Last year I put together a list of some of my favorite Halloween specials and movies. It skewed a bit more unconventional by including things like a an animated concept album or a Mary Kate & Ashley movie, but it was a lot of fun to write so I’m back again to remind you all of the breadth of Benevolent Halloween^TM.

This year I though it’d be fun to look at specifically TV Specials. To be even more specific, TV Specials that mostly aired once and can’t really be found by any “official” means. Like before, I’m shooting for entries most people haven’t heard of, or remember. There’ll be exceptions to both these rules, but I hope you understand I only broke them because I really wanted to gush about a thing.

Gary Larson’s Tales From the Far Side

“It’s a hot one today Karen, you could fry any one of us on the sidewalk!”

Peanuts set the precedent for comic strip adaptations doing holiday specials. The only other juggernaut to compare it’s success to is Garfield, but I’d argue the orange tabby’s holiday specials haven’t had the same impact that Peanuts has (Garfield’s Halloween will not be appearing on this list.) This is all to explain that there is a sea of comic strip adaptations that were released into the void to capitalize on Peanut’s success and were never seen again.

Among those was a short anthology based on Gary Larson’s The Far Side. Now, The Far Side might be one of the hardest strips to adapt due to how good Larson was at setting up, and delivering, punchlines all within a single panel. To take those moments of crystalized comedy and make it so you can see the lead-up and aftermath sounds like it would rob them of their impact. That said, Larson’s comic also makes for a perfect Halloween Special because so many strips deal with monsters or the macbre or simply punchlines that amount to “Everyone present probably died quite painfully.”

So it’s astounding that Tales From the Far Side works as well as it does. It makes the smart choice to not actually adapt individual strips except in background site gags. Instead these are shorts written by Larson himself that are effectively new material. Some use a strip as a jumping off point, such as the segment about an airplane for bugs. The original strip is just a gag about what in-flight movie they’d watch, but now we see how their luggage is stored, what kind of meals they get, how classes are divided, and it all feels like each one of these gags could be their own Far Side strip in terms of quality. What may be most surprising is that the special is largely without dialogue, letting the situations speak for themselves. There are some genuinely good belly laughs to be found while still keeping the very laid back, dry comedy Larson was typically known for. I think it would make for excellent viewing early on Halloween Night, right as the sun begins to set.

Halloween is Grinch Night

“Oh it’s a wonderful night for eyebrows…”

Also in the vein of “made to capitalize on a more successful special” Halloween is Grinch Night is exactly what it says on the tin. Let’s do a version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but now it’s about how Halloween for Whoville is entirely Grinch-driven.

The plot is that the wind starts blowing hard and sour, which causes a chain reaction of local wildlife growing restless that in turn wakes the Grinch and sets him to cause chaos on Whoville. Is this set before or after his Christmas escapades? There is no way of knowing. The special is written by the good doctor Seuss himself and it’s probably the only time you’d see him handling a Halloween setting like this. Autumnal is probably the best word to describe this. Strong contrasts of orange and purple set the pallet, and it’s the imagery that carries it through an admittedly dull plot.

Dull is probably too harsh a word. Relaxed is much gentler. The bulk of the action is just Whos sitting in their boarded-up house waiting for the Grinch to Grinch them while singing songs that are nowhere near the quality of You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch. The real eye-catch of the special is when one brave Who child goes to meet the Grinch halfway and challenges him to hit him with all his planned Halloween spooks at once. What follows is musical number that captures the same surreal “What the hell is happening?” quality as Disney’s Pink Elephants or Heffalumps and Woozles. The music is discordant and the imagery is blink-and-you-miss-it bizarre. I learned from this special from people that saw it once years ago and remember it purely for this sequence and it’s easy to see why. Just be prepared that to get there you have to suffer Max the Dog’s depressing slave song.

A Disney Halloween

“Halloween parties go back a long, long way. The first was quite a bewitching affair…”

What we have here is a Disney Channel special from the early days of the Eisner reign. It’s actually a Frankenstein of two earlier specials titled Disney’s Halloween Treat and Disney’s Greatest Villains. Essentially it’s a 90 minute compilation of various horror-themed cartoons and film segments tied together with intros from various hosts like the Magic Mirror or a talking Jack O’ Lantern.

The selling point to me is what a snapshot this is of where Disney was at. This is pre-Renaissance. The most recent movie was Fox and the Hound and the next was The Black Cauldron. As such, the sources pulled from are actually rather deep cuts. It opens with Night on Bald Mountain, but then transfers to The Old Mill which isn’t necessarily horror, but does tie in a dark autumn theme. The middle section is a tribute to the great villains of Disney, with the lineup being Captain Hook, Edgar from Artistocats, Willie the Giant from Fun & Fancy Free, and Madame Medusa from The Rescuers.

with a feature length runtime and lots of variety, it actually makes for pretty good background noise at a party. The special ends on the Donald Duck cartoon Trick or Treat which is a banger and worth seeking out on it’s own. Regrettably this year may be the only time I’ll get to see the full version of this special itself as the source I watched it on has already been taken down.

Will Vinton’s Claymation Comedy of Horrors

“Lavatory…I hate homonyms”

It would be difficult to communicate how prevalent, and quickly forgotten, the work of Will Vinton was in the transitory years between the 80s and the 90s. He was the pioneer of claymation, and his work can be seen in Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, adverts for the California Raisins and Dominoes Noid, and also that one short you were definitely shown by the weird kid in high school where a couple of kids talk to Satan. Will also put out shorts of his own original characters, including a trio of holiday specials based on Christmas, Easter, and Halloween.

In the Halloween special we follow carnival huckster Wilshire Pig and his hapless toady Sheldon Snail as they plumb Frankenswine’s castle for the means to conquer the world. It just so happens that at the time of their arrival, the castle is host to an annual gathering of monsters quite eager to gut any hapless mortals they come across.

The tone is very 90s crudeness. Wilshire is a good heel protagonist, and many of the monster encounters are subversive (the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse just being a couple of wise guys is a good gag). It was clearly made to appeal to older kids and adults in the same way that 90s era Simpsons was. To be honest, on some rewatches I do find the characters rather grating and feel a lot of the sketches, particularly towards the end, to be just noise, but I stick around for the stellar animation.

These days stop-motion works very hard to make you forget that it’s stop-motion where Vinton’s style was called Claymation for a reason. Characters morph and mold to whatever function they need to serve. The character designs are a little lumpy and textured. You feel like at any moment a hand is about to come down and squash them flat. There’s still a snappyness so the comedy, a lot of it physical, can land. The humor of the special may have a bit of mean streak, but it’s still worth seeking out to remember what a talent Will Vinton was.

Raggedy Ann & Andy In the Pumpkin Who Couldn’t Smile

“You might find this difficult to believe, but I think I have witnessed something unique in the annals of crime.”

Where Claymation Comedy of Horrors is crude, The Pumpkin Who Couldn’t Smile is tender. I was actually surprised at how this doll-driven special warmed the cockles of the my heart. A big piece of that is director Chuck Jones bringing his typical charm and soft designs. This carries a very similar tone to his Grinch special, minus any musical numbers. The stakes are low, it’s just about delivering a lonely pumpkin to a lonely boy before Halloween ends. There’s one action scene, a slapstick chase serving as the climax, but it’s a very mellow chase scene.

The other chunk of credit has to be given to the two leads. Raggedy Ann is played with supreme sweetness by June Foray. When she speaks on the virtues of Halloween and childlike wonder you can’t help but sigh contentedly and listen along. She’s contrasted by Daws Butler as Raggedy Andy, who has a heart of gold, but also a smartmouth. Very few scenes pass without Andy cracking wise and he goes a long way towards making this special worthwhile on re-watch.

If you’re only tangentially aware of the Raggedies, this is where you can learn they genuinely had their own Poochy. A radical skateboarding dog named Raggedy Arthur who mostly exists in this special to look cool and perform some pantomime comedy. I know a special this “Cute” might be a hard sell, but I think it genuinely sells the lighter side of the holiday than any other on this list. Sometimes Halloween isn’t about the scares and more about the harvest, the falling leaves, and the apple cider. That’s what this special is for.

The Muppet Show: Vincent Price/Alice Cooper

“Excuse me, but do you have a room for the night? You see, the road has washed out and my horse has a flat tire.”

I couldn’t have these all be animated, so for this entry I’m dipping into a true nostalgic favorite of mine. The Halloween episodes of the original Muppet Show, guest starring Vincent Price in season one and Alice Cooper in season 3, are Halloween constants in my house.

The magic of The Muppet Show is it’s never just muppets talking to each other. They sing. They cavort. They explode. Jim Henson was an experimental filmmaker before he was a puppeteer and any given episode of the original run can conceal an unexpected dip into the surreal, or the best cover of a pop song you’ve ever heard. Those are all turned up to 11 for the Halloween episodes, both of which have guest stars committed to their respective bits. Vincent Price is at his Price-iest and Alice Cooper contributes his own weirdo aesthetic to the proceedings.

Sketchwise, you have a real funky version of “Welcome to My Nightmare” where Alice Cooper dances with a ghost, the first appearance of my favorite muppet Uncle Deadly, and a bizarre sketch about a toothache that to this day I still don’t understand the joke of. The musical number that will stick with me is a monster rendition of “Once a Year Day” from Broadway musical The Pajama Game. In that show, the song is about the jubilation of factory workers being allowed to let loose at company picnic. The Muppet version reframes it as an ode to the childish fun of Halloween and how it’s a night for people to goof off and pretend to be ghosts and goblins. It’s a “dare to be stupid” message that I can fully get behind for the season.

Night of the Living Doo/The Scooby-Doo Project

“The Zombie just nabbed David Cross!”

I’m double dipping again because I didn’t want two full slots to be dedicated to the specific genre of “New Millennium Scooby-Doo specials that aired once as bumpers to a marathon.”

Both of these are such curious artifacts. These are Scooby-Doo parodies that are pre-Zombie Island but also pre-Adult Swim. The shades of Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law and Sealab 2021 can be felt here, what with recycling animation from old Hannah-Barbera cartoons, but making them crass and self-aware. The Scooby-Doo Project is a live-action/animated hybrid that follows the Blair Witch Project, only now it’s found-footage of Mystery Inc. getting lost in the woods and tensions rising as a result. I’m not going to say that it’s stellar. Most of the shots are just live footage of the forest floor with the Scooby gang shouting at each other. There’s a really tired Scrappy-Doo joke (This article’s writer is pro-Scrappy-Doo. You were all gaslit by James Gunn in 2002). But it still builds to one stupid, knockout punchline with Shaggy recreating the famous “Staring at the corner” scene from Blair Witch. Really, this is mostly fascinating from the historical context and the fact it was made at all, and played as straight as it was. It’s probably the only time you’ll hear the original Scooby voice actors cry out with genuine terror in their voices.

The other special is much stronger. Night of the Living Doo is a straight parody of The New Scooby-Doo Movies, only now the guest stars are Gary Coleman (Scooby is a huge fan), David Cross, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. The self-referential jokes are pretty much just from David Cross, who undersells the delivery just right. It’s not so much winking at the camera as a shrug and a smile. Saying the words “Fred Jones establishes a one-sided rivalry with 90s comedian David Cross” is just inherently funny to me.

The real shame is I can never really watch these specials in their original contexts, split up as interstitials between commercials as part of larger “One Night Only” marathons on Cartoon Network. It’s an extra mile of effort I feel is lost in children’s programming, as more and more air time has to be given to squeeze in as many commercials as possible to make up for the audience they’ve lost to streaming.

Ed, Edd n Eddy’s Boo Haw Haw

“Make them scream! Make them sweat! Give them a Halloween they’ll never forget!”

Cartoon Network’s Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktacular will not be appearing on this list for spiteful reasons. Any time I look up listicles of forgotten Halloween Specials they always list Scary Godmother and I take umbrage with that because I don’t know a single person who has forgotten Scary Godmother. It still airs on Cartoon Network!

You know what I do need to remind people of? The cool as hell Ed Edd n Eddy special that’s been wiped from the archives of HBO Max. This was a special I always looked forward to in October, not just because Ed Edd n Eddy was my favorite cartoon, but because of how visually gnarly it got. The Eds are on a quest for a town called Spook-E-Ville and have numerous encounters with the kids of the cul-de-sac that turn to violent misunderstandings because the dullard of the trio, Ed, stayed up late watching too many horror movies and now sees their various costumes as real monsters he must vanquish.

When we’re seeing things from everyone else’s point-of-view it’s classic cartoon ultraviolence that the series was known for, but when things switch to Ed’s demented view the animation changes to something more out of Heavy Metal or Ed Roth. The designs for the monsters are grotesque and gnarly and everything has a flickering film effect that gives it this greasy grindhouse feel. It really feels like series creator Danny Antonucci going back to his roots in adult animated shorts (don’t ever look up The Brothers Grunt) and having a ball with it. Like a lot of things Ed Edd n Eddy did right, it took something relatively mundane for a kid, like Trick or Treating, and elevated it to this comedic adventure that matched how exciting it felt to venture out into the night in search of candy and spooks.

The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t

“It’s one of those nights I wish I was dead…and stayed dead.”

Also known as The Night Dracula Saved the World, this is a very straightforward “Universal Monsters Hang-Out” premise starring a bunch of 70s sitcom actors doing some classic vaudeville comedy. The plot is paper-thin. Dracula (Judd Hirsch) summons all the monsters to his manor because someone is spreading a nasty rumor that there won’t be a Halloween this year. Turns out it was the Witch (Mariette Hartley) because she wants more recognition as a Halloween icon (also Drac’s merchandise deals). She holds the world hostage by refusing to usher in the Halloween season and it’s up to the other monsters to convince her otherwise.

At 24 minutes, the special moves at a pretty quick pace. The only action set-piece I can think of is a brief chase around Dracula’s house, but otherwise the special lives on Hirsch and Hartley’s chemistry. They give genuinely good performances and Hirsch does a surprisingly good Dracula voice. Ultimately it’s a lot of adults standing around in costumes making small talk, but that’s kinda what Halloween is when you’re older. I dunno…this one might be entry on the list that’s simplest execution-wise, but still brings a smile to my face when I rewatch it. I think as a kid I would have been charmed by the idea of monsters wishing there were more kids that dressed up as them.

It does end on a spoof of Saturday Night Fever, and it correctly identifies the green man with bolts on his neck as Frankenstein’s Monster, so it has that going for it.

Ghostwatch

“Do you think Mr. Pipes has come to hurt you?”

Let’s end this list on some genuine horror. Ghostwatch comes from the BBC. Aired on Halloween night as an official news broadcast, starring established BBC News presenters, Ghostwatch presents itself as an overnight investigation into “The Most Haunted House in Britain” to provide the most concrete evidence of the supernatural yet seen. It has your usual special news broadcast patter: A lot of faffing about an elaborate studio set complete with skull fireplace, telephone operators arranged in stadium seating to take live calls from viewers, interviews with randos on the street with only a passing knowledge of the current events. At any moment you expect them to cut to Geraldo Rivera to give us the big scoop on Capone’s vault. I’m the kind of person who stays glued to the TV when there’s a hurricane in Florida, and I’ll stay in rapt fascination as Anderson Cooper blithely fills time by going over the packaged rations in whatever hotel or school gymnasium he’s taken shelter in. Ghostwatch feels real.

But it’s not. It’s an Orson Welles War of the Worlds caliber hoax. Other than the credulity of of the events, which ends with BBC presenter Michael Parkinson possessed by a nursery rhyme-slinging ghost, the only sign of artifice were a blink and you’ll miss it writer’s credit at the start. When watched on streaming the special ends with a credit sequence that was not present in original broadcast. As it stands, Ghostwatch was a one night only trick that can never be experienced in it’s original context.

So is it good as a Halloween viewing? Depends on what kind of time you have on your hands. Ostensibly the special falls into what we’d now classify as Found Footage, and like a found footage film the bulk of it’s 90 minute runtime is spent reinforcing it’s authenticity. It’s a slow burn where eagle-eyed viewers may be able to spot the alleged ghost appearing for only a few frames in a doorway or in a mirror’s reflection. The last ten minutes is where it ramps up considerably, to a degree where it’d be fair to say the filmmakers may’ve gotten too ambitious with the escalation of events, but I’ll admit that after shutting off the TV, I found myself jumping at the shadows of my dark house and dreaded looking too closely at any reflective surfaces.

But found footage tends to work on me regardless. I’m a scaredy-cat who watches Raggedy Ann & Andy cartoons for Halloween. I still think the height of horror is the Vampire episode of Lost Tapes on Animal Planet

Actually…wait, the list isn’t over just yet.

The Vampire Episode of Lost Tapes on Animal Planet

“This family would find there’s much more to fear inside this old house. These are their tapes.”

Part of growing up is finding that piece of media that scares the feces out of you and carrying with that for the rest of your life. For some unknowable reason in 2008, Animal Planet, the American channel devoted to nature documentaries like Crocodile Hunter and Meerkat Manor, started broadcasting a found-footage horror anthology series. Each episode was based on a particular cryptid (they ran out of cryptids and switched to folk monsters in season 2) murdering people with the wackiest reasons for filming their current situation.

Like Ghostwatch, the series presented an air of authenticity by having armchair experts talk about the episode’s monster and never running credits. I think in season 2 they started to put a tiny “All Events are Fictitious” disclaimer with the title sequence. Lost Tapes artifice is easier to see through than Ghostwatch because…well in one episode Men in Black do battle with Q: The Serpent God, but to a child in the midst of a paranormal phase familiar with the over-edited grunginess of 2000s Ancient Aliens and Monsterquest programming, it might be a little difficult to conceive of blatant fiction being peddled to you by trusted & wholesome edutainment channel Animal Planet. They ran marathons of this show on Father’s Day…for some reason.

All this to say, one October night, I watched the premier episode of Lost Tapes season 2 and have been traumatized at the thought of blood-sucking Nosferatu living in my walls ever since. The prolonged sequence of a bestial gangrel looming over a sleeping child is burned into my memory. I did not get any sleep that night and the morning after I, without consulting my parents, removed the door to my closet so that no auger could hide within. That door still sits, dusty and unused, in my parent’s garage. A monument to that Halloween memory.

The makers of this show scarred me in a way that can never be healed, and may the Serpent God have mercy on their souls.

Happy Halloween.