A Disney Halloween — 1983 TV Special Recreation

Background

As a child of the 80s, I grew up during a wonderful period of cable TV when The Disney Channel was its best — no commercial interruptions, marvelous interstitial materials, in-depth updates on various company projects, programing you now have to spend hundreds of dollars on DVD’s to get and terrific holiday specials that perfectly put you in the mood for season.

One of these much-beloved specials is an extended/revised version of VHS that came out in 1982. A Disney Halloween premiered on the Disney Channel during its 1983 inaugural year and became a holiday tradition for over a decade afterwards. Technically defined as a “clip show” this special combined most of Disney spookiest animation moments.

In the years since its retirement, it lived on as recorded video on those antiquated and almost nearly extinct VCRs and over the process of time has degraded to the point of being nearly unwatchable. Fast-forward a few decades and thanks to technological advancements coupled with Disney’s own restoration efforts on individual films we now have the ability to recreate this much-beloved holiday special.

The 2024 Restoration

What you see is an exact replica of the Halloween special created in 1983. In contrast to my previous efforts ten years ago, this version utilizes the most up-to-date restorations of the animation features in full HD with enhanced audio. In addition, more obscure titles like excerpts from “The Great Cat Family” (1956) and various Pluto cartoons were upscaled and painstakingly cleaned frame-by-frame for the best presentation possible. Finally, the Magic Mirror segments (originally from 1977s “Disney’s Greatest Villains”) were recreated by using the original layout drawing of the mirror itself which was hand-tinted and animated with AI-enhanced upscaling footage of Hans Conried’s performance which was also manually cleaned.