Can't imagine Halloween without Count Floyd - and here, the host of "Monster Chiller Horror Theater" introduces RUSH, the excellent progressive rock ensemble (Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee, Neal Peart).
Like Count Floyd, Vincent Price is always a key Halloween ingredient!
One of our favorite Roger Corman flicks is THE COMEDY OF TERRORS, co-starring Peter Lorre, Vincent Price and Boris Karloff.
When Vincent Price and Peter Lorre made a bunch of movies for Corman, it is apparent that they were trying to make each other laugh!
Between takes on THE COMEDY OF TERRORS, no doubt Boris Karloff enjoyed a nice hot cuppa joe.
Then there's the Corman adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's fever dream Masque Of The Red Death, in which I'm shocked, shocked that Vincent Price does not flat-out say "and because I'm so deliciously evil. . . "
And now for something completely different, this blogmeister is a big fan of comedienne Ana Gastayer's dead-on Martha Stewart impersonation and the following Halloween sketch.
On the topic of semi-spooky SNL sketches, it's true - we will NOT feature David S. Pumpkins this Halloween.
From SNL to stop-motion, here's THE OLD MAN & THE GOBLINS, a 1998 film by the stop-motion animators at Screen Novelties - Seamus Walsh, Chris Finnegan and Mark Caballero. It's got the Halloween spirit in a profound way. Love the tie-ins to O'Brien, Starewicz and Svankmajer.
Who made the most vividly Halloween-themed animation? Starewicz, of course!
Favorite Fleischer studio Halloween film? SWING YOU SINNERS!
Almost as cool as SWING YOU SINNERS: the 1933 Screen Song cartoon Boo, Boo, Theme Song.
Another Fleischer classic underscores the reality that if one happens to be an insect, by all means DON'T check into a hotel run by spiders! The Cobweb Hotel is also the diametric opposite of the mid-1930s trend of imitating Disney. Jack Mercer's voices, as always, are a hoot.
How can we properly finish a Happy Halloween post?
With elephants smashing pumpkins (not Billy Corgan & the Smashing Pumpkins but pachyderms) at the Oregon Zoo, that's how!
First and foremost, let's plug some cool screenings.
It's no surprise to readers of Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog that we're big fans of Halloween cartoons and Frankenstein (both young and not-so-young).
A Sunday matinee selection of spooky stop-motion madness in GLORIOUS 16mm, Peculiar Puppets vol. VII, shall be the order of the day tomorrow at Roxy Cinema NYC tomorrow afternoon at 3:00 p.m. EST.
The press release elaborates:
Roxy Cinema hereby presents a seventh retrospective screening featuring various peculiar examples of puppet films from the 1930s through the 1950s+.
This particular showcase features spooky subjects in celebration of the Halloween season. Warning: You may find some of the offerings to be rather creepy, possibly unsettling, and even potentially controversial!
Ten days later on October 30, there shall be a Halloween cartoon program at Manhattan's Metrograph on 7 Ludlow Street. Showtime is 5:15pm. NYC aficionados of vintage animation and classic movies, check these Cartoon Carnival shows out!
Also of note: October 20 is National Chicken & Waffles Day.
Not DON & WAFFLES Day, but National Chicken & Waffles Day!
One way to start celebrating National Chicken & Waffles Day is to watch the following cheesy commercial from the even cheesier early 1970's. This one's cheesy enough to be MST-3K worthy.
Since we did not include Jay Ward ads in recent posts featuring a slew of animated TV commercials, here are two excellent ads for Aunt Jemima Frozen Waffles featuring our breakfast pals, Professor Goody and Wallace The Waffle Whiffer.
The best Chicken + Waffles combo this writer/waffle enthusiast has sampled was at a long-gone but incredible restaurant (the name of which utterly escapes me) in Oakland, CA. The food was outstanding!
That said, the famous Chicken & Waffles chain remains Roscoe's in L.A.
Not surprisingly, there are numerous videos on YouTube about how to prepare chicken & waffles.
There are more chicken & waffle recipes on YouTube than one can actually watch or eat in a reasonable time frame.
Our favorite is invariably Alton Brown, here with the chefs of Cutthroat Kitchen.
What does Halloween mean to the guy who writes this blog? David S. Pumpkins! Don't know why this guy cracks me up, but he does. . . only every time, without fail! Kenan Thompson, Kate McKinnon and Beck Bennett, not surprisingly, shine in supporting roles.
Why post David S. Pumpkins two years in a row on Halloween? Because we MUST - David S. Pumpkins and his two dancin' skeleton assistants, played by SNL writer/performers Mikey Day and Bobby Moynihan, inevitably get this blogmeister at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog ROFL! "Ah'm David Pumpkins, man! Any questions?"
There was an animated David S. Pumpkins Halloween Special made in 2017. It's not bad, albeit not anywhere near as funny as the previous two sketches. However, you do get the excellent comedienne and SNL stalwart Cecily Strong, along with Tom Hanks, among the voice talents.
On what day can it be considered a good idea to both watch David S. Pumpkins AND post a film in which comedian, actor and prolific cartoon voice artist Billy Bletcher is chased by a giant lobster? Halloween, of course!
It's no surprise to readers of Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog that we're big fans of Halloween cartoons.
Produced in 1942 for MGM by Rudy Ising, the musical cartoon BATS IN THE BELFRY is, while not at all scary, very odd and very enjoyable. Sounds like at least one of the three goofball bats was voiced by the ubiquitous Pinto Colvig.
Since we've posted numerous Halloween classics from Fleischer Studios, including BOO, BOO THEME SONG, a skeleton and ghost-filled 1933 "follow the bouncing ball" Screen Song, the brilliant 1934 Popeye opus SHIVER MY TIMBERS and the super-surreal Talkartoons SWING YOU SINNERS and MYSTERIOUS MOSE before, let's find a Halloween-themed Popeye never posted before on Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog.
Here's one: Popeye in GHOSKS IS THE BUNK (1939)
Is there something else we absolutely MUST do, while watching yet more spooky cartoons - or, as in the case of the following Columbia Color Rhapsody cartoon produced by the Ub Iwerks Studio, not that spooky - to get in the spirit of the holiday - and wishing all a Happy Halloween?
Yes - close today's Halloween post with a Count Floyd Monster Chiller Horror Theatre sketch from SCTV.
We wish our readers a Happy Halloween that's chock full of inventive animation.
We'll start Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog post #1250 with the trailer to The Corpse Bride, a very good Halloween flick.
Would Halloween be complete without the inimitable Mighty Mouse, who, as part of his superhero duties, must rescue singing rodents enjoying a Halloween party from a witch and her patented Terrytoons cat? Well, not for us, it wouldn't - that's why we've posted this cartoon on this blog several times!
Next up: by far the least scary but most jaunty and tuneful Halloween cartoon of all, SCRAPPY'S GHOST STORY (1935). As always, this blogger's love of Scrappy and Charles Mintz Studio cartoons remains a mystery!
Those who cringe at Mighty Mouse and Scrappy generally go for Fleischer Popeyes, so here's one of the best, Shiver Me Timbers (1934).
The Max Fleischer Screen Songs series included BOO, BOO, THEME SONG, a gratuitously grotesque cartoon about ghosts, ghouls and spiders who run their own radio station, which they use to sell a poisonous drink named DeKayo.
Another poster has uploaded the song segment from BOO BOO THEME SONG featuring The Funnyboners (a great name for a group). Must watch the following on YouTube. The song by The Funnyboners begins at 3:34. If you resample both videos as mp4 files and combine, that's the entire ghoulish cartoon.
Alas, we missed the chance to plug this weekend's fantastic spooky Halloween movie screenings (A Psychotronix Halloween at the Orinda Theatre, Lon Chaney at Niles, Saturday Afternoon Cartoons: A Haunted Halloween in Manhattan at the Metrograph) a few days ago (uh - before they actually happened), but can post a ghost-filled Fleischer "Inkwell Imps" cartoon seen last night as part of the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum's splendid Halloween show.
Sometimes this animation buff believes that the gang at the Van Beuren Studio really, really wanted to produce cartoons every bit as bizarre as Fleischer's. In the otherworldly Gypped In Egypt, starring "Don & Waffles," the bizarreness gets a full court press!
Don & Waffles soon became Tom & Jerry and kicked off their series with a Halloween cartoon, which gives Fleischer's a run for the money in the grotesquerie and bad taste departments.
Another classic Van Beuren cartoon is not specifically a Halloween film, but its storyline about the search for a pot of gold over the rainbow includes demons, apparitions, singing frogs and assorted weird characters, including an odd naked guy carrying around a sack of money while dragging a ball & chain. We love it so much we've posted it two consecutive Halloweens! Wonder if Sally Cruikshank, animator of Quasi At The Quackadero, Face Like A Frog, Make Me Psychic and Quasi's Cabaret, ever saw it. . .
The Ub Iwerks Studio, not wanting to be outdone, made several Flip The Frog cartoons that delved into imaginatively spooky territory. This must be at least the fourth time we have posted The Cuckoo Murder Case, one of the very best Flips and Iwerks cartoons, on this blog! Along with The Wild Goose Chase and Mighty Mouse in The Witch's Cat, The Cuckoo Murder Case was a cornerstone of our Halloween 2010 post!
Since we somehow forgot all about Warner Bros. cartoons, here is one of the spookiest Looney Tunes, an "old dark house" tale directed by the great Frank Tashlin.
Switching for no reason from animation to live-action, Halloween presents as good an excuse as any to post a certain Saturday Night Live bit featuring Tom Hanks as the not all that scary David S. Pumpkins!
A Saturday Night Live Halloween sketch that got this blogger laughing out loud featured Chris Farley's always over-enthusiastic motivational speaker Matt Foley.
Love those Vincent Price's Halloween Special sketches co-starring Bill Hader, Fred Armisen and Kristin Wiig.
How can we close this Halloween post? Well, this way - with the song It's Halloween by The Shaggs. Who were The Shaggs? Three young ladies, the Wiggins sisters from Fremont, New Hampshire whose crazy father wanted more than anything to make a successful rock band out of them. He was so desperate he bought his daughters studio time and recorded an album before they actually learned to play their instruments.
Yes, The Shaggs play out of tune, out of time and out of measurable reality, but there is genuine charm in their utter earnestness, likability, honesty and New Hampshire accents.
The Shaggs try hard and clearly want very much to sing and play their instruments at least reasonably well. Find this admirable.
This blogger is, among many things, an amateur guitarist who got started attempting to play chords on an acoustic guitar around the same time The Shaggs' Philosophy Of The World album was recorded - and totally gets how one sounds - fumbling, stumbling and often failing - when trying to learn to play an instrument. So, while attempting to play a finger-busting Ted Greene guitar chord, we say HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Alas, the gang at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog has not found a pristine 35mm nitrate negative of Tod Browning's London After Midnight in a cave or basement somewhere, but we will wish all a Happy Halloween nonetheless!
We'll kick today's Halloween-themed post off with a few cartoons.
Here's one of those indescribable Van Beuren Studio entries from the "Aesop's Fables" series. Starts with a fantasy about finding a pot of gold over the rainbow and then veers off into a netherworld, including demons and apparitions among the patented bizarre imagery the Van Beuren and Fleischer animators were so skilled at creating.
Didn't know there was such a thing as horny fossils until seeing this 1932 Betty Boop epic. I don't get it. They're fossils. . . THEY'RE DEAD!
Ace animator Ub Iwerks produced Skeleton Frolic among a series of cartoons his studio sub-contracted to Columbia Pictures from 1936-1940. It is a followup of sorts to the groundbreaking 1929 Walt Disney Silly Symphony cartoon The Skeleton Dance, but realized in the prevalent animation style of the mid-1930's.
Skeleton Frolic is very enjoyably spooky and a fine example of Technicolor cartoonmaking. Love the musical element, presumably provided by Eddie Kilfeather, as well as the super-cool backgrounds throughout. Not sure who animated it; Ub himself, fastest animator in the West and Walt Disney's not-so-secret weapon in the 1920's, did the honors on much of the Silly Symphony cartoon. Could that be Irv Spence's lively, distinctive and imaginative animation on the skeleton orchestra sequence?
It's likely the experts, from Mark Kausler to Devon Baxter, have an answer for that question. IIRC, by the time Skeleton Frolic was produced in late 1936 - early 1937 as the second Iwerks Studio contribution to the Columbia Color Rhapsody series, top animators Grim Natwick, Berny Wolf and Shamus Culhane had long since left to join the Walt Disney Studio.
At this point, we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog down a pint of pumpkin spice ale and two or three pumpkin spice double cappucchinos and enjoy the entertainment.
Photo by Christopher Walters
Can't decide between The Bride Of Frankenstein and Young Frankenstein as my Halloween choice.
Will have no choice but to watch both. Again.
Nothing says scary quite like The Paul Lynde Halloween Special (1976), co-starring none other than the great Margaret Hamilton.
We at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog watch it every year without fail!
Now it's time for some trailers from terrible movies!
And, unquestionably, it wouldn't be Halloween without a judicious selection of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and Creature Features TV show openings!
Seems we always finish the annual Happy Halloween post with a slew of references to the 1948 Universal Pictures feature Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and its various followups. Since the gang here remains resolutely Way Too Lazy To Write A Blog, we'll do it again. . . Happy Halloween!
Tomorrow is Halloween of what has been a horror show year - and a very tough time for all of us at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write To Blog, with the sudden loss of a beloved, esteemed and wonderful mascot to a blood clot earlier this week.
“Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.” — Anatole France
The best this blogger can do is confirm that he, unlike our lovable mascot, is not dead, here to write the Halloween 2020 blog post - and that he and Madame Blogmeister have long since mailed our ballots.
We will start Halloween as we do every year with a viewing of the Cartoon Roots series' Halloween Haunts, a ghost, goblin, ghoul and animation rarity-filled DVD/Blu-Ray set from Cartoons On Film which gets the official Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog Red Seal of approval.
The 15 film set is an exceptional compilation of spooky cartoons representing a slew of studios and animation techniques. Here are low-res examples of two gems from the Halloween Haunts set.
All the studios - from Lantz to Mintz to Iwerks - produced Halloween-themed cartoons, in response to the success of Disney's The Skeleton Dance.
The Fleischer studio made more Halloween-themed cartoons than anyone.
Wish there was a post on Vimeo, YouTube or DailyMotion of the complete version of Boo Boo Theme Song, an exceptionally creepy Halloween "Screen Song" cartoon from Fleischer Studios. Here's the one bit from this Screen Song which is up on YouTube: the Funnyboners singing Boo, Boo Theme Song - and spoofing Mr. Showbiz of 1933, Bing Crosby.
Oddly, the 16mm film prints of Fleischer Screen Songs cartoons struck for television distribution by UM&M/NTA often do not feature the live-action song sequences. Frequently, the song segments were cut from the 16mm negatives. One hopes 35mm materials on complete Fleischer Screen Songs are still intact and sitting in an archive (UCLA? LoC? Eastman House? Eye?) or a cold, dark cave somewhere.
We'll follow that up with, rather amazingly, a couple of Walt Disney cartoons. Yes, Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, believe it or not, has a couple of favorite Disney cartoons, after "Pink Elephants On Parade" and Goofy in "Hockey Homicide" (and, at #3, the attempted Diz-Dali collaboration, unfinished back in 1946 but completed in 2003).
A few Disney films are actually apropo for Halloween. The following classic, The Mad Doctor, is right up there with Mickey's Garden and Through The Mirror as one of the truly great cartoons from this series - and, for who knows what reason, passed into the public domain. Don't know why - there were many Copyright Catalog errors regarding Fleischer, Famous Studios and especially Van Beuren Studio titles going public domain, but very, very few mistakes involving Disney cartoons.
Another film we love is the Silly Symphony Egyptian Melodies.
Alas, Walt, no doubt planning the move to full-length animated features, put the kibbosh on the surreal and dark imagery seen in the first two seasons of Silly Symphonies. The Mad Doctor could be considered the last gasp of this at Disney, very odd moments involving ducks eating chicken in Donald Duck cartoons notwithstanding.
In Disney's extremely ambitious animated features, the memorable Night On Bald Mountain segment in Fantasia, may have, to some degree, been inspired by an incredible film made seven years earlier by pinscreen animators Alexandre Alexandrovitch Alexeieff and Claire Parker. Have not seen a quote from Walt Disney confirming that he was aware of this, but it would come as no great surprise that he did, and that it was one of the inspirations for Fantasia.
The Alexeieff and Parker films were created using a technique even more intensely painstaking and detail-oriented than the animation Disney made showcasing the multiplane camera: the pinscreen.
In closing, here's Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker's 1963 homage to that lighthearted partying guy and literary visionary, Nikolai Gogol, Le Nez. It's even better than Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart and will haunt your dreams.
Happy Halloween from Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, where Don & Waffles, Mutt & Jeff and Alexeieff and Parker all co-exist on the same psychic plane!
Here at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, it's Halloween - and time for big screen fun.
And that means Gothic horror flicks made at Universal by James Whale!
And loving homages to James Whale's movies courtesy of Mel Brooks!
And, of course, Halloween cartoons. . .
It's also time to watch spooky comedies yet again, starting with Laurel & Hardy.
And raise that spooky comedies quotient with The Bowery Boys yet again.
As well as The Three Stooges in If A Body Meets A Body.
Another opus de Stooges, Idle Roomers, is excellent Halloween fare because of the guy resembling the little bro of The Wolfman who enters at 7:01.
Universal Pictures stars Bud Abbott & Lou Costello specialized in scare comedies, starting with Who Done It.
These were such big box-office hits that feature films in which Bud & Lou did The Monster Mash in haunted houses would extend through the end of the 1940's and into the 1950's.
The comedy team frequently co-starred with Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Boris Karloff or Glenn Strange as Frankenstein and Lon Chaney, Jr. as The Wolfman.
Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy co-stars noir queen Marie Windsor!
A&C even made an appearance on The Colgate Comedy Hour with the monster du jour of 1954, the hideous "Gillman" from The Creature From The Black Lagoon!
The creepiest of all 20th century horror-comedies was made four decades later. That would be the Razzie Award winner Nothing But Trouble, a delirious Beetlejuice-influenced Halloween offering written and directed by Dan Aykroyd that got some of the worst reviews this blogger has ever seen, both on the TV show Siskel & Ebert At The Movies and by print film reviewers in many publications. It cost 45 million bucks to produce and made 8.5 million.
Is it understandable why many disliked this nightmarishly disturbing piece that frequently ventured into gross-out territory and found it a terrible movie? Yes. Do we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog regard Nothing But Trouble (which, very oddly, was given the exact same title as Laurel & Hardy's worst feature film) as a weirdly inspired one-of-a-kind fever dream? Yes. Would it have been a lot better with Harold Ramis substituted for Chevy Chase and also assisting with writing and/or directing? Yes - and John Landis, after reading the script, turned it down.
Do we believe that the objective in making this unsettling (and at times disgusting) opus was to serve up a humorous parody of horror movies a la Mel Brooks? No, definitely not. Unlike the Bowery Boys and Three Stooges monster comedies, it is more than a tad too grotesque to get laughs - but, bear in mind, this is not unprecedented, as none other than Stan Laurel wrote macabre shock endings for such L&H vehicles as Going Bye Bye and The Bullfighters.
That said, Nothing But Trouble, described by Vincent Canby in The New York Times as "a charmless feature-length joke about the world's most elaborate speed trap" is entirely a shock ending from start to finish. In the central role as the hideous 106 year old "hanging judge" of Volkenvania, Aykroyd presides as the ringmaster.
While the film fails in many ways, as an American Gothic piece, it succeeds with flying over-saturated colors, reverb-filled echoes of theremins and imagery a la horror-meister Tod Browning's gruesome films The Devil Doll, Freaks and West Of Zanzibar viewed through a broken funhouse mirror. . . with a musical number by Digital Underground thrown in for good measure.
The not-crazy-about-gory-movies correspondent here is glad the movie was cut from an R to a PG-13, so the violence is not graphic; then it would be not just ultra-creepy but unwatchable. Why the studio released Nothing But Trouble in February 1991, instead of holding it back until October and marketing it as a Halloween movie, nobody knows.
At Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, we like a rocked-out Halloween as much as anyone.
Like Bo Diddley, Dracula preferred the Gibson Flying V.
We're well aware that only Alice Cooper could confirm that Frankenstein played a Les Paul, Dracula rocked a Flying V - and that the Groucho Marx response to Alice Cooper's show was "this is like vaudeville."
And, yes, the gang at the Psychotronix Film Festival and Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog remain well aware that songwriter/guitarist Roky Erickson of The 13th Floor Elevators and The Explosives may actually have walked with a zombie sometime.
After all, Bobby Boris Pickett didn't just do The Monster Mash, he did the Monster Swim, too.
Of course, the official Screamin' Jay Hawkins response would be that Alice Cooper and Bobby Boris Pickett stole their acts from him!
We finish today's Halloween post with none other than Count Floyd's scary Monster Chiller Horror Theater.
All the Chaney (Sr. and Jr.), Carradine, Tor and Bela-crazed reprobates at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog send our scariest wishes for a Happy Halloween!
This Halloween, we ponder the passing of John Zacherle, one of the greatest and funniest TV horror hosts ever, on October 27.
The horror host's recorda, "82 Tombstones," "Dummy Doll" and "Dinner With Drac" actually precede Bobby "Boris" Pickett's hit The Monster Mash. That is appropriate, given that Zacherley rose out of a coffin to introduce the Grateful Dead at Fillmore East.
Must tip that battered top hat worn by John Carradine in countless low-budget movies to Zacherley.
Joining Zacherley in today's Halloween post will be current horror host Mr. Lobo of Cinema Insomnia.
We'll raise that, and the dead, with Halloween blackouts from The Ernie Kovacs Show and Take A Good Look.
And, of course, the one, the only Auntie Gruesome, with a version of Cinderella this writer prefers to both Disney's Cinderella and Jerry Lewis' Cinderfella.
We finish today's post off, appropriately, as the great John Candy's birthday was on October 31, with an episode of Count Floyd's Monster Chiller Horror Theatre. OWOOOOOOOOO!!!
We wish all the readers of Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog a Happy Halloween! As Tallulah Bankhead, chain smoking and hoisting a shot while wearing a designer witch costume would say, Happy Halloween, dahhhlings!
Los Angeles area animation and classic movie buffs, note that Jerry Beck shall be presenting one of his Halloween cartoon spooktaculars tonight at the Cinefamily (Silent Film Theatre) at 611 N. Fairfax Ave.
As the press release for the program describes, "animation historian Jerry Beck screams—err, screens — a selection of strange, creepy Halloween-related cartoons using vintage 16mm and 35mm prints that range from ghoulishly red Eastmancolor to gorgeously garish Technicolor. Prepare to be dazzled by animated witches, warlocks, goblins, pumpkin-heads, black cats, and everyone from Koko The Clown to Casper the Friendly Ghost, as classic cartoon characters Oswald Rabbit, Flip The Frog and Popeye."
Don't know if Boo Boo Theme Song, an exceptionally creepy Halloween "Screen Song" cartoon from Fleischer Studios is on the bill in Jerry's spooktacular, but it certainly is apropo. Here are the Funnyboners singing Boo, Boo Theme Song.
Oddly, the 16mm film prints of Fleischer Screen Songs cartoons struck for television distribution by UM&M/NTA often do not feature the live-action song sequences. In some cases, the songs were cut from the 16mm negatives. Fortunately, there were LOTS of excellent Halloween cartoons made in 1929-1933 by all the studios.
The cinema and pumpkin-crazed rapscallions at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog send our very wishes for a Happy Halloween.
We raise a hemlock-filled toast with the following snippets of celluloid, cartoon and video goodness, starring a veritable rogues' gallery of our very favorite artistes!
Photo by Christopher Walters Happy Halloween! Since the last post covered musical short subjects of the early 1930's and it wasn't possible to get ALL of them in, here, straight from the cartoon universe and the deep subconscious, is the following stunner from Fleischer Studios. No matter how many times Mr. Blogmeister sees the following phantasmagorical cartoon, he's floored by the cinematic invention of it all. Making history as the dancing apparition: Cab Calloway.
Also pretty darn wonderful is this Aesop's Fables cartoon produced down the block from Fleischer's by the Van Beuren studio. Main characters Don & Waffles pretty much spent their entire screen career getting chased around by skeletons, goblins, ghosts and any ghoul who had a SAG card.
Many of us born at a certain time grew up watching The Dean Martin Show, which always had at least one comedian as a guest. Usually, if said comic was not Dom DeLuise, the featured comedian on Dino's variety program was the hilarious Paul Lynde.
Yes, THAT Paul Lynde, the one who repeatedly got away with flagrant censorship flaunting of the first degree inhabiting "the middle square" on The Hollywood Squares. So, submitted for your approval, here's The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, which features, among others, Margaret Hamilton, Tim Conway and Kiss.
With a big time tip of the Max Linder/Raymond Griffith top hat to the San Francisco Giants, who beat an exceptional Kansas City Royals team to win the 2014 World Series, here is the dapper Parisian himself, Max Linder in Ah Secours!, a hallucinogenic and surreal black comedy more akin to The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari than Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush - and directed by Abel Gance of Napoleon fame.
Although Steve Stanchfield has the last word on Halloween cartoons in today's Cartoon Research posting, here's one more, from the Toby The Pup series, created by Dick Huemer, Sid Marcus and Art Davis for release by RKO Radio Pictures.
And what would Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog be without an SCTV clip?
We close with Bill Cosby's The Chicken Heart, one brilliant sendup of old time radio, specifically the super-scary LIGHTS OUT show by Arch Oboler. Enjoy!
