The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper - Cartoon Retrospective

Happy Halloween, my beautiful fairies! The only time of the year I can go out as the beautiful fairy I am, wings and all, and pester humans for free sweets without consequence. The Mayfair cartoons were fun and all, but I want to do an entire Halloween-like cartoon review! And I’m not going to beat around the bush, since it’s Halloween, that bush is probably dead and possessed by Satan. You know, fun spooks and whimsical creeps! And I know just what to do for this diabolical day!

Around 2 years ago, I made a video where I reviewed a weird Halloween-tailored show from my childhood called Casper’s Scare School, a mid-2000s reboot of nobody’s favorite pleasantly preachy poltergeist, Casper the Friendly Ghost. The show was not good, to put it nicely: season 1 was passable, but season 2 was downright atrocious. You can hear me discuss it in length in this review here. I also did a lengthy discussion about Casper during a previous video review of the equally-lame direct-to-DVD pilot film of Casper’s Scare School, which you can watch here. 

Doing research on Casper himself only made it even sadder, with the Casper franchise itself literally being worth only $175. Not kidding either! During Casper’s creation as a storybook and cartoon star back in the 1940s, one of his creators, Seymour Reit, was drafted into World War 2. This left his other creator, Joe Oriolo (who also created the Felix the Cat TV series), to sell the character to Paramount Pictures for a pathetically comical total of $175. For reference, that is around $3,395 accounting for inflation, meaning Casper is practically worthless even in modern money. Seymour and Joe didn’t even get revenue earned from future media, as their deal was a one-time purchase with no additional earnings or shares. With that in mind, it makes sense that no one is clamoring to buy or use this character, due to how hokey of a presentation it has. The problem with Casper the Friendly Ghost as a series and a character is that his world needs severe contrast in order to work properly. The concept only works when it’s this sweet character against a dark world, but when the “scary” world is as juvenile and childish as your lovable lead, it ruins any atmosphere or interest the concept of a grim but kind spirit could bring. 

But that got me remembering, for this Halloween season and my nostalgic look-back on my older projects, that there was another cartoon before Casper’s Scare School. That being 1996’s The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper. (Ignore the fact that my video review of the Casper’s Scare School movie is one of my highest-rated YouTube videos and let me cash grab on myself this one time.)

 

According to Wikipedia (the most reliable of internet archives), after production wrapped on the first movie (which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year), a sequel was proposed and a treatment was written. But the film was like Casper himself: dead by his very inception. The budget for the first movie was $55 million, and it ended up grossing over $289 million, but analysts predicted much higher earnings for the film, so they considered it a flop despite making twice its budget back and more. The two human stars of the movie, Christina Ricci and Bill Pullman, were also unable to film any sequel for at least a year as both actors had other projects right after Casper. The producers then decided to abandon the live-action sequel ideas and instead develop a cartoon series to continue the story- hence this review. The show is a direct sequel to the 1995 live-action movie Casper, famous for being the first mainstream film to have a fully CGI character as the lead. For the sake of this review, I watched the movie in preparation for this review. If you need to know my thoughts on the movie, allow me to give a brief review here.

 

The movie is meant to be a reboot of Casper himself, or at the very least a definitive version of him. This movie was the directorial debut of Brad Silberling, who went onto direct City of Angels and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, and released in May of 1995 (yes, this Halloween movie was released in May). The plot is as 1990s family-faire as you can get. There’s an evil lady named Carrigan and her bumbling lawyer lackey Dibs, played by Cathy Moriarty and Eric Idle, who want the treasure of the Whipstaff Mansion in the city of Friendship, Maine- a town which reminds me of the town in Beetlejuice but with less drownings and car crashes. You see, Carrigan got a map within the papers of her father’s will, who left her the mansion, that tells of a treasure hidden inside of Luigi’s Mansion. Unfortunately, no amount of expulsion will get rid of the ghosts haunting the mansion to get the treasure. So they summon a teenage girl named Kathleen ‘Kat’ Harvey (played by Christina Ricci) and her father Dr. James Harvey (played by Bill Pullman), a paranormal therapist who is hired to move into the Whipstaff Manor in order to rid the mansion of its ghost problem: that problem being Casper (played by Malachi Pearson is his debut role) and his insufferable uncles The Ghostly Trio (voiced by Joe Nipote, Brad Garrett, and the late Joe Alaskey).

It’s discovered later after Casper and Kat’s friendship hijinks that Casper’s father, who owned the I Spy Spooky Mansion before Carrigan’s father, built a machine called the Lazarus, which he claimed could bring the dead back to life. Turns out Casper died tragically young and his Dad went insane trying to revive him. So Casper and Kat venture to find the Lazarus within the manor as Dr. Harvey attempts to coax The Ghostly Trio into helping find his dead wife Amelia, who he thinks is a ghost too. Carrigan and Dibs, thinking this machine can help them find the treasure, steal the formula that powers the machine. But betrayals and backstabbings follow, which results in Carrigan dying and becoming a ghost herself. After the uncles try to kill the doctor but then change their minds… only to accidentally kill him anyway, Carrigan gets what she thinks is the real treasure, but Casper and Kat remind her that Casper's treasure was her “unfinished business” that made her a ghost in the first place and by getting it, this defeats her by sending her to the Shadow Realm. Speaking of, Dr. Harvey is now a ghost too (and being Bill Pullman, I assume this means he’s now a Schwartz ghost?). So they use the revived Lazarus to restore him, but it can only bring one person back to life so Casper is once again screwed. Until Dr. Harvey’s wife is revealed to be an angel and for some reason has the power to grant Casper a temporary human form which he uses to have a great time at a Halloween party with Kat, and there’s your movie.

 

The movie is pretty good for what it is. There's heart, but not a whole lot happens until the ending. The movie is inoffensive, but not the most memorable. The film reminds me a lot tonally of The Addams Family duology, but definitely weaker than those movies. Similar plot points, similar atmospheres, similar brands of humor- only Casper being a lot less funny. The Addams Family at home, so to speak. The set design of the mansion itself is really cool, which is a good thing, because pretty much the entire movie takes place in it. My friends watched this movie with me, and we got a lot of comparisons, from the animated short Night of the Werehog to “Resident Evil 9 looks amazing!”, but it’s genuinely a good set. The characters are likable, I especially love the relationship between Kat and her father. But Casper's crush on Kat isn't cute, it's weirdly obsessive and his instantaneous crush on her is what inspires him to bring Carrigan to hire Dr. Harvey makes him seem less friendly and more unintentionally creepy. Thankfully, they have enough emotional scenes together to make it sting less. The relationship between Kat and Casper when they're just being friends is cute, but the romance felt forced upon on Casper’s end.

The dialogue is alright, nothing painful and even a few bouts of good comedic timing. There's a few plot holes and inconsistent bits, like Casper saying he can't hurt anyone when ghosts are seen absolutely hurting people. If his uncles are his biological uncles and living with him as ghosts in the mansion, then what happened to his parents? And if ghosts leave this plane of existence or “move on” after they deal with their unfinished business, then why are the four ghosts still here? Why hasn’t Casper moved on after his stated purpose on Earth was to keep his father from being lonely and the father is gone now? What unfinished business could The Ghostly Trio possibly have? It can’t be to take care of Casper, he's dead. They're disgusting, obnoxious creeps as the movie states who abuse him regularly to the point where I’m wondering if there’s a Ghost Child Protective Services I can call. Maybe their unfinished business is that they wanted more people to annoy, but didn't specify how many or for how long for a loophole to exploit. An afterlife hack, if you will. As for the villain, Carrigan is forgotten about for the second act. She had potential to be a decent villain, with the movie really doing a good job at making her hateable in the first act, but she really feels like a tool for weak conflict and she doesn’t do anything for the rest of the movie. She doesn’t even throw a single spell when she’s turned into a ghost. 

But overall, it’s a perfectly cute Halloween movie with a good if aged visual style thanks to Disney animator Phil Nibbelink doing the animation direction and James Horner’s soundtrack is great to boot. It's fun despite its flaws. The first act’s pretty good, nothing really happens in the second act, but everything happens in the third. There's decent emotional bits with the doctor and his wife, Kat and Casper, etc. And I won’t lie saying that this movie did make me tear up with some of its themes of death. It’s not a Halloween staple, especially since it had a May release date, but I'd recommend it if you're interested. If you want to watch the movie for yourself, you can pay $3 for a WatchCartoonOnline membership like I did to watch it myself: https://www.wcopremium.tv/casper-1995#

 

But we’re here for the cartoon, which aired on Fox Kids television from 1996 to 1998 for 4 seasons. 52 episodes were produced, but only the first 46 appeared on Fox, with the remaining debuting on Fox Family Channel. The cartoon was written by the same people who wrote the movie, two rather famous women in the animation writing scene, Sherri Stoner and Deanna Oliver. Sherri Stoner was probably most famous for her writing on Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs (she also provided the voice of Slappy Squirrel on that show as well). Where Deanna Oliver is most famous for writing The Brave Little Toaster and its two sequels. In addition to writing for animation, she currently teaches and directs main-stage shows at The Groundlings in Hollywood. 

“Many of the same people who worked on this show also worked on Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain (the latter of which was a spin-off from the former; coincidentally, the former had also debuted on Fox).” - Wikipedia 

This results in the show itself being rather funny. One thing that really surprised me genuinely was the writing. This is a show I like to dub a "shenanigan show”, where the plot is more of an excuse for hi-jinks and funny scenarios. But thankfully, the show doesn’t feel like it’s wasting your time or insulting your intelligence too heavily. But what is the premise? It’s incredibly simple, it’s a direct sequel to the movie. If you watched that, you’re pretty much all up to speed. But if you’re not or don’t want to watch the movie, the premise is that Casper is a young ghost who is deeply invested in making friends. However, ghost society and culture dictates that he spends time scaring humans rather than befriending them. His afterlife is pretty miserable, all things considered. He has three abusive uncles- Stinkie, Stretch, and Fatso- whose afterlife purpose is found in making everyone living wish they were as dead as they are. He’s under constant pressure from his teachers, classmates, and general ghost community to be scary (oh great, not another Scare School). And he’s just straight-up not having a good time- well, duh. He’s dead. But he does have glimmers of happiness thanks to his living friend Kat and her father Dr. James Harvey, who all live in the spooky mansion Casper haunts in the hopes of living a normal life despite their surroundings and in the hopes that Dr. Harvey can try and redeem Casper’s uncles to make them move on from this plane of existence so they won’t have to annoy anyone ever again.

(Speaking of Animaniacs, both Rob Paulsen (the voice of Yakko) and Tress MacNeille (the voice of Dot) star in this show. Rob Paulsen plays Casper’s slimy cousin Spooky, where Tress MacNeille plays the typical passive-aggressive teacher role in Miss Banshee. Jesse Harnell (the voice of Wakko) would also replace Brad Garrett as the voice of Fatso in seasons 3 and 4.)

This show takes on a bit of a sitcom style of a small group of characters getting into comedic scenarios and cracking jokes along the way. So how are the characters? Thankfully, they’re rather charming. Casper (voiced by Malachi Pearson) isn’t as obnoxiously saccharine as he is in other adaptations. Casper’s catchphrase seems to be, “I hate my afterlife.” Casper seems to hate putting up with all sorts of crap, and it’s kind of fun seeing him portrayed as the relatable everyman doing his best rather than generically boy-scoutish. He can be a jerk sometimes, which is rather refreshing, while still being kind and well-meaning. His relationship with his human friend Kat (voiced by Kath Soucie), is charming and refreshingly flawed: they laugh but they fight, they tease but they ultimately care. I’m just happy these two aren’t overly-sweet and have a lot of spunk to them. Everything from duck Bigfoot to ghost aliens based on Barney the Dinosaur are in this show, and despite its unassuming nature, there’s not much to actually be bored with. 

 

What I don’t like are his uncles: Stinkie, Stretch, and Fatso (all played by their film actors). Their job is to be abusive to Casper and make every other character miserable. Their main target is Dr. James Harvey (voiced by Dan Castellaneta), whose therapy career is exaggerated for comedy and whose eccentric and sensitive side is also played-up. After his wife, Amelia's death, Dr. Harvey has gone on to become a "ghost therapist", trying to help ghosts move on from their trauma and trying (unsuccessfully) to rehabilitate the mischief-making Ghostly Trio. It's actually kind of a funny idea for a character. In the movie, he tried to make contact with his wife because he believed that she was a ghost. But after learning that she instead became an angel, he and his teenage daughter Kat stay at their new home at Whipstaff Manor. The role was originated by Bill Pullman in the Casper film, but he is voiced by Dan Castellaneta on the show. Funnily enough, Dan Castellaneta would go on to voice Stretch in the Casper’s Scare School movie. So I guess Dan kept flying back to Casper for whatever reason. Thankfully, the doctor’s chemistry with the three uncles can actually work sometimes if either their mischief backfires on them or it’s not constantly making Dr. Harvey miserable. The problem is the three uncles are seen as a unit for a reason: they’re not devoid of life, but they simply don’t have much distinction in terms of personality. Casper himself was invented in the 1940s, but the uncles weren't a thing until the 1950s. "Stretch", "Stinky", and "Fatso" were popular nicknames back then... among WW2 veterans. Knowing that Casper died of pneumonia at 12-years-old (according to a newspaper seen in the 1995 feature film), we know that this series has dark backstories. This gives the implication that his uncles died fighting in World War 2. Now to question which side they were fighting for, because I doubt these guys would be selfless enough to fight for anyone’s freedom but their own. Not saying they would be on the German side, but do they really seem like the patriotic type?

The show uses old Casper supporting characters from the comics and cartoons such as Casper's cousin Spooky (voiced by Rob Paulsen). He’s your typical rude punk with the thickest New Yorker accent you’ll hear in a New York minute. He admires Casper’s uncles and despises his cousin's sweet side, but doesn’t actively hate Casper, he just likes to tease and rival him. He’s a perfectly fine rival character for what he is and usually has great comedic timing. Speaking of great comedy, there’s Spooky’s on-and-off girlfriend Pearl- or as she’s commonly referred to by Spooky’s Brooklyn accent, “Porl” or “Poil”. She is the typical bimbo who takes everything literally. She’s voiced by Miriam-Flynn, who played Jean on Taz-Mania and is often typecasted as old ladies. She’s dumb and bubbly, but sometimes the smartest character on the show because despite her absent-mindnessness, she actually does pay attention. She’s probably one of my favorites due to her cute aura and comedic timing. 

 

And that’s the problem with reviewing a show like this: it’s hard to review a comedy without just resorting to “the jokes are funny”. The best you can do is describe the show’s energy. You can tell the writers for Animaniacs worked on this show. The types of humor they go for are very similar: wordplay, puns, pop culture references, ironic juxtaposition, breaking the fourth wall to other characters and not just the audience. Not only the jokes they tell, but how they deliver the set-ups and punchlines is also similar. They have this snappy but dry energy to them, that rolling of the eyes at the camera after a joke similar to how Wakko, Yakko, and Dot would jab at jokes delivered in their own show, often putting punchlines on top of other punchlines. It’s not nearly as clever, but it’s also not a graveyard of humor. There’s even a few adult jokes they sneak in, such as in the episode “Spooking Bee”, where Casper does impressions of characters in Catcher in the Rye and the “alluring” works of Jackie Collins. The tone and cheekiness definitely throw a bone for older audiences every now and then. (Hell, the first episode even makes jokes on how weird Casper’s old 1945 design was.) The slapstick’s pretty decent too. It’s fast-pasted, expressive, and not overused. That’s probably helped by the show’s art style. It’s well-animated, smooth, and snappy. There’s even some great stylized moments such as the short segments in between the two 11-minute segments per episode. “The Ghostly Day”, a poem portrayed in a black-and-white children’s book aesthetic, is probably one of my favorites in terms of the show’s really good art direction. Top this with the supernatural setting with dark backgrounds, and it reminds me a little of Beetlejuice: The Animated Series. The animation is as good as it can be.

As for general episodes, “Spooking Bee” is one of the funniest in the whole series due to the comedic rivalry between Spooky and Casper, Pearl’s delightful dumb-blonde moments, the slapstick being charming, as well as the punchline to the entire episode’s premise. Not every moment of this show is gold, however. “Is So Too” is probably the worst episode of the series. It’s incredibly unpleasant and mean-spirited with only one joke that they hammer into the ground, and it makes Casper supremely unlikable by having him essentially harass his only friend because he thinks she’s on a date. With that being said, a majority of the episodes (and this show as a whole) is funny, charming, and surprising. And that’s a good summary of the show as a whole. 

I certainly enjoyed this Halloween treat in my bag this year. The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper was well-paced, well-meaning and even quite witty at points. It wasn’t anything spectacular as the title suggests, but it was genuinely good and that was quite a spooky surprise considering this ghoul’s track record. The animation is great, the writing is decently humorous, and there was a clear passion and personality behind this cartoon despite its nature as a cash-grab. I certainly had a better time with this than Casper's Scare School, all things considered! If you’re interested, you can find the first season free on YouTube and the rest of the seasons haunting the web: https://youtu.be/u3sWZp2MO_8?list=PLrEUeK4wYnxqYi5SVWvWFiRD7vySBi5Qx 

Sorry for the short and simpler review, guys. I’m losing my passion for writing these, and they’re a lot more effort than they’re worth due to the minimal attention I receive for them. With that being said, I do intend to finish what I start and will continue to upload reviews as much as I can. I do plan on posting future reviews, but don’t expect the momentum to keep going for too long. Just know I’m at that point in my life where I’m experimenting and finding my passions. This blog was a test, and it was a test to see if this was a hobby I wanted to do for a part of my life. It is not. Watching cartoons is my main hobby and I always felt pressured to do more with my life, so I decided to do media reviews. However, I'm only 23 at the time of writing this blog. And I don't want to say this is my blog's final entry. Right now, just know I'm in that part of my life where I'm exploring my options. And hey, this wasn't a bad option to pick. Happy Halloween, everyone. And thanks for being a part of my journey in life.