Trick or Treat (1978, CHiPs)

CHiPs (an acronym of California Highway Patrol) was the cop show for kids that didn't like cop shows. Officers Ponch (Erik Estrada) and John (Larry Wilcox) rarely drew their weapons, and let legions of criminals walk free with a stern warning.

In the world of CHiPs, police work wasn't about using either brute force or ingenious detective work to bring hard-boiled criminals off the gritty Streets of Mean. Instead, a typical beat might entail rescuing a runaway boat on jet-skis, luring an escaped circus tiger back to his cage, or delivering a newborn on the floor of the disco (after winning the disco contest, of course!)

The Season 2 Halloween episode, Trick or Treat (1978), stayed true to the formula.

Nothing scary to see here, folks, as Ponch and John tackle decidedly lightweight incidents like a hold-up woman dressed as a ghost, candy-bag theft by an older woman convinced she's lost her wedding ring in a batch of candy, and a pair of naughty ladies stealing city property for a scavenger hunt.

Sarge demonstrates how to thoroughly search a suspect for hidden contraband.

The biggest treat of this episode is getting a look at vintage plastic Halloween adornments... close encounters of the Ben Cooper kind.

Below we have Bigfoot (mask only, missing the smock, from the 1977 Sid & Marty Krofft show Bigfoot & Wildboy), a Batman (1974, this rendering based on the comic strip), and a Raggedy Ann (1973). Oh yea, there's also a non-plastic vampire and witch, too.

Later that evening we'll encounter this group. Bigfoot again, this time complete with smock, Skeleton (looks like a slight variation of a 1974 version that I remember as being the first costume I ever wore), The Incredible Hulk (looks like an earlier version than the 1980s model posted below), and Darth Vader (sin smock, con cape).

Here's a closer look at Skeleton.


Costume images came from the awesome and topical book Halloween: Costumes and Other Treats. See many more images in a previous post here.

The Farmer and the Witch (1966, Ida DeLage, Gil Miret)

A farmer gets caught up in a feud with a witch in the 1966 picture book The Farmer and The Witch, one of several witch books authored by Ida DeLage and illustrated by Gil Miret. (This story was apparently also published under the title The Witch's Spell.)

After some back-and-forth in which the witch steals the farmer's pie, and the farmer chases her with a hayfork, the feud escalates when the witch concocts a brew to poison his drinking water!

Stirring her mixture 99 times to the left, then 99 times to the right, she recites:

Seven toadstools in a row.
Old black feather from a crow.
Wiggle worm,
Spider spin,
Drop another lizard in.
Big fat grub,
A snail or two.
Cook them up
For witch's brew.

The farmer ends up using a Halloween jack-o-lantern and the witch's left-behind cloak to make a scarecrow.

Cartoon Jack-O-Lantern Line-Up

Here's a collection of Jack-O-Lanterns stolen from the front yards
of eight cartoons. Can you identify them?

UPDATE (10-24-09): Apologies to any readers who had trouble posting their answers--seems this little challenge was so popular, it temporarily overwhelmed Blogger.com and froze the servers for several hours. Anyway, now that traffic seems to have settled down, I've posted the answers in the comments.

(1)

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(8)

Havoc on Halloween (Soup & Me, 1975)

The illustration above is a scene from Havoc on Halloween, the fifth chapter from "Soup & Me" (1975, Robert Newton Peck, illustrations by Charles Lilly).
Second in a series, "Soup & Me" chronicles the episodic misadventures of grade school boys Robert Peck (the author's surrogate) and best friend Luther Vinson a.k.a. "Soup" in a small rural town in circa 1930's Vermont. Rob is basically a good kid who lets himself get goaded into one predicament after another by Soup, whose penchant for mischief falls somewhere between Huckleberry Finn and Bam Margera.
When they aren't planning some kind of revenge against their recurring nemesis, female bully Janice Riker, they're trying to give each other haircuts with yard shears so they can use their barber money for candy, or assembling a rickety soapbox car from an old wash basin and duct tape.
These are FUNNY stories, which I first became aware of when they were adapted for an episode of the ABC Weekend Specials (The Trouble With Miss Switch, Bunnicula, The Red Room Riddle and The Ransom of Red Chief are some other children's titles adapted for the series).

Here's a freeze frame of the pumpkin-transporting scene which appeared behind the end credits of the TV special.

After enjoying the TV episode, I sought out the source material at the school library, and found the books to be even better, thanks to author Peck's gift for prose.
Take this passage, where Soup is convincing Rob to steal a prize pumpkin from a neighbor's patch:

I looked where he pointed, and sure enough, there was the biggest old pumpkin in the whole State of Vermont. I wanted to say something, but the words that came to mind just weren't big enough or orange enough to fit the size.
"That's some vegetable." said Soup.
"You know Soup...if God were to carve a jack-o-lantern, that there is the one pumpkin he'd pick."

Soup uses his influence to talk Rob into loading that jumbo pumpkin into a wheelbarrow, with the ultimate goal of arriving with it at the church Halloween party looking like a couple of heroes. Unfortunately the church is at the bottom of a very steep hill, and you can probably guess that even though everything doesn't go to plan, they still end up making one memorable entrance.