Remember when you couldn’t just watch any ol’ Halloween special unless you taped it the year before?
Making a tape of seasonal special presentations was an artform.
You’d scan the week’s TV listings to figure out which Tuesday night sitcom was getting preempted for some spooky goodness. You’d grab that well-worn TDK labeled “Halloween specials” from under the pile in the TV stand. You’d program the VCR, because you were the only one in your family who knew how, and you’d catch a little bit of Halloween magic – complete with McDonald’s commercials and local news teasers.
One of the more memorable Halloween specials was Disney’s 1977 Halloween Hall O’ Fame, starring THE Jonathan Winters.
Halloween Hall O’ Fame was exactly the kind of special that lived on those recorded tapes. Originally broadcast on October 30th on NBC as a Wonderful World of Disney Halloween clip show for some of their spookier golden-age cartoons, like the classic Trick or Treat (1952), Lonesome Ghosts (1937, but not included in the syndicated re-packaging), Pluto’s Judgement Day (1935), and of course The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949). The framing device was Jonathan Winters, riffing alone in a TV studio prop room, doing a one-man two-hander with a mean jack-o’-lantern spirit. He played both parts, natch.
It also had a long afterlife in syndication, which is how it ended up on many people’s radar. The image of Winters decked out in orange lives in the same part of the brain that remembers Witch’s Night Out and McDonald’s McBoo pails. It’s not a “classic”, not in the Charlie Brown sense. But it aired long enough, and haunted the airwaves just often enough, to leave a trace on our collective subconscious.
Eventually the special got elbowed aside. As the ’80s and ’90s wore on, the Halloween lineup thickened with Simpsons Treehouse of Horror and every sitcom doing their best to up the ante on their own Halloween-themed episodes. Halloween Hall O’ Fame quietly slipped through the floorboards.
These artifacts are a reminder that Halloween used to be something you had to wait for. And work for. Finding TV specials required discipline and planning.
But October belonged to The Great Pumpkin, and still does. Garfield eventually got second billing depending on your age, but for a certain demographic slice of Gen X weirdos, Disney’s Halloween Hall O’ Fame usually lurked somewhere on that dusty perennial Halloween VHS. -Pop