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?

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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.

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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.

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Airdate: October 27, 1966

So… today was a crazy day. I don’t know how much enthusiasm I’ll have for writing about a 50-year-old children’s Halloween special, but we’ll see. If anything, watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was a pretty relaxing trip back to childhood to provide a little bit of comfort after a day that felt a bit surreal.

I say that the Peanuts transports me back to childhood not only because it’s about the comical melancholy of being a kid, but also because I have a few various memories of Peanuts from my own childhood. First, of reruns of the cartoon being aired occasionally (possibly on Nickelodeon?) as well as their presence in the comics section of the newspaper (remember those?) and experiencing the Camp Snoopy theme park at the Mall of America during my summers in Minnesota. In recent years, the Peanuts property I’ve returned to the most is the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas (as well as that special), though I do have a vague memory of watching It’s The Great Pumpkin on TV as a kid. Upon revisiting it, I was glad to see it has about the same high level of charm as everything else in the Peanuts universe.

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