This Looks Terrible! The Paul Lynde Halloween Special (1976)

The 1976 Paul Lynde Halloween Special has a reputation as the tackiest of the tacky, a formidable contender, along with the Star Wars Holiday Special, Pink Lady & Jeff and The Brady Bunch Hour as the single most misconceived embarrassment in the oft-humiliating world of variety specials and shows. 

That’s an impressively appalling group of world-class mistakes to be a part of it but The Paul Lynde Halloween Special earns its place in the pantheon of the worst of the legendarily horrible, the historically abysmal. It is an astonishingly thrown-together bit of campy nonsense, a sustained insult to the public’s taste and intelligence that runs a mere fifty one minutes but seems to last several lifetimes. 

My five-year-old son Declan loves Halloween. It’s his favorite holiday and he uses the word “Halloween” to describe more than just the day itself. If he sees Halloween decorations he shouts out happily “Halloween!” If he sees someone on TV dressed like a ghost or a mummy or a Frankenstein’s Monster he’ll excitedly proclaim, “Halloween!” 

My son would be mortified by the egregious lack of Halloween in the Paul Lynde Halloween Special. I would never show it to him, of course, because I love my son and would never want to hurt him that way but if I did he would be apoplectic at all the bullshit in The Paul Lynde Halloween Special that has nothing to do with “Halloween.” 

He’d stare daggers at me watching Peter Criss, Kiss drummer and the author of one of the most exquisitely insane rock star memoirs of all time, perform the tender BALLAD “Beth” as a solo piano number. What does Peter Criss crooning about the loneliness of the road have to do with Halloween? I suppose being separated from your loved one by the rigors of travel and the demands of the studio could be spookily scarifying but really it’s just one of many aggressively, insultingly random elements in the special that make it an enduring humiliation.

To cite another non-spooky element that would have Declan ready to murder the makers of the Paul Lynde Halloween Special for false advertising, seemingly half of it is devoted to an elaborate trucker sketch so endless and interminable I suspect that in another multiverse world it’s still going on, and will in fact last until the end of time. 

It begins with Paul Lynde making a wish to become a glamourpuss long-haul trucker known as the Rhinestone Trucker, then Tim Conway enters the picture as his friend and primary romantic rival for a sexy truck stop waitress played by Happy Days veteran Roz Kelly, who is billed here as Roz “Pinky Tuscadero” Kelly after the character she played on the sitcom. Like a goddamn Shakespearean comedy, this ends with a wedding.

Name a more iconic duo!

The shoddy pretext for springing a four and a half hour long trucker sketch on an audience expecting ghouls and goblins is that Lynde is being held captive by witches who want him to help improve their public image. To sweeten the deal, they act as witchy Deus ex machina granting Lynde wishes. 

First Lynde wishes he could be a trucker. Then, in an even more astonishingly irrelevant and non-spooky development, Lynde wishes he was a rich, dashing sheikh as a pretext for a Valentino parody that would have been anachronistic back in the days when Milton Berle was the king of television. 

Apparently the writers here, who include, of course, notorious zinger-flinger and human Muppet Bruce Villanch (whose credits include, non-coincidentally, the Star Wars Holiday Special and Brady Bunch Variety Hour) wanted to include a lengthy sketch whose ideal audience died decades earlier. 

The opening credits for The Paul Lynde Halloween Special includes one for “Special Guest Star Florence Henderson”, another for a “Special Appearance” by Betty White, and, finally, and climactically, a “Rock and Roll Explosion by Kiss.” I like to think they were negotiating and re-negotiating these credits up until broadcast, and that at one point they teased Kiss as the “Special Guest Star” and a “Rock and Roll Explosion by Betty White.”

We start off, of course, with Lynde in Christmas garb, and then an Easter Bunny costume out of mankind’s worst nightmares before our palpably embarrassed host is informed by his tart-tongued housekeeper Margaret (AKA Margaret Hamilton from the Wizard of Oz) that it’s actually a holiday known for “witches and spooks and strange creatures of the night.”

This of course prompts Lynde, wisecrack-delivery machine, to quip, “that sounds like Hollywood Squares!” which, sadly, may be the freshest, most surprising joke of the night. 

Lynde was a very funny man, a consummate comedy professional waging war with some of the worst material ever to haunt the American airwaves. I could not come up with jokes cornier than the ones Lynde is saddled with here, like when he talks about a “real scary holiday coming up—Election Day!” 

Lynde performs a Halloween-themed new version of “Kids”, his signature song from Bye Bye Birdie with updated, season-specific lyrics about today “there’s too much Alice Cooper, not enough Alice Fay!” 

Lynde is dumped in a garbage can by demonic pranksters played by Donnie and Marie Osmond. In a desperate bid to get away from all those pesky kids his housekeeper takes him to Gloomsbury Manor, where she then reveals that she is a witch, and her sister is not only a witch but a specific witch, Witchiepoo (Billie Hayes) from H.R Pufnstuf. 

And then Kiss shows up because why the hell not to sing no less than three songs: “Detroit Rock City”, “Beth” and “King of the Night Time World” (which was co-written by notorious ghoul and real-life Frankenstein’s Monster Kim Fowley), the last in a haunted disco because Lynde, in his kindness, gave the witches his final wish and they chose to visit a Hollywood disco where Florence Henderson performs a sexy disco version of “Black Magic.” 

Henderson is apparently the only performer here who did not get the memo that they would be making something unspeakably, unbelievably, inconceivably idiotic and bad and consequently there would be no use trying at all. Henderson is a consummate professional giving the excruciating Valentino skit an element of glamour and mature sensuality (honestly, the only real positive takeaway I got from this is that Henderson was a very beautiful and charismatic woman) it does not deserve and somehow manages to hold onto her dignity and her bold yet classy sexuality crooning “Black Magic” in the same haunted disco where Kiss performed “King of the Night Time World” and the cast closes things out with a group cover of “Disco Lady” re-titled “Disco Baby.” 

I expected The Paul Lynde Halloween Special to be bad but I was hoping it would be fun-bad, so bad it’s good, bad in a way I will want to experience over and over again. Nope, this is fucking brutal, a joyless slog, a tacky, campy endurance test. 

So do yourself a favor this Halloween and skip the Paul Lynde Halloween Special. You think it’s going to be bad. Really, you have no idea. 

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