Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 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...

  It’s truly a strange feeling to look at something and think “I can’t wait to watch you die.” But yet, as the Gregorian months of April and May drone on, propelling us closer to summer with every passing hour, as the leaves emerge and everything becomes an endless sea of green, lightly peppered with other colors that seem manufactured even if they aren’t, that is all I can think. I can’t wait to watch them die. Green leaves are so boring. And the world is so green in the spring. It seems like the decor of a minimalist, married to one color scheme, clean but blah . And I am anything but a minimalist. I don't understand why spring and summer are considered so beautiful; why they make people seem to feel so alive.  I can't wait to watch them die. As I look up at the thick, green leaves, remembering a restaurant I frequented as a child that was built to look like a rainforest, I start to picture them in all sorts of vibrant hues of orange, yellow, red, even brown. I can't wait...

I believe I was fourteen years old the first time I tried to calculate the halfway point to Halloween. Fourteen  was the year I started to jtruly accept my eternal longing for Halloween as a part of me; a bigger part than I ever allowed myself to acknowledge in such a way before. I can't remember exactly how I did it. I just remember this little purse-sized calendar I'd gotten from a local Hallmark store, full of spooky doodles and quotes and sayings despite the fact that it had a pastel flower on the front and a list of traditional wedding anniversary gifts on the final pages. (I pondered these often. Paper? Clocks? Did anyone abide by this?) That calendar was like me. Outwardly very girly, very much what you'd expect from a basic female of my age, but the inside was full of everything I was afraid to express.  On the first page, like a warning, I'd written I like black cats and bats. Somewhere in the middle, a pair of eyes drawn over the calendar boxes of whichever mo...

Some of you may have noticed (I'm actually certain that a few people did) that I didn't write my usual episode-by-episode reviews of American Horror Story once the Stories season ended and NYC began.  This past season, for the first time ever, I had no real desire to watch it. I absolutely loathed the Death Valley portion of Double Feature . I will never, ever watch that again unless I, for some reason, need to get myself into a very bad mood. Seeing something like that put out into the world of AHS almost made me want to stop watching entirely...I don't even know if I would have done the Stories season had it not been for Denis O'Hare's involvement in the first episode and the promise of the revival of one of his previous characters.  But I did, and it was perfectly fine for what it was, much better than most of the first season. However, when NYC premiered, all I kept hearing about was how it didn't feel like AHS, and it honestly sounded far too reality-based ...

 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...

  I don't think I ever understood the world's obsession with spring. Perhaps it's because I've always found new beginnings ominous, as opposed to exciting. You could say I'm averse to change. But then, autumn is a time of change as well, isn't it? Regardless of the reason, I never understood what is so exciting about baking sun and bright skies. Or how the flowers, in shades of pink, purple, yellow...or the green grass and leaves, for that matter, were supposedly more beautiful, more inviting, than the explosions of different shades of orange against a spooky gray sky.  Most people want to fast forward to this time of year, but I wish I could fast-forward through it. Spring and summer...what is so lovely to the rest of the world, is a time of physical and mental exhaustion for me. It's a strange thing, when I really think about it. The countdown to Halloween is longest in the winter months, as the clock resets. We cling to the memories of last Halloween, so ...