Cartoon Crazy's Spooky Toons 2000 Horror Movie Review

Spooky Toons culls 13 vintage cartoons, each centering on some poor bug-eyed creature contracting a usually misguided case of the creeps. To say it’s fraught with the sort of frightful scenes that remind one of bats and broomsticks, though, would be misleading. Mostly, these nuggets (most less than 10 minuts long) jog nostalgia. Casper, star of two segments, was never fond of scaring folks to begin with, and Betty Boop, the other double-billed character, is too cutesie-poo to pull off a portrayal of genuine fear. Still, Spooky Toons ought to sit well with fans of the form and those more concerned with old-fashioned fun than Halloween-focused fare, as it trots out some early, largely forgotten gems. For instance, there’s Balloon Land, about a town full of walking, talking balloons forever on the run from the roguish, rhyming Pin Cushion (“I always have a pin at hand / That’s the reason I am panned”), and Ouija Board, a partly animated featurette following the adventures of a cartoon clown who leaps off a storyboard and wreaks havoc in his studio’s art department. Another standout—Huffless, Puffless—seems misplaced in this collection, but it’s still a joy to watch. It has a crew of hipster dragons haranguing a nonsmoking member of the tribe: “John, stop puttin’ it on. Ain’t no joke—you’ve gotta smoke!” In the end, of course, the puffless dragon overpowers his air-polluting peers, much the same way this compilation’s winning lineup overpowers its watered-down theme. —Tammy La Gorce