This might be the most fun stroll of all! You get to wear a costume and ring doorbells and people will give you treats! You might even see an old pal, after all it's his favorite time of year. Come on along as we pay a visit to the most famous ghost of all...
I have to admit I've been a Casper fan for a very long time and I just loved the movie ( feature film made in 1995) and drag it out every Halloween and make Corey, my son, watch it with me. It has become a Holiday tradition just like those Christmas movies we just have to watch every year.
Given that Casper is depicted as a ghostly little boy, an ongoing issue with the series regards the question of whether or not he is, in fact, a dead child. Early Casper cartoons seemed to suggest this, as they portrayed him "living" beside a gravestone. Specifically, the short There's Good Boos To-Night featured a fox befriended by Casper coming back from the dead as a ghost.
This rather macabre premise was later abandoned in favor of the idea that ghosts were merely a type of creature, similar to ghouls, goblins, etc. He was thereafter portrayed with feet and shown to have ghostly parents. In the 1960s and 1970s, the stock answer provided by Harvey Comics in response to those wondering how Casper died was that he was a ghost simply because his parents were already ghosts when they were married.
The 1995 feature film Casper, however, revived the concept that Casper was a deceased human and a portion of the plot dealt with him trying to remember his life and had him rediscovering the circumstance of his own death. The first direct-to-video film to follow the feature, Casper: A Spirited Beginning, showed Casper's early days as a ghost, not showing how he died (although implying he did) and ignoring the story provided in the previous film. All films to follow A Spirited Beginning avoided the issue altogether.
Casper was created in the early-1940s by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo, the former devising the idea for the character and the latter providing illustrations. Intended initially as the basis for a children's storybook, there was at first little interest in their idea and when Reit was away on military service during the Second World War, Oriolo sold the rights to the character to Paramount Pictures' Famous Studios animation division, for which he had occasionally worked.
The Friendly Ghost, the first Noveltoon to feature Casper, was released by Paramount in 1945. In the cartoon, Casper is a cute, pudgy ghost-child, who prefers making friends with people instead of scaring them. He leaves his home at the local haunted house and goes out to make friends. However, every person or animal he meets takes one horrified look at him and runs off in the other direction. Distraught, Casper unsuccessfully attempts to commit suicide by laying himself down on a railway track before an oncoming train (apparently forgetting that he's already dead) before he meets two little children who become his friends. The children's mother at first rejects Casper, but later welcomes him into the family after he wards off a greedy landlord. The series featured the catchy theme song that you are listening to right now.
Casper, the friendly ghost
The friendliest ghost you know!
The grownups might look at him with fright,
But the children all love him so.
In 1995, the friendly ghost was adapted into a live-action feature film entitled Casper, where he and his wicked uncles, the Ghostly Trio, were created with computer animation. The film constructed a backstory for Casper and is the only time in the series that the question of his death has been addressed. According to the film, Casper was a twelve-year-old boy living in Whipstaff Manor with his inventor father J. T. McFadden until he died from pneumonia after playing out in the cold until it was past nightfall. Much of the backstory he is given in the film is contradicted by other Casper media. However Casper got a last name for the first time, Casper McFadden.
The movie really is done very well and if you have children or grandchildren why not make this your Halloween tradition too?
Until we meet again....
