Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 It was announced today that all Party City stores are going to be closing, very soon. I can't say that I didn't see this coming from miles away.  For the last several years, I've noticed much of their Halloween stock has been the same, save for the animatronics, which still seemed to be a very new thing to the company. The hanging ghouls, the skeletons, the cutesy, family-friendly stuff...they've basically just been recycling it all since at least 2019 or so, with a couple of occasional new additions thrown in. I can't remember the last time I went to Party City expecting to be "wowed", save for the Terrifier release.  And from what I hear, those that preordered the animatronics this past season, generally got shafted. Preorders being cancelled, items not actually coming in stock until a week or two before Halloween...I heard so many stories around the community. Not to mention the fact that the product that almost put them back on the map, Rattles the gr...

 It's time for another round of 90s Kid Halloween Nostalgia! Sometimes it saddens me that today's kids will likely never know the true magic of Saturday morning cartoons. There was something about that feeling of waking up, maybe earlier than we should have been on a day off, but wanting to make the most of our day, knowing we had two full days of freedom ahead of us. Somehow the cartoon blocks felt like a celebration. As if Saturday was a weekly holiday and Saturday morning cartoons were the party we were always invited to, or the special we waited for with bated breath.  Some of my fondest memories of my childhood weekends are of losing myself in those cartoons for several hours. My favorite block of all was the  One Saturday Morning  block on ABC, run by Disney. It premiered just after I turned ten, and it immediately became a weekly fixture in my life, with me counting down the days until it came back around, and begging my parents not to plan any outings until t...

 One of my absolute favorite pastimes is watching old Halloween content on YouTube. Most of my nights end with a compilation of vintage Halloween commercials, old Halloween safety PSAs, or Halloween specials from my youth. There's nothing I find more relaxing.  A few days ago, I suddenly had a memory of an old spooky cartoon I hadn't in seen ages, a movie I used to rent from the video store as a child called The Ketchup Vampires , and felt compelled to look it up.  Both  The Ketchup Vampires  and its sequel/prequel  Ketchup Vampires 2  are available on YouTube. And let me tell you, this unlocked some major memories for me! The original movie is dated 1995, so I would have been seven or eight at the time, depending on the month of its release. But I vividly remember discovering it at our local video rental place.  I had wandered over to the children's section while my mother looked through the new releases in the main part of the store. Looking rig...

 As a 90s kid, I have a lot of memories and attachments to Halloween episodes of popular kids’ TV series of the time. Even if I didn’t necessarily like a particular series, or watch it regularly, I usually tuned into whatever they were offering at Halloween-time. I’ve often said, I’ll pretty much watch Halloween-relating anything. One such instance was with an early-90s Nickelodeon series called The Adventures Of Pete & Pete. I enjoyed this show to some extent, but I was a little young to truly get it at the time during which it initially aired. (It started in 1993,  when I would have been turning six, and ended in 1996, when I was nine.) I also wasn’t super into live-action shows, so I don’t have vivid memories of watching it, though I know I did. I just remember it being a show about two brothers, both for some reason named Pete, going on adventures that were sort of surreal at times. On a strange sidenote, I do remember contemplating the lyrics to the theme song  f...