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TV Special Tonight!: The Last Halloween

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As you know (unless you’ve been living under a rock, not that we’re judging you, rent’s high, man), October is the month of Halloween. To honor the occasion, we’ll be looking at a forgotten Halloween special, a spooky, haunting outing starring a scary group of…space aliens.

“What da what??”

Yes, that’s right, space aliens. Today’s TV Special Tonight spotlights The Last Halloween, a live action/animated Halloween television special produced by Hanna-Barbera. It premiered and first aired on CBS on October 28, 1991. It received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects. The visual effects and animation were provided by Industrial Light & Magic and Pacific Data Images.
The_Last_Halloween
Fun Trivia fact: Bill Hanna himself provided the narration for this special. Also, the special tied into a marketing campaign that candy company M&M/Mars was doing at the time, Mission from Mars.

“Money, money, moooney! MOOO-NAY!”

The plot (such as it is) a tad..clunky. Upon watching it, you’ll find yourself going “Whaaa…?” a lot.
The special is set in a town called Crystal Lake, not a camp called Crystal Lake, so no cameo by Jason Voorhees.
Four aliens – Gleep (Paul Williams), Romtu (Don Messick), Scoota (Frank Welker), and Bing (also Frank Welker) have been sent to Earth from the planet Mars (’cause it had a product tie-in with M&M/MARS. Get it? Get it??) in order to find a rare material known as “coobi” (which is later revealed to be candy). After crash landing on Earth, they wander the streets searching for “coobi,” but are mistaken for trick-or-treaters and ignored. When Scoota gets a strong reading on his “coobi meter,” the four aliens chase down two children, Jeanie (Sarah Matinek) and Michael (Will Nipper), into the woods. The children learn about the aliens’ mission and agree to help them collect candy.
space_goofs__by_boxbird_dbzey7r-fullview
“Feh. When we landed on Earth, were we befriended by nice kids? No! We got chased into a creepy house and were forced to live there. Yeah, life’s fair!”
 
Naturally, keeping in tune with TV and Movie Cliches 101, when the aliens patrol the streets in search of candy, they are of course mistaken for kids in costumes, despite them looking like things that fell out of the Master Controller’s nose.

If you saw these guys on your block, you wouldn’t think they were trick-or-treaters, you’d think that George Lucas was holding auditions for his next unnecessary Star Wars prequel.

One of the many little less-than-thoroughly explored subplots in this special is how Michael wigs over how his sister Jennie always wears the same costume every Halloween; the reason being that said costume was crafted by the kids’ late mother, who has apparently died of CFMDS (Convenient Fictional Mother Death Syndrome–an illness which runs rampant throughout the Disney Studio). And oh, the smarmy tacked-on sentiment that this plot point inspires: EVERY time someone mentions the dead mother, the music swells and someone delivers a sappy speech chock full of greeting card homilies such as “Mothers are more beautiful than fairies”, leading to a hee-larious scene in which our alien buddies happen upon a boy wearing a fairy costume (!) and assume him to be a mother.
WTF2
There’s also another subplot involving Rhea Perlman as Mrs. Gizbourne, a creepy mad scientist lady who, along her henchman Hans (Richard “Bull” Moll), are holed up in an old Victorian style house performing experiments on insects to find the secrets of eternal youth. It is revealed that by performing these experiments they have nearly drained Crystal Lake, which is the main source of power for a candy factory in town. Mrs. Gizbourne then demands that Hans find a bug “big and strong enough to survive a nuclear meltdown.”
“Good, good.”
 
And oh noes! If the candy factory closes down, then this will be the last Halloween in the town. (Why? They never say.) Anyway, the special returns to the children and the aliens. They agree to split into two groups to find more candy, one group consisting of Gleep, Romtu, and Scoota and the other group consisting of Jeanie, Michael and Bing. One of the aliens, Bing (not Crosby) is mistaken by Hans to be a giant bug and is captured and taken back to Gizbourne’s house. The children learn of Mrs. Gizbourne’s plot, but are soon captured by Hans. Jeanie and Michael are quickly able to escape with Bing in tow to the lake. There they are found by Jeanie and Michael’s father, who goes on to thwart Mrs. Gizbourne’s plans. The first group of aliens then arrive at the candy factory, take all of the candy, give Michael a special skipping stone and return to Mars. Michael uses this stone and the power of wishing to revive Crystal Lake. (He could have wished for his mother to come back to life, but why waste it on something frivolous?) The candy factory is thus saved, and the townspeople end the special rejoicing.
“Yay.”
 
As previously mentioned, The Last Halloween was made as a tie-in to a candy company’s Halloween campaign, which begs the question…..
BooCrew
…So when are the Hershey’s Boo Crew going to get their own TV special?

Nerdvana: The Four Freedoms Plaza

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On this segment of Nerdvana, I’ll be talking about one of my all time favorite fictional home bases, the Fantastic Four’s current digs, the Four Freedoms Plaza.

It looks like a big number 4! That’s all, no more. Now that’s numerical!
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When I was a kid, I used to fantasize about living in a luxury shopping mall that was closed to the public (Hey, give me a break. I was seven!), but now, I think I’d prefer to live in a dwelling like this one. The Four Freedoms Plaza served as the Fantastic Four’s replacement headquarters after their original dwelling, the Baxter Building, was destroyed by Kristoff Vernard, the adoptive son of Doctor Doom.

Doctor-Doom

“Kristoff had a perfectly good reason for destroying that building! They wanted a background check and a drug test?? Preposterous!”

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The building’s outer walls and windows are constructed of advanced carbon-fiber composites, said to be nearly comparable in strength to diamond. Numerous small tubes run throughout the sections of the building occupied by the Fantastic Four, enabling Mister Fantastic to easily stretch to any floor or area. One elevator shaft has been deliberately left empty, to facilitate the Human Torch’s rapid flight to and from the upper floors. There are a set of “breakaway points” above the 50th and 70th stories with built-in explosive charges, designed to separate the upper floors from the civilian-occupied lower floors, should anyone try to lift the building into orbit.

Reed Richards

“We’re prepared for super villain attacks, inter dimensional portals opening up in sub space and alien invasions, but when Ben discovers that we’re all out of Twinkies, now that’s an emergency!”

 

The title of the building comes from a Franklin D. Roosevelt speech urging the Congress of the United States to enter World War II. In it Roosevelt outlined the four freedoms the world would enjoy if it united together to defeat the Axis Power:

  1. Freedom of speech
  2. Freedom of worship
  3. Freedom from want
  4. Freedom from fear

Of the 100 story building:

  • Floors 1 through 50 belong to the former tenants of the Baxter Building (e.g. Quasar).
  • Floors 51-70 are “buffer floors”, where the tenants do not have 99 year leases. Reed has left this space available in case the team expands or grows and needs more space.
  • Floors 71-100 serve as the headquarters for the team. The layout of the floors is essentially the same as that of the Baxter Building.
  • Floor 71 is a reception area where the team’s robot Roberta acts as both a receptionist and a guardian for the rest of the building.
  • Floor 72 acts as an inn where guests of the team can stay. Two suites maintained solely for aquatic visitors (such as Atlanteans) are accessible from pool entrances. These pools can also be used as aquatic conference rooms, and each suite has a different type of water: one fresh water and one salt water. A watertight elevator connects these suites with the river access tunnel on Sublevel 5.
  • Floors 73-75 are the team’s living quarters. Besides the four members of the team the floor also accommodated Alicia Masters (later revealed to be the Skrull Lyja), Crystal, Ms. Marvel II, Wyatt Wingfoot, and She-Hulk among others. There was also a kitchen, pantry, spa, two gyms (one for normal strength levels, the other for super-strong users), a large library, and a computerized classroom.
  • Floors 76 and 77 function as the team’s command center. Meeting rooms, communications stations, links to Starcore and other astronomical organizations, and a computerized medical station are here.
  • Floors 78-80 are storage for miscellaneous supplies. These floors serve as future expansion space and as a buffer in case of a disaster in Reed’s laboratory. Alicia claimed a section of 78 as a studio for the times she stayed in the building.
  • Floors 81-99 act as Reed’s laboratory and storage for his equipment. There is an identical workstation on each floor, enabling Reed to work on any floor. The workstation consists of computer terminals, communications console, and mechanical fabricators. None of these workstations is located overhead any other workstation and no three of them are in a straight line. This minimizes the risk of several stations being destroyed in a battle. The workstations were linked to each other and to a similar console in the Richards’s home.
  • Floors 90 and 91 contains the Negative Zone Portal. The Portal is in a heavily armored room with walls of strongly reinforced material.
  • Floors 98 and 99 serve as warehouse and machine shops. They support the hangar on 100 and act as a buffer to absorb damage from possible hangar disasters. Fuel tanks for the FF’s vehicles are on 99.
  • Floor 100 is the FF’s hangar. It fills the space under the four immense fours that top the building.
“I’ve been known to crash at the Four Freedoms Plaza on one or more occasions. I’ve also smashed the place a couple of times. I have anger issues.”
 
I feel I should give honorable mention to Marvel Universe’s Helicarrier. the reason why I didn’t mention it here is because the Helicarrier, while undoubtedly awesome, serves as an HQ. It’s a base of operation, not living quarters, but hey, the Helicarrier freakin’ flies!
iron_man_3

“You know, I had Stark Industries design my own Helicarrier. It was red and gold. My colors. Yeah, it was damaged by the Red Hulk, but I just built another one. It’s good to be rich.”


Ultimate-Fantastic-Four-Movie-Cast-2015-570x320

“Come visit the spacious, luxurious Four Freedoms Plaza today! No weirdos, please.”

 

The Hub: What Could Have Been

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Well, folks, we’re approaching the final week of The Hub network being called The Hub. Next Monday (October 13) will mark the beginning of The Hub’s rebrand as Discovery Family.

Disc Fam logo

Hasbro will still be in control of the channel from 5 AM to 5 PM, but the rest of the hours will be programmed by Discovery. Yesterday, I came across one of the promos for Discovery Family. Take a look:

That’s it? Just a bunch of educational science, nature and animal documentaries?? Color me underwhelmed. So let’s examine this, shall we? Going by the above promo, Discovery Family’s lineup will have no animated shows (except for the established Hasbro properties such My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Transformers Rescue Bots), no scripted shows and no movies. It’s almost as though Discovery wants this channel to fail. DiscFam is probably going to be an even bigger bomb than the XFL. Yeah, The Hub’s airing old sitcom reruns in prime time was a phenomenally stupid programming decision, but does Discovery honestly believe that they can gain a substantial following by running a bunch of educational documentaries and reality programs in their place? What kind of network that wants to attract kids doesn’t have any cartoons on it’s lineup? That’s just dumb! And yes, I know that live action shows are cheaper to produce than animated shows, but even if DiscFam brought back some of their old Discovery Kids shows in reruns, that would be better than having no cartoons on the lineup at all. After I first saw this promo, my initial thought for the future of Discovery Family was this:

I predict that this new schedule is going to go over like a lead balloon covered with fat people. Even the DiscFam logo looks dull, generic and uninspired. Admittedly, I kind of like the tagline “Let’s Go!”, but it’s wasted on this snooze fest of a lineup. It makes me wish that Hasbro had partnered with some other company to launch it’s family oriented family cable channel and Discovery wasn’t involved at all. This leads me to ponder what things may have been like had Hasbro hitched it’s wagon to another company besides Discovery. Here are a few choices. Before I start, I’m going to say that the Big 3 (Disney, Warner Brothers and Viacom) are already off of the table, since they already have active family oriented cable channels, so we don’t have to imagine what their family channels would be like. That said, to borrow DiscFam’s tagline, Let’s go!

HASBRO AND DREAMWORKS

Dreamworks wouldn’t want to do this, and they have no reason to do it, but imagine if Hasbro and DreamWorks had partnered up and launched a family oriented cable channel. Not only would said channel be able to air all of the movies from the Shrek, Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda franchises as well as How To Train Your Dragon, but they’d also be able to air the DreamWorks series such as Monsters VS Aliens, Penguins of Madagascar, Dragons: Riders/Defenders of Berk, Kung-Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness and the upcoming animated series based on The Croods. Also Dreamworks currently owns the Classic Media library, which  includes the UPA TV catalogue, Harvey Entertainment, Big Idea Productions, Filmation and the license rights to Gumby, Voltron and the Jay Ward productions. This means that this hypothetical channel could also air reruns of Rocky & Bullwinkle and Felix the Cat, as well as any new adaptations of said projects.  Add to that My Little Pony:Friendship is Magic, Transformers and Littlest Pet Shop, and it sounds like a winner to me.

ADDENDUM: As it happens, a Hasbro/Dreamworks partnership almost happened, but Dreamworks’ president Jeffry Katzenberg wanted too much money and power, so Hasbro backed out of the deal. And the Greek chorus moans “More’s the pity.”

HASBRO AND 20TH CENTURY FOX

I know that FOX wouldn’t be interested in doing this, since their last attempt at a family friendly cable channel (Fox Family) didn’t end well and they already have a couple of cable channels under their belt, but it would be pretty cool if FOX had a showcase for their Fox Kids library of shows, as well as any new series that the studio would want to produce. Furthermore, there wouldn’t be the issue of what the channel would air at night after the kids have gone to bed, since this channel could air the FOX prime time shows and/or some of the FX or FXX programs. Plus, FOX owns The Simpsons lock, stock and barrel, so there wouldn’t be any issues if they wanted to air reruns of that on this channel.

HASBRO AND NBC/UNIVERSAL

I think that Hasbro and Universal would get along pretty well. Partnered with Universal, this hypothetical channel could air the likes of Woody Woodpecker and some of Universal Studios movies. Plus, Universal owns Qubo and Sprout. ‘ Nuff said.

HASBRO AND COOKIE JAR

Under this partnership, we would have a channel that had access to all of the Hasbro properties as well of all of the shows on Cookie Jar TV and KEWLopolis.

Honestly, any of these partnerships sounds better than what we’re getting. Now, it’s possible that Discovery may surprise us all by pulling something really special out of their collective sleeves, but I’m not counting on that. After seeing that Discovery Family promo and reading what Discovery’s master plan for the channel is, I have only this to say to all of them.

Nerdvana: Don’t Worry, Be Happy!

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Today Nerdvana celebrates a short bearded guy with a deliriously sunny disposition. No, it’s not Uncle Si from Duck Dynasty, it’s Happy of the Seven Dwarfs.

“Happy, happy, happy! It’s party time, Jack!”
 
Happy is one of our favorite Disney characters, nee, one of our favorite cartoon characters at the moment and a rising fan favorite. Yet he didn’t begin that way. For a long time, it looked like if we were ever going to give Happy any mention here at all, it would be on Beyond the Background. Happy began his his career on a rather inauspicious note, despite being in one of THE most popular animated feature films of all time. Admittedly, it’s been quite a while since we’ve seen the movie, but thinking back, it’s hard to recall any real standout performances by Happy. He had a single verse to himself in “A Silly Song”, but that’s about it. Happy’s performance never really made much of an impact on proceedings; this is partly because the other Dwarfs, aside from Grumpy obviously, are likewise basically happy fellows, so Happy’s primary characteristic–being happy–had no real way of distinguishing itself among the among the other 5. Even though we always thought there was potential for greatness with the character even back then, it seemed as though the Hapster was destined to remain a bit player.
 
But then, the Mouse House decided to give the Dwarfs their own show, The 7D. For this new cartoon, the characters were all redesigned, then everybody hated the new designs so they had to be redesigned yet again. Here’s the result of Happy’s makeover:

His hat resembles a party hat. Nice touch.

Okay, Happy received some plastic surgery and a new wardrobe, but there was still doubt that he could hold his own as a character.
That all changed on July 7, 2014. (Get it? 7-7-14. The seventh day of the seventh month in ’14, which is 7+7. It’s a Seven Dwarfs thing, GET IT??)
Everything changed during the show’s premiere episode, “The Long, Long Winter”. (I don’t know if this was the first episode made, since many fans agree that the episode “The Littlest Giants/Gnome Alone” felt more like a pilot with all of its’ expository dialogue, but it was the first episode aired), at precisely this moment:
 Long Long Winter Gif 2
Long Long Winter Gif
Climbing_Song

“Ohhhhhhh, Uppity-up, uppity-up, up, up, up, up, uppity-up, uppity up, uppity-up, up, up, HARMONICA SOLO!”

Long Long Winter 1

“Does he have to be directly behind me?!?”

When I first saw this short, I thought, “They’re not really going to show him singing the whole way up, are they?” But they did. It was brilliant. Even falling doesn’t stop Happy. He takes a tumble, then after reassuring us that he’s not dead or injured, starts caterwauling again. And he goes on, and on, and on….And suddenly, BAM! At that exact moment, Happy’s untapped potential was finally realized, and he ascended from minor character to major player. That makes us happy.
Like all of the Dwarfs on The 7D, Happy’s basic characteristics were exaggerated for comic effect, basically cranked up to 11. Here, Happy isn’t just cheerful, he’s deliriously, almost insanely happy, and whoever’s idea it was to give Happy a penchant for breaking into inanely happy songs should be hailed as a genius. Happy’s singing habit could be Disney’s subtle jab at their own studio, which is known for featuring characters who burst into song at the slightest provocation. (Giving Happy a penchant for jokes and comedy would have worked too, but what they did is still good.) It’s also worth mentioning that Happy has read more episode titles aloud than any other character on the show.
A lot of Happy’s appeal stems from the talents of the actor who provides his voice, Kevin Michael Richardson, known to some of his fans as “Sexual Chocolate” due to his smooth bass voice. (And here I thought that was the WWE’s Mark Henry.)
Kevin Richardson, the voice behind our favorite guitar strumming dwarf. Hard to believe that Mr. Oompty-Smoompty Shmoodley-Doo and Nickelodeon’s Shredder are the same guy.
 
In one of TV’s great ironies, Mr. Richardson auditioned for the show assuming he’d be a lock for the voice of Grumpy. Indeed, Richardson would have made a decent Grumpy, given some of his past roles (most kids today probably know him best as the voice of Mr. Gus on Cartoon Network’s Uncle Grandpa), but that role went to Maurice LaMarche. Personally, I’m glad things worked out the way they did, because as previously stated, while Richardson could have worked as Grumpy, LaMarche sells the role; now I can’t imagine anyone else voicing Grumpy but LaMarche, nor anyone but Richardson voicing Happy. His voicing of the character is one of the highlights of the show.
Speaking of Grumpy, it’s amazing how in all this time, in all these years, no one at the Mouse House has ever thought of playing Happy off of Grumpy until now. The notion seems like a no-brainer, given that the 2 characters are night and day attitude-wise. In Snow White, Grumpy would frequently square off against Doc, but he and Happy interacted very little. But now that Doc on this show is basically a cross between Thomas Edison, Leonardo DaVinci and Carl Sagan, Happy is the Dwarf who annoys Grumpy the most. Seeing these 2 play off another and the light and dark contrast of their natures is another highlight.
So hats off to Happy. Congratulation for breaking out of background character status and hitting the big time. the following sums Happy up perfectly:
“Stay happy, my friends.”