halloween episode

Cheers: Fairy Tales Can Come True

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First let’s start with a rundown of the costumes:
SAM – Cowboy
DIANE – Alice in Wonderland
FRASIER – Mad Hatter
COACH – Pirate
CARLA – Convict
NORM – Norm
CLIFF – Ponce de Leon

Frasier and Diane are together in this episode, if you can’t tell by their ridiculous costumes. They have BIG plans to go to the Boston Pops, which Sam also likes because of his great admiration for the man working the pyrotechnics. That’s a cool skilled-labor job, so I’m not sure that Sam is terribly off-base by likening it to that of a classical musician, though I’m sure every classical musician in the world would be pissed that I said that. Sam and Frasier debate whether or not Sam is as dumb as he seems or if he is just pretending.

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Shortly thereafter, Cliff shows up dressed as Ponce de Leon. The gang and a couple of random barflies we probably never see again discuss his shyness around women and wonders if he’s gay. Coach tells them all to cut it out saying that they can’t possibly tell if someone is gay based upon a superficial analysis. It’s surprisingly progressive, until he describes an obviously gay baseball player and, upon realizing he’s gay, wonders if he might be interested in dating Cliff.

As it happens, Cliff sits next to a mysterious woman at the bar. She introduces herself as Tinkerbell and he introduces himself as Ponce de Leon. They are both very shy. As they close down the bar, dancing to easy listening that I’m surprised exists on the Cheers jukebox, Diane offers Sam her tickets to the Boston Pops. She still wants to attend the Pops, but Frasier will be out of town.

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When Sam and Diane realize the both don’t know anyone else who would like to attend, the two former lover decide to go together. Like that couldn’t possibly have any negative consequences. Finally, Sam kicks out Tinkerbell and Ponce, she proposes that they meet back at Cheers the following night at 8 pm as their actual selves.

The following night, Sam and Diane return from the Pops having had a lovely, flirtatious time. They’re even kind of color coordinated. But when Diane proclaims their success at a platonic outing, and Sam makes a joke about the night not being over yet, Diane runs away. Literally, she screams and runs away.

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Cliff ends up getting cold feet and hiding from Tinkerbell in Sam’s office as it gets closer and closer to 8 pm. Norm gives him a little pep-talk, reminding him that it was Cliff who danced with this woman, not Ponce de Leon, because Cliff is Ponce de Leon. But then she doesn’t show. And damn it’s sad. But then she calls the bar and says that she was nervous to meet him without being in a costume. Boy, they really are a match!

When she finally does show up, they’re both so nervous that they say their names wrong. It’s so freaking adorable. Then they just sort of stand there and stare at each other until Sam puts a song on the jukebox and positions them in a dancing formation. This whole scene is magic and I can’t eve really describe it. Watch below and see for yourself.

Very Special Halloween Lesson: We must never forget that we are the people behind the masks we wear.

That was pretty profound, huh?

Sabrina, the Teenage Witch: The Halloween Scene

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Sabrina has no plans for Halloween. Her friends all think it’s lame and her aunts will be in the other realm at a new galaxy opening, a very exclusive event. So she’s decided to have a house party at their empty house and encourage all of her college friends to attend.

Since when do you have to get college kids excited about Halloween? But fine. And if anything says, “cool party” it’s got to be Sabrina’s little bo-peep costume couples costume with her cat, Salem, dressed as a lamb. But the party does seem to be a little cool when the lights flicker and monsters that Sabrina has hired from the other realm show up. Everyone thinks they’re just really great scary haunted house actors, but of course, they are legit ghouls.

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Meanwhile, Sabrina’s aunts are feeling self-conscious at the galaxy opening, realizing they look like Romy & Michele at a black tie event. They also learn that the new galaxy is a landfill and no one wanted to attend the party, so they extended the guest list at the last moment. As our current president would say, “Sad.”

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Back at the ghoul-party, the party planner has apparently sent so many ghouls that the party is now over-run with ghouls. Meanwhile, word has gotten out that this party is happening, and all of her aunt’s belongings are getting decimated.

Okay, so. Hm. This is the problem I’ve always had with a sitcom about magic, especially one that doesn’t even have pressure from an over-bearing husband to deter its lead from using it (I’m looking at you, Bewitched). Why don’t her aunts just fix their ridiculous costumes by conjuring up some better costumes? Why doesn’t Sabrina just magically repair all of the damage to her aunt’s house?

But none of it matters because soon, Sabrina’s aunts are leaving their lame galaxy party to attend a much cooler party, which they quickly learn is Sabrina’s party at their home. They’re not terribly excited about it.

However, Sabrina’s peeved aunts are the least of her worries. When it’s time to return all of the ghouls, she realizes that Frankenstein is missing. Apparently, he’s gone home with one of her friends–eek–and they are quite smitten. Sabrina drags him back to her house but he resists going back to the other realm due to marital problems with The Bride of Frankenstein. So Sabrina and her aunts travel back with him to help them communicate, using a little magic. SO WHY COULDN’T SHE USE MAGIC TO FIX THE WATER STAIN ON THE PIANO BEFORE THEY GOT HOME?!?

Okay, fine. At least we get this cute little scene.

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Very Special Halloween Lesson: If you have magic powers, use them to make sure you’re dressed appropriately for a black tie event. Don’t squander them by becoming armchair analysts for the Frankensteins.

Happy Days: Haunted

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arnoldsEvery year Ralph has a Halloween party and every year a gang called The Demons crashes it and destroy it. So this year he’s decided to have it at a creepy old house where The Demons will never find him. He sends Richie to check out the house and make sure that it is spooky enough for the party.

On his way home from taking Joanie to a “Chipmunks” meeting (which I guess is kind of like “Brownies”), Richie stops to check out the house. Joanie has heard plenty of stories about people getting their heads chopped off in that house, but she reluctantly follows Richie in when he refuses to leave her outside by herself. When a painting falls off of the wall above the mantel, Joanie flees to the porch. Alone in the house, Richie thinks he sees a headless body. He confides in his father when he gets home, but Howard tells him that it must be his mind playing tricks on him.

Uh okay. You don’t even want to maybe call the police? Just in case?

qk4epya8hwxbazsf9ggbckhifdoWhen the time comes for the party, Richard is all freaked out about a potential ghost. Dude, if you find a headless body in an abandoned house, you should be freaked out about a potential serial killer. But I guess the 1950’s were a more innocent time.

Richie and his date arrive at the party to find that they are the only ones there. And it is SPOOKY. But then Ralph pops out of a coffin and blows some bubble gum. Then the rest of the party pops out from behind some pocket doors.

a281Everything is fine until the lights go out later on in the night. But it’s just Ralph fooling around again. Richie calls him out on it and Ralph gets pretty pissed that Richie ruined his prank. So he goes over to talk to Potsie. He taps him on the shoulder mid-dance, so Potsie thinks he’s trying to cut-in. But Ralph just wants to talk, so Potsie tells his dance partner to go make him a sandwich. Literally. Ohhhh the 70’s/50’s.

Since they can’t just let their friend be happy dancing with his date, Potise and Ralph ask Richie to get some root beer from the closet–where of course they have rigged a headless dummy to freak him out. The whole party laughs at Richie, but when another headless figure descends the stairs and threatens to chop of their heads, they’re all legitimately frightened. Richie is the only one brave enough to confront the headless figure. And it turns out that it’s just The Demons! Ha-ha.

Very Special Halloween Lesson: Apparently, you can just spend a ton of money on a party in an abandoned house and that’s totally not considered trespassing. Also, it will probably be pretty clean and have electricity.

Sabrina, The Teenage Witch: Good Will Haunting

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Cue: Creepy pipe organ music and a red-eyed bat flying at the camera.

Salem sits at a cob-webbed covered desk and reads to us from a giant book. This episode, he says, “may not be suitable for some parents.” Ooooh

In the witching world, Halloween is kind of like Christmas, which is why Sabrina’s family member sends her a doll as a gift. It’s weird because she’s too old for a doll but even weirder because the doll is creepy AF.

tve46167-675-19981030-0Sabrina finds the doll on the staircase “staring” at her. Thinking that Salem is pulling a prank, she tosses the doll up the stairs. OMG Sabrina, NO! You will anger her! But when she and her friends are watching a movie, she sees the doll again. This time it turns its head at her and BLINKS its eyes. AGHHHHHHH

This may be the most frightening thing I have ever written about on this blog.

When Sabrina tries to open the door for some trick-or-treaters, she finds that she is not only unable to open it, but also that it is electrified! This must be the doll’s doing. As if it couldn’t get any worse the doll says, “I’m a Molly Dolly and I’m gonna get youuuu.”

Wtf. How is this a show aimed at children?? Thank God, I missed this episode back in 1998. I’m starting to think that Salem’s message at the beginning of the episode wasn’t about parents at all. Why didn’t he say “this show is not for children or anyone who can’t handle scary movies on any level whatsoever.”

Meanwhile, Sabrina’s aunts are at a Halloween party. Unfortunately, that party has turned out to be an insane asylum that they can never leave, Hotel California style. So basically, Sabrina and her friends are about to get murdered by a doll and no one can save them.

18bd4f0e71635aa4ea788a7c9b66c887Sabrina attempts to warn her friends about the evil doll, but they think she is playing a prank. I guess they’d think it was part of the prank if she tried to tell them she was a witch too.

Back at the insane asylum, an evil doctor chases Sabrina’s aunts with a giant needle. Ick. When a real Frankenstein’s Monster and a Mummy pop out of a closet (these are also Harvey and his friend’s costumes by the way), her friends say this prank has gone TOO far. But they’re obviously scared enough to run around the house while the monsters chase them.

sabrina3-11Things reach a fever pitch when Sabrina engages in fisticuffs with the doll, and her aunts are the subjects of a scary experiment to switch their brains with those of some chickens. Sabrina subdues the doll and rushes to the party to find her aunts…who unfortunately are now chickens.

Luckily, the party isn’t really an insane asylum. It’s a theme party. So at the end of the night, everything will go back to normal. Also, that evil creepy doll is just the other realm’s idea of a good time. Sabrina and her aunts return home and put everything right. They laugh everything off as an elaborate practical joke. Omg how does Sabrina even have any friends?? She needs to put some kind of memory loss spell on all of them STAT.

Very Special Halloween Lesson: NO more dolls. Ever.

Brotherly Love: Witchcraft

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TSDBRLO EC003It’s Halloween and the Romans (a.k.a. The Lawrence brothers) are busy planning their nights. Matt has FINALLY been asked to a party, Joe is taking Andy trick or treating at the mall, Claire (Joe’s step-mom, Matt & Andy’s mom) is going to a party, and Lloyd (one of the mechanics at the family business) has plans to watch “the scariest movie of all time,” The Sound of Music. (“The hills are alive!”)

Claire takes forever to decide on a costume. There’s a lot of pressure on this night, since she hardly ever goes out. She finally settles on being a piece of gum stuck under a chair. It’s, um, certainly original. The costume consists of dressing from head to toe in pink (the toe part consisting of fuzzy pink slippers).

screen-shot-2016-09-25-at-5-36-43-pmAnd just to make it clear that she’s not simply bubble gum, she wears a chair-hat. The chair/gum scale is off for obvious reasons. I can only assume she didn’t want to break her neck in order to ensure the authenticity of her costume. But this basically means she looks not like a wad of gum, but rather a woman wearing a chair-hat.

Meanwhile, Matt sits at home handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, waiting to go to the party until Joe returns home with Andy. Andy’s costume is Spider Man dressed as a ghost. (He’s wearing a Spiderman Mask under a bed sheet.) Joe takes him to a kid’s party at the mall and flirts with a fortuneteller while Andy plays with his friends. The fortuneteller is obviously Lou, a mechanic at his garage. But I guess he’s so confused by her harem mask that he doesn’t recognize her. This makes it abundantly apparent how rarely he looks at her eyes.

hqdefault1When the fortuneteller accurately guesses Andy’s costume, Joe pays her $10 to tell his fortune. Back at home, Matt stingily hands out  candy based on the quality of the kids’ costumes. Geez, he’s way too young to be this much of a curmudgeon. When some college kids stop by his apartment to trick-or-treat (already super creepy) sans costumes (cannot decide if this makes it more or less creepy), Matt refuses to give them candy (duh, I mean isn’t it illegal to trick-or-treat after a certain age), so they hang him on the Halloween wreath on Lloyd’s door.

Wait, hold on. Lloyd also lives above the garage? Does Lou also have an apartment there? Is housing like a fringe benefit of being a mechanic at that place?? When he discovers that the college kids took all of the candy, Lloyd leaves the apartment to hunt them down. He also leaves Matt on the door, whoops.

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Lou was very into the 90’s belly shirt fad

In his hurry to get home, Joe accidentally kidnaps a child. To be fair, she’s also dressed as a ghost/sheet person. But she’s Casper, not Spiderman/Ghost. Joe rushes back to the mall to retrieve Andy and return the kid he took by mistake. In his haste, he doesn’t stop to help Matt off of the wreath. Vulnerable and alone, Matt is egged by Halloween pranksters.

Back at the diner, the little girl’s dad has accidentally mistaken Andy for his child. He and Joe are relieved to see one another and switch their children before Joe heads home again. Luckily, by the time he gets back Lloyd has found the college kids and forced them to clean up everyone’s apartments. They then decide that Matt is cool and invite him to go a party with them, which just so happens to be the party he’s been trying to attend all night anyway.

Joe apologizes to Andy for leaving him behind at the mall. Andy tells him not to worry and that he was okay because he was with Lou. (OBVIOUSLY.) And of course, what’s the one thing that no Halloween episode is complete without? A Very Special Halloween Lesson!

Best Halloween Dialogue:
Matt (on the phone): Iris, slow down. What’s Debbie’s costume? She’s Madonna? From which album? The book? Oh, what page?

The Baby-Sitters Club: Dawn and the Haunted House

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Things start off ominously in this episode of The Baby-Sitters Club. There’s a sketchy haunted house and Claudia is being super cryptic about something. Actually, it turns out she’s failing out of middle school. Her mom’s set her up with a tutor but she’s going to have to miss out on some BSC meetings. No big deal though, she can just explain the situation to her friends.

Except she doesn’t plan on doing that, she makes some big dramatic deal out of this and says, “I can’t live without The Baby-Sitters Club and The Baby-Sitters Club can’t live without me.” Geez.

Screen Shot 2015-10-18 at 10.37.43 AMAnyway, Dawn and Stacey end up babysitting for this kid who is obsessed with dinosaur fossils. He wants to go hunt bones in the backyard because there are a lot of them by Mrs. Slade’s house. Dawn and Stacey are like wtf?? And this kid is just like, “She’s a witch lady. She talks to animals and turns people into dogs.”

So the baby-sitters decide to take the kids outside to investigate. Yep, that’s right, the people you trust to keep your children safe while you are at the mall are taking them on a literal witch hunt. They evacuate the woods when they find a sick looking dog and a hear strange noises coming from the general vicinity of Ms. Slade’s house.

Screen Shot 2015-10-18 at 11.29.25 AMThen they go to the hardware store to meet the other babysitters! “I just love hardware stores,” Stacey says, “next to Bloomingdale’s there’s no place I’d rather be.” Uh, yeah. Okay. As it turns out, Mrs. Slade is also shopping in the hardware store. She’s purchasing some really creepy stuff too: a lantern (for working late at night) and a shovel (for digging deep). I mean I think it’s pretty obvious that she’s burying bodies in the night.

That night at their spooky sleepover party, they all tell stories about the scariest thing that has ever happened to them. Mallory’s story is about how she was walking home with a group in the woods and THEY ALL LEFT HER to take the road instead. Seriously, I wonder if they make her super sad intentionally.

Screen Shot 2015-10-18 at 11.32.16 AMThen they start talking about how creepy Mrs. Slade is and Claudia tells them all that her behavior is probably perfectly normal. When they bring up the shovel incident, Claudia says, “so she gardens,” and Dawn calls that the “dumbest thing [she’s] ever heard.” Well, no, it’s definitely the only intelligent thing anyone has said about this poor woman. But Claudia gets her feelings her and storms off. They’re all like geez, I wish I knew what was wrong with her! And I’m just wondering how NONE of them have managed to notice that Claudia has been reading a textbook for the entire duration of this slumber party. They are terrible detectives.

Then Stacey goes back to babysit for fossil kid. This time she has Mary Anne with her. Fossil kid is all like hey look, I can see Mrs. Slade through my telescope! And Stacey is all like,” it’s not nice to spy on people,” but then she pushes him out of the way so she can spy on Mrs. Slade herself. She sees Claudia through the telescope with Mrs. Slade. Mrs. Slade is rubbing some kind of herb on their faces, and even I have to admit that’s weird.

Screen Shot 2015-10-18 at 11.06.45 AMStacey calls Dawn to get the BSC over to the Slade house to rescue Claudia. Basically, their plan consists of Stacey telling Mrs. Slade that there is a wounded dog in the woods. So Mrs. Slade is going to go looking for the dog, and the girls will seize that opportunity to “rescue” Claudia. Well, this seems extraordinarily cruel but okay.

Dawn, Jessi, and Kristy enter the house for the rescue mission. They make Mallory wait outside and watch the door. Claudia hears them poking around and tells them that Mrs. Slade is definitely not a witch. She’s a former vet who is now tutoring Claudia in biology. So now the BSC has sent a veterinarian out looking for a hurt dog and Claudia is basically like you jerks, she will stay out there all night.

So the BSC goes out looking for Mrs. Slade. They’re calling for her and nothing works, so then Claudia has a great idea. “I bet she’ll hear us if we bark like dogs.” So then they all howl and it works. Omg. This is the weirdest episode ever. Then they all have to tell her that they thought she was a witch and that they lied about the dog. But it wasn’t a total loss because Mrs. Slade found a bird who needs to have his wing mended.

Halloween Lesson: Don’t call old ladies witches. That’s like breaking a cardinal rule of feminism or something.