Father Malone's TV Halloween Roundup - CHiPs, 21 Jump Street, Millennium

Welcome back midnight viewers to Father Malone's Halloween round up. That's right, Halloween is mere days away. I'm going dressed as a man with hope for humanity and Ripley Jean is. I can't believe this. Ripley is going as a cheerleader.

Cheerleaders are awful people. Oh that's why you're going. Oh okay, I can appreciate that. As such, we are going to be a halloweening it up this week with some recommendations from the days of your Every television series, every television series worth a damn will at some point break down and give us a Halloween themed episode. I know Roseanne made it a tradition, lots of shows have had Halloween as a runner.

But Ripley and I are delving into some one off Halloween episodes you might not have been privy to, or maybe you don't remember, or more likely you're blocking them out. I'm a firm proponent of the notion that television itself is and certainly was the biggest proselytizer for the holiday, spreading the good word of costumes and dimly lit parties and candy just being handed out. They just give it away with the end of sugar rationing in post war America and Ralph Cramden dressing like the Man from Space, sand Ozzie and Harriet and Lassie and Andy Griffith show all presenting Halloween episodes. How was it not going to explode? And there certainly have been a fucking explosion of Halloween episodes since the nineteen nineties.

We've all gone our favorites. We definitely want to hear yours. Leave us a comment and set us straight on what we missed. And while you're at a hit, subscribe and like five stars and give me a review, even a two word review. How about this good show?

Or me like, how about that? Can you give a thumbs up emoji in a podcast review? Does that count the count undead? Undead? Undead?

Yeah? I agree, it's overplayed. Name a better song from Baohous Stigmata martyr Man, you got me there. I'd also recommend their cover of Ziggy Stardust? Is it better than Bowie?

Is that sacrilege? Yes? And yes? Speaking of music, Speaking of TV, should I be monstering this up Carlughing, go. The Round Boils and ghoules?

Ah? Maybe not with my first choice you're gonna get a heaping helping of television music, horror, boobs, and Ralph Mouth. Those are not in order of importance, but they are the ingredients that make the Witches brew known as Rock Devil Rock. This aired on October the thirty first, nineteen eighty two. Nine year old me watched this with fistfuls of recently looted Kende treasure.

It's from Chips, that's right, the California Highway Patrol. I loved them as a kid. I hated them when I lived in Los Angeles, but at least here they were nice. And like I said, this episode has booze. This is from their sixth season of the show, So Paunch but no job.

Instead we get that blow dry and the loss Bobby. Yesh. Anyone remember the sergeant from Chips. That's Chris Pine's dad. Yeah, Captain Kirk, one of them.

What do you mean, William fucking Shantner? Are you just trying to make me feel old? Anyway? Paunch and Bobby are assigned to protect Mollick, a glam horror rock superstar. He's the entire band Kiss in One Body.

It's nineteen eighty two, so who are you gonna get to embody such a rock god. Ralph Mouth from Happy Days, naturally Donny most here he's credited as Donald Most these days, he's just don I'm not making fun of him, not necessarily. Let's just say he was an inappropriate choice, though granted I can't see any real rock stars showing up for a cameo on the sixth season of Chips. That's what elvirus for. Yes, she's in it.

You should have known. I mentioned boobs. Is that reductive? Well, considering ninety five percent of her material is boob related, I think I'm in the clear. Anyway, someone is trying to kill Mollock.

Then the writers managed to weave in the other scary rock myth of the day backwards masking. Hey, if you play that one bit of Steward of Heaven backward, it is my Sweet Satan. Did he ever do that? Actually? Take the vinyl and spin it backwards.

I don't know if it's on there intentionally or not, but it does sound like my sweet Satan. Actually, it sounds like my sweet Slatan, Like Lon Cheney Junior is Lenny from Mice and Men dropping by to invoke the Dark Lord. So anyway, Mollok is getting backwards man messaging from a would be assassin and oh man, Paunch and Bobby are really inept. That's what I took away from a rewatch here. And the assassination attempts are elaborate and they're only ever thwarted accidentally by our heroes.

You want to hear some of Mollock's music, you know you do? Ausbullm Sin Wild Friends side Hell Spits Metal Body on another side Sun. Okay, this is a super weird connection and it's musical, but it has nothing to do with this episode's music. At one point, Paunch befriends a young boy named Flippy why they are doing the lord's work in the writer's room over at Chips. Flippy is played by Robert Trujillo.

He'd become the bass player for Suicidal Tendencies and he's the current bassist for Metallica. He is in fact their longest continuous bass player and on their feet Whist albums. You want another weirdo connection. That song you just heard the lyrics were by Carol Conners. She wrote and I love this so much, the lyrics for Rockies theme.

Let's get into the lyrics of that just a sample gonna fly now, that's it. And speaking of Halloween connections, this episode was directed by John Aston. That's right, Gomez Adams, Louise Guzmann. Take off your tiny headphones and leave the studio right now. This episode has everything fire, breathing and candy corn.

There's trick or treating and costumes and a Halloween party. Witch costumes. Well, I spotted a mostly generic bunch of army guys and a devil girl, a witch, some guy with a pelt and a sword, a bunch of I don't know what the fucks there was a pumpkin. Main cast members were Dracula Lone Ranger, Robert Pine as Patten, and Molloch as Donny. Most see, it's Halloween and you can only go as himself.

One thing about this episode I do actually love of is that we get dressed down Elvira the out running around and doing Erin's Elvira, so she's still got the hair and the makeup, but she's in jeans and a T shirt. It's an Elvira T shirt, naturally, which makes it somehow even cooler. What's the best ride at not Scary Farm? Elvira? One last thing when Malik is performing his song.

They keep cutting to shots of a huge crowd. Now, you kind of figured it was going to be stock footage, but then I noticed that the Prudential Center was being constructed in the background and the John Hancock Building. So the crowd for Mollik is mid seventies footage of a crowd on Boston Common mixed with southern California in the early eighties. Donnie most in kiss makeup, singing and dancing around on stage. Kudos mister Aston in fairness, the episode is actually well directed, John Aston doing really good and interesting work here.

Okay, let's get this hearst moving, HP and Stein play it. It takes Thank you HP. Remember this is not a competition, it is only an exhibition. Please no wagering. This is what you chose.

I love it. Remember when the thought of children in high school without undercover officers infiltrating their peer groups was unthinkable. Fuck you due Process, Fuck you Silvil Liberties. It's twenty one Jump Street Fox Monday Night is the night of the Screams. Jump Street is haunted.

I looked that way once after and especially Gnarley Chili. Dog, Gwen Robinsondes and depth. There's been some pretty weird stuff going on, very weird. I love this show. I watched it religiously in high school.

It's so fucking earnest, And yes I own it on DVD, but it's available right now on peacock, where you need to go and check out Season four, episode six. This aired the night before Halloween nineteen eighty nine. Like I said, season four, so Depp is totally checked out, he's short timing, he's got calendar filled with x's. Some might say that led to a disinterested performance. I'd say he turns in his best performance on the show since season one.

Remember season one was a whole other show. They had an ex hippie captain played by Frederick Forrest from Apocalypse Now running the Precinct. This was the time where Depp was trying to do shit like sneak in that his character was addicted to peanut butter, which is ridiculous, but he made good on that because if you see the twenty one Jump Street movie with Jonah Hill, Depp is in a lot of the scenes disguised as a biker. That biker has a jar of peanut butter in his hand at all times. Here he's always doing weird bits of business in his delivery rivals Nick Cage.

At times it's great, it only adds to the episode. In fact, this one's pretty good overall. I gotta admit I don't think I realized until rewatching how languidly paced the show was, and they used every minute, which allows for a lot of odd subplots. Here the main plot has Pamela Adlin. She's credited here as Pamela Siegel.

She's the voice of Bobby Hill on King of the Hill, though to me she will always be Dolores the little sister in G two You Bowl Me Ova, You Tell him Kid. Here she's playing a girl who claims to have psychic powers and is predicting a spate of arsons that are occurring at her high school. Is she the culprit? Of course she is, only she's not, which means the show has the rare distinction of proving the supernatural in its world. Why not demon dogs in Flaming Skulls for season five?

It couldn't be worse than Richard Grico. As the show progresses, we get seances and lay lines in an entire homage to Close Encounters complete with pickup truck in spotlight by train tracks. This is kind of a delight and it has Ian Abercrombie as a psychic medium. Mister Abercrombie is no stranger to the undead. When now retrieves the book from its cradle, you must recite the words platu errata nickto.

Clatu verrata, nickto okay again, I got it, I got it, I know your damn words, all right. That was him, an army of darkness, though most will recognize him as mister hit from Seinfeld costumes on display in this episode for the main cast Devil Phantom, Elvis Torreador Peter Delouiz as Dracula with a bizarre halfwig that comes down to his eyebrows. In fact, they cover the eyebrows and the eyebrows are part of the mask. It's very unusual. And Depp as Travis bikele from taxi driver complete with mohawk.

At the high school dance to the accompanying Monster Mash. We get a cowboy, a farmer, firefighter, there's a werewolf, a shrimp, a banana of which there's a leopard. There's some flappers and a toga guy. A fucking really good Andy Warhol and a girl in a screen accurate starfleet uniform Wrath of Khan era where it was all burgundy and really militaristic, and Pamela Adlin in drag as a gold lamet bearded, star covered wizard. Like I said, the episode overall is really good, but the ending was going for poignance, but like most twenty one Jump Street episodes, it presents more morose, just kind of another downer at the end of one of these.

Why the episode does work is because of its authors. They managed to marry a police procedural and a supernatural investigation. Moreover, they have a skeptic and a believer who trade places over the course of the episode. I'm not saying that they inadvertently created the X Files, but I will say that they were the best writers on The X Files. Remember early X Files, so creepy, so intriguing, terribly mysterious.

That's the blue Raja for mystery men. I know you didn't, but then nobody saw it. At the beginning of every episode of The X Files, when the credits were playing out, if you saw written by Glenn Morgan and James Wong, you were in for a treat. They'd go on to create the Final Destination franchise, writing and directing the first and the third film. The third is the best of the series, hands down.

Sincerely comment to All You Want Part three Roller Coaster, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Best of series. They also created my second favorite sci fi show of the nineteen nineties, Space Above and Beyond. That's about a bunch of space marines as they face their first alien threat, The wild Cards Baby vansin Man. I loved Vanson. That show also featured the mighty James Morrison.

I'd love to just cut in his recitation from the Iliad here from season one, episode fifteen, the Angriest Angel. But that has nothing to do what we're talking about. You know what? Fuck it here it is. Looking darkly upon hector swift footed, Achilles answered, I cannot forgive you, as there are no trustworthy oths between men and lions.

There can be no love between you and me. One or the other must fall before then to glut with his blood Aris the god who fights under the Shield's guard, Remember every valor of yours. For now the need comes hardest upon you to be a spearman and a bold warrior. There shall be no escape for you, you will pay in a lump for all those sorrows of my companions you killed in your spear's fury. Clearly they didn't write that, but they had the good sense to put it in Morgan and Wong prolific fellows.

And when it came time for the second season of Chris Carter series Millennium, Carter found himself stretched too thin. He was show running X Files and Millennium and gearing up for the X Files feature film, so he turned the reins over to Morgan and Wong, And let me tell you the second season of Millennium. If it isn't the best season of horror television of all time, it's definitely my favorite season of horror television of all time. If you remember, Millennium started out as a psychic profiling show. Frank Black, a former profiler from the FBI, has a unique gift that allows him to literally see through the eyes of the killer, including the killer's twisted versions of reality.

Season one found him no longer with the FEDS, but working with a private investigation consulting firm known as the Millennium Group, and his wife and daughter settled in a bright yellow house in Seattle, and the series was basically a freak of the week, with connective tissue pointing toward a common warning that some form of apocalypse was on the way. It was good. It was a really good show, solid writing, cinema quality in most cases, and anchored with the tombstone vocalizations of Lance Henrickson. Season two hoo boy. We began with a alance of questions.

You haven't you read a lesson? We left with untold consequences. I've tried to destroy the group and how the group must destroy them. We continue with unthinkable repercussions. I don't want anything to do with him.

Fair God for the hour of his KINGDOMSCA, believe the last. This is who we are. Beware of the present. That is worth dying for him, and that is worth killing. Over fear the future.

I just step down. I know this how ago, I can't tell my back. Kinds to the second series of The Phenomenal. Millennium, Morgan and Wong immediately fracture the fam sending everyone away from that Yellow house. Frank gets drawn further into the Millennium Group, who are revealed to be one of the many groups around the globe.

All preparing for the apocalypse, either either to thwart it or precipitate its beginning, in order to control what's left afterwards. So while every episode is its own story, they're all pointed in one direction, and there's no missteps this season at all. There might be some poor execution and some sloppy effects now and again, but this season synthesized what pre millennial hysteria was all about. It knew what urban myth was all about. It understood conspiracy theory as folklore, and it wasn't afraid to dive headfirst into the supernatural.

Donaxo demuri, You're already on the bed, As Roger Sterling once said, what were once oblique signs manifesting in Frank's mind are now prophecies, some reel, some very real, and all slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. The Curse of Frank Black was season two, Episodsode six. It aired Halloween Night, nineteen ninety seven, and in a season of television that is already head and shoulders above the also rans and parallel thinking shows that emerged at the same time period, it manages to produce an episode that boiled the entire series down to forty three minutes of the Sublime. This episode is nearly silent. It was loosely based on the classic Japanese anthology Qui don A film will definitely be going to cover over unanthology's attack.

We'll get to it. I promise I'm saving it because that movie is special. We follow Frank Black on Halloween night as he takes his daughter trick or treating, gets waylaid by screaming Jay Hawkins, and comes face to face with the reality of the undead and his potential place in the infernal hierarchy to come. After dropping of his daughter, Frank's car breaks down, leaving him stranded and forcing him to walk home. Along the way he's shadowed by a demon.

These sequences evoke a loneliness that haunts Halloween, particularly after the revelry has died down. It's a side of the holiday that's rarely photographed, and the episode has a neat Peter Greenaway like game running through it, as the numbers two six ' eight and the word acts keep popping up, eventually revealed as acts Chapter twenty six, verse eight. Why should it be thought incredible by you that God raises the dead? Frank finds himself back in the empty Yellow House, where that verse comes true and he's faced with a real life ghost with an offer from the next world. The ghost is played by Dean Winters.

You probably know him as Mayhem from those ubiquitous insurance ads, but he's done great work on shows like Oz and thirty Rock and Brooklyn ninety nine. His speech here is electrifying, partly performance, definitely the writing. These two, to me are to television what Karazuski and Alexander are to film. Simply the best of the best. I'm sure if I were to compile a list of my favorite episodes of television of all time, Morgan and Wong would dominate it.

And you can see improvement here because that ending of twenty one Jump Street was reaching for what they achieve here with seeming effortlessness. A Halloween episode that provokes genuine dread throughout while leaving you with a bit of hope. Not a happy ending, but a hopeful ending. Costumes on display here have Britney tip Lady as Jordan Frank's daughter as Marge Simpson, a screen accurate Marge Simpson, a benefit from being on the Fox network. There's also a flashback to the nineteen fifties with a cowboy, a hobo, a gangster, and young Frank Black as General MacArthur.

I guess that would be his counterpart to Robert Prime's Patton over on Chips, and in a tip of the hat to themselves, one of the Chigs shows up. Those are the Armored Alien Warriors from their show space Above and Beyond the Curse of Frank Black. I don't know if you can find it anywhere, but you should go see it immediately. It's really it's one of the best Halloween episodes of all time. It's certainly the most resonant one for me.

Okay, we are going to round up this roundup, but here's a quick bunch of empisodic television. You should also check out Beverly Hill's nine oh two one zero and it's an episode called Gypsy's As and Fleas from nineteen ninety five. How could that be any good? It's not. It's great because it has the only live television appearance of psychobilly gods the Cramps.

I would also recommend any of the Adams Family Halloween episodes. They are all aces and that's John Aston's Gomez by your tongue. There were two episodes of Happy Days the Evil Eye in nineteen seventy eight, but the one previous to that Fonselaectomy Jesus Christ. They scared the shit out of me, but then again I was five. Lastly, and most recently, Brooklyn ninety nine has had a special Halloween heist episode nearly every year they were on the air, and they are all fucking hilarious.

I think that's enough. We've recommended enough. You're all just gonna watch Friday the thirteenth and Halloween a Nightmare on Elm Street again and again and again. From young Ripley and myself. I'd like to thank you all for listening, and I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that Halloween is all about the dead coming back and dragging you off to the nether world.

Here in this Thursday, We've got a brand new Tales from the dark Side centered episode, taking a look at two episodes from season two. Those are Effect and Calls and Monsters in My Room. I'll leave you with a bit of song from the greatest standalone Halloween television special of all time. Happy Halloween, everyone, Helloween, Don't tell me the nails go wrong and you'll queen. Shot come become a sardine.

Your dentist cot son A Gueen has Anybody scene to Bourriene on they stop playing stick and baking the crazy night scene this scare right. Shot show from Shoes. Show, Show Show