# 44 Days till Halloween



## Dinosaur1972 (Mar 28, 2007)

44 Days till Halloween
9/17/2013

*McDonald's Scary Sound Effects Cassette (1995)
*I’m so glad there are people in this world that commit old cassettes to mp3 format and share with the world. This cracks me up. On Side A, Grimace sings a song called “I Scare Myself” which is pretty funny. Side B is a whopping 5 minutes of scary sounds.

*Music for Little People - Spooky Favorites (1999)
*This one is pretty cute, and also geared to the really really young. “If You’re Scary and You Know It”, “5 Little Pumpkins”, it’s not bad. It mostly consists of familiar tunes with Halloween lyrics. Some songs are sung by kids, and they actually sound like kids – not the kid-choruses you hear during Kidz Bop. I like “The Thing” and “There Was An Old Woman (All Skin and Bones)”… classics.

*Oscar Brand And His Young Friends - Trick or Treat: Hallowe'en Celebrated in Story & Song (1979)
*Another classic. Reminds me of Dean Gitter … just a man and his guitar, singing spooky folk songs. Oscar gets help in some of the choruses by some kids. Good songs that tell good stories, this is a good listen.

*Pat Patrick - Monsters and Monstrous Things (1983)
*These must be original songs (I haven’t heard them anywhere else) … they just aren’t very GOOD songs. (One exception … “Monsters In My Room” … isn’t awful.) They’re kind of boring songs. The horn section is pretty good … anything like this produced now would use crappy synthesized horns instead of the real deal.

*Paul Hecht & Carole Danel - Selections From the Haunted House and Other Spooky Poems and Tales (1970)
*I LOVE THIS ONE. It’s dreadfully short … it’s pretty much all short poems with a couple of ghost stories. Some are clever and funny, some are pretty spooky … this was back when it was OK to scare a kid, just a little. Might be my favorite telling of “The Velvet Ribbon”, and there are two other very scary stories … “The Erl-King” and “The Cradle That Rocked By Itself”. 

*Peter Pan Records - Monster Mash (1977)
*Ah, Peter Pan Records strikes again with another platter of cheese. “Monster Mash”, “PPE”, “Witch Doctor”. Upside – it has “Dinner With Drac” (though it lacks Zacherley’s laughter). There are other, non-spooky novelty songs here, too. It’s not awful, but it isn’t great.

*Robert J Walsh - Ghostly Songs and Stories (1993)
*It’s got “Worms Crawl In”, “Skin and Bones”, “Witches Brew” … traditional kids songs. Again – not bad, but not earth-shattering. There’s an instrumental called “Ghoul’s Dance” that is pretty good.

*Playhouse Presentation of Frankenstein
*No idea when this was made, who made it, or anything else. It is very well done … it actually sticks to the Mary Shelley story. It tells it in a fairly simple way, but the story retains its horror. The stories themes hold up well too … in the movie, Frankenstein isn’t necessarily the “bad guy” … the Monster is. In the story, Frankenstein is just as responsible for all the horror as the Monster … this recording makes that clear.

*Scary Stories for Little Monsters (1999)
*Six tracks here. The reader (Liza Watts) does a terrific job. 

*Old Gray Goose - Scary Stories For Halloween (2004)
*After I listened to the first track, I thought maybe this isn’t for kids. The Old Gray Goose is kind of a sick bastard – his first story is a little nasty. I really enjoy his accent – is it Jersey?


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