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.

Did You Know? - Fun Facts About The Nightmare Before Christmas

Welcome to another edition of a series that I like to call Did You Know?. Inspired a little by the Nostalgia Critic's "What You Never Knew" series, this series will allow me to share with you some interesting tidbits, behind-the-scenes information, and fun facts about an animated movie or TV series. Because I like sharing new information with people.

Question: What's the one movie that qualifies as both a Halloween movie AND a Christmas movie? Answer: The Nightmare Before Christmas.

While it was directed by Henry Selick, not Tim Burton (as the internet will make clear to you), this movie is still very much a Tim Burton creation. Well, it was more of a collaboration between Tim, Henry, and Danny Elfman. But it was Tim who wrote the poem that the movie was based on. It's beloved, not just by goth kids who shop at Hot Topic, but by a whole lotta folks. And there's a good reason for that - it's a good movie! It's got lots of creepy, kooky characters and a great soundtrack, and some real heart to it.

...so how the heck did Henry Selick go from directing this to being responsible for Monkeybone?

Okay, we're not here to talk about Monkeybone (the less said about that movie, the better). We're here to talk about The Nightmare Before Christmas. You probably already know that Jack Skellington makes cameos in many of Tim Burton and Henry Selick's other films (for example, his head is the yolk of an egg in Coraline). And you probably already know that most of the actors in the film do double-duty - Catherine O'Hara is both Sally AND Shock, Danny Elfman is Jack's singing voice, Barrel, AND the Clown With the Tear-Away Face, and so on. But did you know any of THESE things about the movie?

1) Believe it or not, Danny Elfman wrote the songs for the film before a script was written. According to him, "Tim would show me sketches and drawings, and he would tell me the story, describe it in bits of phrases and words and I would say 'Yeah, I got it.' Three days later, I had a song."

In a 1993 interview, Danny said, "The first thing I told Disney is that there weren't going to be any pop songs. That was exactly what we wanted to get away from. The songs are more classical musical. For this film, my influences are Kurt Weill to Rodgers and Hammerstein with a little bit of Gilbert and Sullivan."

Concept art for Jack Skellington's arrival in Christmas Town.

2) Not only were the songs written before the script, but Henry Selick and his crew started filming the movie before the script was completed as well! One minute of the movie took about a week to shoot, and the film as a whole took three years to finish.

3) How did Tim think up the idea? Well, apparently in Burbank it's common for Halloween and Christmas decorations to be put on display in stores at the same time... just like everywhere else. Tim saw this one day and the gears in his head started turning.

4) Tim originally thought up the film as a stop-motion TV special. Why stop-motion? Some of his inspirations included the work of Ray Harryhausen, the Rankin-Bass Christmas specials, Czench stop-motion animator Karel Zeman, Russian/French/Polish stop-motion animator Ladislas Starevich, and even the Chuck Jones adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. He pitched the idea to Disney in 1983. They suggested doing it in hand-drawn animation, with the animation done by Nelvana. "But I just said no, it's got to be stop-motion. That's part of what it is: stop-motion," Tim insisted. So the project sat on the shelf for a while and Tim worked on projects like his 1982 short film Vincent (which an early version of Jack makes a cameo appearance in) and the original live action version of Frankenweenie...

5) ...until the film's producers and Paul Reubens, impressed by Tim Burton's work at Disney, offered him the chance to direct Pee-Wee's Big Adventure at Warner Bros. After that film was a success, Tim directed 1988's Beetlejuice, which was also a box office hit and led to Warner Bros. hiring him to direct a new Batman movie. Edward Scissorhands, his next film, was also very successful, cementing Tim's status as a director you could turn to for a guaranteed box office hit. But he still wanted to do The Nightmare Before Christmas, identifying with Jack Skellington a lot: a guy who, despite being very successful and popular, was bored and wanted to try something new. In 1990, Tim Burton's agent reached out to Disney and asked them if they still owned The Nightmare Before Christmas - they did, and they were thrilled by the thought of working with Tim Burton. To make things full circle, Paul Reubens provided the voice of Lock in the finished film - fitting that the guy who's partly responsible for it getting off the ground got to take part in it!

And while we're on the subject... I'm gonna try not to bring up Monkeybone too much in this post, but it was directed by Henry Selick, so I suppose I should mention this... originally, the monkey was going to be voiced by Paul Reubens. According to at least one review, he left production after reading the script (Monkeybone wound up being voiced by John Tuturro trying way too hard instead). Very wise move, Paul.

Here is the original Marquette of Jack Skellington.

6) At the same time that Tim was crafting Nightmare, he was also working on a project called "Trick or Treat" - about a brother and sister stumbling inside a house filled with monsters on Halloween Night. Nothing came out of the idea, apparently because Disney didn't like it, but you can find concept art online that suggests it was a big influence on Nightmare.

7) Henry Selick was the one who added white pinstripes to Jack's suit - he thought it would help Jack stand out in front of the already dark set.

8) If you pause at the right time during "This Is Halloween", when Oogie Boogie's shadow on the moon becomes a flock of bats, you can actually see the strings holding up the bats! (This was the 1990s, they likely didn't have the technology to go in and digitally remove the strings)

9) The first test animation for the film was done in office space rented at Tippett Studio, owned by stop-motion animator Phil Tippett. For those who don't know, Phil worked on such films as the first two Star Wars movies, Jurassic Park, DragonHeart, My Favorite Martian, and The Spiderwick Chronicles.

Tom St. Amand, who created the armatures that gave the characters their range of motion, said, "The main challenge with the puppets on this film was to make them animator friendly. Some of the puppets have really small feet and spindly bodies, not typical at all for stop-motion, and we had to make them move with as few restrictions as possible."

10) Originally, Zero was going to be hand-drawn animation, adding the characters on top of the stop-motion footage at a percent to effect a transparent look. For whatever reason, they eventually decided to just have Zero be stop-motion like everyone else.

Concept art for some of Halloween Town's residents. I think the only one who didn't
make it into the movie is the one-eyed green blob thing.

11) Oogie Boogie was inspired by Betty Boop cartoons - specifically, the ones where Cab Calloway would perform a song and they'd rotoscope his dance moves (remember that one where he was a walrus?). Writer Caroline Thompson felt Oogie was a racist stereotype and tried to get Tim and Henry to overhaul the character, to no avail.

11) The animators had special trapdoors cut into the soundstages where the sets were built so they could more easily reach in and manipulate the puppets.

12) Tim thought it would be great to give life to characters who had no eyes ("I used to torture Disney by saying 'It's great, there's the first character with no eyeballs. Then they'd get all paranoid," he said in an interview with Cartoon Research). Disney didn't agree, and fought very hard to give Jack some eyes. Tim and his crew wouldn't budge - which is good, because honestly, I think Jack would've looked even scarier with eyes...

Tim Burton with some of the film's puppets.

13) Tim's original choice for the voice of Santa Claus was Vincent Price. Yes, THAT Vincent Price.

14) At some point, it was going to be revealed that Oogie Boogie was actually Dr. Finklestein in disguise, much to Jack, Sally, and Santa's confusion. He was mad because Sally had a thing for Jack and wanted revenge. Tim rejected the idea (which I agree would've been pretty stupid), and apparently hated it so much that he punched a hole in a wall.

15) Two of the kids who receive toys from Jack are wearing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck pajamas.

16) Danny Elfman said in an interview that the hardest song for him to write was Sally's song. "That was a big challenge, because there always is a ballad in a musical and Tim and I both really, really did not want to do the obligatory pop ballad, so I really wanted to find a ballad that would work for Sally, that would not schlock up the score," he explained. "In musicals for a long time, when the ballad starts is when I always go get something to drink. It's like I just want to come back afterwards. I know it's the one part of the score that I have no interest in, that loses me completely. It was my biggest challenge in a way to come up with a ballad that, if I were watching it, I wouldn't want to think because, 'Oh God, here comes the schlock time.' If she suddenly burst into a really gutsy song it wouldn't really fit her character. She is a wispy thing and she's not sure who she is or what she is. She's fresh. She's just recently made, in fact. So it was my desire to find something that felt very ethereal and gentle for her."

Catherine O'Hara was also insecure about doing Sally's singing. "She was insecure going in because, at that point, she had never really done that sort of thing," Danny explained, "But I knew she could do it and I thought she did it perfectly."

17) Speaking of the songs, at one point in production Henry became concerned that maybe there were too many musical numbers in the film. "I was telling Tim, 'People aren't used to this many songs in an animated film*. I'm worried that that's going to lose some of the audience'," he said. "So we finish the film, and they do their trims, and then he comes to me and says, 'You know, Henry, I think you're right, we've got too many songs. We've got to cut one or two.' There weren't many times I could really go to Tim and say 'No, we're not going to,' but that was the time. I said, 'Tim, I'm convinced that every song has to stay because every song is so important to tell the emotional story of the film.' And I convinced him that I hadn't been right and we need to keep the songs. They had become such an integral part of the film - character development, the emotional center and just basic storytelling - that I felt there would be a huge hole that would leave confusion. And also the running time - the movie was a very short feature, like 74 minutes, and I felt it just wasn't going to be long enough."

Concept art of Lock, Shock and Barrel.

18) Behemoth - the big grey-skinned guy with a hatchet in his head - is based on Swedish wrestler and Plan 9 From Outer Space actor Tor Johnson.

19) The sewing machine that Sally uses features a spider spinning a web - the web's string is used as "thread" for the machine. Very reminiscent of a joke you'd see in The Flintstones, isn't it?

20) And while we're on the subject of spiders and webs, you might notice that the stones in the walkway at Jack's house are arranged in a spiderweb pattern.

21) Mr. Hyde has a smaller duplicate of himself under his hat, and that duplicate in turn has an even smaller duplicate under HIS hat. And then, during the "Making Christmas" song, we see the three Mr. Hydes working on a set of nesting dolls. Now THAT'S a clever joke.

22) According to Henry Selick, Oogie Boogie was the toughest character to design because he's "big and pretty shapeless". "He was a bear of a puppet to move," he explained, "He was much bigger, much heavier... Oogie was a wrestling match. It was the most taxing, draining character to give him some sense of fluidity, keep him big, have him be fun, and then, of course, when the threads are pulled from his burlap sack of skin and all the bugs are revealed, that was a pretty nightmarish shot."

23) The Clown With the Tear-Away Face is, in my opinion, one of the creepiest characters in the movie (which likely stems from my being afraid of clowns). But would you believe that he was originally even creepier? Henry said in an interview that in the storyboards, when he tore his face off, it was far more disgusting. "He would tear his face away and it was like flesh and blood underneath," he stated. "We didn't shoot that, but it was in the storyboards and I just knew that that was kind of grotesque. It suddenly became like a horror film, like Halloween or something John Carpenter. We self-edited that and just made it an empty space."

24) Remember Tim Burton's 2012 animated film Frankenweenie? That movie based on the aforementioned live action short film Tim made in 1984, right? Well, look closely at the box of dog biscuits that Dr. Finklestein has:

That's Frankenweenie on the box.

25) Bonita DeCarlo, who'd previously worked with Henry Selick on fifty-two Pillsbury Doughboy commercials, was the film's character fabricator supervisor. Her favorite puppet used in the film was the one of Jack in his scarecrow costume during "This Is Halloween". "It was the first time we see Jack in the movie," she said. "There was only one created, and I insisted on doing the fabrication myself."

26) The hardest shot in the movie to film was the close-up shot of the knob on the door to Christmas Town with Jack's reflection on it. Getting the reflection just right took a lot of time, care, and attention.

27) Disney initially considered setting up a new division called "Touchstone Animation" to make the film. Instead, it was made and released under the regular ol' Touchstone banner. Why not just release it under the Disney banner? Well, they were afraid it was too scary for the typical Disney animation audience (and yet The Black Cauldron, which was considered so scary that Jeffrey Katzenberg started physically editing scenes in an attempt to tone it down, WAS released under the Disney banner. Go figure).

28) You likely already know about Disneyland's annual Haunted Mansion Christmas overlay featuring the characters from the film. But before that, in 1996, an Imagineer named Chris Merritt submitted a proposal for a dark ride based on The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Concept art for the attraction.

His idea was to have guests enter Halloween Town through the tree with the Jack O'Lantern-shaped door featured in the film, then board coffin sleighs for a tour of Halloween Town. Apparently, the reason this didn't get off the ground is because people around Imagineering didn't think The Nightmare Before Christmas was a good enough movie.

In case you're wondering if anything Nightmare Before Christmas ever made it to Walt Disney World... well, we've never gotten a Christmas overlay of the Haunted Mansion for some reason, but if you go on the ride there are several hidden Jack Skellingtons to look for. For example, in the library, one book has a picture of Jack on it, while another is labeled "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and has Jack's face on the spine. And in the attic, you can find another book with Jack on the cover, a Jack snow globe, and a Jack plush doll. Puppets and sets from the film were also displayed at the Backlot Tour featured at Disney's Hollywood Studios (or, as it was called in the 1990s, Disney-MGM Studios) for a while as well.

29) Tim Burton told MTV in 2006 that he's never had any interest in doing a sequel to the film: "I was always very protective of [the film], not to do sequels or things of that kind. You know, 'Jack visits Thanksgiving World' or other kinds of things, just because I felt the movie had a purity to it and the people that like it. Because it's not a mass-market kind of thing, it was important to kind of keep that purity of it. I try to respect people and keep the purity of it as much as possible."

30) However, at some point Michael Mullin and a bunch of artists met with a business team from Disney's offices in Japan, who told them that since The Nightmare Before Christmas was so popular there, they wanted to expand the property so they could make more merchandise. They asked, "What if Jack Skellington went to the OTHER holiday lands?" Everyone agreed that would be cool, but they knew Tim Burton probably wouldn't approve of a sequel to the movie, one that he would have nothing to do with at that, just to sell more Jack Skellington dolls. And Michael was the only writer in the room, so the chances of them whipping up something good enough for Tim were very, very small.

So Michael thought up two ideas: The Nightmare Before Easter ("I know that's a lazy title, but it was necessary from a branding perspective," he admitted) and A Midsummer Night's Scream. He showed the stories to folks at Disney Publishing, who said that they were great but they couldn't do anything with them. As it turned out, though, Tim Burton still approved all Nightmare products and their packaging, AND Michael knew the woman who sent him these items to approve of. So he printed out both stories and had her send them to Tim with the next batch. About a week later, he got a call from Mr. Burton's agent. Tim loved the stories and wanted to meet Michael.

At the meeting, Tim and Michael discussed the popularity of the characters, recent shifts in licensing and the retail industry, and the stories. Since Tim didn't want to do a sequel MOVIE, he agreed with Michael that the best thing to do would be to publish them as books. Michael's mindset was, since The Nightmare Before Christmas was a year-round merchandising property with a particularly big push in the fall (Halloween) and winter (Christmas) seasons, the books he wrote could extend that push through spring (Valentine's Day and Easter), guaranteeing the company more revenue as a result. He even got Deane Taylor, the film's art director, to whip up the illustrations for The Nightmare Before Easter I've been including here.

But no one at Disney moved forward with the stories in any way. A couple of years later, Michael reconnected with the executive who'd become Disney's President of Feature Animation and told her the whole story. He made it clear that he intended to make these stories into books, but of course she wound up getting Dick Cook (then the chairman of Walt Disney Studios) and Michael Eisner involved, and they essentially ambushed Tim Burton with a pitch for two sequel movies. They also offered Michael the screenwriting gig on both, which he accepted, even though he knew that Tim would never go for the idea. And he didn't.

Michael summed up the whole mess like this: "Disney is an enormous, very complex company. Despite all that happened, I never blamed any one person or department. A colleague at the time put it best when he said: 'Creatively, Disney can't get out of its own way.' I'd argue this is still the case, best exemplified with the trend of live-action remakes of animated films. It's all driven by ROI, and the practice is creatively lazy. The same, tired stance about pleasing stockholders, blah, blah, blah."

You can read the two stories that Michael wrote on his website - here is part one of The Nightmare Before Easter, here is part two, and here is A Midsummer Night's Scream.

30) In 2003, Tim was asked at a Disneyana Fan Club convention if there were plans for a Broadway adaptation of the movie. He said no - "We thought we'd go right to the ice show."

Concept art of Jack filling in for Santa.

31) Near the end, when Santa gives Halloween Town snow, at one point we see the vampires playing hockey. They're using a pumpkin as a puck. Originally, the pumpkin was going to be a severed head - Tim Burton's, to be precise. "And it was really funny. And Denise Di Novi or one of the Hollywood producers told me, 'I don't think Tim's going to like that.' And I feel so stupid for not just asking him," Henry told the Hollywood Reporter in 2018.

Sources:
- https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/influences-before-the-nightmare-began/
- https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-nightmare-before-christmas-puppet-fabrication-part-1/
- https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-nightmare-before-christmas-puppet-fabrication-part-2/
- https://www.insider.com/nightmare-before-christmas-facts-2018
- https://www.mouseplanet.com/12183/The_Making_of_Tim_Burtons_The_Nightmare_Before_Christmas__Part_One
- https://www.mouseplanet.com/12188/The_Making_of_Tim_Burtons_The_Nightmare_Before_Christmas__Part_Two
- https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/7-things-you-didnt-know-about-tim-burtons-the-nightmare-before-christmas/
- https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/60723/21-things-you-didnt-know-about-nightmare-christmas

* Clearly, Henry never heard of Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure, which came out two decades earlier and contained... how many songs? It has to be at least fifteen. Of course, that movie was a flop, so maybe he was right to be concerned about the number of songs...

The Animation and All Things Related House of Horrors, Part 2: Museum of the Weird Mascot Costumes

If you understood the reference in the name of the post, you're clearly as big of a Disney fan as I am. Congratulations.

Previously, our trek through the Animation and All Things Related House of Horrors took us through the Lair of the Creepy Toys, filled to the brim with disturbing-looking dolls, plushes, and figurines (didn't know it was possible to make a Mickey Mouse doll look terrifying? Guess what, it IS). Today, I'll be showing you even MORE horrifying creatures masquerading as beloved cartoon characters. Ones that will repulse you. Ones that will make you cringe...

No, I'm not doing a review of Jellystone!. This section of the Animation and All Things Related House of Horrors is packed with costumed versions of cartoon characters. You know, the kind you see at theme parks, or at movie premieres, or at birthday parties or whatever. I know some people are afraid of "mascot costumes", but I don't think I've ever had a problem with them. With some exceptions... one time my family went to Perkins and they were having a "Character Night", which meant there was somebody in a Tweety Bird costume wandering around the tables. I remember finding that giant Tweety off-putting.

The art of designing a mascot costume is one that's been covered in great detail by several YouTubers, notably Disney Dan and Nathan Spies (if you haven't watched any of their videos, I highly recommend it). Most of the time, you'll get something appealing-looking. For example, here's the Porky Pig they have wandering around Six Flags:

That looks great, doesn't it? Exactly like the animated character it's based on (well, maybe not EXACTLY, but you know what I mean). Or how about these Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo costumes?

Those are fantastic! But sometimes, you get a mascot costume that's supposed to be a beloved cartoon character but is more likely to make fans of the character run away screaming than run up to give them a hug. Some of these are official mascot costumes, others are bootlegs you can find on Etsy or running amok in Times Square. Enter, if you dare...

These Disney Character Costumes From the Ice Capades

Let's start off with an obvious one - at some point before Disneyland opened, several Disney characters appeared in one of the Ice Capades shows. They looked horrifying. For some reason, they couldn't get better-looking Mickey, Minnie, Pluto etc. costumes made in time for the grand opening of Disneyland in 1955, so they had these nightmare-inducing things run around the park. Mickey and Minnie, in particular, looked horrific. Eventually, they had those weird slices in their faces filled in, but given the addition of angry eyebrows:

This did not help at all.

These Early Mickey and Minnie Mouse Costumes

...and before the Ice Capades, THIS was how Mickey and Minnie were brought into the real world. Even that kid in the photo looks creeped-out.

The Costumes Used in That Live Phineas and Ferb Show

This is another relatively well-known one. I guess Ferb doesn't look TOO bad, but the others... yeesh. Not quite human, not quite cartoon character... isn't this what the plot of Cool World originally going to be? A human/cartoon character hybrid viewing herself as a freak and revolting against her human father?

For more information about this show, please watch Disney Dan's video about it. Apologies in advance for the nightmares!

Pretty Much Every Single Lola Bunny (Looney Tunes) Costume Ever Made

I can't think of a single cartoon character that's had more awful-looking mascot costumes than Lola Bunny. I don't know what it is about her design (maybe the fact that they tried to make her "hot", or the permanent DreamWorks Face she sports), but they still have yet to make a Lola Bunny costume that actually looks decent. And putting her next to a good-looking Bugs costume just makes her look even worse.

This Hyacinth Hippo (Fantasia) Costume

You know Hyacinth Hippo, don't you? The leader of the cheery dancing hippos in Fantasia, likely the reason why people think hippos are kindhearted souls until they go to Africa and discover that they're actually incredibly aggressive and one of the most dangerous animals in all of Africa? Well, this is what she looks like on those rare occasions when they bring her into the theme parks. It's always bothered me that they made her pink (she's not pink in the movie. She's brown!), but honestly, that's the least of this costume's worries. If somebody wore this on a trip to Africa, I bet actual hippos would take one look at it and run away screaming.

These Cosmo and Wanda (The Fairly OddParents!) Costumes

I don't think Butch Hartman's art style translates that well into three dimensions.

This Bootleg Sid the Sloth (Ice Age) Costume

The coloring is wrong. The face shape is wrong. The hair is wrong. The hands and feet are wrong. Everything about this costume is wrong. But I'm sure it'll come in handy when Ice Age enters the public domain and somebody inevitably decides to make a horror movie based on it.

These Timon, Pumbaa, and Rafiki (The Lion King) Costumes

For some inexplicable reason, Disney decided to use these in one of the Disney On Ice shows. I think Pumbaa's making that face because he just saw himself in a mirror.

This Ursula (The Little Mermaid) Costume

That poor unfortunate soul they forced to dressed like this...

This Porky Pig Costume From the 1940s

I'm a member of the Cartoon Research Facebook group, and recently fellow member Devon Baxter shared this photo with us dubbing it "Pure nightmare fuel from 1940." And that's a great way of describing it. I don't know which is freakier, that Porky costume or the dolls in the background.

These Bootleg Cat in the Hat Costumes

What makes these costumes horrifying is that they seem to specifically be based on the Mike Myers version of the Cat in the Hat. Let's be honest, the Mike Myers version of the Cat in the Hat was already pretty creepy-looking, so I have no idea why anyone would model their Cat in the Hat suit after it. At least this one doesn't curse...

This Captain Caveman Costume

Did they even have a reference picture when they were making this? Why the black beady eyes with the weird white mask around it? Why the oversized tongue sticking out? Maybe Captain Caveman is just hard to translate to a walkaround costume, but surely they could've made something more on-model than THIS.

The Big Hero 6 Character Costumes Used at Disneyland Paris

When Hiro, the main character from Disney's 2014 release Big Hero 6, did meet-and-greets in the American parks, they used a "face" character - as in, a character without a mask. That's what they usually do for human characters in the parks (such as the Disney princes and princesses, Peter Pan, Alice, what have you). For whatever reason, in Disneyland Paris they decided to make Hiro and his friends "fur" characters - the kind with masks. And... yeah. Suddenly it becomes pretty obvious why the American parks used a face character...

This Jessica Rabbit (Who Framed Roger Rabbit) Costume

And speaking of Disneyland Paris, this is what they did when they decided to do a Jessica Rabbit meet and greet. She's not bad, she's just... actually, yeah, she's bad.

This Genie (Aladdin) Costume They Use at Disneyland Paris

I dare say this is on par with the CGI blue Will Smith version of the Genie from the 2019 remake.

This Shrek Costume they used at Universal Studios in 2001

Just so we're clear, I'm obviously not trying to say that the guy WEARING the costume has an ugly face or anything. It's just... there's a lot of Uncanny Valley going on with this costume. Fortunately, they didn't stick with this costume - at some point they started using a "fur character" Shrek instead of painting somebody's face green. It worked for Brian D'Arcy James, but it's not working for this guy.

This Dino (The Flintstones) Costume

Judging by the presence of Elizabeth Perkins and Rosie O'Donnell lookalikes, I believe this Dino is intended to look like the one from the live action movie adaptation of The Flintstones. That live action puppet/CGI Dino already looked a little creepy, but when you make it gigantic, suddenly it's terrifying. I think it's mainly those eyes...

These Hotel Transylvania Character Costumes

Yeah, they're monsters, they're SUPPOSED to be scary, but still...

This Bo Peep (Toy Story) Costume

I get what they were trying to do here, but... those EYES. Those LIPS. That weird plastic mask. Somebody tell this creature that its sheep wandered off so it'll go away.

This Bootleg Woody (Toy Story) Costume

There's something about the needlessly shiny face and his vacant expression that creeps me out. The shirt looks good, though, I'll give it that...

Incidentally, the same company that made this also made a Buzz Lightyear costume. Yes, it looks just as creepy.

This Fairy Godmother (Cinderella) Costume They Use at Tokyo Disneyland

Okay, there's a reason why the Fairy Godmother they use in the American parks is a face character. This is that reason.

This Doug Funnie (Doug) Costume

Say what you will about the Disney version of Doug - at least it led to a better-looking Doug walkaround than this one.

This Tommy Pickles (Rugrats) Costume

This is actually a pretty nice recreation of the cruder, more off-putting art style of the first season of Rugrats. Still, and I know this is an obvious joke, but... I've heard of fame going to your head, but this is ridiculous...

This Gadget (Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers) Costume

This one isn't TOO bad. It's mainly the eyes. She looks stoned.

This Mildew Wolf Costume

Not even the somewhat-obscure Hanna-Barbera characters are safe from having creepy costumes made of them. Now THIS is a Big Bad Wolf that I, for one, AM afraid of.

This Shaggy Rogers (Scooby-Doo) Costume

I also found out about this one via Facebook. All I can say is, zoinks...

This Abby Mallard (Chicken Little) Costume

Abby Mallard is the "Ugly Duckling", sure, but she isn't THAT ugly. In the movie, she's at least "Ugly Cute". This is just straight-up HIDEOUS.

This Bootleg SpongeBob SquarePants Costume

That poor kid. I think just looking at that thing is enough to scar her for life.

These Lumiere (Beauty and the Beast) Costumes

Okay, Disney Dan already talked about these costumes in his "Top 10 Creepiest Costume Characters at Disney Parks" video (I'm not limiting myself to just Disney characters, so this post is totally different!), but they're still worth bringing up. They have a perfectly good Lumiere costume they use in the Disney parks for stuff like the Beauty and the Beast live show at Disney's Hollywood Studios, so why on Earth would they create these disturbing half-face character/half-fur character hybrid things? Nobody looked at these and thought "Gee, these look utterly horrifying"? That bottom one in particular looks less like Lumiere and more like a demonic clown.

I... think this thing is supposed to be a bootleg Donald Duck Costume

I think this one speaks for itself, really...

The good news is, these creepy-looking mascot costumes tend to be the exception, not the rule. Companies like Olympus Mascots, Loonie Times, and International Mascots are able to translate iconic cartoon characters into walkaround costumes quite well, and Disney has been getting better and better at making great-looking costumes. So if you encounter a mascot costume in the wild, chances are it won't wind up in your nightmares.

Thus concludes our trip through the Animation and All Things Related House of Horrors. Now I will raise the safety bar and a creepy Tommy Pickles will follow you home!

Hurry back... hurry baaaaaaa-aaaaaaaack...