Review: Bruce Vilanch's 'It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time'

Bruce Vilanch is the scribe behind such widely reviled pop-cultural specimens as The Star Wars Holiday Special, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, and Can't Stop the Music, starring the Village People. That Vilanch didn't toss himself out of the nearest fifth floor window sometime in the early eighties could be a consequence of his mythical acceleration-powder intake or his equally legendary propensity for self-deprecation. 

Since Vilanch dispels the myth that he was some sort of incorrigible coke receptacle in his new book It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time, and goes above and beyond to remind us of his self-deprecating sense of humor, we can assume that the latter is responsible for him still being with us. One must surely need a prodigious ability to laugh at oneself to take a full-on wallow in their greatest failures for two hundred pages, which is basically what Vilanch does in It Seemed Like a Bad Idea. He takes us on a tour through the terrible variety shows, awful feature films, and crappy stage performances he wrote, mostly as an excuse to drop a lot of corny jokes one might expect from the guy who wrote that alien cooking show Chewbacca's wife loves to watch.

Review: 'Outro Records Rock 'n Roll Halloween Party!'

While getting up the Halloween decorations (which I seem to do a little earlier every year... as my wife likes to point out), it is key to set the right mood. I've got my Zacherle and Vic Mizzy and Vince Gauraldi LPs, and Black Sabbath and The Misfits for when I get fed up and ready to rock, but I'm guessing none of those are gonna hit the spot this year like Outro Records' new comp Outro Records Rock 'n Roll Halloween Party! 

Review: 'Halloween Nation: Behind the Scenes of America’s Fright Night'

A week into November, Halloween is not exactly the number one thing on my mind, and I tend to have Halloween on my mind more than most people. However, reading the new edition of Lesley Pratt Bannatyne’s Halloween Nation: Behind the Scenes of America’s Fright Night helped me catch that spooky wave again. 

Playing the ever affable tour guide, Bannatyne focuses on the people who make Halloween an all-year obsession by devoting their lives to growing monstrous pumpkins, building their own elaborate decorations, running haunted attractions, prepping for costume parades, performing in creepy burlesque shows, playing trick-or-treat pranks, participating in zombie-invasion recreation societies, and crafting installments of The Simpsons’ annual “Treehouse of Horror” (hiya, Mike Reiss!). They’re the people who really draw every oozing bit of fun out of the funnest holiday. And I thought I was obsessed because I start decorating my apartment in September and spend the days leading up to October 31 watching several monster movies a day. I’m a rank amateur compared to the cat who collected so much jack-o’-lantern paraphernalia that he was able to put a down payment open a house by selling $200,000 worth of his stuff. And, yes, he still owned thousands of dollars worth of leftovers as of the book’s original publication in 2011 (the new edition features a fresh introduction by the author).

 

Bannatyne also covers people who identify as real-life ghost conjurers and spell-casting witches. I found that stuff less interesting because those people are not necessarily enamored with Halloween and because it isn’t 2011 anymore. Back then, I might have found folks who believe they have magical powers charmingly kooky. Today, when people who believe Democrats are baby-eating lizard people from outer space can actually win seats in Congress, I have a lot less tolerance for fantasy.

Review: 'Fright Favorites: 31 Movies to Haunt Your Halloween and Beyond'

It was hard enough boiling a century of horror cinema down to 200 spook shows. Imagine having to whittle it down to 31.

I understand the significance of the number—just enough to watch a single picture on each night of October—but its skimpiness skirts inconsequence. Normally, I wouldn’t even bother with a book like Fright Favorites: 31 Movies to Haunt Your Halloween and Beyond. I made an exception because its author is the David Bordwell of horror: David J. Skal, the writer of such essential tomes as The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen, and Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween.

Review: 'It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: Music from the Original Soundtrack' on Vinyl

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip was special because of its willingness to acknowledge the failures of childhood. Its TV-special incarnation built on that specialness with the refreshing move to cast actual child actors in the roles of Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty, and the rest of the gang, and Vince Guaraldi’s sophisticated yet whimsical jazz score. The elliptical arpeggios of “Lucy and Linus” can still launch a million memories for anyone who grew up watching Charlie Brown choose the scrawniest X-Mas tree on the lot or Snoopy battle the Red Baron.

Guaraldi’s soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas was released in conjunction with that TV special in December of 1965. Our fellow Peanuts have had to wait a lot longer for the release of the soundtrack to the second most popular Peanuts special. Last year, Craft Recordings put out a CD soundtrack for It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Because original tapes of Guaraldi’s score were apparently unavailable, the disc consists of music pulled straight from the special’s soundtrack. That means audio fidelity is a bit weak and non-musical sound effects are often audible. Sometimes this enhances the mood, as when spooky groans and giggles intrude on the mysterious “Graveyard Theme” or Snoopy weeps along with Schroeder’s rendition of “Roses of Picardy”. Other times, incongruous plops and crinkles invade the music to baffle anyone who cannot remember the accompanying visuals well. Because many of these pieces are mere passing cues, they often fade out as soon as they fade in, and there is a great deal of repetition. Versions of “Lucy and Linus”, “The Great Pumpkin Waltz”, “Charlie Brown Theme”, and “Trick or Treat” each appear three times, making for some pretty repetitious listening over the soundtrack’s skimpy twenty minutes.

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: Music from the Original Soundtrack is now making its vinyl debut just in time for Halloween season. Because it is so brief, all seventeen short tracks are lumped on one side of the record. Side B is devoted to one of those vinyl etchings that are becoming increasingly common, much to the frustration of audiophiles who’d probably prefer that the music be spread over both sides so that the disc could spin at 45 rpms instead of 33 1/3. Of course, considering the lo-fi nature of this soundtrack, increasing its speed probably wouldn’t make much sonic difference.

Nevertheless, Guaraldi’s music remains an evocative, magically autumnal time machine to some of our happiest Halloween memories, so Craft’s soundtrack album is still a nice souvenir…though it’s no substitute for sitting down with the kids to actually watch Linus waste his Halloween sitting in a pumpkin patch like the blockhead he is.

And Now for No Other Reason Than It's Halloween, Here's Some Halloween Wallpaper for Your Desktop with Love from Psychobabble!

Review: 'Retro Fan' Issue #2

Michael Eury’s new magazine Retro Fan has a very singular purpose: to hit the nostalgia sweet spot. With the arguable exception of Christmas, no holiday hits that spot like Halloween, so you can bet that Retro Fan’s autumnal issue will give you that deep bath in ghouls you crave at this time every year. Articles cover such gruesome yet wistful topics as horror hosts (including a brief interview with this issue’s cover-girl, Elvira), 1960s monster TV (specifically Bewitched, The Munsters, and The Addams Family), The Groovie Goolies, and those delightfully garish Ben Cooper costumes.

While these topics have all been discussed many times before, the Retro Fan writing staff always hits just the right note. The writers’ references to their own, very relatable, childhood experiences maximize the nostalgia value without upstaging the topics. The tone is friendly, but the articles are almost absurdly in depth. Did I previously know that Bob Clampett was preparing an animated feature with basically the same premise as The Munsters way back in the 1940s? Nope. Do I now ache for the existence of such a film? You bet your abbie-normal brain I do. Did I know that there were also plans for a sort of Muppet Babies-esque spin off of The Groovie Goolies in the 1980s? Hell, most ex-employees of Filmation didn’t even know that!

For those who do not have a predilection for monsters and the macabre, there are also articles about such non-Halloweeny topics as Sindy: the British Barbie (good to see a female writer being invited to the show this issue…hopefully there will be more in issue #3), a now defunct dinosaur theme park in San Diego, a fab collection of lunch boxes, and super hero View-Master reels. If I have any beef with this issue, it’s that I wish the lunch box photos were bigger and it would have been nice if the View-Master article were more seasonal, focusing on those wonderful adaptations of creepy classics such as Dracula and Frankenstein featuring creepy dolls. I loved those.

But the biggest disappointment is not Retro Fan’s fault at all. As soon as I glanced at an article about a pop culture museum in Baltimore, I was poised to buy a bus ticket to Charm City—then I read the sidebar explaining that the museum closed for business between the article’s writing and the magazine’s publication! It’s just another reminder of how quickly things change, how constantly the past replaces the present. At least we have Retro Fan to memorialize such lost things with humanity and love.

Psychobabble’s 10 Tips for the Perfect Retro-Halloween

In a confusing, modern world in which everyone wanders around aimlessly in their virtual reality helmets while playing Pokemon pogs on their telephones and listening to auto-tuned teenagers sing about their vaginas, Psychobabble offers Halloween as an oasis of retro sensibilities. Not politically retro. That would be gross. I just mean Halloweenally retro. Take off the helmet. Put down the phone. Turn off that singer who is still a teenager and consider listening to one who was a teenager fifty years ago (may I suggest The Crystals’ and their “Frankenstein Twist”?). It’s time to buckle down and allow the waves of nostalgia in.

There are few things more old-fashioned than the notion that the vale between the natural world and the spirit world will lift up and a host of ghosts will sneak under it and start partying on our turf every October 31^st.. That’s some silly shit. So it would be highly inappropriate to celebrate such an old-fashioned holiday in a new-fashioned way. Here are Psychobabble’s ten tips for recreating the perfect retro Halloween experience.

1. Hang Beistly decorations.

Halloween is not an icy pool. You don’t just leap into it on October 31^st and leap right back out again. It is a warm bath. You sink into it slowly and lounge, preferably for an entire month. Part of that involves decorating your home. Many people spend all of their energy hanging ghouls and skeletons all over the outside of their homes, which is all fine and good for showing your neighbors how festive you are, but you should never neglect the inside either, since you probably spend more time indoors than out on the lawn. Whether you’re decorating inside or out, you cannot have a truly retro Halloween without some Beistle decorations. You know them. They’re those grinning cats and jack-o-lanterns, wrinkly witches, and dancing skeletons rendered in shades of orange, black, yellow, and green on die-cut cardboard. These designs have been in use since the Beistle Company began in 1900 and were particularly ubiquitous in the seventies and early eighties. Few visuals will instantly conjure those old-timey Halloween feelings than Beistle decorations, though you are also welcome to hang up some of those toxic melted plastic popcorn decorations depicting ghosts, witches, and cats. They’re retro too. Expensive animatronic serial killers and giant inflatable Adam Sandler vampires from Hotel Transylvania are not.

2. Send mail using actual paper and actual mail boxes.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 31

The Date: October 31

The Movie: Halloween (1978)

What Is It?: John Carpenter slaps a Bill Shatner mask on Tony Moran and shoves a kitchen knife in his hand and—voilà —a whole new horror genre is born. Horny teenagers will never be safe again.

Why Today?: No reason.

It's the Psychobabble Halloween Special!

With its rituals of begging for candy, playing dress up, and believing in the kinds of things you should stop believing in at age seven—Flying witches! Ghosts! Werewolves! Pumpkins!—Halloween is definitely a kids holiday. I admit that even as I get more into Halloween the older I get. That’s because adult children such as myself can indulge in a month-long orgy of horror movies with content way to axe-centric for Trick-or-Treating tykes. When it comes to feature films, the kids are mostly shut out despite a few seasonal kid-friendly flicks like Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and Mad Monster Party (am I dating myself with my references? Nah.). Kids generally need to turn to the small screen for their Halloween entertainment. Fortunately, there’s plenty of Halloween entertainment on TV to eliminate the dangers of playing outside in the late-October fresh air. At least there have been since the late 1970s when annually aired Halloween specials really became a thing on TV. Before that period, specials popped up pretty infrequently outside of spooky episodes of “Bewitched”  (“Trick or Treat”; “Twitch or Treat”) or “The Beverly Hillbillies” (“Trick or Treat”—are you sensing a lack of imagination here?). Other shows like “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Monkees” really blew it by airing episodes such as “Ghost a Go-Go” and “The Monstrous Monkee Mash” far removed from the holiday (and both series aired shows on October 31^st during their runs, so the scheduling was extra stupid).

Halloween Season Begins on Psychobabble!

Feel free to make this your Halloween Season desktop!

Psychobabble Presents...366 Days at the Drive-In!

October 1 is always a big day here on Psychobabble. It commemorates the beginning of the month-long Halloween Season celebration and this site’s anniversary. Tomorrow kicks off my eighth year of Psychobabbling. It will also mark the start of an all-new feature called 366 Days at the Drive-In. This will be Psychobabble’s very first daily feature: from October 1, 2015, through September 30, 2016, I’ll post a new movie recommendation every day (it’s 366 days since 2016 is a leap year).

I’ll be tailoring each film to the particular date I recommend it, and each movie is 100% Psychobabble approved. That means the very best in cult, sci-fi, fantasy, goofy comedy, animation, Rock & Roll, and horror. Since October is Halloween season, we’ll commence with 31 straight days of horror! Check in tomorrow for Day 1.

I Was a Late-Generation Monster Kid

My room would be fuzzed with that vague purple that comes right before the sunrise. I’d be exhausted, because it was 6 AM and little kids need their rest, and because I’d been toiling away in school all week long, probably learning to print or gluing elbow macaroni to paper plates or whatever else it is you do in school when you’re five or six. I don’t remember how old I was exactly, because I can’t find any information about when “Groovie Goolies” aired at 6:30 AM (or was it 6:00 AM?) on Saturday Mornings in the late-seventies/early eighties, but man, do I remember that sickly feeling of trying to fight myself awake every Saturday morning so I could creep downstairs to the still-dark den to take in those cornball Burbank-by-way-of-Transylvania jokes and groove along to those bubble gum pop songs as sugary as the Frankenberry cereal I’d scarf after the closing credits.

...And for No Other Reason Than It's Awesome, Here's a Vintage Ben Cooper Costume Ad...

...And for No Other Reason Than They're Awesome, Here Are Some Boxes of Monster Candy Cigarettes...

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Review: 'Pumpkin Cinema'

There are already enough horror movie guides haunting bookstores to choke King Kong. Nathaniel Tolle justifies the existence of yet another one by employing a welcome premise: movies that conjure just the right atmosphere for Halloween viewing. He lays out his criteria in the introductory chapter of Pumpkin Cinema: nothing too slow, too long, too depressing, too cruel, or too off-season for Halloween fun. Such seasonally perfect selections as Something Wicked This Way Comes, House of Frankenstein, The Adventures of Ichabod, and of course, Halloween are shoe-ins.

Sometimes Tolle has trouble sticking to his own premise, as when he chooses the swelteringly Amazonian Creature from the Black Lagoon instead of more appropriately autumnal alternatives like The Wolf Man or Dracula (which he disqualifies for being too slow…blasphemy!). While those are some glaring omissions matched only by the near-total absence of Hammer horrors, I appreciated Tolle’s otherwise appreciation of classic monster movies from all eras and how he further distinguishes his book from similar guides by getting into cartoons, short films, and Halloween episodes of non-supernatural TV series. I also liked the fact that he selected movies he likes, so you don’t have to hunt around to locate his recommendations. You still might want to approach a lot of those recommendations with caution since Tolle can be undiscerning when it comes to direct-to-video cheapies and holiday movies starring Ernest or The Olsen Twins. That unfettered enthusiasm extends to writing that is accessible yet can get dodgy without enough editorial intervention. Someone certainly should have steered him away from writing “working quite well are the many ample bosoms that constantly struggle to stay confined in their tiny bikini tops” in his entry for the notorious rape-monster movie Humanoids from the Deep. Yeesh.

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