Thursday 6 October 2016

Bugs Bunny's Howl-oween Special (1977)

Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Speedy Gonzalez, and Sylvester and Tweety Pie, have run-ins with Witch Hazel, Haunted Hotels, and a certain Dr. Jykle and his famous potion.


I love Loony Tunes, but so how I've never seen this, nor indeed knew of its existence, so I was looking forward to a half hour of spooky new material from Bugs and the gang.

Sadly, new material is VERY thin on the ground.

Culled from bits and pieces of a hand full of Loony Tunes shorts from originally released 1954-1966, the only new material is an odd second here and there inserted to try and mould the different scenes into a cohesive single entity, with varying degrees of success.

The most blatant (but also smoothest) of these transitions happens when Bugs give Witch Hazel some of the Hyde potion and, thanks to a brief new shot, she inexplicably turns not into a large beastly version of herself (as has everyone who has taken it up until this point) but instead into a Dracula-esq vampire... allowing a scene from Transylvania 6-5000 (which, as you may have guessed, features a vampire) to be used.

The pick-and-mix nature of the special doesn't work at all; most of the shorts feel empty as they aren't presented in full, and the linking device is so poor that taken as a new piece the special makes no real sense from one second to the next.

Yes, it's aimed at young children... but it's appallingly lazy, and they'd be far better served to watch the separate 'toons in their entirety.


Disclaimer:
If you look through the archives, you'll see that I've been using "Bought from Poundland" as a tag since at least 2011.


In March 2014, I took a part time job at Poundland.

In accordance with the companies social media policy, in September 2014 I contacted Poundland's social media team to check that I would be okay to carry on with my plan to use the "bought from Poundland" tag.

I have been given the go-ahead on condition that I make the following clear:


All the reviews on this blog are entirely the opinion of Will Tingle, the reviews are not endorsed by Poundland in any way and (as should be obvious from some of the more scathing ones) are certainly not reviews I have been paid to write.

In short: The views expressed in this blog are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Poundland or it's owners, shareholders, or  management.

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