Season 2 Episode 5
Air Date: October 27, 1985

I’ve been watching a lot of Tales from the Crypt lately. So it was weird to take a break and revist its less celebrated predecessor. You see Crypt was a high budget HBO series with all star directors and A-list talent like Demi Moore, Brad Pitt, and Tom Hanks. While Darkside had guests like… Jerry Stiller, I guess? Darkside was never a big show. Nor a great show. But you can’t deny that it beat Crypt to the punch by six years and has surely earned its spot in horror TV history.

Continue reading →

Airdate: October 30, 1979

Look, I don’t need to pretend that I put a lot of thought into picking this Flintstones special to review, since this year was more about having fun with Shocktober. I basically just chose The Flintstones Meet Rockula and Frankenstone because of its silly title. So it should come as no surprise that I more or less got what I was asking for here. It’s a special that feels a little lazy and a little too removed from The Flintstones early ’60s heyday, but it’s still a little amusing to watch these characters get into some by-the-numbers Halloween hijinks. To quote many a prehistoric bird, it’s a living.

Continue reading →

Air Date: October 29th, 1976

I think I only picked this special because it was mentioned in an episode of Family Guy. It was that episode where Peter and Lois went to Kisstock. They run into Dave and Dotty the nudists and Peter and Dave face off in a Kiss trivia battle. Hey, why am I explaining the scene when I can just post it right here?

Continue reading →

Season 3, Episode 7
Original Air Date: November 24th, 1978

Hey! Why isn’t the goddamn Muppet Show on Disney+? I did some digging and the best answer I could find is that Bob Iger thinks the Muppets are dumb. The Muppets being an acquisition by Iger’s predecessor Michael Eisner, Iger hasn’t been interested in integrating the Muppets into the Disney brand post-90s. That means I had to go to the deepest darkest depths of the internet to find this episode. Thanks, Bob.

Continue reading →

Season 1, Episode 5
Airdate: October 9, 1976

Much like the entire run of The Addams Family, you could say that basically any episode of one of the various Scooby-Doo cartoons from the ’70s is spooky enough to feel like a Halloween episode. Perhaps it says something that The Munsters never even had a Halloween episode, since doing a Halloween episode of a show that’s basically already Halloween-themed is a bit redundant. Still, this was the first of several “official” Halloween episodes and specials to take place in the Scooby-Doo-niverse (sorry), though unsurprisingly there isn’t all that much in this episode that’s different from the tried-and-true formula of a Scooby-Doo episode. Regardless, it’s been god knows how many years since I’ve watched an episode of Scooby-Doo, so it was still kinda fun to watch these meddling kids solve a mystery. Continue reading →

Season 2, Episode 7
Original Air Date: October 27, 1967

The only holiday special in Star Trek history, “Catspaw” was the first episode of the original series’ second season to be shot, even though it premiered seventh so that it could air close to Halloween. That means it was the first episode to include new series regular Walter Koenig as Pavel Chekov, who, like everyone who isn’t Kirk, Spock, or Bones, doesn’t do a whole lot on this adventure. In fact, if you’re looking for anything else particularly novel about this episode, you’ll probably be disappointed. It turns out that even in a spooky setting, Star Trek‘s gonna Star Trek.

Continue reading →