2014 Halloween movie #4 The Paul Lynde Halloween Special. My first thought watching this was: Paul Lynde was really talented. He was an amazing campy mixture of bitterness and wit. I love the dismissive way he tells his housekeeper (played by Margaret Hamilton), Go dust something! with a sneer. But also, I was reminded when bitterness and bad jokes are your only tools, it makes for a tedious hour-long show. 1976 was a weird time to be alive. I was seven years old at the time, but I remember all the references in this special: Beretta, Florence Henderson (badly singing That Old Black Magic), Billy Jack, Kiss, OPEC oil sheikhs, Billy Barty, the Osmonds, truckers, Betty White, and Tim Conway. You can tell that Bruce Vilanch helped write a lot of this stuff: the goal was not to produce a timeless holiday classic, but to crap out something in prime-time for ABC - hence all the dated (and terrible) jokes. But I think there is something here that is historical and important, even if it makes me regret all the TV I watched in the seventies.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 19:18:23 +0000
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