The Last Halloween
I remember many years ago in the 1990’s a Halloween special that revolved around a trio of aliens being obsessed over candy. I couldn’t remember the title of the picture but all I could think of was that it came on the TV following one of those Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes on the same cassette. At some point the tapes would be lost and along with it the special that would continue to perplex me for a very long time. It would be around two decades later when I finally found it out by accident while looking up Hanna Barbera stuff that the studio produced the show. It was called “The Last Halloween” and it aired on CBS way back on October 28, 1991.
Strange as it may sound, Hanna-Barbera would from time to time produce a live action special alongside their usual slate of animated series and specials throughout the decades in order to keep things financially afloat. You know, like “The Banana Splits”? Among the specials the studio made was this Emmy award winning live action/animated TV special sponsored by MARS Candy, which explains why the film was relentlessly plugging in the company's products throughout the storyline. And the executive producer was David Kirschner, whose name we will recognize from a lot of animation productions we watched in our childhood from the 80’s and 90’s. It had some airtime in reruns on the network following its initial premiere but it has been rarely seen the mid 90’s which is a real shame. The special had notable comedians and voice over artists involved together such as Rhea Perlman, Paul Williams, Frank Welker, and Richard Moll to name a few. It was also pretty cool that the film was narrated by studio co-founder William Hanna. The effects done for the special were ahead of its time and I would probably think very expensive as well. Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) did the visual effects while the state of the art computer animation was created by the then fledgling animation studio Pacific Digital Imaging (PDI), who we now know these days as DreamWorks Animation.
This would not be the last time Hanna-Barbera or PDI would be involved in a Halloween special as each studio would separately be involved in different iconic productions down the road later on.
