Halloween is Grinch Night

This fairly little-known sequel to the much-better-known "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" came out in 1978 as a TV special, featuing Hans Conried as the voice of the Grinch - Seuss fans might recognize his voice from his role as Dr. Terwilliger in the Suess written film from 25 years before - The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. Conried had quite a voice - he's probaby best known now as the voice of Disney's Captain Hook. The Grinch here sounds EXACTLY like Dr. T - and it works. Incidentally, he also appeared in The Great Bear Scare, a rather inferior Halloween special, a few years later, and was the voice of the magic mirror in the later versions of Disney's Halloween Treat.

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

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

Exactly what will happen when the Grinch gets there is not clear, but you can't bet your sweet bippy it ain't gonna be pleasant. In one song, Whos claim they wouldn't go out on such a night for a dollar and fifty cents (which was more back then than it is now, of course).



Eucharia, a young bespectacled Who, decides to take matters into his own hands, and enters the Grinch's wagon to see a real freak-out of a spook show with cool music to match.


The visual style of this is a bit more sophisticated that the Christmas edition (a bit less stylized, perhaps), but unmistakably Seussian. The music, while not spawning any hits that still get a lot of radio play nowadays, is pretty catchy, too. It was written by the great Joe Raposo, who is best known, probably, for his work on Sesame Street in the 70's.


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


This was aired on TBS, TNT and the Disney Channel many times over the years, up until about the mid-to-late 90's, but it hasn't been aired in a while, to my knowledge, and hasn't yet seen release as a DVD. Finding a video copy shouldn't be that hard, thouhg (see link at left), OR you can watch it all here, thanks to youtube:

PART 1:


PART 2:


PART 3:

The New Misadventures of Ichabod Crane

Well, I don't know what to do with this. It's a 25 minute cartoon from 1979. It was made before the video market really existed, but was never aired on TV, as far as I can tell. I'm putting it both as a Halloween Special and as a Sleepy Hollow variations. It's one of the strangest variations on the the story I've ever seen.

It's not really a sequel, as the title implies, as there's no hint that the events of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ever happened. I suppose I should call it a "re-imagining." When the Headless Horseman steals a chest full of gold coins at the beginning, the town of Sleepy Hollow elects Ichabod Crane, local supernatural expert, to find the Horsesman and get rid of it. Crane sets off, with Rip Van Winkle in tow (bringing in the protaganist from Washington Irving's other enduring hit, who here looks and acts about like Yosemite Sam). Together, along with a talking horse who sounds like the bloodhound from "101 Dalmations," they find out that the horseman is actually a witch named Velma Van Dam in disguise. Plot-wise, it kinda reminds me of the 1999 Tim Burton version.

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

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

Tales from the Far Side

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

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

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

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

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

Bugs Bunny's Howl-o-ween Special

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



None of these cut-and-paste specials are THAT fondly regarded by Loony Tunes fans, but Bugs Bunny's Howl-o-ween special seems to be regarded as particularly awful. Cut and paste jobs are never that good of an idea; the old Looney Tunes shorts were quite ridigly 6 minutes long, and were built to work as 6 minute shorts. Cut 'em up, and you lose the whole rhythm. One of the beautiful things about Looney Tunes, and most great comedy, is the way it all flows together.

It wouldn't be so bad if they just played the shorts on their own terms and presented them as separate shorts, like Disney's Halloween Treat (which was also cut up some of the clips, but doesn't suffer as much for it). Instead, they tried to use the new footage to edit the clips into one big movie - one big movie where the characters' appearances change from time to time, and Broom Hilda's house rarely looks the same twice. I SUPPOSE I can just saw that witch's houses were probably known to change shapes at random from time to time, but, still.

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

It can now be watched online right here.

The Flintstones Meet Rockula and Frankenstone

After the Flintstone's long prime-time run and subsequent decent into Saturday mornings, The Flintstones was resurrected as a series of hour-long specials and other TV movies around the late 70s that would continue sporadically for years. Some of them, like "Pebbles and Bam Bam Get Married," were pretty bad. Others, like "A Flintstones Christmas Carol," were very good (the Christmas Carol variation was really excellent, even keeping i mind that it's hard to do Christmas Carol badly - the script was a very clever take on it that managed to be a story on its own AND a very faithful adaption; a neat trick). Quality-wise, the 1980 hour-long halloween special "The Flintstones Meet Rockula and Frankenstone" falls right about the middle. It's not bad, but there's nothing terribly remarkable about it. The animation is better than the show had in the 1960s, but, other than that, it's just long Flintstones episode with monsters in it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's part 1:

The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly

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



"Silly" is the operative word here, not "scared." The plot involves Ronald, Birdie and the gang going camping in the Far-Flung Forest, singing irritatingly catchy songs along the way (written by the same guys who made most of the Rugrats music, and, strangely enough, formed the core of the band Devo. This is not their best work). It's really not very Halloweenish at all, in fact.

Based on the comments of other viewers, some kids really seem to enjoy this, but adults will have an awfully hard time sitting through it. This is probably the video in the collection that is the LEAST required viewing, but completists who have to have a copy can find it online for under a buck without too much trouble.

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



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



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

The Paul Lynde Halloween Special

I missed the 1970s by about six months. Rare is the time that I feel like I really missed all that much.
For instance, I have yet to see an episode of one of those "comedy variety" shows that were so popular in those days that I actually found entertaining (not counting the Muppet Show, of course, which was really more of a satire of the genre). But one thing I'll say for The Paul Lynde Halloween Special is that it's nowhere near as excruciating as, say, the Star Wars Holiday Special from a couple of years later.

No one ever gave comedian Paul Lynde a series of his own - the guy was funny, but he was also frankly a bit weird. Giving him a comedy variety Halloween special rather than an actual series probably seemed like a good idea in 1976.

To watch this thing today is to be transported to another era. And to be transported to this era is a surefire way to make you forget that shows like this hve been replaced by "reality" shows about vacuous rich girls and say "There's no place like home."

Speaking of that, though, it features an interesting guest star: Maragaret Hamilton reprises her role as the Wicked Witch of the West, the role she'd made famous nearly forty years before. Besides her, there's a veritable who's who of 1970s b-listers.

The show is best known today for being the national TV debut of KISS, a fairly odd choice for a goofy show, since, while it's hard for those of us born AFTER Kiss Meets The Phantom of the Park to imagine, there was a time when people genuinely thought that KISS was scary. Putting them into a show like this was downright subversive.

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

Here're some clips:

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




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


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

Which Witch is Which?

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

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

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

Anyway, it's all to do with a park ranger (a regular, I guess), throwing a halloween party and explaining the nuances of the holiday to a fascinated Buttons and Rusty, explaining along the way that "city animals are different from forest animals," which is why buttons and rusty are supposed to stay away from the trailer park. I think they might be going for something political here. I'm not really sure. My favorite part of watching this special this year was the fact that the copy I saw had commercials for Panini sticker albums. I loved those things! I had the Hulk Hogan's Rock n Wrestling album, and almost all of the stickers for it. And the He-Man one, I think. Why haven't THOSE made a comeback as an 80s collectable? Every other fad from those days has.

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

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