The only way to watch this is incredibly low-res on YouTube, I think. I wish I had any confidence at all that this will be fixed by the promised Disney streaming service. If it is, you will see me shilling hard for people to contribute to my Patreon for this column, because I track a lot of the featured viewing down low-res on YouTube. And that’s with Disney constantly hunting people down for copyright violation. Disney’s attitude toward copyright is a whole other issue that I’m just not going to get in right now.

There were actually two Disney Halloween specials aired on The Wonderful World of Disney in successive years that were not terribly dissimilar, and this is the one I always preferred. It starts out with a generic Ominous Narrator (Hal Douglas) introducing various clips out of the Vault—we’ll get into a full list in a minute—and then segues to the Magic Mirror (reused clips of Hans Conried, who had just died) talking about the great Disney Villains as existed at the time. Then two more cartoons.

Honestly, it doesn’t hold together all that cohesively, but I still really liked it as a kid. The Ominous Narrator gives us “Night on Bald Mountain” and the Wizards’ Duel from The Sword in the Stone, which work okay together, but it’s followed by “The Old Mill,” which isn’t even Halloween but just generically autumnal. Then we get clips of major characters afraid—bits of “Mickey’s Parrot,” all of “Donald Duck and the Gorilla.” The “Heffalumps and Woozles” song from Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day. “Puss Cafe,” “Cat Nap Pluto,” and “Pluto’s Judgement Day” assembled into one. Then the conflicting “The Truth About Cats” and “The Siamese Cat Song.”

Then the Magic Mirror comes on to talk about, in succession, Captain Hook (also Conried, so that’s fun), Edgar Balthazar of The Aristocats, Willie the Giant, Shere Khan and Kaa, the Evil Queen of Snow White, Maleficent, Lady Tremaine of Cinderella, Cruella De Vil, the Queen of Hearts, and Madame Medusa of The Rescuers. It’s an interesting assortment of villains, really, and it kind of highlights how many of Disney’s villains have been female. This is not something I blame them for, necessarily, given the stories with which they were working in the first place, but it’s still worth noting. Then after that, we get all of “Lonesome Ghosts” and “Trick or Treat.”

There’s some solid material here, and I’m awfully fond of the Mirror’s ode to villainy. (Which I believe is actually lifted whole cloth from a special from the ’70s, because this is just the Inception of clip shows?) It’s just put together badly. There’s no real flow to most of it, more just sort of “Hey, look, this is sort of about Halloween, right?” Which not all of them are, after all. As I said, it’s not even just “not all of these are scary.” It’s that scary isn’t necessarily the same as “about Halloween.”

I mean, you guys know that technically, “Night on Bald Mountain” is in fact originally “St. John’s Eve on Bald Mountain,” right? And that St. John’s Eve is the summer solstice? Right! Like who doesn’t know that? Actually, they say in Fantasia that it’s Walpurgisnacht, which is May Day. But Modest Mussorgsky, who wrote the original piece, named it very specifically. And if it were Walpurgisnacht, that’s literally the opposite of the year from Halloween.

But okay, sure, we’ll go along with that. We think of it as Halloween anyway, because demons and scariness. But several of those villains are fairly mundane, honestly. That’s the scary thing about several of them. They’re just ordinary people. Sure, Maleficent and Willie and the Evil Queen. But Madame Medusa? And isn’t the real fear of Lady Tremaine that she’s got complete authority over Cinderella, a fear surely common to any child who’s been made to clean their room?

This is, however, another “I don’t blame Disney for it.” It’s the same as most other people’s attitudes toward the holiday. All scary stuff is Halloween. All winter stuff is Christmas. All romantic stuff is Valentine’s Day. And so for the most part, yes, I understand that it’s just all lumped together. Except “The Old Mill,” which we’ll get to some other time, which isn’t even scary except to one bird.

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