Trick-or-Treat With Casper

Title: Casper Saves Halloween (aka He Ain’t Scary, He’s Our Brother)
Release: October 30, 1979
Genre: Animated Halloween Special
MPAA Rating: G
Writer: Larz Bourne & Bob Ogle
Director: Carl Urbano
Music By: Hoyt S. Curtin
Produced By: Joseph Barbera, William Hanna, Alex Lovy
Distributed By: Hanna-Barbera Productions
Run Time: 30 minutes

I love to watch Halloween specials (and Christmas specials!) every year. They’re fun, short, and usually feature some classic cartoon character who is usually trying to "save Halloween". As you can tell from it’s title: Casper Saves Halloween (or in some versions, He’s Ain’t Scary, He’s Our Brother), he does just that for a group of orphans.

This cartoon special features America’s favorite friendly ghost since 1945 and runs at the usual 30 minutes. Casper resembles the his original form from his early TV series in everything but voice. You would never guess that this cartoon special is almost 30 years old! It’s still interesting and doesn’t look dated at all!

I enjoyed kicking off the Halloween season with Casper and although some the songs were a little annoying and not very well written, the story is cute enough to sit through. It’s not The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown but I still think it’s worth a watch... especially for those Casper fans out there!

~ Casper Saves Halloween is a largely forgotten cartoon but thankfully AOL has put it up on their Halloween In2TV channel.

Links: Casper the Friendly Ghost (Wikipedia)

Imdb.com

Bcdb.com (Big Cartoon Database)