# 79 Days Till Halloween



## Dinosaur1972 (Mar 28, 2007)

79 Days Till Halloween
8/13/2013

More mixes! Picking up where we left off:

*Dartman's Halloween Special (2009)
*This time, Dartman distributed his mix as one long mp3. I like it … you get better flow from one track to the next … but there’s no track listing that I’ve ever found. A few repeats from the previous year’s mix here. I like that he added some background noise to the tracks … so you faintly hear screams or wind during the songs … makes it kinda fun.

*Dartman's Halloween Treat Bag (2010)
*In 2010, instead of a mix, Dartman just shared a bunch of individual tracks. Not all are tagged, so there are times that I have no idea what I’m listening to. But there are highlights … “Sucker For Your Love” from the 1981 film “The Monster Club”, a fun intro from the Paul Lynde Halloween Special. Also a 31 minute mp3 that sounds like it is a mix itself … a mix within a mix? It had Monster Mash by B(B)P – that makes 10 from him and 12 overall.

*Ghouls With Attitude Halloween Compilation Vol. 1 and 2 (2004)
*Two CDs worth of 60’s-70’s tracks… many rare ones, some fun movie trailers. Highlights: “Monster Surfer”, “Someone Walked Over My Grave” (Criswell!), a little Louise Huebner, “Mostly Ghostly”, “Opening the Coffin”. Lowlights: “Burned at the Stake” … kind of morbid for an otherwise fun collection. And while I love the 16-minute “Troll at the General Meeting”, it seems a tad out of place surrounded by 2-minute songs. The CD covers are top-notch.

*Halloween Booootie (2009)
*After all the mixes with old 60’s tunes, and a whole lot of repetition, it is nice to hear a mix with more modern sounds. Instead of tacking tracks together, the “Booootie” mixes are comprised of mixed tracks. Many of these are odd combinations, but it is a lot of fun to hear how they are put together. Some very talented dj’s put these tracks together – Cheekyboy, Voicedude. “Thiller” + “Hollaback Girl”, “Thunderstruck” + “Ghostbusters”, “Monster Mash” + “Smells Like Teen Spirit” … it takes some serious creative skills to dream up those combinations and make them work. 

*Halloween Booootie 2 (2010)
*More of the same. “Just Dance” + “Thriller” + “Freaks Come Out At Night”, “Keeping Halloween Alive” + “Toxic”, “Mercy” + “Monster Mash”, “Tubular Bells” + “Monster” … if there’s a weakness here, it is that both the 2009 and 2010 mixes use a bit of the same source material. But that’s pretty minor. 

OK … ready for a change. Back to Ghost Stories!

*Arch Oboler's Drop Dead! An Exercise In Horror! (1962)
*Oboler was a writer who penned most of the scripts to the radio series “Lights Out”, a 1930’s horror-radio show. By 1962, of course, horror had made the move from radio to movie theater. You can almost hear the derision in Oboler’s voice when he refers to movies like “Psycho”, and tells us our imaginations are more terrifying than anything that can be seen on-screen. The stories here are wonderful examples of those old shows from the 30’s. Some are better than others … “The Dark” is terrific, “I’m Hungry” is plenty twisted, and then – of course – there is “Chicken Heart”. Others are less effective, and the album ends with its weakest sketch.

*Arch Oboler's Original Radio Broadcast Lights Out (1978)
*This old album is simply two of Oboler’s old plays, each taking up one side of the album. Side A, Oxychloride X, tells the story of a college student that invents a terrible chemical. Side B, Rocket From Manhattan, about a team of researchers returning to earth, unsure of what they might find. Great stories.


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