Halloween Night 1986: What Was Actually On

Halloween 1986 landed on a Friday, which meant no school the next morning and no reason to come in off the street early. The set was on anyway, running in the background of a night nobody planned around it. What was on that night is not a matter of memory, because the listings survive.

Halloween night 1986 fell on a Friday. In the early evening Nickelodeon ran Double Dare, You Can't Do That on Television, and Danger Mouse, while the Disney Channel showed Halloween Is Grinch Night at 7:10. Prime time went to horror: MTV gave Elvira four straight hours, WGN ran two hours of Tales from the Darkside, and local stations aired Halloween and Night of the Living Dead.

The kids' end of the dial, 5 to 8 PM

The listings below come from TV Guide for Friday, October 31, 1986. Times are as printed.

Two things worth pulling out of that block. The Disney Channel built an actual Halloween evening, running the Ichabod Crane cartoon and then Halloween Is Grinch Night, the 1977 Dr. Seuss special that the listing described as the Grinch setting out to prove Halloween is the perfect night for nastiness. And Nickelodeon did essentially nothing seasonal at all: Double Dare, You Can't Do That on Television, and Danger Mouse were the ordinary Friday lineup, running on Halloween the same as any other night.

The seasonal programming for younger kids sat on broadcast instead. One Detroit station ran The Halloween That Almost Wasn't at 5:30, the fantasy special in which a witch played by Mariette Hartley refuses to fly over the moon because she is tired of being called ugly, with Judd Hirsch as Dracula. Showtime had a children's monster program at 6:00.

Also at 5:30, on a public television station, a household could find Captain Kangaroo, which had returned to public TV that same fall after CBS pushed it off weekday mornings. In Detroit that meant 5:30 in the afternoon, which is its own small illustration of how before-school television in 1986 had stopped being a national schedule at all.

Prime time was for horror

At 8:00 the evening changed register completely.

MTV cleared four hours for an Elvira Halloween special. WGN ran two hours of Tales from the Darkside. On the pay channels it was Stephen King's Silver Bullet on Showtime, Teen Wolf on HBO, and Better Off Dead on Cinemax. Broadcast filled in around them: an ABC station ran a Halloween episode of Webster in which the boys try to photograph the old woman down the street to prove she is not a witch, and at 8:30 a Mr. Belvedere in which, per the listing, George's new club turns out to be a satanic cult. Earlier, at 7:00, an M*A*S*H rerun was billed as a touch of the supernatural during a busy Halloween night in the OR.

The two real horror movies were local choices, not national ones, and they say something about how much latitude an independent station had. One Detroit independent ran John Carpenter's Halloween from 1978, uncut across two hours. Another ran Night of the Living Dead, and TV Guide printed the station's own hedge alongside it: the channel planned to announce that the program might not be suitable for all family members, and the print noted that color had been added by computer.

That is a 1968 black-and-white zombie film, colorized, on free television, on a Friday night, with a disclaimer the station wrote itself. No network would have done it. A local independent with airtime to fill in 1986 absolutely would.

What was not on

Two things a person expects to find that night were not there.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown does not appear in the Friday listings. It had premiered on CBS on October 27, 1966, and it was a fixture, but it did not run on the night itself that year.

Neither did Garfield. Garfield's Halloween Adventure, originally titled Garfield in Disguise, had premiered on CBS on October 30, 1985, written by Jim Davis and directed by Phil Roman. That is the answer to the question people usually mean when they ask what year the Garfield Halloween special is from: 1985, not 1986. Davis would premiere his Christmas special on CBS the following year.

One more listing worth noting without developing it: USA carried Dance Party U.S.A. at 5:30 that evening. The full history of that show and its cast lives in the WatchParty USA archive.

The honest bottom line

Halloween 1986 was not a curated night of television, and the listings make that obvious. The children's cable channels mostly ran their normal Friday shows, the seasonal specials were older titles being cycled again rather than anything new, and the genuinely memorable programming was two local stations running horror movies because horror movies were cheap and it was October. The nostalgia attaches to a night that the industry treated as unremarkable. That does not make the memory wrong. A Friday with no school, a colorized zombie movie on channel 50, and four hours of Elvira was a real thing that happened, and it happened because nobody was managing it very hard.

Sources

• TV Guide, Detroit Edition, week including Friday October 31, 1986, listings pages A-149 to A-152. Scans read page by page and retained with this page's working files. Primary record for the timed listings.
• Wikipedia, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown", "Garfield's Halloween Adventure" and "Disney's Halloween Treat" (premiere dates and broadcast records).
• Method note: negative claims about what did or did not air are scoped strictly to the hours actually read in that edition. Detroit-specific channels are labelled as such; cable and superstation feeds are national.

Part of the Saturday morning 80s time-capsule series, which also tracks seasonal television. See also Christmas Specials in December 1987 and the same season's weekly grid, Saturday Morning Fall 1986.

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