Above: The Garfield Halloween special, which first aired on the CBS TV network in 1985. If you were of the right age, the world of analog TV seasonal "specials" was the norm. Because the IRC stuff annoys the readership, we've decided to go this route.
Halloween is Grinch Night (1977), a prequel to the 1966 special How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I think they used to run this one on NBC. This is a DePatie-Freeling production, which means it came out of the same studio as the animated Pink Panther film intros and the now long-forgotten Pink Panther and Inspector Clouseau cartoons.
Above: Witch's Night Out (1978), a Canadian-made special featuring the voices of Gilda Radner, Cathlene O'Hara, Valri Bromfield, and Dan Aykroyd, so this is where Second City (SCTV) met Saturday Night Live. First ran on NBC in America, CBC in Canada; this writer saw it run on KTLA (Channel 5 in Los Angeles) as weekend filler between old monster movies in October. Is it ugly? Maybe. But it is the sequel to an earlier cartoon called The Gift of Winter (1974), with many of the same characters and Radner, Bromfield, Aykroyd voicing them.
Top: NSFW warning, that is NOTIt's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, it's mostoffensivevideos' re-edit and re-dubbing called It's the Great Dolemite, Charlie Brown. In that version all the kids are parodies of streetwise Black people, the dialogue is X-rated, and the runtime is down to 11 minutes or so.
Middle and Bottom: You have to get the original 1966 special on DVD or off Apple+ the streaming service. These snippets of Great Pumpkin from YouTube predate that streaming service by a decade. Copyright is now elastic in the Internet age; only if an old media item is popular are they willing to defend it.
The Halloween That Almost Wasn't (1979); this recording was taken off WLS-TV in Chicago on the 28th of October the year the special premiered; includes all the obnoxious ads. Judd Hirsch as Dracula, Henry Gibson as Igor, Mariette Hartley as a witch; all involved in a plot to save Halloween from something trying to stop it, don't ask. This ran for years on the Disney Channel, was released on VHS under another title.
Above: The Worst Witch (1986). This is based on a series of kids books (1974-2018) written and illustrated by Jill Murphy and stars Tim Curry, Diana Rigg, and Fairuza Balk. Balk plays Mildred Hubble, a witch student at a witch boarding school, and she stinks at the magic bit. Accordig to IMDb the plot is this: "The headmistress of the school, Miss Cackle (Charlotte Rae), has an evil twin sister (Agatha) who plans to destroy the school. Can Mildred foil the plan before the Grand Wizard (Tim Curry) comes to the Academy for the Halloween celebration you'll never forget?" Tim Curry's aforementioned "Grand Wizard" (!) sings this crazy song when he flys in. This is a totally British production that originally ran on ITV in the UK before the Disney Channel picked it up and ran it on American cable for years.
Last but definitely not least, the Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffing of "Manos" - The Hands of Fate. Not really a Halloween special, but higher quality than most of the stuff I've linked here. Watch as a Texas family of three tries to take a vacation at a "Valley Lodge", gets lost and finds the house of "The Master" (Tom Netman) and his satyr manservant "Torgo" (John Reynolds), who both worship the unknown god Manos anlong with The Master's collection of wives. Are they zombies? A warlock and his familiars? The film never says. Made on a ranch outside El Paso, Texas and shot "wild track" (i.e., with no sychronized sound) on 16mm Bell & Howell home movie cameras, it's a very hand-made movie with loads of mistakes and thanks to using a restored version of the Ektachrome workprint, the visual element of this copy is fantastic when compared with the 35mm to Betamax dub Best Brains, Inc. used for the MST3K episode.
Here is Wikipedia's list of TV Halloween specials, so you can find more mind-rotting crap to look at this Halloween: link.
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