1982: Disney's Halloween Treat / A Disney Halloween

This anthology of Disney clips introduced a generation to such clips as "Donald Duck: Trick or Treat" (featuring the venerable 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."

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). The next year there was a another with many of the same clips (but lacking the Headless Horseman sequence), and with a section of “villain” clips narrated by the Magic Mirror in the middle. The Magic Mirror was played by  Hans Conried, who is also the voice of Captain Hook, not to mention the Grinch in Halloween is Grinch Night - Halloween Special royalty!).  This is mostly footage from the 1977 Disney’s Greatest Villains special. This version was retitled A Disney Halloween (though it still used the "Halloween Treat" song in the intro). The VHS tape I have of it is from a Magical World of Disney airing from the late 80s or early 90s (not sure which, but Roger Rabbit is in the intro, so it’s at least that recent). It features an introduction by Michael Eisner in which he refers to it as “A Disney Halloween Treat,” mashing up the two titles and confusing things further.

To the chagrin of Disney fans everywhere, it's never been remastered and put on DVD in either incarnation (though the 1982 version was put out on VHS; copies command big bucks now). 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.

Other than the framing devices and a few different clips, 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 and hanging witches in the later version (using clips from the 1956 Great Cat Family) is especially nifty. Finding the original “cat” clip, which has the same lines read by Walt Disney himself, and goes on a bit longer with stories of witch hunting, was a similar feeling to the one I got upon finally seeing that deleted Return of the Jedi scene when Luke builds a new lightsaber.

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 (though not having the Headless Horseman sequence is a major oversight). 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 made 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).

Of all the Halloween specials, I think I have the most vivid memories of watching this one - or the most specific memories, anyway. Some, like It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, I have no specific memory of watching as a a kid, though I know I must have. Most of them I remember watching in my living room or at my grandparents’ house or a friend’s house. This one I remember watching many places - it the living room of the house where we lived until I was three. In the living room of the house we moved into later. At my grandmother’s house. At our house in Atlanta as a teenager. At the first house I lived in on my own with my Disney-obsessed roommates. And now at my apartment with my wife and stepson.  I remember being five years old on my first Disneyland trip and being afraid of the Haunted Mansion until my dad told me the narrator was the same guy who did The Great Talking Pumpkin.  Disney is obsessed with creating memories nowadays…. sometimes I wish they’d do more to help relive the ones we already have.


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."



And here's the relevant part of The Great Cat Family
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Halloween is Grinch Night

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:

* -
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.

Frankenweenie (original short)

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)



And a trailer for the feature version:

The Worst Witch

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.

Garfield's Halloween Adventure (1985)

Before Garfield had his own saturday morning series, the venerable Garfield and Friends, there was 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. When Scholastic book order forms came out, all of the cool kids ordered the Garfield books out of them.  Today, the “cool kids” have grown up to think that Garfield now represents all that is wrong with newspaper comic strips.

It’s not entirely Garfield’s own fault; the strip has to be translated into dozens of languages, which limits what kind of humor he can get away with.  But his strip had a great supporting cast in the 80s, and it eventually became little more than Garfield sitting around, talking to Jon and maybe squashing a spider (though it seemed to have improved last time I read it for any stretch of time).

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 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).  (and even the dvd is now rare).

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!

One quick thing to append here: there's some talk of an "alternate ending" in which the ghosts follow Odie because he still has a bit of the gold. Anyone know more about this? It was in the book version of the story, but no one's found a video that included that scene yet. Most likely, people are just remembering the book and misremembering the ending as being in the cartoon.


PART 1:


PART 2:


PART 3:

The Halloween Tree

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 away.

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, and got really rare for a while until 2012, when Warner Archive released it as a "dvd on demand" that you can order from amazon.

* - 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.

1979: The Halloween that Almost Wasn't (AKA The Night Dracula Saved the World)

This live action special from 1979 was a Disney Channel staple for most of the 80s and a chunk of the 90s, but is mostly forgotten today. I remember seeing it in first grade and loving it so much that I immediately started working on staging a theatrical version in my backyard, starring my friends from the neighborhood. The play never materialized, but what a bunch of roles we had to pick from! This has a Wolf-Man, Zoltar the Zombie, a tap-dancing Frankenstein's Monster, Igor, a Mummy, Dracula, AND a witch.

Seeing Judd Hirsch as Dracula is great - he disappears into the role (and away from his normal persona) so completely that I didn't even realize it was him for years (even seeing his name on the screen didn't help - I didn't recognize him at all).

The plot revolves around Dracula taking the other monsters to task for being more funny than scary - a worthy enough cause by the late 1970s - but the witch gives him some friction. She's tired of being feared instead of loved, and has a few demands. She has quite a bargaining chip, too: in this little corner of reality, Halloween can only happen if the witch flies over the moon on her broomstick. Poor Dracula never realized that the witch controlled the means of production.

After a few failed attempts on the part of the monsters, she's persuaded to take the ride by a couple of kids who've just been given a basic lesson on the history of Halloween (one of the more accurate ones ever put on television, in fact). She agrees to maker her flight, but, since she still has Dracula right where she wants him, she gets him to throw in a percentage of the t-shirt sales and promise to take her disco dancing. Yep. Disco dancing. The special then ends in a disco scene, with the witch turning into a disco queen and Dracula tossing off his vampire gear for a Saturday Night Fever get-up.

Quite a few specials from this era - and for the next few years - ended with a disco. This one features the song "Keep on Thinkin,'" which has exatly zero to do with Halloween, but is pretty catchy, and, since I only heard it around Halloween, always does, in fact, make me think of the season. For a better disco song, though, dig "Witch Magic" from the end of Witch's Night Out.

This was aired under the name "The Halloween That Almost Wasn't," but sold on video as "The Night Dracula Saved the World." The makeup job earned it an emmy for "Outstanding Individual Achievement - Children's Program," and it was nominated for three more (editing, outstanding program, and outstanding achievement for Mariette Hartley's performance as the witch).

Every Halloween fan should track down a copy - it's one of the rare specials that stands up on its own even if it doesn't make you nostalgic. The plot is a bit random, but the writing is sharp and funny, and the performances are dynamite. A deserving classic. And, though it's never been released on DVD (the dvds going around are bootlegs of a VHS rip) you can watch it right here.

PART 1:


PART 2:


PART 3