivia: in 1839, Irving wrote a non-fiction update on the Sleepy Hollow area, lamenting that, while things hadn't changed much around town in the last several years, the town was slowly moving into the modern era. Read it here

The Haunted Pumpkin of Sleepy Hollow

2008-09-14T09:34:00.003-05:00

At 48 minutes, this can also be filed under both the "specials" section of the site AND the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" variations. Made direct-to-video in 2004, this features much higher production values than your average halloween cartoon.

It starts out very well, too. Beginning with a flashback of Ichabod's midnight ride (and a good one at that), then moving to the present day, where a Sleepy Hollow-area library is showing off the original manuscript of Irving's story (in reality, only a fragment of the manuscript exists, but nevermind).

We then meet our heros, including a boy named Nicholas Crane (there sure are a lot of relatives of Ichabod showing up these days). When thieves steal the manuscript and hide it in a pumpkin, the pumpkin becomes possessed by ghosts. Or something like that. I didn't really understand all of the details.

When Nick and his friend find the pumpkin, it turns out to be the home of a ghost from the revolutionary war, who informs them that on the night before Halloween, the horseman will ride again. And, if he can put the pumpkin (which is actually his head - again, the physics didn't always make sense) onto his shoulders at midnight, he'll be brought back to life.

Now, all of this is very well and good - it's a pretty good setup for a cartoon. It doesn't make much SENSE, but plenty of perfectly good cartoons don't. The problem here is that the characters simply aren't that interesting. And when the ghost comes out of the pumpkin, the kids are scared for a second, then immediately start to take the whole thing in stride. They aren't even interested enough in the fact that there's a ghost talking to him to ask what the food is like in the afterlife or any other such questions. Considering how freaked out they get by the obligatory neighborhood bully dressing up like the headless horseman, they should have been at least a little bit frightened by real ghost. Maybe the fact that he sort of reminds the viewer of Captain Crunch put them at ease.

Now, people taking seeing a ghost or getting possessed by a ghost or somethign like that in stride is pretty much par for the course (running like hell and then contemplating life, the universe, and everything would get in the way of the plot). But this took things a bit too far.

All this is not to say that the show is a failure - kids will probably enjoy it. The songs could have been a lot worse. And, hey - it's an hour-long Halloween special that creates and exists in its own world, which by 2004 was practically a lost art form, and has to count for something.

The Littles Halloween Episode

2008-09-14T09:32:00.001-05:00

On Halloween, The Littles' battle a black cat, which, since they're so little, is the size of a giant.

Meanwhile, the kid in whose air vent they live hears stories about an old man who lives in the local haunted house, where, according to the rumor, he turns kids into cats. He and the littles launch separate investigations. While no one ends up getting any candy, the old man turns out to be a good guy. I can't imagine you saw THAT one coming.

But, hey. I've seen worse. They don't make cartoons quite like this anymore - I never really watched it as a kid, but just watching that STYLE of cartoon brings back memories.

Here's the full episode:

Legend of Sleepy Hollow (made for TV move - Odyssey Channel 1999)

2008-09-14T09:31:00.000-05:00

This was released to TV right around the same time as the Tim Burton version hit theatres, which caused a bit of confustion at the time.

This version stays rather true to the orginal, even having the story be framed by scenes in which the tale is told to Deidrich Knickerbocker, which makes it the first movie to mention Knickerbocker that I can think of offhand.

The movie plays up the gold-digging jerk side of Ichabod, and differs from Irving's text chiefly in its attempts to make Katrina a more sympathetic character. The portrayal of Ichabod as a vain jerk who thinks he's a whole lot better than the local yokels (though he's willing to join them if he can marry Katrina) is similar to the way they portrayed Ichabod in the Will Rogers version.

Visually good, if not particularly striking. Certainly better than the Goldblum version, and probably more watchable today for most viewers, than the Will Rogers version, but the best versions are both very funny and very spooky - and this is a little bit of both, but not enough of either.

Pac Man Halloween Episodes

2008-09-14T09:30:00.001-05:00

The early 80's Pac Man cartoon had an episode that featured two Halloween stories. Not exactly engaging or funny, but they look nice, and they CERTAINLY hold the record for "most uses of the term 'chomp' in a Halloween Special." There are plenty of worse 80s cartoon halloween episodes out there.

PACULA:

It's a rainy night in Pacland, and the ghosts are wandering around until Pac Man, disguised as a gravestone, jumps out at them for the first of many chase scenes. At length, he chases them into an old castle that happens to be near the town, where their boss has created a vampire Pac Man clone who says "I vant to chomp your bones" (?!?!?). Meanwhile, the kids watch "Pac Wars" at the drive-in, until the vampire shows up, taking the guy's place and telling the girl "I vant to chomp your bones." "Not now, Frankie," she replies. "I'm watching the movie!" Sheesh. Doesn't she know what the drive-in is for?

Pac Man then gets into a battle with the Pacula monster, chases him into the castle, and spends the last couple of minutes chasing the ghosts around.

I have to say, the deep colors on this are nice. The rainstorm looks especially Halloweenish.

TRICK OR CHOMP:

Baby Pac is all excited to go trick-or-treating with Daddy. Instead of candy, they get power pellets. All goes well until the ghosts show up, bringing about the inevitable chase scene. This time, it ends in a haunted house (nevermind the fact that every house the ghosts go into is, by definition, haunted). This, of course, turns into ANOTHER chase scene. Not as watchable as Pacula, which at least has that delightful drive-in innuendo.

TRICK OR CHOMP 1:

TRICK OR CHOMP 2:

PACULA 1:

PACULA 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VOIjVVyymE&feature=related

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

2008-09-14T09:27:00.004-05:00

When I look at the clip above, I can practically taste the pumpkin-shaped candy corn bits that I used to use in gingerbread haunted houses (they were tasty, but you got sick of them FAST, so you'd have half the bag left for arts and crafts). For many people, this remains THE Halloween Special. Indeed, of all the shows on this site, it's the only one that is still broadcast regularly. Most of the others disappeared from the airways in the 1990s.

IT'S THE GREAT PUMPKIN, CHARLIE BROWN pre-dates most of the other TV specials on this site by a solid decade, and comes from before the days when the tropes of the genre had really been codified. It doesn't go for any of the three basic plotlines of Halloween specials (The Spooky Old Lady Who is Actually Nice, The Person Who Doesn't Love Halloween Until the End of the Show, and The Chaotic Adventure That Ends With a Disco Party). It exists in a wonderful world of its own.

This was the second Peanuts special produced, following the groundbreaking "A Charlie Brown Christmas," and holds onto the distinctive, jazzy style of its predecessor, including music by Vince Guaraldi (something that most later Peanuts specials sadly lacked), all against a gorgeous autumnal backdrop.

Of all Halloween specials, this certainly holds the title for Most Dramatic Effect on Pop Culture (a title it will probably never lose, though there's always a chance that The Worst Witch will catch on as a midnight movie with audience participation and gradually take over). It remains the special that springs to most people's mind when they think of Halloween cartoons.

Consider the phrases that have entered our cultural lexicon because of it:

"All I got was a rock!"
"Clearly, we are separated by denominational differences."
"You didn't tell me you were going to kill it!"
And, my favorite, Sally's line about trick or treating: "Are you sure it's legal? I wouldn't want to be accused of taking part in a rumble."

And, of course, one absolutely can NOT have a pumpkin patch anymore without trying to make it "sincere."

Some might complain that the Flying Ace sequence goes on a bit too long, and they have a point - I'm more interested in the Great Pumpkin, the party, and the trick-or-treating than in the Snoopy subplot, which isn't all that Halloweeny. But this is a minor complaint. Any show that looks like this one and features the gorgeous "Great Pumpkin Waltz" by Vince Guaraldi gets a free pass on such things.

Pinky and the Brain Halloween Episode (with video)

2008-09-14T09:26:00.000-05:00

Now, here we have a new concept. We've seen plenty of Halloween specials over the years that deal with trick or treating woes, or having the old lady turn out not to be a witch after all, but one plot concept that hasn't quite been explored as much is the idea of having a character sell his soul to the devil in exchange for being over to take over the world, then trying to get out of the deal by besting Satan at rhythmic gymnastics - the olympic sport where they wave ribbons around. Brain, it seems, always dreamed of winning the gold in that event, and is even willing to send Pinky to hell for it. Good stuff, this. I'm a sucker for a good Faust story (Star Wars: Episode 3 rules!), and to put on into a cartoon takes guts. Or, as was so often the case with Pinky and the Brain and Animaniacs, perhaps it just takes a studio willing to let the writers do what they want. You don't see that very often.

It's really an actual special, too. I stuck in this section because I think it just aired as a regular episode, not as a prime time airing or anything, but it's a full half hour, not a 10 minute segment.

Here's the whole thing on youtube!
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Pound Puppies: Ghost Hounders

2008-09-14T09:24:00.000-05:00

Long before The Ghost Hunters hit the sci-fi channel, "Ghost Hounders" was the most popular TV show in Pound Puppy land. I suppose it's worth noting that the Pound Puppies thought that Milwaukee was THE place to be - as a direct result of this show, I grew up under the impression that Milwaukee was one of the five or six biggest, flashiest cities in the USA. I suppose you might say the writing on this show was a notch above average based on this alone.

Here, the Pound Puppies, led by the ever-amiable Cooler, takes on the Ghost of the Terrible Terrier, with the help of Biff Barker, Ghost Hounder. The Terrible Terrier insists that puppies move out of their home by midnight. It's a pretty entertaining episode, but, like most Halloween-themed episodes of saturday morning cartoons, if you aren't that interested in the characters in the first place, it's hard to get into the show. But, as I mentioned, the writing is pretty smart compared to what you saw on most saturday cartoons in the 80s - especially those shows that focused on licensed characters. Not necessarily required Halloween viewing, but better than a lot other shows in its category.

Here it is!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Scooby Doo: The Headless Horseman of Halloween

2008-09-14T09:22:00.003-05:00

Scooby Doo fell on hard times after, say, the first season. Plots got sillier, and, well, do I even have to mention Scrappy?

Still, the 70's incarnation had some good episodes - including the headless horseman episode, which even the short-lived, widely-ignored Scooby Dumb couldn't bring down.

The gang starts off at a party thrown by some the great great granddaughter of Ichabod Crane (whose family must wait until old age to start having kids; I suspect she left out a "great" or two), held at Crane Manor in Sleepy Hollow. The party falls into chaos when a headless horseman shows up. Where headless horsemen show up, chaos pretty generally follows.

The gang, of course, goes after him. After searching around for clues and dealing a better-than-average gang of drawing room mystery characters, they end up trying to break into the grave of the headless horseman to see if he's still there.

Now, let me repeat that. They end up TRYING TO BREAK INTO THE GRAVE of the Headless Horseman.

Now, look, I don't buy into the tired old "scooby and shaggy were potheads" jokes (scooby has the munchies because he's a dog, and Shaggy is always hungry because he never gets to eat - Scooby always gulps Shaggy's food down before he has a chance), but, seriously, these guys break a LOT of laws in this show. They break into houses, mausoleums, and scads of other places where they surely aren't welcome. I can usually take it in stride when they break into an old house, but trying to pry open a grave with what appears to be a tire iron is where I draw the line. Bad form, Freddie. Bad form. You could at least TRY to get a permit.

Wlile I'm on the topic, let me vent about another thing you hear a lot - people often wonder out loud (or on blogs) where it is they're going in that van. Are they following the Dead? Hauling drugs across the border? The fact is, they ALWAYS say where they're going. Usually it's either to visit an old friend or to see a rock music festival. It's true, though, that Fred and Daphne, in particular, seem to be remarkably well-connected. They know celebrities and big-shots in every rinky-dink town in the nation, as well as the better part of the U.K.

ANYWAY - this is a pretty cool Sleepy Hollow variation, and one of the best 1970s episodes of Scooby Doo. And while the monster or ghost may turn out to be some smuggler or realtor in a mask, as usual, the show is not without genuine supernatural overtones: surely there's no logical explanation for the fact that the Mystery Machine still runs. It does break down in plenty of episodes, but it's always back on the road in 22 minutes. The laugh track is kinda otherworldly, too.

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1990s: The Simpsons

2008-09-14T09:21:00.001-05:00

Several of these rank among THE definitive Halloween episodes - not just of cartoons, and not just of the 90's, but of any kind of show, ever. Period.

The first five or so installments of the traditional THH are classic episodes that were among the highlights of the seasons - and seasons 2-6 were nothing to shake at stick at to begin with. There's no point in doing long recaps here - I'd ramble on all night. I'll just pick my favorite scene of them all: the one in which Burns puts a brain on his head and says "look at me! I'm Davy Crocket!" This is one of the better Simpsons lines of all time, which is really saying something.

I forgot to set the VCR one year, and ended up missing the 6th installment - a fact that haunted me for the rest of the year. As it turns out, though, the sixth installment (the one with the giant advertising characters coming to life) marked the beginning of a definite change - around this time, THH went from being the highlight of the year to being, sometimes, the low point. It's been hit or miss since then, but, alas, mostly miss. It's only natural that once you get up to nearly 20 annual specials, with three stories each, you'll start to run thin on ideas. There are only so many twilight zone episodes that one can parody, after all. When it scores, though, it scores, and it's gotten better the last few years.

Still, THH 1-5 should be in EVERY collection of Halloween Specials, and none should really be without the others, either, if only for the sake of completism.

Super Mario Brothers Super Show: Count Koopula (whole show video)

2008-09-14T09:19:00.000-05:00

COUNT KOOPULA:

Video gaming seems to be a bit more of a selective hobby among kids today - in the late 80's, Nintendo was a way of life for all of us. Even those of us who didn't HAVE a Nintendo. The only problem my friends and I had with the movie The Wizard (which critics rightly noted was a movie-lengthed Nintendo commercial) was that it could have used MORE Nintendo (though we did wonder how the girl knew what the warp whistle did if she'd never seen the game before). It's no wonder the Mario Bros. got their own show, and amazing that it took as long as it did for them to get a live action movie. Unfortunately, neither the movie nor the show lived up to our expectations. Not enough Nintendo scenes, I guess.

This isn't exactly a Halloween episode - the live action sequence deals with a visit from Blackstone, the magician who I remember seeing on The Bozo Show from time to time.

Then comes "Count Koopula," the first animated segment. Koopa sends a vampire bat to steal Mario and co's spaghetti to lure them into his castle - apparenlty,now Koopa WANTS Mario and company to come to their castle, instead of setting up obstacles to keep him away. Maybe it was discrepencies like this that kept my friends and I from loving this show. I don't remember for sure - it certainly wasn't as well-liked as "Captain N: the Gamemaster."

This is still worth watching just to see Captain Lou Albano singing "Come On Do the Mario." It's a dance that even I can do, and I can't even drop it like it's hot, despite my wife's best efforts to teach me to do so.

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Or, spare yourself the episode, and just watch Cap'n Lou in action!