Note, this project is one of my annual Halloween Projects, which are something of an outgrowth of my old Children’s Halloween Record blog Scar Stuff.
For a complete listing of my Halloween Projects, please click here.
Here’s a higher quality (and downloadable) encode of the complete 1977 “Halloween Safety” Centron Educational Film that I converted to digital from the original 16mm source and uploaded to YouTube a few years ago.
Halloween Safety Educational Film (1977, Centron) from Jason Willis on Vimeo.
Settle back and watch in abject horror as a reasonably creepy witch costume devolves into an utter wreck of reflective tape and white fabric over the course of 11 minutes! Boo! Scary!
…and of course I can be seen in all of my spooky age-seven Halloween glory starting at around 5:26, and at various points thereafter (don’t blink though; I’m talking about mmmmaybe 14 seconds total.) My first ever acting role! And what a role it was! Oh my! Excelsior!
And for good measure, here’s the original detailing of the saga with more background dope:
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!
You can check the exciting Jason-only edit here:
…and the truly obsessive can see the original YouTube upload (which I split into two parts) here:
and here:
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