Welcome
to Needless Things’ month-long celebration of the greatest time of
the year!
From
today through Halloween, me and the rest of the Needless Things
Irregulars will be sharing the spookiest, creepiest, and most fun
content we can to help get you in the Halloween mood.
I’m
kicking things off today with an idea I had last year but never got
around to doing. It’s something that you can do at home, as well.
You
see, for the past few years I’ve been writing up the SyFy channel’s
31 Days
of Halloween
programming. It’s never the best, but SyFy is the only channel that
essentially shows spooky stuff every hour of the month that they have
programming. Other channels show spooky movies and shows sporadically
throughout the month or maybe in the last week leading up to
Halloween, but SyFy does it all month. And for that, I salute them.
Despite
how rotten some of their stuff is. I don’t even mind the bad
movies, it’s the seven thousand episodes of Ghost
Hunters
that they air every year. And also that they seem to run out of
content three weeks into October and start just replaying everything.
Writing
up that schedule is a lot of work and takes a ton of planning in
advance. And while for the most part I can handle shouting into the
void with no response, I just can’t do another year of that with no
visible results. I know Blogger makes it hard to comment on Needless
Things, and with any luck that problem will be addressed by a friend
that’s helping me with the site, but for this year I’m out. It’s
just not worth it.
Thinking
about Halloween programming gave me an idea, though. I botch and moan
about SyFy’s choices, but how hard would it actually be to program
a good Halloween schedule for an entire month? Well, I’m sure as
heck not going to find out without getting paid, but I think it would
be fun to program a single day.
A perfect day – my ideal day of creepy TV shows, movies, and
cartoons.
Initially
this was going to be my post for Halloween, but you don’t really
need help then, do you?
No,
this is the sort of thing you need a week or two into October to
really kick things into gear. Maybe you’ve been to the Spirit store
or wandered through Target’s excellent (this year) Halloween
section. You feel Halloween a little bit, but you need that spark to
light the fire. A day of perfect programming would do the trick.
What
follows is a day of Halloween viewing, from 6 AM until the wee hours
of the morning. In my mind, I have a full day with nothing to do but
sit in the recliner with a mug of rum and root beer, munching the
occasional Pallookaville
corndog. Some of the stuff on this list is probably obvious, but
that’s what I’m going for – the best representations of the
Halloween spirit, not a list of obscure shit you’ve never seen
before. No, this is Halloween comfort food. We'll get into the weird
shit later with Jerry
and
Devlin.
After
you check this out I encourage you to create your own “Perfect
Halloween” list and try to watch everything on it, even if you have
to spread it out over a week.
I
formatted this in a similar manner as the old TV
Guide
magazines and wrote the listings myself. I’m not trying to be
clever with these. I’m writing them in the straightest-laced TV
Guide
way possible. Maybe it’ll get me a job.
Morning
6:00
– Mad Monster Party – Family – Boris Karloff, Phyllis Diller
“Animagic”
monsters gather on the Isle of Evil and get up to no good in this
feature from Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass.(95 min.)
8:00
– Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? “Foul Play in Funland” –
Children
Scooby-Doo
and the gang encounter a scary robot at a carnival. (21 min.)
8:30
– The Groovie Goolies – Children (30 min.)
9:00
- Duck Tales “Ducky Horror Picture Show” – Children
Famous
monsters descend upon Duckburg for their annual convention and it’s
up to Scrooge McDuck to save the day! (22 min.)
9:30
– Animaniacs "Draculee, Draculaa / Phranken-Runt" –
Children
The
Warner Brothers and the Warner Sister, Dot, celebrate Halloween in
their own inimitable fashion. (30 min.)
10:00
– Ernest Scared Stupid – Family – Jim Varney, Eartha Kitt
Lovable
goof Ernest P. Worrell saves his town from an evil troll. (91 min.)
Afternoon
12:00
– The Pit – Horror – Sammy Snyders, Jeannie Elias
A
bullied young boy feeds his tormentors to monsters that live in a
hole in the woods. (92 min.)
2:00
– GI Joe: A Real American Hero “Skeletons in the Closet” –
Children
Lady
Jaye discovers a dark secret of her ancestry, and a darker secret
beneath a Scottish castle. (30 min.)
2:30
– Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends “The Bride of Dracula!” –
Children
Peter
and Bobby must travel to Transylvania to rescue Angela from the
clutches of the evil Count Dracula! (30 min.)
3:00
– Monster Force “Return of the Creature from the Black Lagoon”
– Children
In
the future, the heroes of Monster Force battle the Creature. (26
min.)
3:30
– The Real Ghostbusters “When Halloween Was Forever” –
Children
The
evil spirit, Samhain, wants to stop time on Halloween. Can the
Ghostbusters stop him first? (30 min.)
4:00
– The Addams Family “Halloween With the Addams Family” –
Sitcom
The
creepy, kooky family celebrate Halloween! (30 min.)
4:30
– Eerie, Indiana “America’s Scariest Home Video” – Family
The
boys get stuck babysitting on Halloween and a mummy wreaks havoc. (26
min.)
5:00
– The Muppet Show “Vincent Price” (22 min.)
5:30
– The Muppet Show “Alice Cooper” (26 min.)
Evening
6:00
– Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Fear, Itself” – Teen Drama
Buffy
and the Scoobies face the Dark Lord of Nightmares and the Bringer of
Terror, Gachnar, in the best Halloween episode of anything, ever.
(Okay,
so I got a little editorial with that one)(42
min.)
7:00
– The Dukes of Hazzard “The Hazzardville Horror” – Action
The
Duke boys encounter a haunted mansion! (45 min.)
8:00
– It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! – Family
Charlie
Brown, Lucy, Linus, Snoopy, and the Peanuts gang await the arrival of
the Great Pumpkin on Halloween night. (25 min.)
8:30
– Gary Larson’s Tales from the Far Side – Family
Spooky
tales from the creator of the hit comic strip, The
Far Side.
(30 min.)
9:00
– Tales from the Crypt “Werewolf Concerto” – Horror
A
star-studded episode features guests at a hotel where everyone is not
what they seem. (29 min.)
9:30
– Monsters “The Match Game”- Horror
Four
teens trade stories in a haunted mansion. They must finish before
time runs out! (22 min.)
10:00
– Trick ‘R Treat – Horror – Anna Paquin, Brian Cox
An
anthology of ghoulish Halloween tales.(82 min.)
12:00
– Halloween – Horror – Donald Pleasance, Jamie Lee Curtis
The
town of Haddonfield, Illinois is stalked by a faceless Shape on
Halloween. (91 min.)
Late
Night
2:00
– Feast – Horror – Balthazar Getty, Henry Rollins
Monsters
terrorize a rural bar and its patrons. (87 min.)
3:30
– Hellraiser – Horror – Doug Bradley, Ashley Laurence
A
family is torn apart by evil straight from Hell. (93 min.)
5:30
– Bugs Bunny’s Howl-oween Special – Family
A
collection of spooky Looney Tunes cartoons.(30 min.)
You
guys, I didn’t realize just how little time there was in a day,
both for the purposes of scheduling this thing and for the purposes
of writing it. I have run out of time in every sense. But I had a lot
of fun doing this, so it’s entirely possible I’ll schedule some
more days of Halloweeny entertainment this month.
In
the meantime, be
sure to join the Needless
Things Podcast Facebook Group
and share your own awesome Halloween viewing schedules. We’d love
to hear from you!
Also,
follow Phantom Troublemaker on Instagram for #Drawlloween and the
return of #monsteraday, where I feature a different monster toy every
day, all month long!
Until
next time, stay creepy!
That's a great list! I love that you selected a number of cartoons that had a cool, spooky episode or two. Nice mixture and it feels like it could be pretty legitimate!
ReplyDeleteI definitely wanted it to feel like a real, old-school day of programming - younger cartoons, milder movies, afternoon cartoons, evening shows, the prime-time specials, then some real horror.
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