The Halloween That Almost Wasn't
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The Halloween That Almost Wasn't is a 1979 made-for-television movie which aired regularly on the Disney Channel until the mid-1990s. It revolves around Dracula (Judd Hirsch) and the Witch (Mariette Hartley) trying to save Halloween. It won an Emmy Award for "Outstanding Individual Achievement - Children's Program" and was nominated for three others. On VHS releases, it was retitled The Night Dracula Saved the World. It premiered on the American Broadcasting Company and was filmed in Tarrytown, New York at Lyndhurst. This was released on Video Home System September 16,1992.
After hearing rumors that Halloween may end and that he is being blamed, Dracula exclaims, "How dare they suggest such a thing? Halloween is my national holiday!" and he calls his monsters - Warren the Werewolf aka Wolf Man (Jack Riley) of Budapest, the Mummy of Egypt (Robert Fitch), Frankenstein (John Schuck), Zabaar the Zombie (Josip Elic) of Haiti, and the Witch - to his castle to make them scary again. Specifically, the problem is that they have "exploited their monsterhood" to the point of being funny rather than scary, such as Frankenstein who let a movie influence him into tapdancing rather than scaring people. (Similarly, the 1990s animated series Rocko's Modern Life featured a fake movie trailer about a pair of adventurers who find Dracula already dead and decide to get some bagels; the movie is called Done to Death.) As it turns out, the rumor was started by the witch herself; sick of jokes about how ugly she is, she no longer wishes to participate, and without her annual ride over the moon, there can be no Halloween. She has prepared a list of demands, which Dracula refuses to meet, so she rides off to her own castle.
Dracula pursues the Witch as a bat but realizes that the sun is about to come up and he goes back into his mausoleum. The next night, on the eve of Halloween, he and the other monsters break in to the Witch's castle. They have her cornered but she turns a painting of the Three Musketeers into minions. After a brief chase scene using Munsters-style fast motion, the witch is cornered in a room while Igor (Henry Gibson) has her broom. Dracula turns into a bat again to sneak under the door but gets smashed by the Witch and comes back; Igor tries climbing on a ledge and swinging into the room through a window Tarzan-style, only to have the Witch open the door so he goes right back outside. "It's one of those days I wish I was dead," Dracula declares. "And stayed dead."
Although Dracula finally gives in to the Witch's demands (including a randomly added wish for him to take her disco dancing every year), she suddenly changes her mind and decides not to go along. But then a pair of children who were watching the newscast of the events on TV apparently appear outside the door, one dressed as the Witch, and plead with her, telling her they love her the way she is. Moved by the children, she does her ride over the moon as promised.
The film concludes with a disco scene where the Witch turns into a disco queen resembling Stephanie Mangano and Dracula, figuring he may as well go with the flow, rips off his costume to reveal a Tony Manero-esque leisure suit (see Saturday Night Fever).
