Ran out to run a few errands behind the Acme next. I had one last bag of items I wanted to deliver at the back of Goodwill, including my old snow boots. Went around front after that and checked out the main store. I found a bag with the most adorable little folk-ish ghost and cute smiling jack o'lantern candle and four CDs. Two will go to Lauren and her parents. The other two are for me:
Elton John - The One
Walt Disney Christmas Favorites Vol. 2 (I bought this mainly for the original songs "It Won't Be Long 'Till Christmas" and "Santa's Rap" and the rarely covered "Bring a Torch Jeanette, Isabella.")
My throat was so dry, I needed to go next door to Five Below for a Coke Oreo Zero. Found a few cute Hello Kitty items that Amanda will love for Christmas, too. They must have been training new cashiers. There were at least five young women standing behind the counter, and they were all perfectly pleasant.
Rode up to Market Street in Audubon for lunch. Had a turkey and bacon croissant sandwich and pumpkin spice chai latte outside at the Brown Dog Cafe. The latte wasn't all that different from the one at Common Grounds, just slightly less sweet. The sandwich was amazing, warm deli turkey housed between thick bacon slices and avocado spread in a flaky croissant. I enjoyed my meal while watching cars and dog walkers go by.
The traffic had picked up considerably by the time I started home. Not only were the kids out of school, but the township was doing electrical work on Nicholson and had the tunnel under the train bridge blocked off. Cars were probably using the bridge as a detour. I went past the Kove Restaurant and down Atlantic instead, enjoying sunshine and perfectly warm weather.
Put on Sheriff Callie's Wild West while getting organized when I got home. Bandits commit "The Great Halloween Robbery" when they steal a giant jack o'lantern full of treats from the whole town. Callie, Toby, and Peck have a hard time finding them and the candy, thanks to Farmer Stinky's corn maze. Peck's tale of "The Ghost of Scary Prairie" is fictional, but his mule Clementine and Toby take it as real and run off. Callie goes after them...and when she ends up scaring them, everyone in town learns a lesson about letting their imaginations run away with them.
Switched to Voyage of the Rock Aliens at Tubi after the cartoon ended. I go further into this extremely 80's B sci-fi musical spoof at my Musical Dreams Movie Reviews blog.
Worked on the inventory next. Added Legally Blonde: The Musical, the stage version of The Lion King, Li'L Abner, and a collection with two off-Broadway revivals of antique hits, Leave It to Jane and Oh Kay! Jane/Kay came from the FYE in Moorestown, and the other two were yard sale finds. I've had Li'l Abner for so long, I have no idea where it came from now. I think I picked it up from the Borders near the Hamilton Mall in college.
Watched Young Frankenstein while working in honor of Teri Garr, who passed away today. Dr. Fredrick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) isn't proud of his family's ghoulish legacy, until he inherits his grandfather's castle. After discovering his grandfather's private library, he decides that maybe his grandfather wasn't that crazy after all and the dead could be brought back to life. He and Igor (Marty Feldman) do find the appropriate enormous body, but Igor brings him an abnormal brain. Now the monster is running loose and the Inspector (Kenneth Mars) and townspeople are calling for both their heads. Not to mention, his fiancee Elizabeth (Madeline Kahn) turns up when he's courting his assistant Inga (Garr).
Classic horror comedy is an all-time favorite, thanks to the delightful cast and Mel Brooks' alternately spooky and silly black-and-white atmosphere. The cast loved making it so much, they added extra scenes just to keep going, and many audiences may understand why.
Put on Match Game '77 while eating a quick dinner. They're near the end of the year now, with many references to Christmas. Elaine Joyce, Ron Pallilo, and Fannie Flagg joined in as Richard tucked Gene's tie into his pants in the opening of the episode I saw.
Finished the night working on my musical review while listening to the Halloween music and sound effects I've acquired in the last few years. While it didn't have a huge hit like "Christmastime Is Here," the score for It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown has many pleasures. "The Great Pumpkin Waltz" is probably the best-known, but the "Graveyard Theme" when the kids are trick or treating and the little number when Snoopy blows leaves around are worth hearing.
Nightmare Before Christmas is very nearly an operetta, with little dialogue and a lot of great music. "What's This," "This Is Halloween," and "Jack's Lament" are probably the best-known numbers from the score now. I also like Catherine O'Hara's gentle "Sally's Song" and "Making Christmas."
Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of The Haunted House is actually many different types of scary sounds, not just ones associated with haunted houses. Side one features mini stories to introduce terrifying dog, cat, and bird noises along with an alien crunching, a squeaking bridge, and even dripping water for Chinese water torture. Side two features more traditional sound-effect scares like crashes, screams, and creaks. Research reveals that I have the re-release from 1973 with the orange cover. It would be revised in 1979 with even more scary sounds.
I'm with Disney on not recommending this one to younger children. The mini-stories on the first side alone will definitely make them uneasy, if not give them nightmares. Older kids and pre-teens who can get past this being a Disney release and are horror fans may find Haunted House to be a worthy venture into the world of pure spooky sound.
Witchcraft...! is the closest I've come to finding a Halloween jazz release. It's instrumental versions of songs related to witches, black magic, or the supernatural like "Old Devil Moon," "That Old Black Magic," "Kiss of Fire," and "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered." Ray Martin and His Orchestra gives them the appropriate soft eerie fantasy quality.
Disney's Halloween Sounds and Songs uses some of those additional sound effects created for the 1979 album. The first half are mildly spooky comic numbers mostly sung by Micky and the gang like "Which Witch Is Which?" We do get a genuinely catchy song in the rock number "Shake Your Bones," along with two Winnie the Pooh songs, the original "Heffalumps and Woozels" and Tigger's "I Want to Scare Myself" from the special Boo To You, Winnie the Pooh. The second half after "Scare Myself" are the sounds...and they're genuinely scary and loud. In fact, they're really too scary to work with the kid-oriented music before them.
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