The Top 5 Halloween Specials

I count down the top 5 Halloween specials ever made.
On
September 27, 2010
Hello. When I was a kid, my parents taped a whole bunch of Halloween specials. Here's a bunch of synopses and tricks and treats. Here they are in no particular order.

Yep, Garfield, the talking cat who can't talk, had his own Halloween special, not to mention a very successful animated TV series that started three years after this was made (as well as a few UNSUCCESSFUL movies). In this one, Garfield & Odie goes out trick or treating dressed as pirates. They come to an old abandoned house with an old man inside telling them a story about how tonight ghost pirates are coming to get treasure there. Safe to say, Garfield and Odie do NOT get killed by said ghost pirates, but the question remains: Who is Carolyn?



I have never heard of the Ted E. Bear line of teddy bears, and talk about star power: Guess who's in this one? That's right, Tom Smothers! Dick, always the smart one, decided not to do this.
Our story begins with this:

(Hopefully people will actually read this and see the word "bearwitness" and not think the world is ending!)
Tom voices Ted E. Bear, who goes into Monster Mountain to investigate what is going on in there. Are the monsters really coming to kill everyone in Bearbank? Watch for Dracula's line "Beautiful downtown Bearbank", an allusion to Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. But after a highly philosophical speech by Ted, which basically points out that we shouldn't be afraid of monsters just because we don't understand them.

Bearbank declares victory, and the monsters, defeated, return to Monster Mountain, heaven forbid they return after midnight.

Yep, someone had the bright idea to give Winnie the Pooh his very own Halloween special. This one revolves around Piglet's timidness, and his Halloween phobia. To conquer this, he makes a big huge monster machine, which his friends think is an actual monster (a "spookable", they call it.)

But when Piglet "defeats" his own creation, Pooh and the gang think he saved their lives. The only high point is Tigger's song in the middle. This has too many songs in it, including Piglet singing. (Yes, Piglet can sing. Not very well, mind you.) At the beginning is a tiny vignette starring Michael Eisner, then CEO of Disney.



Speaking of Disney, remember when the Disney Channel was a pay-per-view station? (This, of course, was before Hannah Montana was even BORN.) Well, before Disney disregarded their own heritage, they aired a very long 90-minute special featuring Disney's spookiest creations. Included is the "A Night at Bald Mountain" sequence from Fantasia, a Donald Duck cartoon with Huey, Dewey and Louie trick-or-treating, and Mickey, Donald and Goofy's ghostbusting cartoon.



Last but not least. This is it, the mother of all those other Halloween specials. Made in the mid-'60s, it is quite possibly the very first Halloween TV special, it features Linus waiting all night in a pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arrive, Charlie Brown and the gang at an unsupervised Halloween party, and a painfully long sequence of Snoopy as a World War I flying ace flying his doghouse and getting shot at by the Red Baron.

Well, there you have it. The Top 5 Halloween specials ever made.
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