The Disney Halloween Specials

Back in the 80s Halloween meant, among other things, lots of Halloween specials on TV. One I made sure to catch every year was A Disney Halloween. It was on in the background at Halloween parties, at Cub Scout meetings as we stuffed scarecrows to decorate our front porches, and after coming home from a night of Trick-or-Treat.



After doing a bit of research, I discovered that when I think of A Disney Halloween, I’m actually remembering bits and pieces of three different specials: Disney’s Halloween Hall O’ Fame, Disney’s Halloween Treat, and A Disney Halloween. A Disney Halloween was the longest, and more or less incorporated all the material from the other two, so for the sake of convenience I’ll use it here to refer to all three shows. Essentially the show was a compilation of a whole bunch of scary moments in Disney shorts and movies from the 1930s all the way up to the 1980s. In an era before most of these movies were easily available on VHS, it was my first exposure to a lot of the classic Disney movies: The Sword in the Stone, Peter Pan, Snow White, The Aristocats, and many others.

Watching these specials now, it’s fun to see how freaky and weird a lot of these old cartoons were. In one episode, for instance, Donald Duck takes gleeful, sadistic pleasure in handing out firecrackers to his own nephews for Trick-or-Treat. How they survived such reckless abuse is far beyond me, but in this particular cartoon they get back at Donald through the help of a devious witch named Hazel and cheerful pop-swing music.

In another cartoon Pluto is condemned to death by a council of vicious cats (who live in a giant stone cat head not at all unlike the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin). After being found guilty, Pluto is nearly burned alive by demonic, pitchfork wielding felines before waking from the dream. I’m glad to see children’s programming that’s not afraid to be so out there. I could be wrong, since I'm looking at it from an adult's eyes, but I feel like kid's entertainment has gotten tamer over the years.

But I didn’t watch the specials for the weird 40s cartoons, or even the clips of Disney villains through the years. What I looked forward to the most were the two segments that scared my Kindergarten mind the worst: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Night on Bald Mountain.



I’ll admit that these days Sleepy Hollow feels a little tame. The final chase with Ichabod and the horseman is still thrilling. (The TV specials tended to cut out the rather grim ending of the tale where Ichabod vanishes forever, perhaps spirited away to hell by the horseman). Disney’s Horseman is clearly supernatural. No matter how many times my parents tried to calm me by insisting the Headless Horseman was just Brom Bones in disguise, I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now. The Headless Horseman is real, damn it!

The rest of the segment hasn’t aged well; most of the time it has nothing to do with the Horseman or the actual “legend” of Sleepy Hollow. Instead we get the chipper voice of Bing Crosby as our narrator and several 1940s era boogie-woogie music numbers that blunt a lot of the terror. It’s hard to be frightened by the Headless Horseman when we learn about him through a jaunty Bing Crosby sing-along.

Night on Bald Mountain, on the other hand, remains just as beautiful, frightening, and eerie as it did when I first watched it. Originally the climax to Disney’s Fantasia, I was first exposed to the segment on A Disney Halloween, and while other kids found it boring, stupid, or slow (criticisms which are unfairly lobbed at the whole of Fantasia to this day) I was transfixed. The animation is phenomenal—I’d say it’s one of the most beautiful hand drawn shorts ever: from the ethereal movements of the ghosts to the spastic flight of the harpies and the impressive, powerful movements of Chernabog atop the mountain, the segment pushed the boundariess of what cartoon animation had been up to that point.



Unlike so many of the other cartoons, there are no heroes in Night on Bald Mountain (described as “the world’s first Halloween party” by the show’s narrator). There is nothing to stand up against the evil of the demon Chernabog. Indeed, he has this night, and presumably every night, free to do what he wants, to raise the dead and cavort with flaming demons and flying harpies without a soul to oppose him. With power like that at his disposal, what earthly force could stop him?

In Fantasia, Chernabog is defeated at dawn by the ringing of the church bell and horrible night of Bald Mountain gives way to the gorgeous Ave Maria sequence. In the Disney Halloween specials, oddly enough, they would cut away before Chernabog’s defeat, leaving him in power on Bald Mountain and presumably prepared to destroy the town and the world. As a kid who was already plenty afraid of the night, it gave me the sense that somewhere in the world something like this could happen unchecked—that the night brought on things so frightening and so otherworldly that it was never a good idea to venture too far from home after dark. Who knew which of the mountains I could see from by bedroom was home to a terrible demon and the dance of the dead?

And while I no longer believe there are mountains where demons dance to classical music, Night on Bald Mountain still reminds me of the days when I did. From that beautiful nightmare to Huey, Dewey, and Louie’s quest for candy, there’s something about A Disney Halloween that perfectly captures the fun and fright of Halloween in the 1980s for those of us who were there. I wonder what the kids are watching now?