Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 It’s time for another random review of something I didn’t expect to resonate with me! The other day I was having a nostalgia moment (something that happens a lot to me, if you couldn’t tell), and started thinking about one of my favorite book series to read when I was much, much younger. I’m sure most people, especially those who grew up in the 90s like yours ghoully, are aware of  The Babysitters Club. I’ve actually seen it go through many different incarnations in my lifetime, from the original book series, to a short-lived HBO series, to a few spinoff book series, to a movie, to the current Netflix series and graphic novels. It’s something that’s pretty universal. However, my favorite thing to come out of the BSC franchise when I was a child was actually the spinoff book series about BSC founder and president Kristy Thomas’s younger stepsister, Karen Brewer: Babysitters Little Sister. I’m not sure how popular the Little Sister series was, but in my youth, I preferred it to...

 This week, there has been much buzz in the Halloween community regarding the upcoming, arguably long overdue, Hocus Pocus sequel. I, personally, always tend to be at least a little apprehensive about sequels, especially when this much time has gone by. Unless a movie is intended to be part of a series, I really don’t see the need for a sequel to suddenly be tacked on several years later. The odds of being able to capture the same mood and magic seem to lessen as time goes on with these things. But, the case of Hocus Pocus is a bit of a strange one. I truly had no idea what a flop my lifelong favorite movie had been when it was first released until fairly recently. I was seven when I first saw the movie, and it made such an enormous impact on me that I suppose I just assumed it did for everyone else, too. As a kid, I think, in my mind, anything Disney released just had to be popular. And also, being just about the only true family Halloween film at the time, I just assumed it was a...