SCARY Links of CREEPY Interest

Welcome to what is effectively the Year Without a Halloween.  Stupid pandemic.  I'm determined to keep the spooky season alive even if I can't pass out candy or keep a running tally of what costumes I see most often, always a fun pop-culture barometer.  Here are some mostly Halloweeny (or not) links for you.

*  Boundless Realms - I don't think I've met a single foolish mortal, Disney Park geek or otherwise, who doesn't adore the Haunted Mansion.  Foxx, of the fantastic Passport to Dreams website, has just written a gorgeous book on the Mansion and it is a must-have. 

* Staying in the Disney Parks world, the always excellent Defunctland released a fantastic documentary about the original EPCOT plans.

* You're Wrong About is my new podcast obsession that goes over historical events, famous figures, and urban myths that, it turns out, we got all wrong.  It's fascinating, if not exactly light listening.  Get ready to scream in anger at various decibels at least once.

* If you need some cuteness after that, I suggest Kyra Kupetsky's creepy-cute "Chickn Nuggit" short-shorts.

* No stupid pandemic is going to stop the guys at Sludge Central from doing their annual Halloween special.

* I am so, so happy that people are starting to rediscover "Michael Jackson's Halloween", if only because it proves I didn't hallucinate all those years ago.  Have a podcast and a video essay.

*You want more Michael Jackson Halloween specials and putting "Thriller" on an infinite loop isn't enough?  Channel KRT just reminded the world of the truly insane "Ghosts" which is... a thing... that exists...

* "Into the Spiderverse" is that rare movie that gets better and better every time I watch it and the latest Film Critic Hulk documentary goes into a deep dive as to why. 

* Saturday morning and weekday morning cartoons are coming back thanks to MeTV, who will be airing blocks of classic theatrical cartoons starting in January.  Consider this your early DVR alert.

* For the first time in decades, the Peanuts holiday specials are not airing on broadcast TV, which is even more upsetting than it looks on the surface according to Emily VanDerWerff's report.

* Spectember is well in the past but I'd be remiss if I didn't share Alphynix's fantastic series of spec creatures and the history of Speculative Biology.

* "Eli Roth's History of Horror" is back for another season and I'd be very happy if we got to do this every year please and thank you.

* And if that wet your appetite for horror movie docs, I also love The Kill Count, which, while it is exactly what it sounds like, is also a surprisingly good kind of a Cliff Notes of gory horror for wimps.

* As far as horror movies of a different sort, Xiran did an excellent tweetmenary of the "Mulan" remake, effectively saving us all thirty dollars.

* The Halloween Jukebox is back!  Without a shuffle feature, sadly, but with 250 songs for your Halloween!

* Finally, Glen Keane has a new movie out and he sat down for an interview to talk about it, "Tangled", "Treasure Planet", and more.

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Art of the week!  A little Fairy Dragon.

The 25 Weird Days of Christmas Day...7?: "I Want a Dog For Christmas, Charlie Brown!"

OK, so it's really The 19 Weird Days of Christmas since I'm skipping weekends but who's counting?

In today's case, make that "The 19 Adorable Days of Christmas".  Because although "I Want a Dog for Christmas" is never going to stand with the truly timeless and beloved Peanuts specials like "It's the Great Pumpkin" or "A Charlie Brown Christmas" or "Flashbeagle", it is, more than any of the other forgotten Peanuts specials I've ever seen, just cuteness overload.

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Drawing of the Day!

Speaking of adorable:



(Robotic cough...)

Back Injury Theater: Things to Notice in "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!"

First off, boo Target. Boo.

Second of all, when I recently reviewed John McLaughlin's Archosauria, which had some... unusual ideas about dinosaur anatomy, and Model a Monster, which had some... unusual ideas about dinosaur extinction, I had no idea there was a connection between the two. Well, according to the Jurassic Albatross blog, there is a connection. And, by the way, the crazy stuff in Model a Monster about how there were humanlike dinosaurs who killed everything with nuclear weapons at the end of the Cretaceous is an actual theory that has actually been proposed.

(I think the "mammals suddenly up and ate all the dinosaur eggs en mass" extinction theory is still more unreal.)

Speaking of unreal, you must read this recent "Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs" post. Because it contains an image that must go mimetic immediately. You will know it when you see it. (If not, my comment there will point it out.)

OK. On to the thing in the title.


Possibly the most beloved of all Halloween specials, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" premiered in 1966. The second special based off the Peanuts comic strips, after "A Charlie Brown Christmas", this is the only older Halloween special that is still shown on television with any reliability (more on that Friday).

That means that you've probably seen it a few times already, and I don't have to tell you how awesome it still is after decades and decades. (If you are a younger viewer, and you've never seen it, hopefully you aren't too jaded to enjoy it.) Instead, this is a list of things you might not have noticed at first:

* - If the "Peanuts" holiday specials weren't so cute and funny, they'd be the most depressing pieces of animation ever shown on television in America. This is a Halloween special that ends with three kids who have no Halloween candy at all, which is tantamount to tragedy in a child's mind.

* - And on top of that, Charlie Brown has a bag of rocks. Now, I know there were real aluminum Christmas trees, so was there ever really a time when adults could punish children with lousy costumes by giving them rocks instead of candy?

* - And on top of that, Linus forgoes trick-or-treating and waits for the Great Pumpkin all night to no avail. Taken another way, the Great Pumpkin has one believer. And the Great Pumpkin is ignoring his one believer.
Essays have been written about this. Long ones.

* - It says a lot about the town in which "Peanuts" takes place that the adults agree to give Lucy extra candy for Linus, after she tells them he is sitting in a pumpkin patch waiting for a "Great Pumpkin".

* - Then again, this is a world where Linus is allowed to sleep outside in a pumpkin patch on a late-autumn night...

* - There is no way that wonderfully strange Red Baron scene would fly today. It's very long, it has nothing to do at all with the rest of the story (save for the payoff in the end), and is an exercise in color and mood.

* - I can't put this feeling into words, so I'll lift this quote from the great X-Entertainment: "Now, there's a big difference between watching the specials on officially released DVDs and videos as opposed to their annual taking over of an all-important prime time slot. There was something extra nice about watching the shows at the same time as millions of others; we all collectively felt the waves of spooky spirit both through Charlie Brown's poorly conceived sheet ghost costume and the many Halloween Happy Meal commercials dispersed between scenes. For those thirty minutes, everything bad in the world took a vacation."

* - And of course, there's Vince Guaraldi's instantly-iconic score running throughout the special. It's hard to imagine how Vince sold the producers on that jazz score for a kid's cartoon, but it's hard to imagine the Peanuts specials working so well with any other composer.

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Totally unrelated, but how's this for scary?



Discovered via SlashFilm. Highlights include Simba-Beast's stripey Tim Burton horns, teleporting Gaston, and their incredibly unsettling take on Lumiere.

I gotta tell you, as someone who lived through the heyday of Disney's Bronze Age, I find this trailer oddly comforting. In the early 90's, many many low-budget animation houses made (or more likely scrounged up) the most incredibly cheap knockoffs of every Disney film of the era and released them on video around the same time the Disney films had been in theaters for a while. And I'm not talking about just the Disney movies based upon public domain fairy tales either, they managed to do rips off "Pocahontas", "Hunchback" and so forth as well. Every company came up with a wildly different "Lion King" cash-in. They were taking advantage of the sad fact that some parents didn't realize the difference.

And it should be noted that the animation in these films is almost across-the-board terrible. What always puzzled me is the fact that these studios can get away with this at all. Shouldn't the Disney lawyers smite the pants off them? These are, after all, the same lawyers that started this little public relations nightmare...

Update: And, not surprisingly, GMToons has deleted all their trailers from YouTube. Too bad; I wanted to show you their equally unbelievable "Land Before Time" ripoff too.
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Sketch of the day!



I've got plans for this...

My (slightly sarcastic) 2000's Time Capsule!

This is my version of the Obligatory End-Of-The-Decade List, mostly cobbled together from a semi-yearly version I posted at LaGremlin Land.
Here is a no-particular-order list of things I would put in a time capsule to represent the lovely decade that has just ended. I am sure the people of the future will understand the significance of each and every one of these items without question, as they will have passed into history:

* - A sun-shaped nipple ring
* - "Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water" CD
* - An "Edward can BUST my headboard, BITE my pillows, and BRUISE my body any day!" t-shirt
* - A magnetic yellow ribbon
* - "Some Kind of Monster" DVD
* - A bottle of Bling2O
* - A "Free Katie" t-shirt
* - A TMX Elmo doll
* - Spenser and Heidi's How to be Famous
* - A Snuggie for dogs
* - "Hung for Christmas" CD
* - The O'Reilly Factor: For Kids!
* - A "Vote or DIE!" t-shirt
* - A huge "Mission Accomplished" banner
* - A pair of Crocs
* - The MySpace servers
* - A bottle of Pimp Juice
* - An Anduril letter opener
* - "The Swan" DVD
* - The Kazakhstan Tourism brochure
* - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
* - The Mtv All-Stars "What's Goin' On (2001)" music video
* - "Crazy Frog" CD
* - Of Pandas and People
* - "Bratz Babies" DVD
* - The International Astronomical Union definition of the word "Planet"
* - Green "Shrek" ketchup
* - Going Rogue
* - "Chinese Democracy" CD

What would you add to this time capsule?

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Before you answer that, read this excellent Total Media Bridge essay about "A Charlie Brown Christmas" (It's still timely. In the olden days, Christmas hype started immediately before Christmas Eve and lasted for several weeks after Christmas Day until Epiphany/Three Kings Day [there's the real significance of "The Twelve Days of Christmas"], instead of starting as early as August, leaving you burnt out by Thanksgiving, and leaving you with a deep disillusioned "now what" feeling that doesn't get resolved until New Years if even then.) I could not have written this better myself.
OK, real updates will start the second full week of January.