The David S. Pumpkins Halloween Special review: Funny, without question
The challenge with doing a special around David S. Pumpkins is that, as a character, his premise is that he has no premise. He is an enigmatic man in a pumpkin suit who parades around asking “any questions?” at the end of everything he does. There is zero reason why this should have worked as entertainment for longer than one or two minutes.
Yet for whatever reason there was an odd sort of charm to this special, so much so that we would probably watch it again. First of all, Peter Dinklage was the narrator even though he had nothing to do with the original sketch. Following that, you had David S. Pumpkins driving around in a giant strawberry, which he later shrank down to eat. He had some great one-liners, he can make pumpkins hover for some reason without explanation, and there is something about David Pumpkins dancing around with those skeletons that makes us laugh every time.
The real “story” of the special was that David S. Pumpkins and his skeleton friends ended up being summoned one Halloween by a young man named Kevin (the young version of the narrator), and eventually they all proved essential to saving Halloween from some menacing man named Raincoat Man, who was lording over everyone’s candy and stealing it in the streets. It only made sense that Raincoat Man turned out to be the lamest villain / villains ever — there were three triplets who wore the costume who were all incredibly dumb and had a serious fear of a musical number that Pumpkins came very close to belting out.
Kevin and his new-found friend managed to get everyone in the neighborhood their candy back, and in the process he learned the true meaning of Halloween: Having a good time — and, according to David S. Pumpkins, candy. Lots of candy. We came, we saw, and we’re not sure we learned anything at all, but we had a great time.
CarterMatt Verdict
By no means should this special have worked as well as it did. Maybe it took a minute or two to get going, but by the midway point it was easy to surrender oneself to Mr. Pumpkins and all of its silliness. It captured both the spirit of the original sketch and then also still had a certain charm about it that is signature to most other Halloween Specials out there. The best thing about it may just be that you can probably enjoy this even if you don’t know the original sketch all that well.
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