Let's Watch This... Again: An Episode of "The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper"

NOTE: Please do not take any of the little nitpicks in this review (or any of my other reviews, for that matter) seriously. I write these reviews in the hopes of making people laugh. Those nitpicks are really just dumb little observations that I'm attempting to make jokes out of, not complaints that add to whether or not I like something.

NOTE #2: No disrespect is meant towards anyone who worked on the show I am reviewing today. I'm sure they are all very nice and talented people.

NOTE #3: If you like this show, that is great. Go ahead and like it. I'm not judging you. But please be civil in the comments.

Somebody on DeviantArt requested that I do a re-review of this show. As I've said before, I am nothing if not a people-pleaser.

For those who didn't read my first review of The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper, it premiered in February 1996 and recieved four seasons and a total of fifty-two episodes (each one consisting of two or three segments). The show was developed by the writers of the Casper movie released the previous year, Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver. Taking place after the film, the show had Casper (voiced once again by by Malachi Pearson) still living in that haunted house with his obnoxious uncles Stretch (Joe Nipote), Stinky (Joe Alaskey), and Fatso (Brad Garrett in the first two seasons, then Jess Harnell in the third and fourth), ghost psychologist Dr. Harvey (Dan Castellaneta) and his daughter Kat (Kath Souice as opposed to Christina Ricci). Also along for the ride were Casper's teacher Ms. Banshee (Tress MacNeille), his cousin Spooky the Tuff Ghost (Rob Paulsen), and Spooky's girlfriend Poil (Sherry Lynn).

I didn't care much for The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper when I first reviewed it in 2022. The episode I reviewed had Casper helping the astronauts on the Apollo 13 shuttle, scaring his uncles by playing a record of some woman singing in a foreign language (it makes just as little sense in contex), and disguising himself as a human boy. I didn't care for it. Mostly because the episode consisted mostly of pop culture references and characters being snarky. Y'know, kind of like Animaniacs, except that show had actually funny gags and heart to make up for the lame pop culture references (by the way, I know I said in my first review that the writers worked on Animaniacs, but according to IMDB only one of them aside from Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver, Chris Otsuki, did. My mistake). It probably doesn't help that I didn't care for the movie much when I rewatched it in 2015. But I know the show does have its fans, so I'm gonna take another look at it and see if I just happened to watch one of the weaker episodes the first time around.

I was originally going to do a review of the nineteenth episode, but it wasn't giving me enough joke material - plus, as I was typing up the review, my computer ran out of power and most of the review I'd written got erased, and I didn't feel like retyping all of it. So instead, we're watching the twenty-fifth episode of the show (the fifteenth episode of the third season). Once again, this is The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper.

The first segment of this episode is called "Gargoils". This one focuses on Stretch, Fatso and Stinky... who, I should mention right now, are characters who I found incredibly annoying and unlikable in the movie. In fact, the only reason I probably didn't hate the previous episode I reviewed more is because they weren't in it much. So this segment's having them be the stars doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

Anyway, the three ghosts are at some sort of ghost dating service. They want "three hot babes" for the night. "And we ain't talkin' talkin' pigs!" Fatso says, the first of what I assume will be MANY pop cutlture references in this episode. You see, they're recieving the MVS - that's the most Valuable Spook Award.

I know the Nostalgia Critic already brought this up in his review of the film, but why
do some of the ghosts have hair and clothes but Casper and his uncles don't?

So the ghost matchmaker sets Stretch, Fatso and Stinkie up with three gargoyles. NOT the ones from the beloved Disney cartoon show (note to self: review Gargoyles at some point), but these lovely ladies. One of them is, for some reason, a caricature of Rosie O'Donnell. I'm pretty sure the other two are supposed to be caricatures as well, but I'm not sure of who. One of them sounds like a bad impression of Rosie Perez, but I don't know if she ever looked like that. The third one... maybe Roseanne Barr? I don't know.

Why are they caricatures? Is the show trying to imply, by making these three celebrities into gargoyles, that they're ugly? Or is it just because celebrity caricatures are automatically hilarious or something? I'm guessing the latter.

And why WOULD somebody sculpt a gargoyle to look like Rosie O'Donnell? Gargoyles
are supposed to ward off evil spirits. I don't imagine that a lot of evil spirits would be scared
of 1990s talk show hosts...

Fatso and Stinkie lament that if they show up at the ceremony with those "pigeon potties", they'll be laughingstocks. "We'll have to go stag," Stretch says. Fatso, whose elevator doesn't go all the way to the top if you get what I mean, pulls out three literal stags.

"You'd better have a good reason for dragging us away from our reindeer games."

The gargoyles make a reference to Showgirls, because... it exists, right? Stretch, Fatso and Stinkie tell them that they can't go out with them because, uh, Fatso has chicken pox, and then fly off laughing... but the gargoyles show up at the ceremony anyway. They already had chicken pox in the sixteenth century. I didn't know gargoyles could get chicken pox. I'm learning so much today!

I guess the joke is that they're all based on celebrities with "Rose" in their name?

"If only there was a way to turn 'em into ghosts!" Fatso says. Oh, jeez, is this gonna go where I think it's going? Are they gonna try to kill the gargoyles? Is it even POSSIBLE to kill a gargoyle? It's made of stone, after all...

Fortunately, they don't attempt to commit gargocide. Instead, they tell the gargoyles that the party is a COSTUME party, so they'll have to go in disguised as ghosts. Despite how laughably bad their ghost costumes are, everybody buys it, because apparently all the ghosts at this party are as dumb as Fatso.

That's the worst Patrick Star costume I've ever seen.

(See? I can make pop culture references too. Doesn't make me funny)

Of course, their costumes wind up falling off, revealing to everyone that they're gargoyles. The ghosts are shocked and appalled by this. Ghosts are racist against gargoyles, it would seem. One unfunny sequence later, the gargoyles return to their posts and ask Stretch, Fatso and Stinkie if they can go out again sometime. Only problem is, they only come to life once a year, so they'll have to wait a while. 

All's well that ends well, right? Well, no. You see, Ms. Banshee, who seems to have some sort of on-again off-again relationship with the trio, was at the ceremony, and she's mad that they went out with somebody else. The moral of today's story, as she puts it, is that Hades knows no fury like a wraith scorned.

Next we get a commercial for an album of Ms. Banshees' Public Domain Hits. The only joke of this segment is that Mrs. Banshee screeches random lyrics of the songs she's singing. Dear lord, I hope Tress MacNeille was paid well for this role. It must've put quite a strain on her vocal cords.

I'm gonna be seeing those teeth in my nightmares.

Order now, and you will also recieve such soon-to-be-classics as "How Dry I Am - Thanks to Pampers", "Skip to My Lou Grant", and "Ring Around Rosie O'Donnell" (why are these writers so obsessed with Rosie O'Donnell?). There are only two good things about this segment. One, the announcer is Jim Cummings, which automatically makes it better. And two, as the random song names fly up the screen, they eventually start including things like "No, Really, You Think Up Some Goofy Titles!", "Is Anyone Reading This?", and "Go Read a Book or Something!". Also, the offer is prohibited in states containing vowels and is not avaliable in areas surrounding lakes. An actually funny joke? It must be my birthday!

Our third segment, "Boobsom Buddies", begins with Stretch telling Stinkie that he's "about as scary as Valerie Bertinelli". Of course the actually funny joke is immediately followed by a pop culture reference. Even if the kids watching this when it aired in 1997 knew who Valerie Bertinelli was (I didn't even know, I had to look it up!), did they actually consider this joke funny?

Casper - yes, the main character of the show is actually IN this episode - and Dr. Harvey find Stretch, Fatso and Stinkie arguing over which of them is responsible for their losing The Price is Right... oh, I mean, The Price is FRIGHT... because they weren't scary enough. Who won? Howard Stern. Is Howard Stern considered scary? Simply mentioning a celebrity is not a joke.

Casper seems exasperated by his own cartoon. I feel your pain, Casper.

"Don't you game show losers ever speak to me again!" Stretch tells Fatso and Stinkie. Then he pushes their beds out the window and announces that he's evicting them. "Can't we all just get along?" Casper asks. Well, Casper, I've spent enough time on the internet to know that, no, we can't.

So, Fatso decides to sleep in Casper's room. He keeps Casper up all night, so when Casper leaves for school the next morning, he's exhausted. On top of THAT, Stinkie decides to go to school wtih Casper. He makes a reference to Saved By the Bell because, again, it exists, so that makes it funny, right?

Isn't this more or less a painfully unfunny version of the SpongeBob episode "Naughty
Nautical Neighbors"? I know this show premiered before SpongeBob, but still...

At ghost school, Stinkie charms Ms. Banshee and douses the class with rotten milk (it's "show and smell"). All the other ghost students love Stinkie, and he announces that he's going to join Casper at school EVERY DAY, much to Casper's dismay. Then when he gets home, he finds out that STRETCH wants to hang out with him, too.

Those veins in Casper's head are even scarier than Ms. Banshee's teeth.

After talking to Dr. Harvey about the situation, Casper thinks up a way to get Stretch, Fatso and Stinkie to make up. He invites each of them to a special banquet for best firends only. Of course, when they show up, they're not pleased by the presence of the other two ghosts, and a food fight starts up while Casper attempts to make a milkshake. Then a tornado pops out of the blender for some reason and sucks everything in. When Casper turns off the blender, his uncles spill out, now blended into... this:

This whole fiasco causes the three of them to make up. All's well that ends well... except that now they're gonna go back to tormenting Casper. No good deed goes unpunished.

What's the Verdict?

Sorry, but I'm still gonna have to put The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper in the "not worth your time" category. The best thing I can say about it is that the animation and voice acting are good. But that's not enough to make up for how painfully unfunny the show is.

Pop culture references in of themselves ARE NOT JOKES. If you're going to make them, at least have some sort of logic behind them. For instance, it wasn't funny when Mighty Max made references to The Flintstones, but if nothing else they had SOMETHING to do with what was going on: he was talking to a caveman, and The Flintstones is an iconic cartoon about cavemen. Even when I make stupid unfunny pop culture references, it's because they have something to do with what's going on in the cartoons I review. Here, they just have the characters mention Howard Stern and Valerie Bertinelli and Showgirls for seemingly no reason.

Problem number two - as the show went on, it started to focus more on Stretch, Stinkie and Fatso than Casper, and I really don't like these three as characters. They're not quite as hateable here as they are in the movie (they don't do anything as bad as, say, mocking Kat over the fact that her father turned into a ghost and she was now an orphan), but they're loud, annoying, and have most of the least funny lines. Casper himself is basically just reduced to reacting with exasperation to their antics here - basically, he's the Dr. Scratchensniff to their Yakko, Wakko and Dot.

So, no, I wouldn't recommend watching The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper. Even if you like the movie, there's not much of substance here. As I said before, the Animaniacs style of humor can only really be pulled off by Animaniacs itself, and most attempts to ape it wind up being washes.

I should probably mention, by the way, that I wasn't really in the Halloween spirit this year at all. The first chunk of October, my family was pretty busy with my sister's wedding. And after that I still didn't really have time to do full reviews. I'm not a huge fan of Halloween in general, but this year, in particular, I really just wanted to get through the month so I could start doing reviews of non-Halloween stuff again. So my apologies if it didn't feel like my heart was in any of these October posts. I'll make up for it during the Christmas season.