tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47691824295486488422024-03-13T05:04:20.614-05:00Halloween Specials.netAuthor Adam Selzer reviews Halloween cartoons and specials, past and present. Nostalgia for kids of the 70s, 80s and 90s alike. Look for new updates every autumn!Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.comBlogger105125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-27712497674018034782018-10-08T08:13:00.001-05:002018-10-08T08:13:56.654-05:00Boo! (1982)<div style="font-family: Times; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin-left: 24.9px; min-height: 23px; text-indent: 29.5px;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Back in March I found myself with an unexpected free night in New York and picked up a ticket to see Weird Al at the Apollo. I was already seeing two shows later on in the tour, and normally one Weird Al show per tour is plenty, as his show is timed to the second and doesn’t really vary from night to night. But this tour was different. This time, Al was doing “The Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Ill-Advised Vanity Tour,” in which he eschewed his usual costume changes, video screens, and props, and left most of the parodies out of his set. Instead, he was doing his more obscure original songs, with a setlist that changed from night to night. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’d dreamed of Al doing a tour like this for years - I love “Yoda” as much as the next guy, but many of my favorite songs in his catalog were songs that might have been in the show when they first came out, but then were dropped as though they’d never existed. The show was glorious - when he broke into “The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota,” which I think is perhaps his greatest work (and not played live for ages), I almost wept. I felt like my life and fandom were being validated.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">In a bar in Harlem after the show, I pondered just how much of my childhood I really need validated, anyway. Nearly everything I loved as a kid has been lionized now (the new Muppet Babies reboot was premiering the next day, even). And quite frankly, a lot the media I loved as a kid doesn’t really deserve to be lionized - this site is full of reviews of shows people remember LOVING in the early 80s, but watch now and marvel that they were ever so easily entertained. There’s no shame in being nostalgic and letting something you loved decades ago spark all those synapses in your brain, but do we really need to reboot and re-release everything?</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">The “Weird Al” tour, I decided, was different from that - these were great songs and represented Al finally giving them (and, to a certain extent, himself) the credit they deserve. Sometimes on this site I can shine a light on works that deserved to be examined as more than to be a simple ephemeral TV special.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><i>Boo!</i>, a 1982 CBC production, isn’t one of those.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">When I first added the “<a href="https://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/p/long-lost-specials-help-wanted.html">long lost specials</a>” portion of this page more than a decade ago, a few people wrote in vaguely remembering a sketch comedy show from the early 80s featuring Universal monsters, an SNL type show that people thought might have been called “<i>Boo TV</i>.” Remembered vaguely by many, but not so well that anyone could be certain of what the title was. So little data was available that it became one of the “holy grails” of Halloween specials. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">This year, it finally surfaced - someone posted an early 80s WGN broadcast (complete with commercials) to Youtube, and the show was rescued from obscurity. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">It’s just about as people described - a comedy variety show featuring Universal Monsters, from the very tail end of the 70s Comedy Variety show boom (indeed, they make several jokes about variety being dead). Dionne Warwick appears as a guest star, first singing “Deja Vu,” which I guess was the closest thing to a spooky song in her repertoire (but which seems totally incongruous here), then singing Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” to Frankenstein’s Monster (which is funny for a minute, but then the song has a few more minutes to go).</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Now, the production values for this special are pretty high - they clearly put some money behind getting all of the sets, props and costumes together. But in the hour long production, there are only a couple sketches where the jokes even hit the level of what we now call “Dad jokes.” Though it lacks the “What the hell / So Bad It’s Good” vibe of the <i>Star Wars Holiday Special</i>, it’s just about as watchable as that, overall. It was probably a lot of fun to make, but doesn't exactly hold up now. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">And it doesn't have to - no one making this was worried about what people would think of it in 2018. And if you watched in the 80s, it’ll bring back memories now, which is valuable all on its own, and tends to have little or nothing to do with the actual quality of the media. It’s great when something comes back into your life and is even better than you remember, but, well, ya can’t win ‘em all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">One curious thing about this broadcast is the commercials, which make me wonder who the heck WGN thought was going to be the audience for this. There are commercials for cereal, candy and video games, but almost all of them, even the cereal commercials, seem to be targeted more at adults than kids. It’s light years away from the kind of colorful, cartoonish commercials you’d see on a Saturday Morning Cartoons break from 1982. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">Whatever merits it may lack, it’s one more Halloween special to cross off the list for completists. Enjoy! </span></div>
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<iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y8uVnkA-j0I" width="560"></iframe>Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-24954720443070193282015-10-22T10:31:00.000-05:002015-10-22T10:31:00.111-05:00Witch's Night Out: The Musical?If you caught our<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2014/10/interview-with-jonathan-rogers-creator.html"> interview with Jonathan Rogers</a>, creator of <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/witchs-night-out-1977.html">Witch's Night Out</a> (by far the most popular special on this site), you know that there were big plans to bring the Witch and co. back to the spotlight, with new specials in the works and more.<br />
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While, this week there's some news: <i>Variety</i> reports that a producer has acquired the rights to a stage version!<br />
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<a href="http://variety.com/2015/legit/news/witchs-night-out-musical-1201620057/">See more at variety.com</a>Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-3656255602204423932015-10-21T09:01:00.000-05:002015-10-21T09:58:54.092-05:001993: Norfin Trolls: Castle of Doom<table><tbody>
<tr><td><span style="font-family: inherit;">After the success of Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake, people spent the 80s and early 90s trying to turn everything into a multimedia licensed property - it was sort of a precursor to how they make everything you've ever heard of into a bad movie nowadays because they assume there's a built-in audience. Sometimes the results were decent - it was a little before the boom, but <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/raggedy-ann-pumpkin-who-couldnt-smile.html">Raggedy Ann's Halloween special</a> was really quite delightful. The <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/pound-puppies-ghost-hounders.html">Pound Puppies</a> show had sharper writing that it probably deserved. The 80s revival of Alvin and the Chipmunks yielded a few above-the-curve shows. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Then, of course, there were things like <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2012/10/1985-scrabble-people-in-pumpkin-full-of.html">The Scrabble People</a>, where VHS tapes of really bad cartoons sitting in bins in flea markets and the dark corners of ebay are all that remind us of a half-assed attempt at turning something you've heard of into a multimedia licensed property. </span></td>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Somewhere in the middle sits this Norfin Trolls: Castle of Doom. I remember that those Troll dolls with the big hair and the naked butts had sort of a moment long about 1991 (though I had no idea until a reader told me about this cartoon that they were called Norfin trolls), and it only made sense for the people at Norfin to turn it all into a cartoon, as well as picture books, Nintendo games, and trading cards. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Unfortunately for all of us, they didn't try very hard. The video games, cards, and books didn't make much impact, and, while their "Castle of Doom" Halloween cartoon isn't necessarily offensively bad (certainly nowhere near as bad as <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2012/10/1985-scrabble-people-in-pumpkin-full-of.html">The Scrabble People: Pumpkin Full of Nonsense)</a>, you don't get the impression that a lot of effort was put into this. Oh, the backgrounds are pretty nice, and the animation isn't as bad as the worst of these shows, but, while they've got trolls in different outfits, little attempt was made to let the viewer know anything about the characters. Outside of the twisted bad guy, who has got some sort of key that will let him into a part of the Castle of Doom that will bring him untold power, the characters have no particular personalities. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The result is a nearly forgotten show so obscure it doesn't even seem to be on IMDB. I had a hard time even finding out when it was <i>made</i>. The VHS release date comes up on amazon as 1997, though it looks more like 1980s animation. The copyright info on the back says 1993.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">You could use this as a lesson for teaching writing students, I think. When you write up a cartoon, even a one-off special, viewers should get a sense of who the characters are and how they'd react to a given situation and how they're different from each other. I sometimes hold up the contrast between Backyardigans and Muppet Babies. Backyardigans was a pretty good show with some excellent music (now and then), but outside of their different looks and names, the characters didn't have paricularly distinct personalities. If the Muppet Babies were acting out, say, a version of <i>Dracula, </i>there's a different way that each of them would play any given role. The Backyardigans were more-or-less interchangeable. Even with, say, the Smurfs, you knew that Brainy and Smurfette and Vanity would all react to a given situation in their own way.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Norfin Trolls take this interchangeability to another extreme - "Castle of Doom" seems like they took a rejected first draft of a Smurfs script and just divied up the lines evenly, so some of Brainy's lines went to one troll, some went to another. Now, the fact that the characters aren't that distinct isn't necessarily a mark of doom for a cartoon (Backyardigans was entertaining enough that you didn't really notice this most of the time), but here the jokes don't land, the timing is bad, and the plot is a little hard to follow. The timing is the worst of it. Cartoons are hard to make, and this Norfin adventure gives the impression that the makers are still figuring things out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Now, maybe I'm being too hard on the Norfin Trolls. The show isn't really offensively bad or anything, and the little kid target audience would probably be entertained by it just fine. But even if you're making a cartoon strictly as hack work or strictly to sell more toys, you can still find a way to make a sharp, quality product. I'm reminded of He-Man writer Paul Dini's interview with He-Man.org - when asked what he said to people who thought He-Man was just a half hour toy commercial, he said, "He-Man was a 1/2 hour toy commercial... Selling the product was the sole reason for doing that show. Though occasionally we could slip in a good story and made the characters more interesting for a strictly non-kid audience." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> That's not really what happened here, and I'm not exactly surprised. I've been running versions of this page since 1998, and I hadn't even heard of this one until just this year. If a show has escaped my notice for this long, odds are that it's not gonna be that memorable.
Still, from my end, it's nice just to find a new special every now and then that I hadn't heard of, and, really, just cueing up a VHS tape makes me feel nostalgic these days, and if you liked this show as a kid, it'll bring back memories now.
The show has never been on DVD, and only the intro is on youtube (see below). VHS tapes run around a dollar.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zQ2zUKW6YTA" width="420"></iframe></span>Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-26921082364325143552014-10-13T08:21:00.000-05:002014-10-13T08:21:24.780-05:00Interview with Jonathan Rogers, creator of WITCH'S NIGHT OUT!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">One of the reasons I love <i>Witch's Night Out</i>, the 1978 special that became a cable staple in the 80s and 90s before vanishing completely, is that it seemed like such a mystery. It seemed to come from nowhere. When it became clear that the post on it here was going to endure as my most popular post, I tried to find out what had happened to John Leach, who created the special, wrote it, directed it, and did the voice of Goodly (while his then wife, Jean Rankin, painted the backgrounds) but I could never find him. He was practically un-Googleable. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Last year, I finally found out that after <i>Witch's Night Out</i>, John Leach had changed his name to Jonathan Rogers and moved to Los Angeles. He practically forgot all about <i>Witch's Night Out</i> until just a couple of years ago, when he found that it had a little cult following. Now, he's not only helped release the remastered DVD, but he's hard at work on <i>new</i> specials featuring the characters from <i>Witch's Night Out</i> and <i>Gift of Winter</i>. Today, he's an artist in upstate New York, and spoke to me by phone:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>ME: There’s a thing in the news today saying that this is the first sSaturday morning in 50 years there were no cartoons broadcast on network TV.</b><br />
<br />Jonathan: REALLY? I didn’t know that?<br />
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Well, the Saturday Morning Carttoon tradition pretty much died out in the 90s, but I guess there was always at least one cartoon being broadcast every Saturday morning until today. But at the same time, I understand that your cartoon, <i>Witch’s Night Out</i> is actually airing today for the first time in years.</b><br />
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Oh today? Really?<br />
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Yeah, on some channel called THis TV. I'm not sure I get that one.</b><br />
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I haven’t looked into it... I’ve seen the show, so , what the hell! (Laughs). As for This TV, well…I don’t even have a television set! I’ve got to get one, I’ve got to - there’s stuff happening that I need to know about. not necessarily in animation, but in comedy, entertainment, all kinds of marvelous things. I’ve never even seen<i> Breaking Bad</i> or <i>Game of Throne!</i>. These things are changing our whole audience. People are getting educated, it’s opening up in a very big way. So I’m getting looser... I predict I’m getitng towards the end of the Valentine’s special….it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s five love stories, all twisted together. Goodly and Nicely, Rotten and Malicious, the kids and their parents, Bazooie and a new character named Valentisia, and the witch herself runs into an old flame.<br />
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What got you started on animation? What cartoons got you interested?</b><br />
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Uh… I never really decided (to go into animation) when I was a kid, I just found myseif DOING it. I mean, I went to see the Disney animation that was current in those days, like <i>Dumbo</i>, which for some reason has vanished. I saw <i>Fantasia</i> and <i>Snow White</i> and all that stuff. But I didn’t really difnt get turned on until UPA started doing <i>Gerald McBoing Boing</i> and the near-sighted Mr. Magoo. And in school I woul do little drawings in the right hand corner of my text book, so you could flip the book and get a little action sequence. I did some pretty elaboate stuff. </span><br />
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</iframe></td><td><span style="font-family: inherit;">So when I grew up, finally, mostly, I was teaching at Sheridan University, and they had just stared an animation course. I was teaching in the school of design, but I was on the faculty, so it meant i could abuse my privileges and use their equipment!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
So I started doing some shorts, and I did the famous Evolou, which nobody’s evern seen. It won about ten awards internationally - New York and Chicago and London and Berlin. Everybody thought that I must know what I’m doing! (laughs). It was an oil painting, just a single frame oil painting that tells a story, the evolution of a person. I thought I was being very clever in calling it Evo-lou. I hope it’s not available anywhere; it has showed up from time to time.<br />
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So, let's talk <i>Witch's Night Out</i>. How did you come up with the story? Do you remember much of the drafting process?<br />
<br />
Not really, except that it was just what we tended to do…(Jean and I) were just full of very complimentary thoughts and ideas and sense of humor and values. My motive for doing the Christmas special was that I noticed that <i>The Grinch</i> and <i>Rudolph</i> kept coming back year after year, and I thoguht “Hey, somebody’s putting some money in their pockets, maybe we can do this.” (laughs) We created our own characters and imposed our own values of them, giving them names like Goodly and Nicely… we chose colors that would be approrpriate to each one, and painted them all one color. Part of that was that we had very, very skimpy budget and it was a very fast way of painting them.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEmfVaijwgyCuTJ2O8z01KPDY_A0E-PmwFLM2-Ebs_6La8ylRbWvZVv9ujwzc5rYU_rV1luesyB1qi96gzug5v8bWqHvvsxPt6jxu79zeaqWk9Vk_vR67OM-jolX983_10n_wov41aBAsE/s1600/jonquote.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEmfVaijwgyCuTJ2O8z01KPDY_A0E-PmwFLM2-Ebs_6La8ylRbWvZVv9ujwzc5rYU_rV1luesyB1qi96gzug5v8bWqHvvsxPt6jxu79zeaqWk9Vk_vR67OM-jolX983_10n_wov41aBAsE/s1600/jonquote.jpg" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>What was life like in the Rankin-Leach household? I talked to Tony, who played Small, and he described a very laid-back, hippie vibe.</b><br />
<br />
(laughs) Is that what he said? Well, that was very polite of him (laughs). Yeah, it was. We were happy. We were hippies, in a way. We never went the whole hippie route because we had two children and were kind of responsible as parents. We wanted our kids to grow up really well and go to nice schools. There were no drugs. We never smoked marijuana or anything like that. Geez. Now, I smoke it whenever I can get it (laughs).<br />
<br /><b>
Uh, would you like me to leave that part out of the transcript? (laughs).</b><br />
<br />
Aw, what the hell. It’s all gonna be legal in my lifetime, I think. But we’ll see. But we didn’t DARE touch it, because it was highly illegal at the time. It was crazy. Not that things are any different in certain states. Like New York, where I am. They’re hysterical here. It’s made everybody nervous, so we all smoke marijuana to calm down (laughs). I can’t do much (of it), because it interferes with this new life that I’ve got. These shows that are coming out have really changed everything. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Write down the name of a gallery called the <a href="https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/">Burchfield Penney</a>. It’s in Buffalo, and it’s sort of like the Norton Simon in Pasadena. It’s not the Museum of Modern Art, it’s a municipal gallery. And it’s up there. They get some very hot shows, and they’re giving ME a show of drawings and paintings in 2017. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The reason I’m mentioning it to you is that we’re doing a preview screening there of <i>Witch’s Night Out</i>. And a thing they’re doing, Adam, is get this: instead of a trivial, cheap little TV cartoon, now it’s <i>ART</i>! It has been redefined! All these experts are going “ooh, ahh, this is really cool!” It’s given it some prestige that it didn’t have.<br />
<br /><b>
Now, you did the voice of Goodly, who is always talking about organizing, delegating responsibilities, and making the world safe for democracy. Was that the opposite or you, sort of a mirror image?</b><br />
<br />
Or, no no no. I’m a bit…certainly in those days I was quite idealistic, quite social minded, a straight-ahead kind of guy, even though I had long hair and a scraggly beard. We were pretty straight folks. I’m much more liberal now.<br />
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Are you still doing the voice of Goodly in the new ones?</b><br />
<br />
I don’t know. I don’t have any plan. I’m so much older now, I’m afraid my voice might sound old. So we’ll see.<br />
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What other specials are you working on? You spoke about a Valentine's special and on one of the videos on the Cross/Rogers page you mention a Thanksgiving one that you whole Jean will work on.</b><br />
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Thanksgiving, Valentine’s, and we have another one called…I don’t know if I’m allowed to mention the title, but it’s about the Witch. She’s not in the Thanksgiving special, but I’m thinking of rewriting it. We wrote another one about how she goes on holiday, because what does she do between Halloweens? <i>(he talks me through the whole plot here. there are zombies.</i>) We’ll save it for the show. I don’t know it’ll ever see the light of day, but it’s a funny show and we have some faith in it.<br />
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Did you have any idea that <i>Witch's Night Out</i> was even still airing all that time?</b><br />
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Well, no! No…I didn’t find out about it really until about five years ago, when a couple of people talked about it. I said “What? What are you talking about? It’s ancient history!” It’s amazing, isn’t it? They didn’t tell me, and I didn’t know it was on Disney Channel! I’d changed my name, it used to be John Leach, as you know. So people saw it, but they didn’t relate Leach to Rogers. So here’s me, I’m an animation producer at Marvel, and nobody ever said anything! Well, it’s all changed now. It was a total surprise to me. I don’t know how much of a cult following it really has; all that stuff on the internet could be ten people.<br />
<br /><b>
Well, one thing I can say is that the entry on halloweenspecials.net isn't just my most popular page, it's twice as popular as the second-most popular page.</b><br />
<br />
Well, you’re just trying to cheer me up! Wow!<br />
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People email about specials they can't quite remember the name of all the time, and it turns out to be <i>Witch's Night Out</i> just about half the time.</b><br /><br />
Well, son of a gun. Well that’s interesting. I’m gonna start getting optimistic! My expectations are pretty low. I mean, I’m old (laughs). I’ve been through this shit a few times. Adam, what do you do, when you’re not talking to dirt like me?<br />
<br /><b>
Oh, I write young adult novels.</b><br />
<br />
Oh! Are you making a living?<br />
<br /><b>
I have a night job as a tour guide, but between the two I just about make a living.</b><br />
<br />
Wel, you’re not hanging outside the strip mall with a cup in your hand. What are some of your titles?<br />
<br /><b>
Well, the new one is called <i>Play Me Backwards</i>…..it’s about a guy who hangs out outside of strip malls. Simon and Schuster put it out about six weeks ago.</b><br />
<br />
Well, they’re not a fly-by-night outfit. I’m gonna ask my library to buy it. They just bought three DVDs of <i>Witch’s Night Out</i>. And they didn’t even ask me, so that was kinda cool!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Now, I found a couple of old articles from the late 70s, early 80s about a third special with some of the same characters called <i>Let's Play Grown-Ups</i>.</b><br />
<br />
It’s never been released. In fact, it was never finished. Now, I patched it up a bit, oh, about five or six years ago… I had some old tapes of it, and I did what I could with it, and I thought “Hey, this is pretty good.” And then I showed it to some young people, and they flipped! They thought it was great! I haven’t paid attention to it at all, because<i> Witch's Night Out</i> and <i>Gift of Winter</i> have completely taken over my brain, but I’d love to see it come out.<br />
<br /><b>
I think the company you were starting at the time was The Toronto Maple Leach Cartoon Platoon?</b><br />
<br />
Yes! Well, Jean was departing, and I was going to start a company, and that was the title I was going to use. But I imploded and went out west to die.<br />
<br /><b>But you didn't die.</b><br /><br />
No, I didn’t. I changed my mind. Met a pretty girl and changed everything.<br />
<br /><b>Had you remained in contact with Jean?</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Oh, yeah! I’m going up to Toronto tomorrow because the DVDs of <i>Gift of Winter</i> came, and one is for her, and I’ll probably take the storyboard for the Valentine special. I’m hoping she’ll participate a little and paint the backgrounds, because she’s retired and she’s interested. We get along fine. We talk all night and we laugh a lot, so things are cool. We were always in touch with our kids and saw each other on holiday occasions. We’ve always been very friendly and cordial and decent, we’ve never had the horrors.<br />
<br /><b>Now, here's my question for everyone involved in the special: What would you have the witch turn <i>you</i> into</b>.<br />
A young man again? That’d be cool. Aw, geez. I really miss what I used to be able to do. I stayed up all night writing last week. I didn’t get any sleep. Well, the following day I was like an idiot, I was walking into the walls! When I was younger I could do two or three nights and I’d still be bopping. I miss that. It’s a provocative question. We all have our own hidden wishes. Next time I talk to you Adam, remind me. I’ll know.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>That's almost exactly what Tony said! Now, did Gilda Radner and Catherine O'Hara have as much fun as they sound like they’re having doing their voices? Part of the charm of the show is that it sounds like everyone is having a lot of fun.</b><br />
<br />
Oh, hell yeah! Well, they were in second city together. Catherine took over for Gilda when she went to SNL. They were all in Second City and then Gilda and Dan (Akroyd) took off, and Catherine moved in. I saw her the first night she took over, and she was such an imitation, physically, and she just did a total imitation of Gilda, and I couldn’t believe it. I was hoping that she would get over it, because Catherine O’Hara is an original talent of substatial proprortions. But I saw her the next night she was already half cured, and when I saw her a week later, she was Catherine.<br />
<br /><b>Strangely enough, my wife is at Second City (the Chicago version, not the Toronto one) right now. I just dropped her off at acting class.</b><br /><br />
No kidding? Wow! Really? Oh, well then, if that’s your thing, then it’s irresistible. I hope she loves it, I hope it takes off. It’s a great kind of life, as crazy as it is. But life is crazy anyway, so you might as well have some fun while you’re doing it!</span>Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-36990656953170026992014-10-01T05:20:00.000-05:002014-10-01T07:42:53.130-05:00Official WITCH'S NIGHT OUT dvd finally here!<table><tbody>
<tr><td><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LU4URQM/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00LU4URQM&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=DK66ONHY3BI34GXR"><img border="0" src="http://ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&ASIN=B00LU4URQM&Format=_SL250_&ID=AsinImage&MarketPlace=US&ServiceVersion=20070822&WS=1&tag=chicagunbeli-20" /></a><img alt="" border="0" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=chicagunbeli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=B00LU4URQM" height="1" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" />
</td><td>A lot of times when I'm visiting schools or doing bookstore events, people ask me what my favorite of my books is. "The new one," I'll say. "Because it hasn't flopped yet, and I haven't banished it down to the basement of my psyche." This is, I admit, me being a whiner, but those of you who've created content that didn't make much of a splash in stores and made your publisher/network/studio give you dirty looks probably know what I mean. It's the way John Leach felt about the cartoons he made in the 1970s for years; he even took the step I never have and changed his name (he's Jonathan Rogers now, which is probably why I could never find him!). He told himself that that part of his life was over and done now. I've sure as hell thought about doing that sometimes.<br />
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But meanwhile, perhaps unbeknownst to John, one of his cartoons, in particular, was still alive; in fact, my review of it was the most popular post on this site. <br />
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<tr><td>Often, you see, people email me asking for help in locating some Halloween special that lingers vaguely in the back of their memory - they remember a few details, and they remember loving it, but if they don't have a tape, they never remember quite enough for them to figure out what the title was. Four times out of five, that turns out to be Leach's 1978 classic <i>Witch's Night Out</i>, which aired on NBC that year before going on to become an October staple on the Disney Channel in the 80s and TNT in the 90s. <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/witchs-night-out-1977.html">You see our main post on it here.</a> I once compared it to McDonald's Pizza: so many people of my generation remember encountering it once in some far-flung McDonald's in a city they were passing through, but we can never quite remember which city it <i>was</i>.<br />
<br />
It was released on video once or twice, but is long out of print. With the small cult following that's grown up around the special over the years, demand for the tapes ran high. I've seen VHS copies go for upwards of a hundred bucks. Deleting comments offering to sell bootleg DVDs took up quite a bit of my time some years (and a few of the bootleggers have quite happily told me they were making a pile off of them before I took their posts down).<br />
<br />
Unlike most of the long-lost specials, the copyright holders were vigilant about taking the special off of youtube and streaming sites, where it would sometimes be posted without permission. Now and then I've tried to embed a version of it here, and I always got "cease and desist" orders. I didn't argue. Though some posters out there really, really got ticked off that someone would stop them from pirating something, I respected the claims of the copyright holder and hoped it meant that they planned to do something with it.</td><td><iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=qf_sp_asin_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=chicagunbeli-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B00LU4URQM&asins=B00LU4URQM&linkId=VLWDYAOMDO4NNBNB&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;">
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<tr><td><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="141" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/F22bYuJiLdo" width="250"></iframe></td><td>Well, folks, after all these years, it finally happened: the creator, now known as Jonathan Rogers, found out about the little cult following a year or two ago (I like to think this site helped) and, according to a facebook post last year, watched his hand-drawn cartoon for the first time in thirty years, then started plans in motion to bring it back into print. The video clip on the left is a trailer for the new edition.<br />
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Some time ago, Jonathan (Leach) Rogers teamed up with James Cross to form Cross-Rogers, which has <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LU4URQM/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00LU4URQM&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=5QCM7GO5MAZIAZZC">now released an official DVD - fully remastered for the first tim</a>e, with a crispness that was probably not apparent even in its very first broadcasts. Surely those boxy old console TVs didn't make it look as sharp and vibrant as it does here.<br />
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Now, I've sometimes mused that maybe we didn't <i>need</i> a fully-remastered version of this special. The VHS tape I watched for years was fuzzy, but it's not like I was watching an HD version back in 1987, when I first saw it. And the animation is wonky and stylized and a bit crude anyway, right?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNvxTCqrjJuPs4NE-TFNn-UUW35a3dK758hWG5Yp7PjrpNvh2PQUaXM0LfomYVu1yJKT7unPsnFS2SaQcgUOY9RxuZ-_O3EjyxmjNtrQXKz4Ao1hf_Jm0hG281fXK0p0zRQD5pMbF-PnTS/s1600/1978_Witch_s_Night_Out__1978__avi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNvxTCqrjJuPs4NE-TFNn-UUW35a3dK758hWG5Yp7PjrpNvh2PQUaXM0LfomYVu1yJKT7unPsnFS2SaQcgUOY9RxuZ-_O3EjyxmjNtrQXKz4Ao1hf_Jm0hG281fXK0p0zRQD5pMbF-PnTS/s1600/1978_Witch_s_Night_Out__1978__avi.jpg" height="165" width="400" /></a>Perhaps I was just afraid that any change would mess with a nearly-perfect experience or something. You know that Hawthorne story about the person who tries to remove one splotch on something otherwise perfect and wrecks the whole thing in the end? It's like that. Maybe the murkiness and mysterious origins were part of the cartoon's charm.<br />
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I needn't have worried, though, because, except for the fact that the dust and scratches in the print are more noticeable now, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LU4URQM/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00LU4URQM&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=6HMUEOD2ISXZDWJH">the DVD</a> is stunning. Watching it now, the colors absolutely POP in a way that they never did before, and the backgrounds, in particular, are bright and crisp. I'm seeing things in the background (and even the foreground) that I never saw before. Looking at the trailer above will probably be sufficient for most people, but here are some side-by-side comparisons of the cartoon as it appears now (right) next to the same shot in the bootlegs:<br />
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<span id="goog_1784140519"></span>This, folks, is absolutely essential. If you're among the many who dropped a few bucks on a bootleg DVD or even downloaded an avi for free someplace, you owe it to yourselves (and the creators, of course) to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LU4URQM/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00LU4URQM&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=6HMUEOD2ISXZDWJH">put a few bucks into upgrading.</a><br />
<br />
The DVD set also features a comic-book version of the story (on-screen only; you can see it on the new website, <a href="http://www.witchsnightout.com/">witchsnightout.com</a>), as well as ten bonus cartoons, mostly very old ones featuring some sort of Halloween theme (like a 1950s Popeye short). Of particular interest is a fascinating 1920 Felix the Cat short in that stunning black and white (seriously black and white - there's hardly a shade of gray in the whole thing) that was common in those early toons of the "Scratchy runs afoul of an Irishman" variety. Also of note is a "Meany, Miney, and Mo" short - a "Lonesome Ghosts" type of clip in which three chimps run into hijinks in a magic shop (though my first time watching the first few minutes I was holding my breath and cringing, certain that it was going to turn out to be alarmingly racist any second now).<br />
<br />
Cross/Rogers is also releasing <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MH26MYC/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00MH26MYC&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=SES6ZDJLUXFRSYP2">a remastered edition of the 1974 Christmas feature, The Gift of Winter,</a> whose existence is the only thing that keeps WNO from being a true "standalone" feature. Their website even announces plans for NEW material featuring these characters (apparently starting with a Thanksgiving special), of which I'm of mixed feelings. Part of the charm of the original is that <i>Witch's Night Out</i>, unlike most of the cartoons on this site, wasn't tied into a larger series or licensed characters or "multimedia properties." It seemed to come out of nowhere, create a world that existed only for twenty-five minutes, and then vanished into our memories. It was, in every sense of the world, a "special," not just a "Halloween episode." On the other hand, though, I really WOULD like to have action figures or PVC figurines of all these characters, ya know?<br />
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This seems to be going around a lot lately - a number of long-lost VHS bootleg favorites are coming back this year (including Mr. Boogedy, about which more later), and I think that this may be The Year of <i>Witch's Night Out</i> on this blog. I tried to interview Jon for the site last year after interviewing Tony, the guy who played Small, though it sort of fell through the cracks. This year I hope to talk more with as many people as I can find. There may have been some value to having the whole thing stay <i>in</i> the woodwork, a quaint little mysterious cartoon that seemed to come out of nowhere, leaving no clues to its origin, but if it's coming out of the woodwork, lets do it right!<br />
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Cross/Rogers has started out strong on this front. Though Jean and Jon, the creators, have been divorced for years, they reunited for a couple of "making of" features that the company has posted to youtube, pulling back the curtain on this cartoon for the first time.<br />
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Here's one of Jean Rankin showing off some of her original background art:<br />
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And an 18 minute clip of Jean and Jon talking and reminiscing. Jean says she couldn't stand to watch "Gift of Winter" for years, and both reveal that they were sort of embarrassed by their early work for years; "all our animation friends thought it was %^@;*," says Jon. Both have warmed up to it over the years, though. "Now, people think it's kinda cool."<br />
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This is a fascinating watch today (particularly if you're like me - a creator of all sorts of flops that you sort of want to disown now and then). Watching the two of them reminisce about a now-bygone era of animation is just wonderful:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/AVrjFJdod3c" width="560"></iframe>Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-32465200485687622022013-10-21T07:03:00.000-05:002014-10-03T16:50:04.534-05:00Witch's Night Out: An Interview with "Small" (Tony Molesworth)<table><tbody>
<tr><td>No Halloween cartoon seems to be remembered quite as fondly as <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/witchs-night-out-1977.html"><i>Witch's Night Out</i>,</a> the 1970s cartoon that was aired for years on the Disney Channel around Halloween. As I stated in <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/witchs-night-out-1977.html">our previous article</a>, the adventures of Small, Tender, Bazooie, and the Witch tend to live in people's collective childhood memories like that one McDonald's we were in one time in Cedar Rapids, or maybe Minneapolis, that served pizza. People everywhere are sure it existed, and remember loving it, but can't quite remember enough about it to find it again. Often, they end up on this site, where the <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/witchs-night-out-1977.html">WNO post</a> is the most popular page by a wide margin. John Leach, the producer, is currently working on getting it back into print. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LU4URQM/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00LU4URQM&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=HXIJ7ULSMM3WZWXZ"><i>(update 2014: done and done!)</i></a></td> <td><iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ac&ref=tf_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=chicagunbeli-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B00LU4URQM&asins=B00LU4URQM&linkId=XZDRWNOGKBQQRD3X&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Small" in action.</td></tr>
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Today, as a special treat, we've tracked down <a href="http://www.tonymolesworth.com/theater.html">Tony Molesworth</a>, who provided the voice of Small (while his girlfriend, Naomi, played Tender). He's still performing as a vaudevillian and comedian in Canada, and graciously agreed to answer a few questions for halloweenspecials.net! </div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>HalloweenSpecials.net: What do you remember about working on the cartoon? How did you get involved?</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> In high school I was dating the Naomi the daughter of the Animators, John Leach and Jean Rankin <i>(and</i> <i>who played Tender -ed).</i> I was a performer, unicycle, comic, juggler, magician and all around clown who was performing for parties and events so they thought i was a natural. I was good at voices; I had built some ventriloquist puppets and that was also part of my act. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tony Molesworth, the voice of "Small"</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> So they were on a home budget to make the film and John asked me if i wanted to do a voice in the film, i had done a bit of voice work for a few commercials so i jumped at the chance. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>Any "behind the scenes" stories you'd like to share? </i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> I thought it was amazing how John's wife, Jean, painted all the backgrounds and then dried them in her kitchen stove there were a few layers of backdrops piled up with the stove open, then they ended up in the film. A very DIY grass roots kinda film. And it was great to meet and work with Gilda Radner; she was already a big celebrity then. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>What was the recording process like? Any anecdotes you'd like to share?</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> We, like most recording studios, did each voice part separately; thats how i did Small, it was in a little recording studio in an old brick building downtown Toronto. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">I believe some of the other actors doubled up for some scenes. I remember everyone was in a very positive mood and all were joking around and </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">having fun. I guess that what you would expect with a buncha clowns like that group. And John liked crazy people - as far as i could tell, he encouraged it, No feeling of work, just play. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">When God retires.. we need someone like him to take over this world. </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tony as he appeared in the late 70s.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>What did you think of the show when it came out? Were you aware that it had a cult following today?</i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> No cult following that I knew about, i thought the film was great, i liked the clown-cartoon feel of it and its universal characters. And i liked John a lot. He had a great sense of humor</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">and it was a laid back cool sorta hippy house, I had lots of dinners with them and let stay over there all the time. </span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Just for fun - if a "fairy godmother" offered to change you into some sort of monster for one night, what would you pick?</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Small..... lol..... I'm into saints not monsters, saints don't sleep at night, the halos keep them awake.. monsters don't look good in halos.... lol </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>How long has it been since you watched the show? </i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I have not seen it since it was made</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><i>What are you up to these days? I see that you're still doing a lot of performing! </i></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"> I have been full time in the comedy biz, cruise ships, corporates, headlining comedy club, fringe and music festivals, opening acts for bands, and opening acts with celeb comics like Howie Mandel. I created an art deck of yoga cards on computer; they are very popular. I never stop writing comedy, songs, shows, bits, I have an kids animation movie i am working on, and a few new one man shows I'll be touring the next summer, and almost finished my first book. One of my new projects i will releasing a music CD, I play melodic and bluegrass styles of banjo and have written some magical and mystical songs, with a universal spiritual flavor. My new music site will be up in Feb 2014 <a href="http://www.anantta.com/">www.anantta.com</a> . ... you asked!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Thank Peace Infinity </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Tony Molesworth.</span><br />
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<b><i>Thanks for talking with us, Tony! And readers, stay tuned for our upcoming interview with John Leach himself!</i></b></div>
Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-8613604880646190302013-10-16T13:49:00.000-05:002013-10-16T13:49:00.046-05:001995: The Ketchup Vampires<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd42Mu4ubM5DxztjPgKn93Ua2HH3dnV0iP3BdcXz7ymfjJ9U_8voQQU5A3B0I7m09JRSA29tbJ35R4bFRHjEIybLZFW_aROZuuEe2uxpP-gBTqEvF1WPU72IdMoKOkbACoQLlXbAi4OYW2/s1600/ketchupvampiresflying.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd42Mu4ubM5DxztjPgKn93Ua2HH3dnV0iP3BdcXz7ymfjJ9U_8voQQU5A3B0I7m09JRSA29tbJ35R4bFRHjEIybLZFW_aROZuuEe2uxpP-gBTqEvF1WPU72IdMoKOkbACoQLlXbAi4OYW2/s320/ketchupvampiresflying.jpg" width="320" /></a>Long about 1985, my friend and I used to sit on top of a set of monkey bars. We'd pretend that it was a space ship or a WW-1 style plane, and that we were under attack by some group called The Ketchup Vampires. "Fire mustard!" we'd shout. When that failed to blow them out of the sky, we'd shout "Fire horse relish!" (we were about confused about the actual names of condiments).<br />
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A decade later or so, in the late 1990s, I happened upon a VHS tape called <i>The Ketchup Vampires</i> <i>2 </i>at Blockbuster and figured that that must have been where we got the idea. But the tape was dated a few years too late for us to have seen it, so it was sort of a mystery. Naturally, I rented the video out to see what it was was, even though they only had part 2, not part 1.<br />
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What it was, was awful. It was apparently a foreign cartoon that had been badly dubbed into English and was pretty much impossible to watch, despite some decent animation (or decent backgrounds, anyway). I seem to recall that you could still hear the German audio track in the background. Information on this thing is scarce even now, but it seems that <i>The Ketchup Vampires</i> was a short-lived series in Germany that spawned a couple of 90 minute specials that were then released in the States with narration by Elvira. Sources differ as to whether the videos are the specials or a whole season of cartoons edited into individual movies. The latter explanation would explain a lot.<br />
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The movies were released in 1995 and 96, a full decade after our monkey bars game, so this wasn't where we got the idea for it. It couldn't have been. Even if it EXISTED (and enough people seem to think of it as an "80s movie" that I'm willing to concede that it might be older than the VHS release implies, though I found no evidence), we probably wouldn't have sat through it. And man, we sat through a lot of crap in those days.<br />
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The plot, such as it is, concerns a group of vampires who, according to the theme song, would "rather kiss you than kill you." I don't want them to do either of those things to me. As the name implies, they eat ketchup - and various "ketchup products" - rather than drinking blood. This sort of conceit has worked well enough for others; Bruce Coville did a book in which Dracula drinks V8 juice, and a <a href="http://www.ikissedazombie.com/">couple of my own books </a>with vampires had them drinking a vegetable compound that was developed during the Civil War and found to be more satisfying than blood (I needed some plausible reason that they could be let into high schools after "coming out of the coffin.") And, no, contrary to some popular youtube comments, I can't imagine that this cartoon was the inspiration for Stephanie Meyer's "vegetarian" vampires, who still drink blood, just not human blood. It's an easy joke for when you want to have vampires, but need them not to be too violent.<br />
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Having seen this cartoon years before writing those books of my own, I do wonder if maybe it <i>was</i> lurking somewhere deep in my subconscious when I wrote out <i>I Kissed a Zombie and I Liked It</i>, but I somehow doubt it, because only now, 15 years after I came up with the initial version of this page, after years of scouring the world for new specials to write about, have I even remembered that this thing existed.<br />
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I'm usually willing to forgive the real stinkers on the grounds that nostalgia is nostalgia, and quality doesn't always figure into these things. But I doubt that many people could watch this and feel particularly nostalgic. For one thing, I don't think very many people ever saw it to start with, and I think that even fewer people saw more than a few minutes of it before getting bored and going to do something else. Even at age 5.<br />
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I can picture the scenario in which this would get watched. The lady down the street whose house you go to after school is having some of "The Girls" over, and needs you and the other kids she watches to be quiet. So she rented this cartoon, and unless it's an emergency, you're all to sit quietly and watch the cartoon until it's over. But even then, and even if said Lady Down the Street was one of those mean ones who wasn't ABOUT to let you do anything else besides watch the movie, your mind would wander. You would focus on picking your nose, scratching out shapes in your arm with your fingernail...pretty much anything. Or stare at the window, maybe, where the trees swaying in the branches were putting on a better show than what was on the screen.<br />
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Then again, googling around shows that there ARE people who don't hate this, so I suppose it takes all kinds of kinds. Many maintain that <i>Ketchup Vampires 2</i> is a LOT better than the first installment, which is sort of terrifying.<br />
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All that said, <i>The Ketchup Vampires 2</i> has some good visuals, and the songs WILL stick in your head. It may be that they could have edited this down into a really fun 20 minute cartoon. Information about it scant enough that I'm not totally sure that it didn't exist, at least in Germany, when my friend and I were playing on the monkey bars, but how we would have heard of it is completely beyond me. Here's the intro to part 1, if you're so inclined, with a catchy theme song:<br />
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And part 2, the one I saw:<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/KB4Eyk7XeZc" width="420"></iframe>Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-45184698907269858322013-10-08T08:29:00.002-05:002014-09-30T08:52:14.707-05:001982: Bunnicula<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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James Howe's 1979 novel <i>Bunnicula</i> belongs in the pantheon of cozy mysteries in which the story is narrated by a great detective's roommate, ala Watson narrating the Sherlock Holmes stories, or Archie telling the stories of Nero Wolfe. Sure, in this instance the narrator is a talking dog named Harold, the detective skills of Chester the Cat are probably questionable, but the venerable children's book maintains a certain coziness and charm, as the two household pets investigate the theory that the new pet rabbit, Bunnicula, is a vampire. After all, the vegetables in the house are being drained of color. There's not much harm in this, but, as Chester says, "Today, vegetables...tomorrow, the world!"<br />
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Re-reading <i>Bunnicula</i> this week was a pleasure - it's a very smart book; smarter, in many ways, than we can get away with in a 90 page middle grade book today. Like a great many middle grade books from that era, the father of the house is an English professor (fathers seem as though they're almost always writers or professors in smart kids' books of the '60s-'80s). In the end, Chester is in therapy, reading books with titles like <i>Finding Yourself by Screaming a Lot</i>.<br />
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The book spawned several sequels, incluing <i>The Celery Stalks at Midnight</i>, my own pick for the best comic horror title of all time, and an animated one-off special that was aired as an ABC Weekend Special in fall, 1982.<br />
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The cartoon varies quite a bit from the plot of the book. Here, the father works at a factory, and the factory is being shut down due to strange vampire-like activity. Harold and Chester, the dog and cat, are a bit more, well, cartoonish than their cozy counterparts in the book. It all ends in a big chase scene inside of the factory, during which Bunnicula exhibits explicit vampire powers (which also never happens in the book).<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJmGRXFMkvdTowwG-sj_om4zujVIwYxafLTZCE_ZoplHKM2r3W_XCTg3kEENiG6J7k814awdsPHNBodmDKgC0ZIKtZ3odON4ubbtrAVZijU8RD1Wgl2TllzKjhKxmyn6ZkMC5gsFpUFJDR/s1600/Screenshot_10_8_13_8_29_AM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJmGRXFMkvdTowwG-sj_om4zujVIwYxafLTZCE_ZoplHKM2r3W_XCTg3kEENiG6J7k814awdsPHNBodmDKgC0ZIKtZ3odON4ubbtrAVZijU8RD1Wgl2TllzKjhKxmyn6ZkMC5gsFpUFJDR/s320/Screenshot_10_8_13_8_29_AM.jpg" height="238" width="320" /></a></div>
Compared to the book, the cartoon seems like a real disaster. But taking the cartoon on its own, it's really not bad at all; visually, and in terms of the plot and the humor, it comes off like a second-string <i>Scooby Doo</i> episode (which is a darn sight better than a third-string one). It has the visual look of an early <i>Scooby</i>, and even some voices that sounds Scooby-like, and the same general premise of a big chase scene as we find out that the <i>real</i> culprit in the factory was a bunch of wolves or coyotes or something, not an actual vampire.<br />
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Judged on its own merits, <i>Bunnicula</i> is a pretty enjoyable 22 minute cartoon. If you enjoyed it as a kid, it will be fun to revisit now. And you can, thanks to youtube: <br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/K-qIuMFztE0" width="420"></iframe>Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-71014528158587786132013-10-02T11:02:00.000-05:002013-10-02T11:02:24.658-05:001988: The Canterville Ghost (animated)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUIzqTFn4z41JmL5p2fdorK8nAgPFcmNDTySop9_1BnweLc8ti-XCo3UjJ6IQcW2LNwYIS8P3n1f0NOt1IY8_WoVv171IrHPGAUebgfpCwj23D-3g0jMq3mheaHb1chOG6lQxd01TmmTav/s1600/Canterville_Ghost_by_halloweenshows.net.avi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="312" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUIzqTFn4z41JmL5p2fdorK8nAgPFcmNDTySop9_1BnweLc8ti-XCo3UjJ6IQcW2LNwYIS8P3n1f0NOt1IY8_WoVv171IrHPGAUebgfpCwj23D-3g0jMq3mheaHb1chOG6lQxd01TmmTav/s320/Canterville_Ghost_by_halloweenshows.net.avi.jpg" width="320" /></a>Very little information exists about this 1988 half hour special, which was aired Sept 26, 1988, apparently (based on the data in the circulating video file) on the USA network. It <i>does</i> look like something they would have shown on USA back then. Nancy Cartwright (Bart Simpson) provides one of the voices. Some remember it playing on USA in the 1990s in a double feature, perhaps with <i>Double Double Toil and Trouble</i> (an Olson Twins affair) and <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/alvin-and-chipmunks-trick-or-treason.html"><i>Trick or Treason</i>,</a> an Alvin and the Chipmunks flop from 1994 that was nowhere near as good as their Wolf Man movie.<br />
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With stylized animation that makes it look like a 16 bit version of the style of <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/witchs-night-out-1977.html">Witch's Night Out</a>, or perhaps WNO cross-bred with one of those picture books they'd animate a little on <i>Reading Rainbow</i>, this is probably fairly gorgeous in good quality (though the circulating video, which was made available by <a href="http://www.halloweenshows.net/2011/10/day-11-canterville-ghost-dot-net.html">halloweenshows dot net</a> , is a bit rough).<br />
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About as rare as these specials get, this edition of <i>The Canterville Ghost</i> actually seems to generate more interest (certainly more emails from fans) than the<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2009/09/canterville-ghost-1956.html"> 1986 live action movie that featured Alyssa Milano,</a> with many people in particular remembering the sequence in which Sir Simon talks about the death of his wife.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE6g-SKGVHaykNYPUrRjtIq8F5vsi9YGXNIGaeGeXuv5pofq9TAfeRh3E5Nj_VwIwCaaKgrLqsOK4oyclRni14tffjb0SygaAFGk8-cDmRm9Dnh9jQDhSFRrq6FFhgDGElPBXpaQwMwoBr/s1600/canterville2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="283" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE6g-SKGVHaykNYPUrRjtIq8F5vsi9YGXNIGaeGeXuv5pofq9TAfeRh3E5Nj_VwIwCaaKgrLqsOK4oyclRni14tffjb0SygaAFGk8-cDmRm9Dnh9jQDhSFRrq6FFhgDGElPBXpaQwMwoBr/s320/canterville2.jpg" width="320" /></a> Plenty of people have made movie and cartoon versions of Oscar Wilde's short story, and it seems to be made for the format: the story of a ghost having trouble scaring the people who move into his house is an easy generator for <i>Home Alone-</i>style pranks and laughs - and this version plays up the humor much more effectively than most of them do, as poor Sir Simon is tormented by the young twins and offered some lubricant for his chains by the father. However, it's only like this for the first two thirds. After that, it abruptly turns into a much sadder story, as Sir Simon tells Virginia how he let his wife go riding one day, and the carraige went off a bridge. They found her drowned body the next day, and he himself wound up buried in an unmarked grave, unmourned. You don't see a lot of cartoons talking about unmarked graves. Virginia has to mourn over Simon's grave, then help him learn to forgive himself so he can go from haunting the attic to the "beautiful garden" in the next world. It's a night and day switch from the tone of the first two-thirds.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBOYjV9YKUVYlE8fkwtcLfVf5J9RhH24Q0XUbmZJvtR-QnqQLglmOtEI7xotoz0poxDf8V28NwGvHqa0tWNdaR5EdFwrtgKlX2QGciUtJmwwOG8OfkTmulop1D4ch7GeMCLFkrdsN728f5/s1600/22AEF05B-593B-401E-82D7-E35A82B5065D.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBOYjV9YKUVYlE8fkwtcLfVf5J9RhH24Q0XUbmZJvtR-QnqQLglmOtEI7xotoz0poxDf8V28NwGvHqa0tWNdaR5EdFwrtgKlX2QGciUtJmwwOG8OfkTmulop1D4ch7GeMCLFkrdsN728f5/s320/22AEF05B-593B-401E-82D7-E35A82B5065D.png" width="320" /></a>It's this portion that keeps the story from simply being a Looney Tunes romp, but it's tends to make for an uneven story that turns too quickly from pure comedy to pure tragedy (with a lot of Victorian-style sentiment in most cases).<br />
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In this version, though, it seems to be the dark sequence towards the end that lives in peoples' memories. The scene (illustrated with a few non-moving painted backgrounds) in which Sir Simon's wife rides off, and the scene of the edge of the carraige poking from the water, are said to have inspired a few nightmares.<br />
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But the whole piece is really as good an adaptation of the story as I've seen, and the animation is really quite unique, like a really cool picture book come to life.<br />
<br />Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-43514758259714114732013-10-01T08:33:00.000-05:002013-10-01T08:38:12.994-05:00On Sleepy Hollow (2013 TV series)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLUAev1cQ_bk1yyM2uGfY2FIDd-5Rcp1mXowPWl7hr3kbdBWbEMfw6yXf5_CLEu_GRx2CPMuRqEusucX6YkPDVku31937QeoSQiAOISrs1eTFBetnAonrXgpuQTh0dd_CNrpYYjRJW8JMG/s1600/sleepyhollowfox.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLUAev1cQ_bk1yyM2uGfY2FIDd-5Rcp1mXowPWl7hr3kbdBWbEMfw6yXf5_CLEu_GRx2CPMuRqEusucX6YkPDVku31937QeoSQiAOISrs1eTFBetnAonrXgpuQTh0dd_CNrpYYjRJW8JMG/s1600/sleepyhollowfox.jpg" /></a></div>
On the show <i>Community</i>, they occasionally show clips of of a <i>Doctor Who </i>parody called <i>Inspector Spacetime</i>. The Inspector and his companion will crash-land somewhere, and the companion will say "Where are we, Inspector?" to which the Inspector replies, "The question isn't <i>where,</i> but....<i>when?"</i><br />
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This line appears, almost verbatim, in the first episode of the new <i>Sleepy Hollow</i> TV show, which I've taken to describing as "If Inspector Spacetime crash-landed in Twin Peaks." I can't do much better to describe than my fellow Firebrand Literary survivor Scott Neumyer did in his Rolling Stone review, which was entitled "<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/sleepy-hollow-is-batshit-crazy-20130916"><i>Sleepy Hollow</i> Is Batshit Crazy</a>." But I mean all this as a compliment. Sure, the show may make very little sense, really, but it has foggy graveyards, catacombs full of the bones of dead witches, dusty old books full of ancient secrets, and some pretty slick coffins. And, now and then, a headless horseman. I'll give pretty much anything with a headless horseman in it a shot.<br />
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Now, this show and its premise have almost nothing to do with the original <i>Legend of Sleepy Hollow</i>. To refresh, the story there is that in the early 1800s, a lanky New Englander named Ichabod Crane comes to Sleepy Hollow, New York, to teach school. While there, he becomes enamored with a coquette named Katrina Van Tassel, whose father owns a heck of a farm. After being strung along by her for a while, he's chased out of town by the Headless Horseman, the chief among all the local ghosts. It's said to be the ghost of a Hessian soldier from the Revolution that had taken place in living memory, but Washington Irving's story, the one that chases Ichabod is strongly implied to have been Brom Bones, Ichabod's romantic rival, in disguise, just trying to scare him.<br />
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Here on the show, Ichabod Crane is a British official who switched sides to fight under George Washington in the 1770s, and died in battle just after decapitating a horseman. His wife, Katrina, put him under some sort of spell that kept him asleep for more than two centuries until he wakes up in New York, where he finds that Katrina was burned as a witch in the 1790s and now inhabits some sort of world-between-worlds, like the Black Lodge only with more shrubbery, and that the horseman is actually one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Teaming up with the police officer who found him, Ichabod and Katrina now fight various demons and witches every week as they try to keep the horseman from finding his head and bringing about the end of days.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNIEIVzarLmKNdPrYGvWE_IkVuhB5QVilRbIQhKI3X9PHybWNRYGSTcU_hT4L3smZQz9FyNPMYvhiigDKsqC1_arr2QebaaGr_uCObss71aR8Zd5zUBwH6Yu4E87qKPNhewq5oGsCTv9To/s1600/sleepyhollowhorseman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNIEIVzarLmKNdPrYGvWE_IkVuhB5QVilRbIQhKI3X9PHybWNRYGSTcU_hT4L3smZQz9FyNPMYvhiigDKsqC1_arr2QebaaGr_uCObss71aR8Zd5zUBwH6Yu4E87qKPNhewq5oGsCTv9To/s320/sleepyhollowhorseman.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
Now, there are plenty of things wrong with this. As a historian, I don't even know where to <i>begin</i> saying what's wrong with Katrina being burned as a witch in the 1790s. I'm hesitant to call it a "modern day take" on the old legend, since it has basically nothing to do with it (I don't think the story of Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman exists in the world of the show). Take out the names Ichabod and Katrina, and there's basically no connection at all.<br />
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And I'm pretty sure that one day soon, perhaps as soon as next week (we're three episodes in as I write this), I'll turn the show on and realize that I no longer have any idea what the hell is going on. It happened about midway through season 2 of <i>Twin Peaks</i>, and about halfway through the run of <i>The X-Files</i>, and I doubt I'll last the whole season on this one. For now it's mostly just a "monster of the week" sort of show, but sooner or later it'll bogged down on the underlying plot and I'll lose track of things.<br />
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But for now, I'm really enjoying it. Though Ichabod's jokes about seeing a Starbucks everywhere now were a bit cheap, I enjoyed watching Ichabod adapt to the 20th century. And though I have some issues with its awful grasp on history, problematic uses of religious themes, etc, it <i>is</i> nice to see such a diverse cast. And it's kind of fun to watch a headless horseman with an assault rifle. He's a pretty bad shot, but, hey, how's he supposed to aim the thing without any eyes? Most Sleepy Hollow variants seem to take it for granted that the horseman can see pretty well.<br />
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And, as mentioned, it's got foggy graveyards and catacombs full of the bones of dead witches that you can apparently find just by poking around in suburban New York basements (hey, they find dead bodies all over the place; they found a whole underground chamber full of skeletons in Union Square back in the 60s). If the show is over-the-top with its corniness and insanity, at least it <i>knows</i> it. It's the kind of show where if someone seems like they'd look good in a cape, they'll probably go ahead and have them wear a cape. Where a villain probably wouldn't be afraid to say "It's mine! All mine!" Where no production assistant would ever dare to utter "Hey, do you think people will wonder how come there's a fog machine going?" It's nice to see a show that seems to have no real interest in taking itself too seriously.Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-39698263828277916972013-09-27T17:43:00.000-05:002013-10-01T09:58:24.060-05:001987: Ghost Stories from The Pickwick Papers<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdFfUJc8xeNrzSnyzEDroTH9IE6gcYFcL0b5-Y6Jl2U8DMWlzlkvGv41Tt7MHIEIlnBGYYfL5gtecpL9K5quOOQEmso9uEjhMC6kjMN1XLLP59HQyZPh1K_AT1j2e3b-mOP9mwk6BZEKNa/s1600/Charles_Dicken_s_GHOST_STORIES_from_The_Pickwick_Papers_PART_ONE_-_YouTube.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdFfUJc8xeNrzSnyzEDroTH9IE6gcYFcL0b5-Y6Jl2U8DMWlzlkvGv41Tt7MHIEIlnBGYYfL5gtecpL9K5quOOQEmso9uEjhMC6kjMN1XLLP59HQyZPh1K_AT1j2e3b-mOP9mwk6BZEKNa/s320/Charles_Dicken_s_GHOST_STORIES_from_The_Pickwick_Papers_PART_ONE_-_YouTube.jpg" width="320" /></a>How in the HELL did I never hear of this? I'm a big Dickens fan - I have a whole blog called <a href="http://dickensdrinks.blogspot.com/">Drink Like the Dickens</a> in which I make drinks out of Dickens books (smoking bishop, wassail, negus, etc). And yet, somehow it escaped me that there was actually a made-for-video cartoon that functions as a Charles Dickens Halloween Special.<br />
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Dickens's first novel, <i>The Pickwick Papers</i>, made him a star. Something like 80% of all people who could read bought a copy, and its hardcore fans rivaled Harry Potter fans for obsessiveness (I would have loved to see what they did on Tumblr). The book, a rambling narrative in which Mr. Pickwick and his friends wander around from adventure to adventure, presented a sort of "Englishness" that everyone recognized, but which had never been captured before. I like to compare it to <i>Clerks</i>, which presented a sort of suburban lifestyle that much of my generation recognized at once, but had never really seen on film before.<br />
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The book hasn't held up particularly well. For a good century, it was the go-to book to mention when people were talking about the funniest book of all time, but today it's funny in an "I guess you had to be there" way. Most of the adventures seem like <i>Laurel and Hardy</i> shorts. But that isn't to say it's bad, by any means.<br />
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At various points in the book, presumably whenever Dickens was short on ideas, some character or another will tell a totally unrelated short story, the best known of which is probably <i>The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton</i>, which was sort of an early version of <i>A Christmas Carol</i>. Many of the stories had ghostly themes, and, in <i>Ghost Stories From The Pickwick Papers</i>, we get animated versions of four of the stories, strung together by a framing device in which the Pickwick Club is telling ghost stories to kill time.<br />
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Emerald City animation was making a lot of Dickens movies in those days, as well as adaptations of classics like <i>The Phantom of the Opera</i>. From what I can see from the previews, they all look similar to this one: gorgeously painted, but still obviously low budget work by skeleton crews.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh551mv9ozFgmsD8bdR6n-d_AgfCbA18pMx0DHEtsWps7Fd4lOq9JsIDSJkBlTAtWQWtLKVjAWZwky9QnRxgGBZE45iNtrzbnV4cfJq1KUQ91Cd2nqDiu2G1Tx0lZPUQs-vG4Y6q8t1GQaQ/s1600/Charles_Dicken_s_GHOST_STORIES_from_The_Pickwick_Papers_PART_ONE_-_YouTube.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh551mv9ozFgmsD8bdR6n-d_AgfCbA18pMx0DHEtsWps7Fd4lOq9JsIDSJkBlTAtWQWtLKVjAWZwky9QnRxgGBZE45iNtrzbnV4cfJq1KUQ91Cd2nqDiu2G1Tx0lZPUQs-vG4Y6q8t1GQaQ/s320/Charles_Dicken_s_GHOST_STORIES_from_The_Pickwick_Papers_PART_ONE_-_YouTube.jpg" width="320" /></a>The animation is of that Filmation style, and a lot of corners are clearly being cut. The script could stand to be a bit punchier, as it drags in places. But the visuals are so fantastic that none of this really matters. The characters themselves look a bit simple, but the backgrounds have some of the best foggy Victorian streets, tumble-down mansions, moldy graveyards, and gnarled branches in the business. The producers were not afraid to be scary, and the result is a great "Halloweenish" vibe throughout. If only the budget had been bigger, you get the impression that this could have made a really dynamite feature film.<br />
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All quibbles aside, though, there are some really good parts here. My favorite story, both in the book and the cartoon, concerns a guy who meets a ghost in an old inn (there are a LOT of inns in this book), and asks the ghosts why ghosts are always haunting gloomy places. Why not go someplace <i>nice</i>? The ghost is astounded. "I never thought of that!" he says. And off he goes.<br />
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Here's it is; thanks to John Bolles for the tip.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6yHpR_TU0os" width="420"></iframe><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/g87zh0sqFzI" width="420"></iframe>Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-3909206312065928952013-09-20T10:58:00.000-05:002013-09-20T16:38:25.189-05:00Fruity Yummy Mummy and Frute Brute Rise Again!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAheSOzA2h93v8-Is2XHNJmhuh4fLvRLg6WURLdolPc47bTv-3rFSirEznGP7scSE1PupD4LijNynZCAEIliFhNHv4kjRojFOPEhs9_R5IuIDSFjpnAsHXVN5G6mgSH7zaEqCIb86NLEvC/s1600/IMG_2007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAheSOzA2h93v8-Is2XHNJmhuh4fLvRLg6WURLdolPc47bTv-3rFSirEznGP7scSE1PupD4LijNynZCAEIliFhNHv4kjRojFOPEhs9_R5IuIDSFjpnAsHXVN5G6mgSH7zaEqCIb86NLEvC/s400/IMG_2007.jpg" width="300" /></a><br />
This is a bit off-topic, but I can't help wanting to talk about this stuff. It's not exactly TV related, unless you count commercials, but it's Halloween nostalgia, all right.<br />
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We had a weird custom on Halloween in Des Moines - before saying "trick or treat," (which you actually did on Beggar's Night, Oct 30th), you had to tell a joke. Something along the lines of "Why did the man put his car in the oven? Because he wanted a hot rod!" We had to <i>work </i>for our treats, and we didn't complain, because we had <i>values</i> in those days. I was surprised to move South and find kids just saying "trick or treat" and expecting candy, like a bunch of mooching commies.<br />
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I remember one year I was trick-or-treating behind a kid whose joke was one he got off a box of Yummy Mummy, the newly-released monster cereal to go along with Count Chocula and Frankenberry (Boo Berry was already sort of hard to find by then). I don't remember the question part of the joke, but the answer was "Fruity Yummy Mummy." The kid carefully recited the joke at every house, and the people at the door, who probably didn't get it if they didn't follow the cereal world closely, smiled politely and gave the kid some candy.<br />
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I'm telling this story because it amounts to just about the full extent of my memories of Fruity Yummy Mummy, which never really got off the ground as a cereal. I remember having it and thinking it was okay a few times, though given the choice I probably would have picked King Vitaman over it. 1988 was an odd time to bring out a new monster cereal; they had already pretty much stopped advertising them on television by then, and I think they've given up on having cool prizes in the boxes for the most part. By the late 90s, I couldn't find any monster cereals at all, except for <i>occasionally</i> Count Chocula.<br />
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Tales of how good Frankenberry was became a part of my teenage suburban folklore. "I used to <i>inhale </i>that stuff," one friend used to say. There was a web page in the mid 90s devoted to the long-lost Boo Berry, lamenting how General Mills "never really gave Boo Berry a chance." Production art from a Frankenberry commercial was one of the first things I bought when I discovered eBay.<br />
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About ten years ago, the cereals started being easy to find at Halloween again, so I've always been able to get my fill of the three basic monsters, and never really found myself missing Fruity Yummy Mummy. Still, when they announced last month that Fruity Yummy Mummy was coming back, along with Fruit Brute, which was cancelled before my time, I was ecstatic. Yes! Bring back <i>everything</i> from my childhood! Let nothing be lost! My generation will not stop until we can get our Ecto-Cooler again. From a metal can.<br />
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So, with a song in my heart, I have been in a Target store just about every, just checking. I've hit grocery stores, too, but only Target is getting retro-style boxes. Just the idea of getting Count Chocula in a retro box was exciting to me, and the chance to try Frute Brute at last made me feel like I had a chance to fill a hole I never realized I had in my soul. In a way.<br />
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Today, they finally showed up in the Halloween department of the West Loop Target here in Chicago. My memories aren't really strong enough to tell me if the flavor is authentic; word on the street is that they were both the same flavor originally, and the way to get the "authentic" version is to mix them. Here's my verdict:<br />
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<b>FRUTE BRUTE</b><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp_kAlGTHyIMV7ERewQDv8wWOkEeYzlRenEBXw7jUm8zRZ0GEPM3c0GOvXDFOw43Vjdh9piNVmdUIAX9OH54ek83BlhNe8pnvbye-jXr4Lz1UFZ34Pa_O1rRi26A2H0fq-RxwRREZWLvKx/s1600/IMG_2013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp_kAlGTHyIMV7ERewQDv8wWOkEeYzlRenEBXw7jUm8zRZ0GEPM3c0GOvXDFOw43Vjdh9piNVmdUIAX9OH54ek83BlhNe8pnvbye-jXr4Lz1UFZ34Pa_O1rRi26A2H0fq-RxwRREZWLvKx/s320/IMG_2013.jpg" width="320" /></a>A cherry-flavored cereal that tastes pretty much like any other red cereal, albeit with marshmallows. Tasty.<br />
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<b>YUMMY MUMMY</b><br />
Now <i>this</i> stuff is tasty business. The orange-cream flavored cereal tastes like a creamsicle bar. Delicious.<br />
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<b>MIXED:</b><br />
Mixing them together makes things a bit too....crowded. Like a bowl of Fruit Loops, the individual cherry, orange and vanilla flavors sort of get lost in the shuffle. Perhaps the sort of guys who can taste twelve different flavors in their wine would appreciate it more, but I just don't have that good of a palette.<br />
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I'll leave you with this photo of how I'm using my boxes to help decorate my desk for Halloween, even though showing a pictures with records exposes me to the general risk of being called a hipster on Reddit. It beats being called a dudebro.<br />
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And a vintage Yummy Mummy commercial. Boo Berry was out of the ads by this point, and Frankenberry would soon follow, if I remember right:<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/GelMgmuYnxs" width="420"></iframe>Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-9292190354709642342013-09-18T08:09:00.000-05:002013-09-18T08:09:06.272-05:002013: The Legend of Smurfy HollowI was going to review the new <i>Sleepy Hollow</i> TV series, but I decided I'd wait for a few more episodes. So far, it seems like <i>Inspector Spacetime</i> landed in <i>Twin Peaks</i> during Season 2, the one where things spun out of control and made very little sense. I mean this in a nice way, and all, but I'm not sure what to say about it yet.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg9cciTuTMLCMw88zvtR5Vbd9iF1HW0CwV3a5f6UJX28EfEeMDLB3BTRgFWztop9GEKXEvMGwjnoAx-SY86A4PlrTcaav7aP_54S_wmfn-EwXEcQqDfSakXZtNToY4lM7ic-BNLHoQF_Jh/s1600/smurftitle-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg9cciTuTMLCMw88zvtR5Vbd9iF1HW0CwV3a5f6UJX28EfEeMDLB3BTRgFWztop9GEKXEvMGwjnoAx-SY86A4PlrTcaav7aP_54S_wmfn-EwXEcQqDfSakXZtNToY4lM7ic-BNLHoQF_Jh/s320/smurftitle-2.jpg" width="320" /></a>So, instead, I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the <i>Smurfs'</i> first proper Halloween special, a straight-to-DVD half hour cartoon entitled <i>The Legend of Smurfy Hollow. </i>It's in stores now.<br />
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<span id="goog_2048418098"></span><span id="goog_2048418099"></span>I suppose we can now expect that every toy we remember is going to be revived for the big screen sooner or later. <i>He-Man</i> hasn't happened yet, but it's in the works. We may not see movies of <i>I Vant to Bite Your Finger</i> or <i>The Wuzzles</i> any time soon, but nothing shocks me anymore. The way the movie business works now, a lot revolves around opening week gross (more than it used to), and "stuff you've heard of" is a safe risk, no matter how bad the movie is.<br />
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So after disappearing from pop culture for about 20 years, a couple of years back the Smurfs came back in a big way with a poorly-received movie that did well enough to spawn a poorly-received sequel. I haven't seen either one of them, so I really shouldn't comment. Even in the 80s, I had a few smurfs and all, and I vaguely remember seeing <i>The Smurfs and the Magic Flute</i> in a theater, but I wasn't all that into them.<br />
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Still, after a few minutes, when <i>The Legend of Smurfy Hollow</i> turned from its CGI framing device of a bunch of smurfs telling ghost stories and morphed into a cell-animated cartoon, I was filled with a warm, fuzzy feeling. A new Smurfs cartoon! After all this time!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxEjYujfpVoXOXSNDR3LvoL8hzaXUvbdnOEc3eVI0DPXgGW5MGiJXSHzJaXBvJJpJlZv69BzoyBILdlyEMtnLcvKJQ0xiXww85U4a5B69DitemVX6ET8lOcgHoHLfq9aFpJ9AtPJvhgqvN/s1600/smurfyhollowbridge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="163" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxEjYujfpVoXOXSNDR3LvoL8hzaXUvbdnOEc3eVI0DPXgGW5MGiJXSHzJaXBvJJpJlZv69BzoyBILdlyEMtnLcvKJQ0xiXww85U4a5B69DitemVX6ET8lOcgHoHLfq9aFpJ9AtPJvhgqvN/s320/smurfyhollowbridge.jpg" width="320" /></a>The story is really nothing like <i>The Legend of Sleepy Hollow</i> at all. Here, we have the Smurfs gearing up for their annual berry-picking competetion, which Brainy Smurf wins every year. Another Smurf (I forget his name) follows Brainy into Smurfy Hollow, which most Smurfs avoid because of several signs saying "Beware of the Headless Horseman." Brainy put them up himself to scare others away from Smurfy Hollow, which is by far the best place to pick berries.<br />
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There's a funny sequence in which Brainy talks to himself about the general absurdity about a headless horseman. "What would he do if it rained?" he asks. But then, of course, a REAL headless horseman shows up, Brainy runs, a rescue party is formed, and sooner or later three smurfs are trapped in Gargamel's cages.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisX00_C6H6HcSh434bhgmqXR1wV6Gexp5CXSOQzfjnStNTDBcU7LAXm_ssVdmiBaviZVKRkOiedAJOpcNdYjWihyphenhyphenk8-a5IbzVKOWFPnfwr_3OcU6jsjQLM5YWP_K3c0o_M48i3bW0EH8W2/s1600/smurfyhollow2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisX00_C6H6HcSh434bhgmqXR1wV6Gexp5CXSOQzfjnStNTDBcU7LAXm_ssVdmiBaviZVKRkOiedAJOpcNdYjWihyphenhyphenk8-a5IbzVKOWFPnfwr_3OcU6jsjQLM5YWP_K3c0o_M48i3bW0EH8W2/s320/smurfyhollow2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
Now, maybe I don't remember well enough, but I don't think Gargamel used to be particularly funny. He's more self-deprecating now; he gets a funny line here in which he exists that his personal hygiene is perfectly in line with 16th century standards. Then, again, the Headless Horseman shows up and chases everyone away. Gargamel is vanquished, and the Smurfs learn some valuable lessons. Spoiler alert: the horseman is really a goat the Papa Smurf magically disguised as a ghost (implying that he's known Brainy was cheating all along, I suppose).<br />
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<i>The Legend of Smurfy Hollow</i> isn't bad. Heck, it's nice just to see a new cell-animated Halloween special at all. The plot only makes a little bit of sense, but it's probably better than the average episode of <i>The Smurfs</i> from the 80s, and it sure made me hungry for a bowl of SmurfBerry Crunch. That was a some good cereal, right there. I suppose a box of Cap'n Crunch's Oops All Berries will have to do...until I can get my hands on the re-released versions of Fruit Brute and Fruity Yummy Mummy, for which I'm checking Target daily. That's where I was when I found this new Smurf DVD, which was only five bucks.<br />
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I'll leave you with Tom Smith's "Smurfin' Safari"<br />
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<iframe seamless="" src="http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2154633496/size=medium/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/t=22/transparent=true/" style="border: 0; height: 120px; width: 100%;"><a href="http://tomsmith.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-duckon-2010">Live at DucKon 2010 by Tom Smith</a></iframe>Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-9376808352539904842013-09-05T22:41:00.003-05:002013-10-01T09:58:42.432-05:001987: The Monster's RingThis is one of those specials that I only saw once, but I remember where I was when I saw it (my next-door neighbor's house), and a couple of stray lines have stuck with me the whole time. It's kind of remarkably, really, because, as a Halloween special, it's not all that memorable. It's not <i>bad</i> or anything, but except for the interest that developed around it due to it being long-lost and hard to find for a while, it never exactly had the rabid following of shows like <i>Witch's Night Out</i>.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSNwD7K5L3F2EKvn2DRZPwl_M83QpK-XUu73551D1LmBImf7Mocipmxol_CQ8JDM_TfetniucT65ZZVhOtxKsqRCOzsmxCR-Daqd-CdIfzf34t-iMrwLWJTgdrGNJ50O-VVDcOQrhRf6Sa/s1600/204D93D5-DC61-44FB-B48A-CDA434925463.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSNwD7K5L3F2EKvn2DRZPwl_M83QpK-XUu73551D1LmBImf7Mocipmxol_CQ8JDM_TfetniucT65ZZVhOtxKsqRCOzsmxCR-Daqd-CdIfzf34t-iMrwLWJTgdrGNJ50O-VVDcOQrhRf6Sa/s320/204D93D5-DC61-44FB-B48A-CDA434925463.png" width="320" /></a></div>
Based on Bruce Coville's novel, and aired as an episode of CBS Storybreak in 1987, <i>The Monster's Ring</i> tells the story of , a young boy who looks exactly like Harry Potter would have if <i>Harry Potter</i> was a late '80s cartoon show. Russell is being hassled by a bully named Eddie who, like Nelson Muntz before him, seems to be a sad, lonely little boy who needs to be isolated from everybody. I wish we could see more of what makes Eddie tick; sometimes in our anti-bullying campaigns we forget that bullies are people, too. Still, his father's advice to "make friends" with the bully, and said father's lack of suspicion when Eddie is seen "borrowing" Russell's bike later, gives me the impression that the father in this cartoon is a pretty dim fellow.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8ChQcdT-lPAVPxy-QweWl5QA54vAhnUXgn2HRrdImMoorzhCXGJngtWzg7iwyh06pB9pLH-5awWt3l-abaNMn1JGSo1KnhW0GpXMdKx3s2XK2rVnW38RipEbLeCWlkPAfECpXy9qX4mYw/s1600/039D1AD2-B0A3-41B4-9D56-0A8009C5A5FF.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8ChQcdT-lPAVPxy-QweWl5QA54vAhnUXgn2HRrdImMoorzhCXGJngtWzg7iwyh06pB9pLH-5awWt3l-abaNMn1JGSo1KnhW0GpXMdKx3s2XK2rVnW38RipEbLeCWlkPAfECpXy9qX4mYw/s320/039D1AD2-B0A3-41B4-9D56-0A8009C5A5FF.png" width="320" /></a>Upon running away from Eddie one day near Halloween, Russell ends up in a part of town where he's never been before, and where the sky is mysteriously dark, even though it was bright just around the corner. In it is a magic shop run by a strange old man who sells <i>real</i> magic at bargain prices. We've all seen shops like this in stores - you buy something like a monkey's paw or a Shakespeare Folio for a nickel, and when you try to go back to the shop, you find it was never there. Never tries to go back to the store in the cartoon, for some reason, but I assume that if he did, he'd never even be able to find that strange part of town again.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM3ZAyMNYjS46yYL7roybMv7iPu1Z7VNnCMsNd934oVMz3XqSo8rX4fyk1kKKn_9cTg8EjZbl__vGabpAV704Jdq6swfC-oJaF9qQZLTuzP4PgKIAsvM5Kpgi7DfWw-kKfbrI1qwGvOMHE/s1600/5A5DA9F7-4382-4976-90DA-52C950F363BC.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM3ZAyMNYjS46yYL7roybMv7iPu1Z7VNnCMsNd934oVMz3XqSo8rX4fyk1kKKn_9cTg8EjZbl__vGabpAV704Jdq6swfC-oJaF9qQZLTuzP4PgKIAsvM5Kpgi7DfWw-kKfbrI1qwGvOMHE/s320/5A5DA9F7-4382-4976-90DA-52C950F363BC.png" width="320" /></a></div>
For a quarter, he buys The Monster's Ring, a little ring said to contain a faithful servant. By squinting one eye and saying "Gremlin of the magic ring, change me to a monstrous thing," Russell is able to turn himself into a monster that puts me in mind of the way Scott Howard looked as a wolf in the <i>Teen Wolf</i> cartoon. Most who see him think it's a great look - "I made it from things we found around the house," he says, in a line that stuck with me - but Eddie is scared to death and runs away, until develops enough self confidence that he doesn't need the ring anymore, and is able to help Eddie from higher-up bullies of his own.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD7Gz0KKv2xs5ORWgyhK0Z5kHGaPKXVbpDqcC4ncAEx82E42sS_U31ROgR-OusIAIea46J07eBgYWhm_7hX7mwhQZKCpvdLbWN5qGHMy4pjs2tv9EytDvdKo_JXHX_YwPdiZNTSh0OxwVj/s1600/6DF95EC0-3087-49F1-8D59-9F881ECB173A.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD7Gz0KKv2xs5ORWgyhK0Z5kHGaPKXVbpDqcC4ncAEx82E42sS_U31ROgR-OusIAIea46J07eBgYWhm_7hX7mwhQZKCpvdLbWN5qGHMy4pjs2tv9EytDvdKo_JXHX_YwPdiZNTSh0OxwVj/s320/6DF95EC0-3087-49F1-8D59-9F881ECB173A.png" width="320" /></a>Lost and impossible to find until it was recently uploaded to youtube by the guy who made up a fake Disney channel (he even added in commercials and stuff), <i>The Monster's Ring</i> isn't so offensively dull or bad that you might watch it now and marvel that you were ever so easily entertained, but I certainly got the idea that some elements of the plot didn't translate well to the 26 minute format, and, though the animation itself isn't bad for its era, it lacks that Halloween atmosphere that I value so highly - the Magic Shop and the strangley dark part of town should have been a real treat to animate, but they come off as pretty bland here. Still, I never got particularly bored watching it now, the plot was pretty coherent, and I did feel like I ought to pick up a copy of the book, which I suppose was the point to begin with.<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="270" src="http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xys6vz" width="480"></iframe><br />
<a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xys6vz_cbs-storybreak-the-monster-s-ring_shortfilms" target="_blank">CBS Storybreak-The Monster's Ring</a> <i>by <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/f100000584650035" target="_blank">f100000584650035</a></i>Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-46165385416179592012-10-15T14:11:00.000-05:002012-10-15T14:11:00.197-05:001973: Pyramid Films Sleepy Hollow Cartoon<br />
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Well, here we have an odd cartoon short to add to the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" variants. The characters generally have the monochrome look of characters that you see in <i>Witch’s Night Out</i>, only they keep changing color. Ichabod is blue in one scene, then white in the next and orange in the next. It makes for an odd style. Ichabod’s long and spindly limbs make him look like a spider (which would actually an interesting way to portray ol’ Ichabod), and his chin and nose look like a couple of penises. Many viewers might be turned off just by the look of the thing.</div>
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But this faithful adaptation - including references to the “Indian wizard,” the “woman in white,” “major Andre’s tree,” and other urban folklore of Sleepy Hollow included in the original story but seldom mentioned in adaptations - has a lot a going for it. The spooky sequences are really cool, and remind me of the trippy sequence in <i>A Boy Named Charlie Brown</i> where Shroeder plays Beethoven’s <i>Pathetique Sonata</i>. The marker and watercolor-style illustrations are genuinely ominous and may scare the heck out of little kids.</div>
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Less successful, though, are the sequences in between the scary parts, with montages of Ichabod singing, eating, and dancing. These just seem like bad Sesame Street sequences to me. Also, the bouncy country score under the “midnight ride” sequence doesn’t quite seem to fit with the visuals. </div>
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Originally produced in 1973 (presumably as a film strip to be played in schools?) and shown on HBO in the 80s, this is an odd little entry to the <i>Sleepy Hollow</i> cartoon canon. Not the best version out there, but the “dark” sequences make it memorable. </div>
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Now available on youtube: </div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/IqEi3SO3gPE" width="420"></iframe>Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-63684431125661322302012-10-12T07:19:00.000-05:002013-09-08T09:03:05.781-05:002010: Scared Shrekless<div style="text-indent: 28px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">When it’s at its best, the <i>Shrek</i> series is pretty terrific - long before everyone on the planet was covering Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” it utilized the song to tremendous effect. Putting Leonard Cohen in a kids movie is downright subversive, in its way. <i>Shrek 2</i> had a bar full of villains in which Captain Hook was playing piano “Little Drop of Poison,” a Tom Waits number. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhonc2PdZDR92cctIl4PKeFVnh8hxEU90nTCQK-_lw1kcOZ4KMsvVBWM_I9Oquvg9K_VNWhvRMo_8gtjOKq9ZMWT-fNacGjog0y_HnYfhvovSjHQseP21eb-ftaPM1SYyDRcUyI8vN2X-39/s1600/Scared+Shrekless+DVDrip+H264-BONE.mp4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhonc2PdZDR92cctIl4PKeFVnh8hxEU90nTCQK-_lw1kcOZ4KMsvVBWM_I9Oquvg9K_VNWhvRMo_8gtjOKq9ZMWT-fNacGjog0y_HnYfhvovSjHQseP21eb-ftaPM1SYyDRcUyI8vN2X-39/s200/Scared+Shrekless+DVDrip+H264-BONE.mp4.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But less successful is the use of, say, Smashmouth. The Cohen and Waits songs, like Pee Wee King’s “You Belong to Me” (which was also used to great effect) have an “outside of time” quality about them that makes them fit into Shrek’s world pretty cleanly. Smashmouth, Neil Diamond, Ricky Martin, and some of the other artists whose works they utilized belong too much to <i>our</i> world. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps this is why Shrek, though sucessful, never began as big an institution as I think it could have been, and why <i>Monsters Inc</i>, which the first <i>Shrek</i> movie beat out for the best animated feature oscar, holds up a bit better for me. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now, this isn’t to say that the Shrek movies aren’t funny - they certainly are, particularly the brilliant first one. But, then, there are times in each installment when they seem to fall back too hard on bodily function jokes and cultural references that make the first movie seem more dated than it should. Now, don’t get me wrong here - I’m <i>fine</i> with pop culture references in cartoons, books, whatever*. I don’t think they automatically make something dated at all, they just make it clear what year a given story is taking place in. When I read a book that takes place n 1964, even if it was <i>written</i> around that time, I want Beatles references. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But perhaps those references only age well if they actually refer to things from the world in which the story takes place. Lifting them into Shrek’s fantasy setting doesn’t hold up as well. Also, though I’m by no means opposed to a fart joke or a poop joke, when they come up in Shrek, I just want to look at the writers and say “Come on, now - you’re better than that.” Some of them seem shoe-horned in to keep the kids laughing at a series where most of the jokes are probably going over their heads. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But, hey. You do what you gotta do. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I haven’t kept track of the series as well as perhaps I should have, but the delightful 2010 Halloween special - <i>Scared Shrekless</i> - makes me want to go back and make up for lost time. Presenting a sort of anthology in which Shrek and the gang try to top each other’s scary stories, this plays like one of the better <i>Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror</i> installments. The title alone shows that the writers here weren’t scared into being approrpiate first and funny second, though it did make me worry that I was in for an evening of poop jokes. But I needn’t have worried - even with such tempting bait for poop joke writers as <i>three ogre babies in diapers</i> (could there <i>be</i> a more tempting bait?), <i>Scared Shrekless</i> didn’t rely on the naughty bits or topical jokes - it just set out to be a damned fine Halloween special, and pulled off one of the best such things in the last fifteen or twenty years. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAxdBbK6PwHLtYUL3DS0lLkP2GexZWJ29ooXQqGob7XMleQvy6Yk3kpuN_XsDk2QZtxRnqdluLS-qcPTQQ7oF4h5IsZJjPH-cuxJzTv7B1gf6Vj88vRP3AwtS4eY8IFja4IFPzwFpmZjqv/s1600/Scared+Shrekless+DVDrip+H264-BONE.mp4-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="177" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAxdBbK6PwHLtYUL3DS0lLkP2GexZWJ29ooXQqGob7XMleQvy6Yk3kpuN_XsDk2QZtxRnqdluLS-qcPTQQ7oF4h5IsZJjPH-cuxJzTv7B1gf6Vj88vRP3AwtS4eY8IFja4IFPzwFpmZjqv/s320/Scared+Shrekless+DVDrip+H264-BONE.mp4-1.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">Beginning with Shrek and his wife and young children trick or treating, Shrek ends up taking his usual pals - Donkey, the gingerbread man, Pinnochio, and the Puss in Boots - out to a supposedly haunted castle, where they’ll try to scare each other. Shrek, as an ogre, claims that he can’t be scared, because <i>he’s</i> the one who does the scaring. Ogres, he and Fiona, his wife, explain, are the kings of Halloween.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The first story is that of the Gingerbread Man, who tells of the night he went to see his baker, having been kicked out by his girlfriend (now <i>there’s</i> a life event that doesn’t happen in many kids’ shows) and demanding that the baker make him a bride. The baker is reluctant to use as much sugar as the gingerbread man calls for, but goes along with it, resulting in the creation of gingerbread woman, who immediately starts acting like a slightly older version of<i> </i>Elmira, the annoying clingy girl from <i>Tiny Toons</i>. Now, as a rule, I don’t think psychotic girlfriends are very funny (they sure aren’t in real life), but it was fun to watch the gingerbread man dealing with adult relationship problems in his high-pitched voice, and fun to watch the evil gingerbread bride coming back to haunt him after he (yes) kills her.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It was the part where he killed her that made me realize I was watching something much more in line with <i>The Simpsons</i> than, say, a Nicktoon (and not just because she dies just about the same way Bart and Lisa do at the end of <i>Treehouse of Horror 5)</i>. People don’t usually get killed in stuff that’s aimed at kids - or, if they do, they generally fall to their death and die offscreen, so more sensitive children, perhaps, could imagine that they just landed on their heads and got a bump that made them change their ways (this would not have been me; I remember making my mother assure me, again and again, that the wicked witch from Snow White was never seen again after falling into that deep chasm).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">From there, <i>Scared Shrekless</i> flounders just slightly - the segment in which Donkey is stalked by a donkey-eating waffle never gets a chance to develop, and the segment in which Shrek gives Gepeto parenting advice when Pinnochio gets possessed by his conscience devolves into “puke in the face / kick in the nuts” jokes. All in all, both of the last segments are pretty good, but with more time to stretch out they could have been great.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And so what we end up with isn’t so unusual - a Halloween special that seems to be wrong length for its script. But in a bit of a rare move, it’s one that I wish was <i>longer</i>; there was too much wild invention here to cram into twenty-one minutes, and the last ten seemed stuffed with the writers trying to get all their jokes in. And I couldn’t blame them. <i>Scared Shrekless</i> is funny, just scary enough that you know that they aren’t wussing out for the sake of the easily-frightened kids, and as gorgeous, visually, as any Halloween special ever produced.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The 2011 DVD is packaged with <i>Thriller Night</i>, another mini Shrek Halloween special, a five minute parody of the “Thriller” video that opens with Shrek running, screaming, from a screening of <i>The Sound of Music. </i>What follows is an excellent, almost shot-for-shot remake of the famous video, with Shrek in the role of Michael Jackson’s girlfriend. It’s pretty funny, too. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">* - maybe I’m just being bitter here; the whole "don't use pop culture" rule for YA writers gets on my nerves a lot. When I read my older books, it's what they LACK that makes them seem dated. My books from 2007-8 have little mention of social media, youtube, streaming video services, etc, all of which would have made for a different plot. A stray reference to Metallica doesn't hurt them at all. </span></div>
Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-17492900141227036292012-10-02T18:02:00.000-05:002013-09-06T04:14:14.338-05:001985: Scrabble People in: A Pumpkin Full of Nonsense<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When I was in grade school, they used to push the heck out of an annual Halloween party for younger kids that would be put on at the high school. The fliers they sent home with us made this look like a costume party for the ages, and I suppose I imagined it as being not unlike the party from the end of The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t. Or perhaps even the really wild party from Teen Wolf.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I finally managed to go in second grade, and was I horribly disappointed. After the costume contest, which I lost to a kid who had a fancy store-bought mask from Spencer Gifts, they sat us down to watch a movie using the old film projector. It started out seeming promising enough: a man said, “I hope you’re feeling brave, because we’re going into a very scary place.” So far, so good.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But that “scary place” was the average household, and the movie was half an hour of Bugs Bunny narrating tips for household safety. Boy, was I mad! They set us up for a good Halloween video, then show us a freaking safety movie. That night might have been the night I did the most swearing under my breath of my young life, an art I perfected later that year playing right field in Little League games that seemed to go on for years without anyone ever hitting the ball into right field. I was already mad that my mummy costume - a combination of a flimsy vinyl mask and a whole lot of toilet paper - had lost to some kid with a fancier mask, and now they’d pulled <i>this</i> crap on us. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>The Scrabble People In: A Pumpkin Full of Nonsense</i> gives me a similar sort of feeling. It gets listed as Halloween specials on various lists of such things, and it was first aired on television on Halloween, 1985, so I <i>guess</i> it qualifies as a Halloween special. I feel bad for the poor kids who tuned in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I started off with wonderful nostalgic feeling as I slipped the tape into the VCR (just doing THAT is almost nostalgic now) and saw the balloon logo for the Children’s Video Library come onscreen as the mellow keyboardy woodwind music played. This really did take me back to a whole world of similar low-end cartoons that I watched as a kid, but haven’t tapped for nostalgia yet. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Then the show opened with two kids, Lulu and Tom, going into a pumpkin patch in their Halloween costumes, accompanied by an odd fellow named Mr. Scrabble who is referred to as their “friend and servant.” He reminded me of Fred from Scooby Doo. So we had a nice autumnal background and kids in costumes talking about going to a Halloween party, and I was feeling nostalgic. So far, so good. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Unfortunately, all references to Halloween and all of the Halloweenish atmosphere that you get in the first minute are over by minute two. At that point, the characters fall down a hole in a giant pumpkin that leads them into a strange town called Nonsense. In Nonsense, all the signs are missing letters, and what letters they have are sometimes in the wrong order (ie, the school sign says SCHL). Horrors!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In 1984, I suppose everyone was trying to launch their famous brand as a Care Bears-style </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">multimedia property. Of all the companies that tried, the people from Scrabble probably did the worst job out of anyone. The “Scrabble People” were designed by the same company who made the Cabbage Patch Kids, and you can see some similarities; the Scrabble People look sort of like the Cabbage Patch Kids might have looked if the designers had done a really half-assed job. “Mr. Scrabble,” in particular, makes no sense to me - his relationship to these kids is never quite explained, leaving me with the uncomfortable feeling that he was some weirdo who took those kids into the pumpkin patch to perform unspeakable acts. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Anyway, Mr. Scrabble and the kids find out that no one in town is allowed to read or write, because their evil overlord , The Muddler (who looks like a goofier version of the Mad Doctor from <i>Mickey Mouse and the Mad Doctor,</i> who was much scarier), has made such things illegal in order to make sure he’s always better than everyone else, since he <i>can</i> read and write. A great many of what jokes there are here are tasteless fat jokes at the expense of the Muddler’s daughter, Rotunda, who demands that Mr. Scrabble marry her. “Is there anything my fiance would like before he walks down the aisle?” the insufferable girl asks. “A very narrow aisle,” Mr. Scrabble replies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">From there, with the help of a princess in exile who knows how to read, the people of Nonsense learn that letters can be made into “their very own words,” and fight for what the back cover describes as “the freedom to read and spell.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The freedom to spell. Now <i>there’s</i> something our founding fathers had on their minds when they crapped themselves to death of dysentery during the brutal winter at Valley Forge. I realize that some people spell stuff for fun, but did you ever wonder who came up with the idea of spelling bees? Who was the first person who said, ‘I know, guys, let’s all stand around and spell stuff!” What a nut that person must have been. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9cLgx-sPjxunmYDb9ZCv9AuPOv_xGqjwseJbaGgX-fTibI_Dz1KUDbZNTtCrt-cNFlIZYIWaSW2rXXLTxMQMWCiezBBOPFgdFZC_douXryXGqEg9ZFoX1RgAbBM5jzCVAXDYXPpCdJyfT/s1600/iPhoto.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9cLgx-sPjxunmYDb9ZCv9AuPOv_xGqjwseJbaGgX-fTibI_Dz1KUDbZNTtCrt-cNFlIZYIWaSW2rXXLTxMQMWCiezBBOPFgdFZC_douXryXGqEg9ZFoX1RgAbBM5jzCVAXDYXPpCdJyfT/s320/iPhoto.jpg" width="320" /></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">Outside of the general nostalgia of watching a cartoon on VHS, the best part of this one, to me, was taking a certain delight in how alarmingly un-PC it all was in regards to the character of Rotunda. Now, Rotunda is not a nice person - when her father sentences a boy to a year in a dungeon for wanting to put letters on the signs, she lobbies for <i>two</i> years before falling through the floor (as she’s wont to do). She could <i>almost</i> be a fun villain with a few tweaks. But what’s shocking about her is how free the show is with the cheap fat jokes at her expense. Even at the end, when books are restored to the world and people are being nice to her, someone thoughtfully gives her a diet book. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In the end, I felt bad for the kids who turned this on on Halloween, 1985, when it aired in a handful of local markets. They wanted a Halloween special and got an edutainment video that made no attempt at all to be scary. The animation was decent (I was amused that it looked as though it could have been made any time between about 1947 and 1987), but really, who cares? </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiV5M_dn-TCWAFT3alszb5feTcgDtQWXOmY0Ikt4eLRjdL7KkBbjAQCQlNCJjSh9m6NezAF3cP5fYafnyYYlvA06_PwVgX3QeG5EhzMkDra-aRkT34whQ2VCT4t5g6wDGOXjLD6d71aMuQ/s1600/iPhoto-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="242" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiV5M_dn-TCWAFT3alszb5feTcgDtQWXOmY0Ikt4eLRjdL7KkBbjAQCQlNCJjSh9m6NezAF3cP5fYafnyYYlvA06_PwVgX3QeG5EhzMkDra-aRkT34whQ2VCT4t5g6wDGOXjLD6d71aMuQ/s320/iPhoto-2.jpg" width="320" /></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are moments in the script when I can tell the writer wasn’t as bad as the concept forced him to be, so I wasn’t too surprised to look him (George Atkins) up and find that he had quite a list of credits, including episodes of <i>Ducktales, Pound Puppies </i>and <i>The Real Ghostbusters,</i> as well as <i>The Bullwinkle Show. </i>I’m more inclined to blame the producers for this one. A revision or two might have made this one pretty neat, in a <i>Phantom Tollbooth</i> sort of way, except that giving the Scrabble People something to do was probably a requirement, and those guys just dragged the whole thing down. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Maybe I’m being too hard on it. Maybe I’m just mad about the ol’ bait-n-switch they pulled on me in 1988. The Scrabble People tried to entertain kids while teaching them stuff, which is a noble thing to try, and I suppose I wouldn’t have minded this, maybe I even would have liked it, if we’d watched it during class in kindergarten and nobody told me it was supposed to be a Halloween cartoon in the first place. The Scrabble People, in any case, never even got into our cultural vocabulary to the extent that, say, Sweet Pickles did. There were a few Scrabble People books and toys, but there were no more videos. All it did for me now was bring back those old feelings that I got when I was duped into watching that safety film after losing a costume contest to a little asshole in a store-bought mask.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And that Bugs Bunny thing they showed us? I believe it was a piece called <i>An Ounce of Prevention</i>. It’s never been released on video at all - only 16mm prints. Extant descriptions say that it showed graphic scenes of burn victims, which I somehow don’t recall at all, even though they were probably far more gruesome than any costume from that night.</span></div>
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Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-59424403063563691162012-09-25T12:06:00.001-05:002013-09-08T09:13:33.225-05:001991: Ernest Scared Stupid<table><tbody>
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…for he today that sheds blood with me shall be my brother…and gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accur’d they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.</span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>-Shakespeare, Henry V</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Remember flipping channels? In the age of cable boxes and on-screen guides, it’s sort of a lost art. Now and then one would stumble across something fantastic, or something that seemed hilarious when paired with the last show you had one. Like when Beavis and Butt-head were flipping channels: “You’re sending that many men against Rambo? Well, you’d better bring a lot of<i> (click!)</i> zip lock bags!”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Most of the time, flipping channels when nothing good was on was just a waste of time, but now and then you would come up with a delightful sort of “organic mash-ups.” Like the time I caught “St. Crispin’s Day speech” in which Henry V pumps his army up for battle on one channel, then flipped over and caught the big battle scene from the end of <i>Ernest Goes to Camp</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Everyone I knew loved <i>Ernest Goes to Camp</i>, even though I don’t think any of us had ever seen any of the Ernest commercials that made him famous in the first place (I sure don’t remember any of them; they may not have aired in my area). After all, though poop jokes ruled the playground, very few kids shows in those days dared to use bathroom humor. <i>Ernest Goes to Camp </i>opened with Ernest looking into a toilet and going “eewwwww.” The 1980s was an era of summer camp movies, and <i>Ernest</i> stands out among them as one of the better ones. Frankly, I think it's better than at least 95% of <i>Meatballs</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When it came out, <i>Ernest Goes to Camp</i> became sort of a go-to example when writers needed to refer to a bad movie. <i>The Far Side</i> had Siskel and Ebert watching it in hell. <i>Perfect Strangers </i>had Larry and Balki working as flight attendants (for some reason) unable to calm down unruly passengers with the promise of an <i>Ernest Goes to Camp</i> screening. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But my friends and I loved it. And when I got to middle school and met kids who’d gone to the other elementary schools in town, I found that <i>they</i> loved it, too. It's something we all shared. I like to imagine that it had more of an impact on my generation than any of us would probably like to admit. Maybe I’m just being crazy here, but there <i>must</i> have been people at Occupy Wall Street who had their first stirrings of anti-corporate sentiment watching Ernest and the Camp Kikiki gang take on the evil developers and construction workers with flying turtles and flaming eggseronious.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The movie was enough of a hit to spawn the Ernest Saturday Morning Show, which people seem to remember fondly. I shouldn’t really comment, since I haven’t seen an episode in 25 years and only remember bits and pieces, but I do remember a segment in which he played a vampire hosting a TV show, and some kid in the audience was hassling him to prove his was a <i>real</i> vampire. “What are you, from Missouri or something?” the vampire said. “You gotta see it to believe it?” I’d seen enough Missouri license plates in Iowa to know that Missouri was the “Show Me” State, but did kids from the East Coast pick that one up? I often think that being willing to tell jokes kids may not get now and then is a sign of a good kids’ show. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Ernest never had a Halloween special of his own, exactly, but his next two movies </span>after <i>Ernest Goes to Camp</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> - which focused on Christmas and Halloween themes, respectively, - were probably made with holiday TV airings in mind.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Ernest Saves Christmas</i> didn’t have the same magic as <i>Ernest Goes to Camp</i>, but I was still excited when <i>Ernest Scared Stupid</i> came out - I remember that it was the first movie I was ever allowed to see without any adult supervision. Twenty-some years later, the only thing I remember all that well is a bit in which Ernest is reading a fragment of a manuscript reading “Thou canst destroy the best with mi k.” The obvious missing letter was L, but Ernest assumed that the word was “Miak,” and took the gag a step further by actually <i>finding</i> a jar of miak. “Bet you didn’t think I could find it out of season!” he crows. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Well, wait, I also remember that there was a bit here about the “unconditional love” of mothers. This came out the same year as<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2009/06/last-halloween-1991.html"> <i>The Last Halloween</i>.</a> What was going on in 1991? Why were all the producers trying to tie sappy bits about motherhood into Halloween programming? Was it all supposed to be an antidote to the supposedly anti-family sentiments people thought they saw in <i>The Simpsons</i> at the time?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Watching <i>Scared Stupid</i> now for the first time in years, it <i>does</i> spark a lot of synapses in my brain as bits and pieces come back (always a fun experience, no?) and I notice some familiar decorations on the walls in the classroom they show in the beginning - they had the same ones in <i>my</i> classroom! I’m old enough now to know who Eartha Kitt was and I particularly enjoy her portrayal as an old weirdo. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But beyond that, well… the “troll” beast just isn’t that scary, or even that spooky. I think there could have been a great Ernest take on the “monster in the woods” motif (a motif dear to my heart) if they'd tweaked the script some, but this sort of falters in comparison to <i>Ernest Goes to Camp</i>. Banding together to fight an evil corporation just seems to inspire me more than spraying milk on an otherworldly beast, or even defeating it with unconditional love while an angry mob chants “kill him” (which might be slightly more touching if the thing’s head didn’t explode). I’m also a bit bummed that all the leaves in this thing are green - despite the decorations on the walls in the school, you only occasionally get any real Halloween vibe from this, and I seem to remember more of it. Still, it’s perfectly watchable and some of Ernest’s lines are pretty funny, and doesn't seem to try to teach you any pesky "valuable lessons." </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Ernest Scared Stupid</i> is pretty harmless. It’s not exactly <i>Henry V</i>, but an one who turns on something that has the word “stupid” right in the title ought to know what’s coming and not complain. <i>Scared Stupid</i> may not live as fondly in my memory as the venerable <i>Ernest Goes to Camp. </i>But if perhaps it doesn't live up to its full potential, well…at least no one was hurt.</span></div>
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<br />Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-82556826936192012232012-09-16T12:44:00.000-05:002013-09-08T09:06:31.365-05:001991: Claymation Comedy of Horrors(newly rewritten for 2012)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMCGsXIj_6V_v1JGIj5moQKde__0X4pmQy04IjULxK20esRJiwlWa1tXpgn-vl9douCsTDr_SxDALz4XoQv_W4pbB96NVlcAXaU4v1HER06_eM6s7KW8XJrVJB2oWuDkqa8r7XxiNaonLR/s1600/1991+Claymation+Comedy+of+Horros.mp4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="152" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMCGsXIj_6V_v1JGIj5moQKde__0X4pmQy04IjULxK20esRJiwlWa1tXpgn-vl9douCsTDr_SxDALz4XoQv_W4pbB96NVlcAXaU4v1HER06_eM6s7KW8XJrVJB2oWuDkqa8r7XxiNaonLR/s200/1991+Claymation+Comedy+of+Horros.mp4.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
Of all the people you've probably never heard of, Will Vinton may have had the biggest impact on your childhood if you grew up in the 1980s. Vinton is the guy who coined the phrase "Claymation," and was the man behind The Noid and the California Raisins. His <i>Claymation Christmas</i> special from 1987 is still fondly remembered.<br />
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In 1991, he followed it up with <i>Claymation Comedy of Horrors</i>, a thirty-minute piece starring Wilshire Pig and Sheldon Snail, a couple of original creations the studio developed (perhaps in order to launch a multi-media property of their own to go with their successful avertising characters). Wilshire was conceived as a a gruff, hustling pig not unlike a swine version of Rotten, the trashy guy from <i>Witch's Night Out.</i> In this special, he and Sheldon find a map to Dr. Frankenswine's lab and spend half an hour poking around the castle, building to a climax in which a giant monster goes stomping around the countryside smashing sheep to the strains of "Climb Every Mountain." Though it was obviously conceived as a Halloween special, it was originally aired in May, 1991.<br />
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Visually, it's pretty nifty, and a couple of the jokes are pretty funny. But Wilshire Pig never quite took off as a hit character, and the special seems to have failed to work its way into my generation's psyche the way the Raisins Christmas special did. I don't get emails about this like I do for <i>Witch's Night Out</i>, <i>Mr. Boogedy</i>, or the other "hits," and I can't imagine anyone getting the reference if I quoted a line from it on one of my ghost tours, like I sometimes do with <i>Garfield's Halloween Adventure</i>. A line from that one will always get a few chuckles of recognition, at the very least.<br />
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So, where did this one go wrong? Why didn't this one become even a cult hit? The most obvious answer is that they didn't air it as much as some of the others, but that's not really accurate - the Disney channel aired it as a Halloween special throughout the 1990s. The biggest problem is the script - while there are some terrific sequences here, it suffers from a less-than-engaging plot and a general sense that they're just not getting the timing or the pacing right for the jokes to work. Perhaps they should have followed the template of the beloved Christmas special and just done a series of Halloweenish musical numbers, but I get the idea not only that they wanted to try to get Wilshire and Sheldon off the ground, and that they wanted to use some ideas they'd been sitting on; on the Will Vinton web page there's some animation art for an aborted <i>Frankenswine</i> project that was in development from 1979-82. Well do I know the feeling of wanting to get some of the good ideas from late, lamented aborted projects worked into new projects when the chance comes up.<br />
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This gets removed from youtube when it's posted, prompting the usual whining from people who think that putting up an "I don't own this note" should somehow trump copyright protection (I'm always amazed at how many people think I should be fighting the evil studios for the right to put up free download links to the cartoons they make).<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00009WHRM/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00009WHRM&linkCode=as2&tag=adasel-20"> It's available on DVD in a collection with the Christmas and easter specials.</a> The glowing reviews on amazon almost universally cover only the Christmas entry.Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-58152542053006509842012-09-13T10:41:00.000-05:002013-09-08T09:18:13.516-05:001972: Jack O'Lantern by Rankin Bass<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“I smell a rat here!” says the witch.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Oh, I do hope so,” says her husband, the warlock. “I’m famished!”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In 1972, Rankin Bass launched a series of animated shows entitled <i>Festival of Family Classics</i>, presenting cartoon versions of old folk tales and classic literature. One early episode, <i>Jack O’Lantern, </i>wound up being re-aired regularly as a Halloween special in many local markets. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">And in many ways, it’s a pure Halloween special. It wasn’t billed as a special episode or anything, but it does exist outside of any regular series and inhabits a world all its own as it tells the story of how jack O’lanterns came to be. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Having already seen from <i>Mad Monster Party</i> that Rankin Bass specials had the capability to rise above their station (hey, they weren’t all <i>Rudolph’s Shiny New Year</i>, and even the corniest ones have plenty of things going for them), I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself enjoying this one. Maybe there’s just a certain thing about any series with the word “Family” in the title that makes me think something is going to suck, but this is a very solid half hour program with good jokes and fun characters that make up for its short-comings in the production department. In fact, it has the opposite problem of the <i>Mad Monsters</i> entries from Rankin Bass: it could actually stand to be longer. Watch a few dozen old Halloween shows and you’ll find that most of them could stand to be either longer or shorter; the ones that just aren’t as long as they could be are generally much more fun to watch than the ones that try to get 90 minutes out of what could have been an eight minute script.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Beginning with a couple of kids begging grandpa to tell them a story (a kind of a lame framing device, if you ask me), the special goes immediately into a flashback of grandpa’s boyhood days on a farm, where he lived with his parents, his sister, a couple of cows, and Billy, their pet goat, “Who didn’t do much of anything except cause trouble.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">One day, their father told them (quite casually) that they’d probably all starve to death soon, because all of the crops were being stolen. Not by crows, he says, but by ghosts and goblins. Young grandpa is a smart lad, and wisely figures that they probably just needed a better scarecrow. To improve their old headless model, he carves a face into a pumpkin.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But this is no pumpkin - it's a leprechaun named Jack O’Lantern who has turned himself into a pumpkin seed to hibernate. As soon as the face is carved, he begins to talk in a thick Irish brogue, and confirms that ghosts, led by Zelda the witch and Archie, her warlock husband, have been stealing the crops to drive farmers off the land so that they can take it for themselves. With a sly chuckle, Jack hops onto the shoulders of the old scarecrow and begins to dance around. That night, he foils the Zelda, Archie and their ghostly minions at every turn.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This all seems like a <i>Home Alone</i>-style story of foiling would-be robbers until Zelda manages to capture the kids; she threatens to turn them into stone if Jack doesn’t leave her and Archie alone and give them his pot of gold (is it wrong that I like it when kids are actually threatened in these things?) Jack emerges in leprechaun form (which makes him look like an Irish Mr. Magoo), leaving his pumpkin behind and saying it’s the pot of gold. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But Jack still has a few tricks up his sleeve….</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The animation here is about a step above what you see in <i><a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/great-bear-scare.html">The Great Bear Scare</a></i> - basically a moving slideshow. It’s a bit annoying at first; enough so that I wished they’d just done a slideshow with voices over it. But I got used to it quickly, and found this one to be rather enjoyable overall. The production values may have been pretty low, but the script is sharp. Jack, with his broad Irish brogue and exaggerated expressions, is fun to watch, and his rivals are terrific - Archie is a wimpy old warlock who calls to mind a Victorian undertaker who happens to fly on broomsticks. Zelda is, like most witches in cartoons, a feisty woman given to wisecracking - she reminded me of the witch in that Donald Duck short, Madame Mim from <i>The Sword in the Stone</i>, the witch in <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/witchs-night-out-1977.html">Witch’s Night Out</a>, and so many others). It’s a style of witch that never seems to get old, though.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Despite the low budget, people who grew up watching this and track down a copy today won’t be shocked by how bad it is; quite the contrary, it’s really a nifty little special, lifted above its production limitations by a good script. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It's been uploaded to youtube by the folks at DTV5, who have remastered it into looking like an episode of CBS Storybreak, complete with commercials. I'm not sure WHY they made it into a Storybreak (or why the commercials come from both Chicago and New York stations from various eras), but it's neat!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/euNbY9j6lPw" width="420"></iframe></span>Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-83155998250971351552012-09-10T08:05:00.002-05:002012-09-10T08:05:25.827-05:00New Stuff Coming Soon!<br />
Hi, everybody! Autumn is rolling around again; any day now Trader Joe's will be bringing back the spiced cider, my ghost tour work load will go from 4-6 tours per week to 10-14, and the traffic on this page will skyrocket. <div>
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I get about 99% of my traffic in October, so that's why I do most of my posting on this site. I expect a few new posts this year, and I'm trying to replace multi-part youtube links with single files wherever possible. I still will not be posting download links to most shows; that isn't legal and saying "I don't own this" doesn't make it so; a few copyright holders in particular are vigilant about getting stuff like that taken down, and I want to keep this page going. </div>
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There will, however, just be a FEW new posts, for the simple reason that I'm running out of stuff to add. I <i>could</i> branch into reviewing Halloween episodes of <i>Perfect Strangers, </i>as I did with a few cartoon series, but I don't want this page getting too bloated, to be honest. I want to keep the focus on that wonderful art form that is the Halloween special. I've got just about all of those covered now. </div>
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If you really want to hear more out of me, I do frequently update the <a href="http://www.chicagounbelievable.com/">The Chicago Unbelievable blog</a> , which talks about history and ghostlore in Chicago. I'll have three new "e-singles" on those topics out via Llewellyn Press on October 1st. I also run a blog called<a href="http://www.playgroundjungle.com/"> Playground Jungle</a>, which all about tracing the history of songs and rhymes that we all learned on the playground as kids (most are a lot older than we thought), though at this point the site is growing more from comments than anything I could add myself. </div>
Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-54635136363817453242011-10-07T16:36:00.001-05:002014-10-03T16:40:00.087-05:00The Midnight Hour (1985)<table><tbody>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><i>The Midnight Hour</i> 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 (mixed-race couples were still pushing it in the 80s, I guess), whose great, great, great, great, great grandma was a witch.</span><br />
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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.</div>
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<i style="font-family: inherit;">The Simpsons</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> 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.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">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." I was left with a lot of questions. Like, is the witch a witch, or a vampire? Is that one zombie a werewolf, or just a really hairy hyperactive 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?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Still, the move has its moments - the "dead rising from their graves" scene is really nifty, if a bit over the top (why <i>shouldn't</i> 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. </span>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 characters get the radio on, we hear some narration from legendary DJ Wolfman Jack. For a minute, I thought they were going for an <i>American Graffiti </i>thing where Wolfman Jack sort of narrates the teenager's lives over the course of One Halloween Night That Changes Everything, but the concept sort of fell apart. Also, <i>American Graffiti </i>firmly takes place in 1962, and this movie can't quite decide if it's 1985 or 1955.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLVJRqULBpcR8a5Q4QszPlKfkPIaKST_PXnVMqmfNQDbS52cTy773kmgNYbNczDei2eX6ncRdnPbkqWEmQnLeZlrWniqnJ6cDX9ROPZ-HsfWfd6WY7n4XNPZRTEqArEHSLrnYbWdvM6ljC/s1600/Screenshot+2011-09-16+18.09.12.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLVJRqULBpcR8a5Q4QszPlKfkPIaKST_PXnVMqmfNQDbS52cTy773kmgNYbNczDei2eX6ncRdnPbkqWEmQnLeZlrWniqnJ6cDX9ROPZ-HsfWfd6WY7n4XNPZRTEqArEHSLrnYbWdvM6ljC/s200/Screenshot+2011-09-16+18.09.12.png" height="165" width="200" /></span></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><small><i>Let's see, we've got milk, soda, purple stuff...ooh, ketchup! All right!</i></small></span></td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">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 us 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. Apparently edicating a song to you on the radio from beyond the graves heals a LOT of wounds.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI2hpko4PTPiiee4XU4AZbNCc8mZNtK1IUNkwzndd7TQdDh3cdUjw9FXFlNsIs4iPgglaE9gdZa_SOhyphenhyphentEiaDFNRJneLN_xpcvkqHP0wXmBb9q61RG9Pm3T7lViXTz6rgLq_M5UVf59F3P/s1600/Screenshot+2011-09-16+18.13.11.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgI2hpko4PTPiiee4XU4AZbNCc8mZNtK1IUNkwzndd7TQdDh3cdUjw9FXFlNsIs4iPgglaE9gdZa_SOhyphenhyphentEiaDFNRJneLN_xpcvkqHP0wXmBb9q61RG9Pm3T7lViXTz6rgLq_M5UVf59F3P/s200/Screenshot+2011-09-16+18.13.11.png" height="168" width="200" /></span></a></div>
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<i><small><span style="font-family: inherit;">"We need to make wax from those bones. It's the only way to break the curse." "No kidding?" - actual dialogue.</span></small></i></td><td width="20"></td><td><span style="font-family: inherit;">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).</span></td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">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.</span></div>
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Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-54687549444759271122011-10-03T03:41:00.022-05:002011-10-03T03:41:00.082-05:001999: Night of the Headless Horseman1999 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 <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/sleepy-hollow-1999-tim-burton.html">Tim Burton movie</a>, the <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/legend-of-sleepy-hollow-made-for-tv.html">Odyssey made-for-TV version</a>, 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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?<br />
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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 <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2009/02/once-upon-midnight-scary-1979.html">Once Upon a Midnight Scary</a>). As my recent viewing went on, I found myself thinking that it sounded like a dynamite radio show.<br />
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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.<br />
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Bizarre, but fun. A VHS version was released, and hulu was streaming it last year.Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-59032146629671691752011-09-26T08:30:00.000-05:002014-10-03T16:28:28.180-05:00My Top Ten Halloween SpecialsI'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:<br />
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<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/witchs-night-out-1977.html">1. Witch's Night Out</a></div>
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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. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LU4URQM/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00LU4URQM&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=4X23EHFAPWKD5JCK">Now remastered on DVD!</a></div>
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<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/1979-halloween-that-almost-wasnt-aka.html">2. The Halloween That Almost Wasn't</a></div>
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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! <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0045MY654/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0045MY654&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=3JOK26PDFRJRUJ4F">Currently still just on VHS</a></div>
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<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/garfields-halloween-adventure-1985.html">3. Garfield's Halloween Adventure</a></div>
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This was perhaps THE Halloween 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. A DVD was released, making the expensive VHS tapes (which sometimes went for about 50 bucks) obsolete, but now <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002PYS74/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0002PYS74&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=GCNDVA7OQONS22XH">even the DVD is rare!</a></div>
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<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/halloween-is-grinch-night.html">4. Halloween is Grinch Night</a></div>
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Though the title alone makes it a "Halloween" cartoon (Halloween is never mentioned), 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 your ass it ain't gonna be pretty. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005EXA8R8/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B005EXA8R8&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=HWMNX4BYDLMZQNUH">This one, at least, is easy to get on DVD.</a></div>
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<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/raggedy-ann-pumpkin-who-couldnt-smile.html">5. Raggedy Ann and the Pumpkin That Couldn't Smile</a>.</div>
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It takes most of the special for Raggedy Ann and Andy to decide to get a boy a pumpkin, then they 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. When you watch most specials as an adult, you marvel at how easily entertained you must have been as a kid. This one is far better than it sounds. Not on DVD, though <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/6303146996/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=6303146996&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=NUHFOAKFJWOWH7AX">VHS copies can be found.</a></div>
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<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/its-great-pumpkin-charlie-brown.html">6. It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown</a></div>
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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. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0019KAQEU/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0019KAQEU&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=5NQXSAAGXG54XKK3">DVD</a></div>
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<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2009/09/devil-and-daniel-mouse.html">7. The Devil and Daniel Mouse</a></div>
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This would probably rate higher if I'd grown up watching it - it's really much <i>better</i> than a few of the ones on this list. But you can't underestimate how big of a role nostalgia plays in how much we love these things. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HLTPO4U/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00HLTPO4U&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=JJUJJ5H3FRK7GH6P">Now on instant video!</a></div>
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<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/1982-disneys-halloween-treat.html">8. Disney's Halloween Treat</a></div>
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The first show I remember watching - in fact, I'm not sure I have any earlier memories of television at all than my memory of watching this at the house where we lived until I was 3. Just a compilation of earlier cartoons, but what great, spooky cartoons they are! </div>
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<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/alvin-and-chipmunks-meet-frankenstein.html">9. Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolf Man</a></div>
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A made-for-video entry from a brief period when it seemed like they wanted to relaunch the Chipmunks as an all-Halloween franchise. <i>Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein</i> isn't much to write home about, but the Wolf Man movie was fantastic. Fairly funny, well written, and featuring plenty of that wonderful Halloween vibe that I love so much.</div>
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10. <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/halloween-tree.html">The Halloween Tree</a></div>
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This animated adaptation of Ray Bradbury's novel gets a bit dull in parts, and the "history of Halloween" angle isn't entirely accurate, but it manages to make solid 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. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FGI4M3M/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00FGI4M3M&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=AECHZLMAXXR4QMNM">Now on instant video!</a></div>
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Honorable mentions:</div>
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<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/adventures-of-ichabod-and-mr-toad.html">Ichabod and Mr Toad</a></div>
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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.</div>
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<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/mr-boogedy.html">Mr. Boogedy / Bride of Boogedy</a></div>
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These haven't really aged well, and "Bride" seems to be trying to cram a 13 episode TV series into a 90 minute movie, but the sheer number of letters I get from people who had nightmares about Mr. Boogedy speak for themselves. Only VHS rips were available for years, but they're n<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LFF6S0K/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00LFF6S0K&linkCode=as2&tag=chicagunbeli-20&linkId=ERIMIEYOVHWCPMHY">ow available as digital downloads in perfect quality!</a></div>
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<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/frankenweenie.html">Frankenweenie </a></div>
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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. I can't wait for the new movie!</div>
<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/p/ebook-edition.html"><img alt="saghalloweenbanner" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8032/8030068603_8ed8733ce7_m.jpg" width="350" /></a>Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4769182429548648842.post-28079431961569583702011-09-16T09:03:00.003-05:002012-09-10T10:39:19.610-05:00Teddy Bear Scare (1998)<table><tbody>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Teddy Bear Scare (alternately known as The Great Bear Scare, not to be confused with the <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/great-bear-scare.html">other special of the same name</a>) 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The first lines of dialogue in this one come as the teddy bears see their owners coming home. "It's about time," says one. "I could use a hug."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Clearly, folks, we are in for some halloween <i>horror</i> here. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But, then again, <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/raggedy-ann-pumpkin-who-couldnt-smile.html" style="font-style: normal;">Raggedy Ann and the Pumpkin Who Couldn't Smile</a> took an equally bland concept and managed to make it witty and creative. Even<a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/great-bear-scare.html" style="font-style: normal;"> The Great Bear Scare</a>, 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 in <i>Teddy Bear Scare</i> suffer from a distinct lack of personality. The Care Bears may have each been based around one single trait apiece, which doesn't really lead to great character depth, but these ones never even rise above seeming like a "Corduroy" knock off. One single trait would have helped. Maybe they got better in their later shows (episodes of <i>The Secret World of </i><i> </i><i>Benjamin </i><i>Bea</i><i style="font-style: normal;">r </i>were still being produced as recently as 2009; perhaps this just isn't a good introduction to them). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">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 it has 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?</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBvxx44E76jf9Ep9oLXVspcHBDvzllI7bhqp8VktqzUtT_uOKsWVf5jfLChyphenhyphenL9zkEY5VIHPa7OZ_yijq9uMQQY-enWwYCmEzksQSxSVmzydolSsAjwxJrPTRxIeIkUSc-F6_4rxTz3_MRE/s1600/Screenshot+2011-09-16+08.49.52.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="189" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBvxx44E76jf9Ep9oLXVspcHBDvzllI7bhqp8VktqzUtT_uOKsWVf5jfLChyphenhyphenL9zkEY5VIHPa7OZ_yijq9uMQQY-enWwYCmEzksQSxSVmzydolSsAjwxJrPTRxIeIkUSc-F6_4rxTz3_MRE/s200/Screenshot+2011-09-16+08.49.52.png" width="200" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">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 having the 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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps I'm being too hard on this one, which has been MIA for years until the good folks at <a href="http://www.halloweenshows.net/2011/09/teddy-bears-scare.html">halloweenshows.net</a> 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. Don't let anyone tell you that the best career advice a writer can get is anything but "follow the trends and stick to the formula." Bitter? You bet I am.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">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 <a href="http://halloweenspecials.blogspot.com/2008/09/witchs-night-out-1977.html">Witch's Night Ou</a>t 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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">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 <i style="font-style: normal;">Webster</i> and <i style="font-style: normal;">Donkey Kong Jr</i> 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, <i style="font-style: normal;">Teddy Bear's Christmas,</i> and eventually spawned a series, <i style="font-style: normal;">The Secret World of Benjamin Bea</i>r, which is still aired in Canada, but by 2011 it was almost completely forgotten. Like the series that spawned <i>Which Witch is Which</i>, 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 <i style="font-style: normal;">after</i> the concept had been done to death, has certainly never developed a cult following of its own.</span></div>
Adam Selzerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16068653440362135301noreply@blogger.com1