On Sleepy Hollow (2013 TV series)

On the show Community, they occasionally show clips of of a Doctor Who parody called Inspector Spacetime. 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 where, but....when?"

This line appears, almost verbatim, in the first episode of the new Sleepy Hollow 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 "Sleepy Hollow Is Batshit Crazy." 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.

Now, this show and its premise have almost nothing to do with the original Legend of Sleepy Hollow. 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.

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.

Now, there are plenty of things wrong with this. As a historian, I don't even know where to begin 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.

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 Twin Peaks, and about halfway through the run of The X-Files, 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.

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 is 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.

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 knows 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.

2013: The Legend of Smurfy Hollow

I was going to review the new Sleepy Hollow TV series, but I decided I'd wait for a few more episodes. So far, it seems like Inspector Spacetime landed in Twin Peaks 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.

So, instead, I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the Smurfs' first proper Halloween special, a straight-to-DVD half hour cartoon entitled The Legend of Smurfy Hollow. It's in stores now.

I suppose we can now expect that every toy we remember is going to be revived for the big screen sooner or later. He-Man hasn't happened yet, but it's in the works. We may not see movies of I Vant to Bite Your Finger or The Wuzzles 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.

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 The Smurfs and the Magic Flute in a theater, but I wasn't all that into them.

Still, after a few minutes, when The Legend of Smurfy Hollow 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!

The story is really nothing like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow 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.

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.

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).

The Legend of Smurfy Hollow 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 The Smurfs 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.

I'll leave you with Tom Smith's "Smurfin' Safari"

1973: Pyramid Films Sleepy Hollow Cartoon

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 Witch’s Night Out, 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.

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 A Boy Named Charlie Brown where Shroeder plays Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata. The marker and watercolor-style illustrations are genuinely ominous and may scare the heck out of little kids.

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. 

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 Sleepy Hollow cartoon canon. Not the best version out there, but the “dark” sequences make it memorable. 

Now available on youtube: 

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

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


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


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


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


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


One of the better minor adaptations, really.

Sleepy Hollow (1999, Tim Burton)

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

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

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



The Trailer:

The Real Ghostbusters: The Headless Motorcyclist

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


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

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

Here's the episode!

PART 1:

PART 2:

PART 3:

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

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

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

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

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

Now on youtube in one file!

The Headless Horseman (1922 silent film with Will Rogers)

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

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

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


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


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

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

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


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

And here's another version that clocks in at 70 minutes. The organ gets a bit old after a while.

The Hollow

A present-day sequel with a descendant of Ichabod who is supposed to be 16 but looks 26. There are times when this isn't much more than another young adult horror film, with a lot of predictable scenes, but it's still fun for fans of the story, since the writers clearly read the original text enough to throw in some in-jokes (such as setting the scene in Knickerbocker High School).

With better sets, a higher budget and some revisions to the plot and script, this could have been a real corker of a movie. There have been surprisingly few sequels to Legend of Sleepy Hollow over the years. As it stands, though, it's just one of those made-for-tv movies that seem to be made to be forgotten.


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

Clips:

The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad

Disney released their version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow on a split-bill with an adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, but the Disney Channel used to show the Ichabod segment by itself aorund Halloween pretty regularly. Disney, wanting to make a movie of the story, got around the fact that the source doesn't have enough material for a 90 minute film by just not making it a full length version - in a VERY rare case of Disney sticking to the source.

Narrated by Bing Crosby (who also sings most of the songs), this is the version most people are familiar with - and they could hardly do better. While it drags a bit in the middle, it's the most entertaining portrayal of Ichabod (showing him as a bit of a buffoon, afraid of his own shadow, with a frame only a cartoon could provide).

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

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

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

Anyway, visually, this version was absolutely unrivaled for fifty years until the Tim Burton version came out (Burton was inspired more by this version that by Irving, perhaps instinctively grasping that it's the headless horseman and the atmosphere that make this story cool, not the Urban vs Agrarian parable), and even now, the midnight ride is head and shoulders (if you'll excuse the pun) over every other version. Spooky as all get-out.

One question, though, remains: is this version of the horseman real, or a guy in a costume? There's a scene where Ichabod looks down the neck of the thing and apaprently doesn't see anything, and I really, really doubt Brom Bones could pull of the kind of riding the horseman does here without being able to see. I think it's real.

This was aired so often (minus the Toad portion, which is also very good) around Halloween that it could almost be considered the first Halloween special.

Legend of Sleepy Hollow - iWerks cartoon - 1932

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

Here it is:

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: INTRODUCTION

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

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

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

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



CHARACTERS:

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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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

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

The Haunted Pumpkin of Sleepy Hollow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scooby Doo: The Headless Horseman of Halloween

Scooby Doo fell on hard times after, say, the first season. Plots got sillier, and, well, do I even have to mention Scrappy? Still, the 70's incarnation had some good episodes - including the headless horseman episode, which even the short-lived, widely-ignored Scooby Dumb couldn't bring down.

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

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

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

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

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


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

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Tall Tales and Legends: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Shelly Duval, host of the venerable Faerie Tale Theatre from the 80s ("The Boy Who Left Home To Find Out About the Shivers" episode is still hugely popular among Halloween Special enthusiasts), applied the same general model from that show to her Tall Tales and Legends series in the late 90's. Unfortunately, on the basis of this episode, it doesn't really capture the same charm, wit, and fun of the original series.


This version features Ed Begley, Jr. as Ichabod, and solves the problem of needing to stretch the source material by meandering around a lot. The dialogue is occasionally very good, but entirely too many scenes go on far too long. Maybe it's just the sets and style of the show, but I was reminded of the stage versions I've seen from time to time, all of which made me think that the story just doesn't lend itself to low budget theatrical presentations. I mean, it's hard to pull off a horse chase on stage.

This does deserve some note for being the only version I know of in which, when Brom insults Ichabod, he seems to be implying that he's gay.