When I was a kid, every Christmas, we'd watch the Rankin/Bass stop motion animated specials on CBS, Rudolph and Frosty and Heat Miser and Cold Miser and Santa. Even Easter had a Peter Rabbit special.But they didn't seem to have a Halloween special*. Little did I know that they went beyond television for that- that they'd created a feature length piece- Mad Monster Party- that fit the bill.
Doctor Frankenstein - voiced by Boris Karloff!- is retiring so he summons all his monster friends- Dracula, The Mummy, The Werewolf, Frankenstein and his Bride (voiced by Phyllis Diller), The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Invisible Man, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Doctor Jekyll /Mister Hyde. All but Jekyll/Hyde are patterned after the Universal Monsters, while Jekyll/Hyde is inspired by the Frederic March portrayal.
Frankenstein is going to leave his position of leader of the monsters to his nephew Felix, and the monsters, led by Dracula, don't take kindly to it.
That Felix has a voice that sounds like Jimmy Stewart is kind of odd. He's voiced by Allen Swift, who did voices on Underdog.
Mad Monster Party is good retro fun, probably the only thing I've watched so far that's really kid friendly.
*Apparently, they did a cartoon called Mad Mad Mad Monsters as a Halloween treat, but somehow it didn't show up on my radar like the Christmas ones did. Anybody remember it?
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