Watch The David S. Pumpkins Halloween Special For Free

Captivating movie !

Absolutely Fantastic

A Masterpiece!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

"The David S. Pumpkins Halloween Special" is a very recent Halloween special from this year and it aired just 2 days ago in fact the day I am writing this. The director here is Emmy winner Don Roy King and this shows already how closely it is connected to the successful long-running Saturday Night Live. I don't know too much about SNL, so no further elaboration in that area. It got some attention especially because the title character is voiced by Tom Hanks and we also see him in costume of his animated character very early and very late during these slightly over 20 minutes. The other well-known name in the cast here is Peter Dinklage who narrates the whole thing. Oh yes I forgot to say it is an animated movie and it unites aspects of several long-running shows into this thingey here. The title character acts and reacts a bit like Bender from Futurama, the moral at the end reminded me of South Park and a lot of the slapstick comedy had a touch of Simpsons to it. And these are only the ones I know. I am sure you will find more parallels, also in terms of the animation style for example. Anyway, I struggled a bit with the main character early on from a comedy perspective, but in the second half I liked him more. The boy and his little sister in the center of it all were nice from start to finish. I am surprised many of the other reviewers hated it so much because at least as a one-time project I think it worked and was a fun watch. The focus on Halloween and several plot points makes it basically impossible to turn this into a recurring series, but that's perfectly fine. I am not sure if it could work as such. But I would not say no to another 20-minute-sequel for Halloween 2018, 2019 or 2020. This was never a scary watch, so it is also a good watch for the little ones. If they are old enough to trick'n treating, they are old enough to watch this television special. I give it a thumbs-up.

Who is Halloween Santa? It has to be David S. Pumpkins (Tom Hanks). The narrator (Peter Dinklage) recounts his meeting with Pumpkins as teenager Kevin. His little sister Dotty picks the dumpy pumpkin which comes with David S. Pumpkins who tells them that he's theirs for Halloween. The Ditmeyer brothers are bullies. Kevin likes Paige. The neighborhood boogeyman Raincoat Man has taken everybody's candy.It's a silly SNL skit that Tom Hanks does with Bobby Moynihan and Mikey Day. It's fun for a stupid two minute break but it struggles to be more than that. It has rudimentary animations with the trio doing the wrap around. It's not quite kiddie level but also not subversive enough to be adult. It's a light mixture of both. While it's watchable, it's not rewatchable.

What a gross disappointment. All of the saccharine of a Charlie Brown holiday special and none of the charm. Trite script and animation, no laughs.This might have been appropriate in an 8:00pm time slot for 7 year olds...but in Saturday Night Live's Time slot? No. Lorne Michaels should be embarrassed.

An animated special based on an SNL sketch that, theoretically, should never have been as funny as it ended up being, seems like a bad idea to produce in the first place. BUT, if they were going to move forward with it, I think that more effort should have been made to appeal to the SNL viewers who liked it in the first place. Aside from the odd line that you would have heard in the original sketch (eg. the skeletons being "part of it"), the first 2 acts gave you little to tell you that this is connected to SNL. Only two of the voice actors were SNL cast members (Bobby Moynihan included, even though he recently left the show) and the story was crafted to be more like one of the traditional Halloween specials for kids. This was a true shame as I was looking forward to seeing how this would be handled. It is clearly a missed opportunity as they were able to take something so simple and build on it for the show.