Rant #2,762: Season of the Witch

A typical Halloween for myself and my family …
 
We didn’t get a single person to come to the door, and all our candy was left and not touched.
 
We weren’t going to be home much of yesterday, but with our house dressed up for the occasion, not a single person came to take candy out of the pail we had by our door filled with the sugary stuff.
 
Next year, I don’t think we will have any remnant of Halloween at our house, because I don’t think we have gotten a soul to come to our door in years.
 
The last kids who came to our door on Halloween are now probably in college.
 
And being a college graduate myself, you learn when you are wasting your time, and Halloween at our house is a total and complete waste of time.
 
But elsewhere, it is magical.
 
My nephew and his wife go all-out with Halloween, and they set up elaborate displays all over their lawn to celebrate the holiday, and both scare and entice the guts out of the kids—and their parents—in the neighborhood they live in.

 
They do it every year, each year better and more elaborate than the previous one, and this year was no exception.
 
We were invited over the take in the festivities, and it was all ghoulish fun.
 
And what’s better, they asked for donations to a local animal rescue organization, and people gave willingly of food, toys, and money to that cause.
 
It was a nice day yesterday, not too cold with lots of sun, so it really made for a great day for the neighborhood kids and kids of all ages.
 
And then we came home, and while my wife fell asleep, I watched, for the first time in years, one of my favorite TV series that was turned into a movie with the original cast—well, almost—in the classic TV-related movie, “Munster, Go Home.”

 
This movie features the stars of the original CBS series—Fred Gwynne as Herman Munster, Yvonne DeCarlo as Lily Munster, Al Lewis as Grandpa Dracula, Butch Patrick as Eddie Munster—but we have the third actress to play Marilyn in the film, the pretty but vapid Debbie Watson, and a slew of British character actors to make the movie really “British,” including Richard Dawson, then of “Hogan’s Heroes.”
 
Just about all the background people who launched the TV show in the first place are involved—including creators Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, who created the show as a goof on “Leave It To Beaver:--and all of it is in color, not the black and while that the TV series used to rather ghoulish effect.
 
The very light story has Herman bequeathed a castle in England, and also a royal title, and the Munsters going over to England to see what they have.
 
They find that there are lots of devious doings in the castle, including a bit of counterfeiting, and everything is resolved at the end as a result of a road race that Herman is in.
 
Yes, it is a very scant story, the color takes a lot of the life out of what we see on screen, and what you get is pretty much an hour and a half version of the TV series, but all in all, the movie was enjoyable when I saw it in the Rochdale Village movie theater back in 1966 and it is still fun now.
 
And as an adult, I see a bit more of what is going on, some very, very mild double entendre jokes being shoehorned in and even a quick paean to Gwynne and Lewis’ previous show, “Car 54, Where Are You.”
 
I guarantee that I didn’t pick up on this as a nine year old, but as an adult, it is fun to notice them now.
 
I had thought that the movie was a precursor for a third season of the show, but Butch Patrick himself told me on Facebook that the movie was a device to launch the TV series in Europe, and nothing more.
 
Whatever the case, of all the movies that have been generated by the series over the decades, this is the only one that I could see that was shown yesterday, so whatever it was created for, it rounded out my celebration of Halloween 2021 in a good way.
 
(And note to Rob Zombie, who I am sure reads this blog on a regular basis: DO NOT DESTROY THE MUNSTERS IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM! as he prepares his own version of the TV series for theatrical release. Too many others have done just that—remember “The Munsters Today” or whatever that horrific 1980s update was called—and the show doesn’t deserve such a decapitation.)
 
So there you have it, Halloween 2021 is gone, all the stuff now has to be taken down, and we can prepare for the really, truly best holiday of the year—Thanksgiving—with all the trimmings.
 
Thanksgiving is November 25 and for my fellow Jews, Hanukkah begins at sundown on November 28 … all of which creates their own set of ghoulish problems that has absolutely nothing to do with Halloween.
 
It would even give the Headless Horseman something of a migraine headache.