Monday, October 22, 2018

'Toon Reviews Shorty: Scary Godmother Part 1: Halloween Spooktacular


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It’s been a while since I’ve done an MC Toon Reviews Shorty, but with another holiday around the corner, it’s a good time to look into an animated special I’ve never seen before.  The interesting thing about this shorty is that the works I’ll be looking into are on the holiday that lends itself well to animation, Halloween.  The scare factor, wild imagery, and imagination in things like parties and costume feel right at home in something as versatile as a cartoon.  Most Halloween specials I’ve seen are tie-ins to established TV shows and special franchises.  I’m largely unfamiliar with standalone Halloween special, but this year I have a good idea of what to look into.  For the next 2 days, I’m going to cover two computer animated specials based on a children’s book series by Jill Orson:



Scary Godmother
It should be known that I’ve never read the books these specials were based on and I’m probably too old for them now.  However, I do know that the two specials featuring the titular character used to air on Cartoon Network every Halloween season, even if they haven't aired in recent years.  I never actually watched them, but over the years, I’ve noticed a lot of animation fans show interest in them. 
Being an animation fan myself and an enjoyer of Halloween specials, I’m all set to look into them myself to draw my own opinions.  I can’t explain why I haven’t pushed myself to watch them before.  Maybe because I was too attached to what I knew or they just didn’t seem that interesting.  As a person trying to keep an open mind, I have high hopes for a fun time with plenty of Halloween spirit.  So let’s enter the Fright Side for two big Halloween parties.
Halloween Spooktacular
(October 31, 2003)
With this special making first impressions on Scary Godmother’s transition into animation, the best hope is that it embraces its imaginative environment.  It may not be the best story ever, but there are plenty of elements to this special to leave a very fun mark.
The special follows a little girl named Hannah who’s going trick-or-treating with her cousin Jimmy and his friends.  Despite hitting it off well with the gang, any possible bonding doesn’t seem possible with Jimmy’s authority over everyone.  He pushes everyone to treat their costume to that of a creature of the night despite most of them not being very monstrous by design.  In addition to painting Jimmy in a jerky one-dimensional light, this scenario makes things difficult to Hannah.  Her main trait for the special is that she’s terrified of monsters as evidenced through dressing up as a cute harmless fairy princess, and using a flashlight to scare any away. 
This fear of Hannah’s sets her up as a target for bullying when Jimmy plans for the gang to ditch her so they can get more candy.  Showing that his friends have little to their personalities even after seeming friendly with Hannah, they choose better trick-or-treating over a child’s well-being.  They trick her into going into a strange-looking house called the Spook House to prove her worth as a big kid.  It’s here where their bullying reaches a whole new low when Jimmy leads everyone to scare Hannah just as she enters.  This move messes with her already huge fear with fabrications of monsters. 
From the first couple minutes, the special seems fine albeit very basic and characterizations.  This tends to make Jimmy and his friends seem too out of line with their jerkiness and Hannah hard to get behind for easily falling for shallow scare attempts.  However, it’s from these characterizations that allow what follows to greatly benefit the special.
The moment Scary Godmother appears and puts a humorous spin on a lonely Hannah’s “boohooing,” the fun of the special really builds.  She’s an eccentric witch with charm and likability in everything she does.  Through her friendly demeanor, she takes Hannah on a trip to her home in the Fright Side to meet her monster friends so Hannah can see what Halloween frights are really like.  A lively flight to the Fright Side with interesting aerial shots of what I assume are the illustrations from the original books and use of wormholes adds more appeal to this character.  They arrive at Scary Godmother’s home, a haunted house at the end of a pumpkin patch where her annual Halloween party is taking place.  While she continues to delight by herself, she’s just as fun working off the many residents in her home.
From here, the special remains in that one place with barely a plot to follow and focus solely on the party and everyone in the Fright Side enjoying it.  Technically, this has the special meander a lot fueled solely by random escapades.  However, one thing I’ve discovered from my reviewing hobby is that great animation doesn’t always need to follow a plot.  Well-defined characters and entertaining moments seem to be what benefits the medium the most.  For the most part, these elements keep the special so enjoyable. 
Scary Godmother remains a highly energized witch of a party host, but each of the guests are very memorable too.  There’s a literal skeleton in the closet, Skully Pettibone who livens up his scenes with great showmanship, breathing believable life into a pile of bones.  Harry the werewolf is the main comic relief through random monologues, mistaking Hannah for a character in his favorite series, and especially eating everything.  He’s mostly a riot and makes the party particularly fun, but he can get pretty overbearing a couple of times up to the point where I feel like siding with the guests to shut him up.  Those moments are even enjoyable in their own right, especially Scary Godmother turning the special into a cook show for peanut butter and jelly crackers for a few seconds.  Anyway, there’s also a vampire family in which the son, Orson, doesn’t fit in through appearing more humanlike.  One of the more creative monsters is Bug-A-Boo, a big round multi-eyed monster, at least in design and through a hilarious chase scene.  As a character, he mostly gets Hannah to realize everything she’s heard or what she believes about monsters are false and aid in her character development (more on that later).  There’s certainly a lot of fun to be had with these characters.  From their designs and personalities, they’re interesting images to think of when it comes to Halloween.  They work well on their own, but also work off splendidly in group scenes. They include dancing creatively, having small conversations, and even ordering pizza after Harry eats all the snacks.  It’s one fun character and one fun moment after another that greatly captures the feel of being at a Halloween party.
The party aspect of the special is so well-done, it makes frequent cuts to the real world seem noticeably lacking.  It’s just Jimmy and his friends waiting outside the Spook House for Hannah to come running scared and that’s it.  These scenes are very slow-paced and boring, mostly consist of awkward and unfunny banter, and even get annoying through repeating lines a couple times.  Plus, they further come off as unlikable and frustratingly stupid for saying they should go in to get Hannah, but never do for weak reasons.  These scenes are really not that good, and getting a lot of them in between the more interesting Halloween party does not do any favors.  They don’t just disrupt the special’s flow, but they leave a relatively negative impact by themselves.
The biggest thing to leave a positive impact however is what both the party and Jimmy and the gang waiting around do for Hannah’s character.  She enters the special as a basic little girl archetype, loving all things pink and being scared of monsters.  It was already discussed how she showed these qualities when she was first bullied by Jimmy and the others, but it follows into the Fright Side too.  She greets every monster she meets with a scream and has to be pushed by Scary Godmother to warm up to them.  Her freaking out at every new monster is slightly frustrating since she doesn’t apply what she learned to a potential friend.  At least her fear can lead to some funny moments such as the aforementioned chase from Bug-A-Boo.  In fact, after meeting him, Hannah truly develops through forming legitimate bonds, mostly with Orson and Bug-A-Boo.  To prove her development is genuine, Hannah works up her own Halloween spirit in the end.  When the big kids finally go into the Spook House for her, Hannah rigs it by having her new monster friends scare them.  There’s a lot of memorable moments from this scene.  They include the vampires casually commenting on what they see before scaring, Skully giving a song and dance routine and falling apart, and one of Harry's overdramatic monologs.  It’s a thrilling and fitting end for Hannah’s arc and is enhanced by the big kids being scared enough to follow her home after the fright and getting a key to visit the Fright Side any time.  The growth from fearing monsters to seeing their friendly side makes for an interesting center for the special.  Developing Hannah’s character and showing what benefits from it makes it especially meaningful.
Ultimately, this special isn’t anything amazing through many basic characters and several unappealing scenes that drag things out too much.  That said, it succeeds through plenty of Halloween spirit from the characters, party setting, and even solid developments.  As far as first impressions go for this special, this series seems like appealing Halloween viewing.
 
 
 
Recommended

Tommorow will be the review of the second Scary Godmother special, The Revenge of Jimmy a surprisingly faithful follow-up to the first special.

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