Small Delight: The Halloween Tree
Hanna-Barbera meets Ray Bradbury!!!
My regular newsletter comes out on Tuesdays, but occasionally I feel the need to pass on other Small Delights on random days. This is one of them.
Hi, friends,
Although it was one of my childhood favorites—along with Something Wicked This Way Comes and The October Country—I haven’t read Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree in approximately 9,000 years. Even so, when I learned that it had been adapted into a 1993 animated TV movie, I got so excited that I fell off the couch.
Okay, falling off the couch is maybe a slight exaggeration, but I DID sit down and watch it IMMEDIATELY, right before I went into work.
RAY BRADBURY HIMSELF DOES THE NARRATION, so you get to hear him read passages like this:
It was a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state. There wasn't so much wilderness around that you couldn't see the town. On the other hand, there wasn't so much town around that you couldn't see and feel and touch the wilderness. The town was full of fences to walk on and sidewalks to skate on, and the muted cries and laughter of boys and girls full of costumes, dreams, and pumpkin spirits preparing for the greatest night of the year. Better than Easter, better than Christmas: Halloween.
Which, like: If there’s something cozier and autumnal than sitting back and listening to Ray Bradbury read to me, I haven’t found it. (He wrote the screenplay, too—based on the passages I looked up & compared, he pulled quite a bit directly from the book. And his voice is like a warm blanket. If I hadn’t already adored him going in, I’d have fallen in love the second I heard his voice.)
The premise, if you don’t know it, is that a group of kids go on an adventure around the world and throughout time with the powerful and mysterious Mr. Moundshroud, in an effort to save their friend Pip, who is fighting for his life in the hospital. The adventure is basically just a framing narrative to allow the kids to dip into the history behind some of the now-classic symbols of Halloween: witches, mummies, skeletons, etc.
[Note: As it’s a 1993 movie based on a 1972 novel, some of it is dated and/or inaccurate. Most glaringly, it equates Día de los Muertos with Halloween, which is not particularly surprising, but still a bummer.]
Mr. Moundshroud.
Is voiced.
BY LEONARD NIMOY!!!
And, if I were in charge of things, he would get a posthumous Emmy for Scenery Chewing, because he GOES FOR IT:
So of course, I took a look at the illustrations in the book, and it looks like the animators did as well:
I will, obviously, be re-reading the whole thing ASAP.
So, there you have it: A Small Delight for the day!
I hope you have a good one.
Talk to you soon,
Leila