Halloween Safety (1977, Centron)

Okay! Just amazing! I finally (finally!) acquired a 16mm reel of the Centron/ Coronet Halloween Safety educational film I appeared in back when I was 7 years old! It had been so long that I could scarcely remember a thing about my involvement, and mostly questioned whether or not it would turn out that I was even really in the damn thing after all. But as of today, for the first time in 30 years, I can confirm that: yes, yes I am. The grand screen-time-total of my glorious film debut? About 14 seconds. 14 seconds of complete fucking Halloween awesomeness.

So the basic deal is that in 1976 I was asked to be in this thing by a casting scout who visited my grade school and picked me out of my 2nd grade class's outfit parade. My costume was a homemade Creature From The Black Lagoon getup with a thin rubber mask ordered out of a comic book for the head, and my previous year's Sears-bought "Planet of the Apes" suit turned inside out, dyed dark green and accented with darker green hanging cheesecloth (which was supposed to resemble seaweed) for the body. Well as it turns out -- and I had completely forgotten this 'til I started watching -- I wasn't actually allowed to wear my rubber Creature from the Black Lagoon mask in the film at all, since a key safety point seems to be that masks are oh-so-very-unnecessary for Halloween fun. Instead (and this all came rushing back to me) they had some make-up dude come in & paint my face like a graveyard ghoul -- it looks great! Really crude and minimalist but still completely in step with my cheesecloth-covered-costume, which now looks to be the dismal shroud of the roaming undead. Man, I totally should have ripped off that look for my costume the following year.

So anyway, what actually happens in those earth-shatteringly historic 14 seconds of mine? Well basically you see me put in a set of vampire teeth (with a giant strand of drool stretching from my hands to my mouth) and then start to apply some white face paint to my lips. Next we cut to a "Halloween Party" scene, and here I remember initially being in front of the whole group only to be shamefully sent to the very back after trying to eat a cookie before the camera started rolling. As the scene pans around you can see me talking to a couple of other kids for a few frames (at least 3 of them were grade school pals of mine) and then... well that's pretty much IT for me actually. Totally incidental! Totally forgettable! Totally worth the three decades wait!

Check the exciting "Jason Only" edit here:




...and then don't miss the REAL full-length 1977 version, where you can watch a reasonably creepy Witch costume devolve into an utter wreck of reflective tape and white fabric over the course of 11 minutes.

Part One:



Part Two:




Coming soon: the completely different "second edition" version from 1985. All new plot! All new kids! All new safety tips!

Well, well, well.

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You guys are pretty fucking amazing. So many astounding emails & comments -- I am fully blown away. For real.

Well okay, you win. Since it's quite clear that I've pretty much got to come back for Halloween this year, I'm now on the hunt for a decent hosting situation. Once I've got that together (a few options are in the works) I'll re-up all the old files and then get to work on adding some cool new ones (assuming, that is, that the rest of the increasingly astounding blogs which keep popping up haven't already beaten me to it. It'll be tough, trust me.)

In the meantime I guess I should point out (to any of the fine folks who have emailed me directly & might've missed the links hidden within the comments), that the lion's share of the files I encoded, along with plenty more I wish I had, are actually already being capably hosted on a variety of other super-cool blogs run by some terribly committed people. While I don't have a full list handy, here (off the top of my head) are a couple of good places to check (please feel free to add more in the comments):

Dave's Mostly Ghostly Music Sharing Blaaahhhggg!!!

Cool Kooky Hip and Groovy

And as good as those are I know that if you search a bit you'll find even more are out there as well -- I honestly can't even being to keep up with all the badical new blogs I've seen with even the most casual of searches.

Actually that kinda brings me to another small point I should at least mention: My main goal with this whole Scar Stuff project was really just to get these records back into as common a circulation as possible so that everyone could enjoy them, but during the process of trying to achieve this end I was really wiped out by the sheer volume of new audio that came at me from all angles as a result. So cool!

In fact it strikes me that the obsessive collectors here on the internet have an inborn anxiousness to play against type (read: creepy greedheads using arcane knowledge & rare media as a tool for wielding power over similarly inclined, but less flush, folks) -- in my clicking around I mostly have seen them happy to scattershot a kind of guileless generosity, all of which couldn't make me happier. In fact speaking of generous, if you like the stuff I was posting you probably should check out the Power Records Project Yahoo group -- there are a few people on there who have REALLY set the bar high for friendliness & sharing (Hello Leland Dugger!). Poke around a bit & I doubt you'll be disappointed.

Okay! So I guess now the hunt is on for some place to spend my file-hosting money. Any suggestions while I encode a few LPs & do some research? Thanks for a year of well-wishes & I promise I'll talk to you guys soon!