Jack O'Lantern Rankin Bass Festival of Family Classics (1972)

Can we really call something a proper holiday if Rankin/Bass didn’t make a television special for it?

Today we’re digging up one of the stranger corners of Rankin/Bass history with Jack O’Lantern, the wonderfully weird 1972 Halloween installment of Festival of Family Classics. It’s new to Lyle, relatively new to Meghan, and packed with pumpkins, witches, warlocks, scarecrows, supernatural mayhem and enough aggressively stage-Irish folklore to make Meghan — after living in Ireland with her Irish husband and spending rather a lot of her academic life specializing in Irish and British history — want to apologize to the entire country. Tá brón orm, a chairde!

We also get into the genuinely fascinating Irish traditions behind the jack-o’-lantern, including why the “turnips” carved in Ireland and Scotland are what Americans would generally call rutabagas, and discover that the real folklore is considerably creepier than Rankin/Bass’s version.

So grab your pumpkin, mind the witches overhead, and join us for a wonderfully peculiar bit of vintage Halloween television.

41 days until Halloween!

Watch it here: LINK

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