Anyway, I think the best new Halloween special from 2017 was The Loud House 2x40 “Tricked!” (which I screencapped but will post next year in the next batch). Advanced the plot of the show, Halloween was central to the episode’s plot, smart and snappy and had a nice through-line about kindness and selflessness without being shmoopy, had a GREAT song with GREAT song animation, plus the show has not only gay adult characters but queer kids/tweens which is so great!!! And it was just the right amount spoopy for its target audience.
The worst is a tie between “A David S. Pumpkins Animated Halloween Special” and “Michael Jackson’s Halloween,” because you could tell from the titles alone that they were not made by people with a love of Halloween specials in their hearts, and also their premises were... incredibly thin and they made no sense and were, really, just Awful.
Still not as bad as the Saved By the Bell Halloween episode, but. Awful. ADSPAHS made the fatal, grave mistake of mocking children’s media while trying to make something kid-friendly, which is bullshit. It wasn’t satire or homage -- SNL, while VERY rarely funny, does understand those concepts, and they had to know this was not that. It was mockery, especially wrt the little sister character, and that’s shitty. Making fun of children and thinking they won’t notice because you see them as passive consumers is bullshit.
MJH was just... not a thing that was about Halloween, at all, and Halloween got shoehorned in to give it ANY reason to be put into a TV programming block, but also, it made the almost-fatal, still-quite-grave error of thinking that kids are stupid and making bad, simplistic media just because it’s for kids. Really, the baddie’s name is “Conformity”? Really? Give children some credit.