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What's up, dudes? The Davis family survived one haunted house, so naturally they stuck around Lucifer Falls for round two, and Mr. Boogedy is back from the great beyond looking for a plus-one! We already covered "Mr. Boogedy" over on The Halloween Podcast, so it's time to finish the job with the 1987 Disney Sunday Movie sequel. I've got Lyle and Meghan from The Halloween Podcast with me to talk all about it!

A year after the vacuum-cleaner exorcism, Carlton is basically Lucifer Falls royalty: he's running the Lucyfest carnival and opening Gag City in an old wax museum (the last owner left the horror figures behind, totally normal, nothing to see here). Grumpy general store guy Tom Lynch (Eugene Levy) hates him, because two whole tables of gag gifts are at stake. Then Jennifer hears a voice in the woods wail "Get out of my house!", a fortune teller says Boogedy is coming, and the boys share a nightmare about a glowing key and a statue that comes to life. Mom and Dad's response? A fake séance! That goes great, and soon Dad is levitating, zombie-walking, and swiping a dead widow's dress for his wife. The cure: Uncle Elmer in a gorilla suit, because apparently you can laugh a demon right out of your body. Then the cloak lands on Lynch, the wax monsters crash the carnival, and Boogedy finally shows up in person to grab himself a bride, complete with Bride of Frankenstein hair. "Boogedy, Boogedy, Boo!" "Just kidding!" (Repeat roughly 25 times.) Cast trivia: Kristy Swanson and Benji Gregory were swapped out for Tammy Lauren (later of "Wishmaster") and Joshua Rudoy, so R.E. went from living with ALF to living with Bigfoot from "Harry and the Hendersons." John Astin was out and Fiddler on the Roof's Leonard Frey was in as Walter Witherspoon. Vincent Schiavelli plays a gravedigger named Lazarus, and David Faustino's "Married… with Children" premiered just one week before this aired!

Possessed dad? Check. Killer wax werewolf? Yep. Ghost wedding with a guy in a pilgrim hat? You'd better believe it! So grab your magic cloak, put on a gorilla suit, and speak into a phone for this episode on “Bride of Boogedy!”

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What's up, dudes? Halloween is almost here, so we're looking to the skies for the weirdest trick-or-treaters ever to land in a small town. It's the 1991 Hanna-Barbera CBS special “The Last Halloween!” I've got Mike Westfall from Advent Calendar House, Chad Young from Horror Movie BBQ with me to talk all about it!

Mars is in big trouble: it's completely out of coobi. So four brave Martians (Romtu the Great, Gleep, Scoota and Bing) blast off, lock onto Earth and crash-land in the woods outside Crystal Falls on Halloween night. That's lucky timing, because coobi turns out to be CANDY ("You've come on the best coobi night of the whole year!"). Michael and Jeanie mistake them for kids in costumes and take them trick-or-treating. Jeanie gets promoted to Queen of Earth ("I'm not a queen, but I am a milk monitor"), and Bing decides she's his new mother. Meanwhile, Dad's candy factory is about to close because Crystal Lake is mysteriously drying up. The culprit? Crabby neighbor Mrs. Gizborne and her henchman Hans, who are draining the lake with a hydroionizer to chase the fountain of youth hiding in a bug that's survived since the dinosaurs ("After tonight, my beauty shall be eternal!"). Grandpa's skipping-stone wish, a chase through Gizborne's lair and one magic Martian stone later, Crystal Falls might just get another Halloween. It's directed by Savage Steve Holland (Better Off Dead!) and narrated by William Hanna himself, and it stars Carla from Cheers, Rhea Perlman, as Mrs. Gizborne and Bull from Night Court, Richard Moll, as Hans. Scooby-Doo himself, Don Messick, voices Romtu, Paul Williams is Gleep and Frank Welker voices Scoota and Bing. The CGI Martians came from ILM and Pacific Data Images, and they won an Emmy for visual effects!

"Yabba dabba doo"? Weird, but got it. A villain trying to get eternal youth from a bug? Yep. A lake refilled by skipping a stone three times? Totally rad! So grab your pillowcase, fire up your coobi meter, and touch down with us for “The Last Halloween!”

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What's up, dudes? We're taking a spooky little detour from the tinsel this week, because before Santa can slide down the chimney, somebody has to save Halloween! In 1979, ABC aired a half-hour special where Count Dracula himself has to rally a crew of washed-up monsters and talk a fed-up Witch into making her annual ride over the moon, or there's no more Halloween, period. I've got Anthony Caruso from ‘Tis the Podcast with me to talk all about it!

It all kicks off when a TV newscaster reports that Halloween may be coming to an end, and that Dracula is getting the blame. The Count is not having it: "How dare they suggest such a thing? Halloween is my national holiday!" So he summons the world's most famous monsters to his castle: Warren the Werewolf of Budapest, Frankenstein's Monster, Zabaar the Zombie of Haiti, the Mummy of Egypt, and the Witch. His diagnosis? The monsters have "exploited their monsterhood" until they're funny instead of scary. Exhibit A: Frankenstein's Monster has picked up tap dancing from the movies. Turns out the Witch started the whole rumor herself. She's sick of jokes about how ugly she is, and without her ride over the moon there's no Halloween at all. She's got a list of demands, Dracula says no, and she flies off to her own castle. Dracula chases her as a bat, but the sun's coming up, so it's back to the mausoleum. The next night, the night before Halloween, the monster squad breaks into her castle. She zaps a painting of the Three Musketeers into living minions, there's a sped-up chase straight out of The Munsters, bat-Dracula tries to slip under a door and gets smashed, and Igor tries a Hunchback-style swing through the window, only for the Witch to open the door and send him right back outside. Dracula sums it up: "It's one of those days I wish I was dead. And stayed dead." He finally caves to her demands, including taking her disco dancing every night, but she changes her mind anyway! It takes two kids who saw it all on the news (one dressed as the Witch) telling her they love her just the way she is to get her on that broom and over the moon. And then? Full-on disco finale. The Witch does a Wonder Woman spin into a Saturday Night Fever dancing queen, and Dracula rips off his cape to reveal a Tony Manero leisure suit. Halloween: saved. Dance floor: destroyed.

Cast trivia time! Judd Hirsch, Dracula himself, was starring as Alex Reiger on Taxi back then. Mariette Hartley (the Witch) shows up in The Incredible Hulk, Henry Gibson (Igor) was in Nashville, Jack Riley (the Werewolf) is in Spaceballs, John Schuck (Frankenstein's Monster) was in the M*A*S*H movie, and Josip Elic (Zabaar the Zombie) was in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Bruce Bilson directed it, it was shot at Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, New York, Kenner sponsored it, and it won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Children's Program (plus three more nominations). It aired on the Disney Channel every October from 1983 to 1996, got retitled The Night Dracula Saved the World for VHS, got riffed by RiffTrax in 2015, and has still never come out on DVD or Blu-ray!

A tap-dancing Frankenstein? Check. A Witch with a list of demands? Yep. Dracula in a disco leisure suit? Oh, you'd better believe it. So grab your cape, turn into a teeny, tiny bat, and put on your dancing shoes for “The Halloween That Almost Wasn't!”

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What's up, dudes? Grab your pillowcase, your sincerity, and maybe a spare rock for the bag, because we're gonna have a watch-along party for the 1966 Peanuts classic "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"! I've got Anthony Caruso from ‘Tis the Podcast, Jeff Loftin from Lost Christmas podcast, and Jeremy Phelps the Alamo City Santa with me to talk all about it!

Halloween's creeping up on the Peanuts neighborhood, and things get off to a rough start: Lucy carves up a pumpkin from the patch (Linus is horrified she "killed it"), then pulls the football away from Charlie Brown yet AGAIN. Linus pens a letter to the Great Pumpkin, the Santa Claus of gourds, and gets roasted by everybody except Sally, whose crush on Linus has her signing up for the pumpkin-patch faith. Charlie Brown, meanwhile, scores an actual invite to Violet's party and is living his best life... for about five minutes. While the gang hits the streets yelling "Tricks or treats! Money or eats!", everyone else rakes in candy bars, gum and a quarter, and poor Chuck goes 0-for-Halloween: "I got a rock." Then he gets to be Violet's jack-o'-lantern drawing board. Snoopy, being Snoopy, ditches the plot entirely, straps on his scarf and turns his doghouse into a Sopwith Camel to dogfight the Red Baron, crash-lands, sneaks across the French countryside, crashes the party's apple-bobbing tub and gets weepy to Schroeder's World War I medleys. Back in the patch, the Great Pumpkin finally rises... and it's a beagle. Sally goes full nuclear: "I was robbed!... You owe me restitution!" Linus slips and says "IF the Great Pumpkin comes" (rookie mistake), Lucy hauls her shivering brother home at 4 a.m., and the next day Linus is right back at it: "Just wait 'til next year, Charlie Brown!"

Fun voice-cast trivia: the kids were real kids, some trained actors and some straight from producer Lee Mendelson's neighborhood, with Peter Robbins as Charlie Brown, Christopher Shea as Linus and Sally Dryer as Lucy. Director Bill Melendez voiced Snoopy by recording nonsense words and speeding them up. And Cathy Steinberg (Sally) had a loose tooth, so she had to knock out all her lines in one night before it fell out and gave her a lisp. She couldn't nail "restitution," so Mendelson recorded it one syllable at a time and spliced it together. Totally rad!

A rock in the trick-or-treat bag? Check. A beagle flying a doghouse against the Red Baron? Yep. A little girl suing for restitution over missed candy? Oh, you better believe it! So grab your ghost sheet, but too many holes in it, and head to the most sincere pumpkin patch for "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"! 

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WARNING!! PARENTAL DISCRETION IS ADVISED!

What’s up, dudes? We all know what fear is… but tonight fear has fur, silver bullets, and a live-TV transformation nobody at home believes. We’re talking Joe Dante’s 1981 werewolf classic “The Howling”! I’ve got Jeremy Phelps the Alamo City Santa with me!

News anchor Karen White walks into a sting for a killer named Eddie Quist and walks out with amnesia and a therapist who thinks a countryside retreat called the Colony is medicine. It is not medicine. It is a werewolf timeshare. Dee Wallace is Karen, Robert Picardo is the transformation showcase, Elisabeth Brooks is Marsha, Patrick Macnee is Doc, and Rob Bottin builds the air-bladder nightmare after Rick Baker left for the other werewolf movie that same year. John Sayles rewrote Gary Brandner’s novel into a satire, Pino Donaggio scored it, and the thing opened March 13, 1981, then howled all the way toward Dante getting the keys to Gremlins. Character names are classic horror directors hiding in plain sight, and the Colony burns so Karen can warn the world on television while the audience laughs it off as special effects.

Silver bullets? Check. Smiley-face calling cards? Yep. A werewolf ordering a rare hamburger at the bar? That’s the tag, dudes! So pack a silver round, skip the wellness retreat, and howl into this episode on “The Howling”!

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What’s up, dudes? Perhaps you can help… solve a mystery. Robert Stack has put on his holiday voice — which still sounds like a missing-persons bulletin wrapped in tinsel — and we’re diving into a special holiday edition of “Unsolved Mysteries”! I’ve got Joe Martinez from Now Watch This and CM Chuck from Just Another Friday Night here to unpack the miracles, the tip lines, and the tonal whiplash.

Stack promises stories that capture the spirit of the season, then delivers the full UM buffet: seven-year-old Chucky McGivern of Philly slides from chicken pox into a Reye’s syndrome coma right before Christmas 1982, while his parents pin a Saint John Neumann relic to his pillow and a mystery kid ghost-visits the ICU like the world’s most intense Candygram. Cue anointing of the sick, a dream full of presents, and a shrine portrait that makes Chucky point and say “that was my best friend.” Then — because this is still Unsolved Mysteries — we hard-cut to Odessa, Texas, a burned body in a trash fire, and a drifter named Bill who treats a stolen pickup like a Christmas list item. 

Then Gallup, New Mexico: nine-year-old Anthonette Cayedito vanishes, a year-later phone call gets cut off mid-name, a napkin under a plate says please help me, and a Navajo medicine ceremony becomes prime-time television. Finally the soft landing: a Florida couple shares sandwiches and five bucks with a hitchhiker who vanishes like fog, then spends the next five Christmases cashing anonymous $500 checks from “your Christian friends.” Miracle? Angel? Incredible luck? Stack shrugs in gravel: a rational explanation is hardly necessary.

Relic flipping on the pillow? Got it. Unknown kid who hangs around the hospital? He’s there too. Anonymous Christmas checks that keep landing like clockwork? Only to a kind elderly couple! So grab your cocoa, keep one eye on the tip line, and hit play with us on this episode all about “Unsolved Mysteries!”

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What’s up, dudes? Halloween is creeping up on us, so we’re checking into the spookiest resort on Saturday morning TV. It’s the 1980 Hanna-Barbera monster mash Drak Pack and the episode “Hideout Hotel”! I’ve got Joe Martinez from Now Watch This with me to talk all about it!

Drak Jr., Frankie, and Howler (the teenage descendants of Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Wolf Man, who fight crime to make up for their ancestors being total jerks for a few centuries) are stuck freezing in the snow back home while their great-great-uncle Big D is soaking up the Florida sun at the 300th-anniversary reunion of the Transylvania Retired Spooks, Spectres, and Spirits Society. Too bad Dr. Dred picked the same hotel. He sends Vampira in as a sea monster to clear the beach, kicks out every paying guest, and reopens the place as Dr. Dred’s Hideout Hotel, a luxury resort for the world’s worst criminals. It comes with a Wall of Crime, prison-bar doors, and a lobby where you check in with your fingerprints. The Drak Pack show up and immediately get buried up to their necks in the sand with high tide coming in (“Enjoying the view, Quack Pack?”). They bust out with a head-bonk Drak Whack and some werewolf sandblasting, then pick off O.G.R.E. one by one: Mummy Man gets wrapped up, Fly gets stuck in the shade, and Vampira’s seagull disguise goes straight into the drink. With hundreds of hoods pulling up in black limos, Frankie accidentally has the idea of the century. It’s a crooks’ convention? Well, Big D has a convention too! Cue skeletons in the closets, beds floating out the windows, and a dragon in the bathtub of Room 521 (“Do we allow pets?”). It’s all voiced by a total ’80s Saturday-morning dream team: Hans Conried (Captain Hook himself!) as Dr. Dred, Alan “Skeletor” Oppenheimer as Big D, Papa Smurf’s Don Messick as Toad and Fly, Duckworth’s Chuck McCann as Mummy Man, and Clumsy Smurf’s Bill Callaway pulling double duty as Frankie and Howler.

Wall of Crime? Check. Sand sculpture of Dr. Dred built by the world’s biggest suck-up? Yep. A dragon in the bathtub? Better call the front desk! So grab your beach towel, register your fingerprints, and check in to this episode on Drak Pack “Hideout Hotel”!

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PARENTAL WARNING: DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE WITH CHILDREN PRESENT!

What’s up, dudes? Cue the piano, because we’re gonna have a watch-along party for the 1965 Peanuts classic “A Charlie Brown Christmas”! I’ve got Jeff Loftin from Lost Christmas podcast and Jeremy Phelps the Alamo City Santa  with me to provide commentary and enjoy the ride!

This is the special CBS was pretty sure they’d just made a mistake. Charles Schulz wrote it, Bill Melendez directed the animation, Lee Mendelson produced it, and Coca-Cola sponsored it after an ad guy asked if they had a Christmas show and Mendelson said yes before he asked Schulz. They built it in about six months on a $76,000 budget (and still went about $20,000 over), with real kids talking, no laugh track, and Vince Guaraldi playing jazz like it belonged next to the tinsel. Schulz got up and left the room when somebody assumed there’d be canned laughs. Mendelson scribbled the words to “Christmas Time Is Here” on the back of an envelope. The network watched a cut and called it slow. Then it aired on CBS on December 9, 1965, at 7:30 p.m. ET, in The Munsters’ Thursday slot, and 45% of the people watching television that night stayed with it. An estimated 15,490,000 homes. Number two, behind Bonanza. An Emmy for Outstanding Children’s Program and a Peabody showed up after that, which is a wild trophy case for a half-hour everybody in the room thought was too quiet.

So press play with us. We’re not gonna recap it like you’ve never seen it. We’re riding the ice, visiting Lucy’s five-cent psychiatric booth, clocking Snoopy’s doghouse light display, and taking Lucy’s very sincere pitch for a big shiny aluminum tree. Charlie Brown, being Charlie Brown, comes back with the little real one. When the rehearsal falls apart, Linus still has Luke 2 and a blanket he is willing to put down. Peter Robbins is Charlie Brown, Christopher Shea is Linus, and the kids recorded the whole thing in a day (Jefferson Airplane was next door and swung by for autographs, because of course they did). Hit play, keep the blanket nearby, and talk through it with us.

Aluminum tree? Check. Nickel therapy? Got it. Guaraldi plus a scripture reading network TV was not ready for? That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown! So grab the sad little sapling, drop a nickel in the booth, and skate on over to this episode on “A Charlie Brown Christmas”!

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What’s up, dudes? Grab your camp flashlight and whatever you do, don’t touch the plunger — we’re gonna talk Nickelodeon’s Salute Your Shorts classic “The Ghost Story / Zeke the Plumber!” I’ve got Mike Westfall from Advent Calendar House, Chad Young from Horror Movie BBQ, and Joe Fulton the Christmas Aficionado with me to provide commentary and enjoy the ride!

It’s Camp Anawanna, June 1991, and Budnick’s weaponizing bedtime. He spins the legend of Zeke — camp custodian, parrot-bit nose, couldn’t smell a gas leak, lit a match, and became what Budnick lovingly calls a human party-popper. All that’s left is a cursed plunger: touch it, and Zeke haunts your dreams, sucking secrets out of your head like a spectral toilet-snake. Telly and Michael take the bait, the whole bunkhouse wakes up traumatized, and the campers — with Ug’s help — challenge Budnick to spend the night on Zeke’s death ground. Pranks, spider webs, a fake noseless plumber who somehow still “smells” fear… then Budnick goes full Scooby-Doo, unmasks Ug, and still somehow loses the fear-off. Shorts saluted. Nightmares achieved.

Cursed plunger? Check. Missing-nose ghost janitor? Yep. Budnick vs. spiders? Camp Anawanna, baby! So put toothpaste around your bed, spit in your hand, and slap your forehead to this episode on “The Ghost Story / Zeke the Plumber!”

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What’s up, dudes? Grab your fold-out poster and your secret word, because we’re cracking open one of the most Christmas-adjacent kids’-mag crossovers of the late ’80s — Muppet Magazine #17, Winter 1987, the “Pee-Wee & Kermit: Playhouse Pals!” cover! I’ve got Tim Babb from Can’t Wait for Christmas  and Mike Westfall from Advent Calendar House with me to talk all about it!

It’s Volume 5, Number 1 of the Henson Company’s full-color quarterly, and the cover alone is peak Saturday-morning destiny: Kermit the Frog hanging with Pee-wee Herman right when Pee-wee’s Playhouse and Muppet Babies were sharing the CBS morning lineup. Inside, Frog-In-Chief Kermit drops by the Playhouse for a visit/interview (Fred Newman on the byline vibes), Miss Piggy goes jogging with Ari Meyers and Allison Smith, Rowlf sits down with Jonathan Silverman for “Barking Beach Memoirs,” and the Muppet Babies crash Clement C. Moore with Louise Gikow and Bruce McNally’s “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.” Plus the pull-out that every ’80s kid fought over — “Hip Holidays from M-MTV!” featuring the Electric Mayhem — because nothing says Winter 1987 like a Muppet MTV Christmas parody and a mailbox full of Miss Piggy’s Advice.

Playhouse pals on the cover? Check. Muppet Babies night-before-Christmas comic? Got it. Fold-out Hip Holidays M-MTV poster? Definitely! So hang your Muppet Magazine on the fridge, whisper the secret word, and flip to this episode on “Muppet Magazine #17 Winter 1987!”

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