Where To Watch
How Chuck Jones and Ray Bradbury came up with The Halloween Tree
It would have been the cartoon collab of the century!
The creation of Ray Bradbury's classic novel and cartoon, The Halloween Tree, actually begins with another Halloween cartoon. It was Halloween 1967, and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was the first half-hour primetime Halloween special.
Excited for the Charlie Brown cartoon, Ray Bradbury watched the premiere with his family and left fairly disappointed. He wanted a Halloween special that was more focused on the spookiness and the history of Halloween, and he knew one friend would agree with him on this - Chuck Jones.
Yes, once again, mark the "Chuck Jones is secretly involved" square on your MeTV Toons Bingo card because that man was friends with everybody. Jones and Bradbury met for lunch to discuss The Great Pumpkin and how they thought a Halloween cartoon should be. Bradbury even brought Jones an oil painting he had made previously of a Halloween Tree, filled with jack-o-lanterns in the branches. Both men felt that there was so much more to Halloween than the cartoon they had just watched.
Jones also felt like there was a lack of Halloween spirit amongst the youth, as Bradbury recalled Jones saying, "‘Some kids rang my bell,’ Chuck said, ‘and when I opened the door they cried ‘Trick or Treat!’ I yelled back, ‘Trick!’ which stunned and surprised them. So one little boy ran out on the lawn and stood on his head! In the old days, if I hadn’t handed out treats, they would have soaped my windows or firecrackered my mailbox. I stared at all these kids, dressed up as witches, mummies, and ghosts and asked them why they dressed that way. No one knew. They had no roots in the past!"
Bradbury also felt that the spiritual side of Halloween, the remembrance of the dead, had been forgotten. Feeling the same frustrations they voice through Moundstroud in the movie, Jones said, "Why don’t we make a cartoon to teach people why they wear bones and sneeze mummy dust?" and the two creative titans got to work on teaching the world about the wonders of Halloween.
Chuck Jones then pitched their idea to MGM, a spooky half-hour Halloween cartoon focused on the history of Halloween, written by Bradbury, directed and produced by Jones. MGM greenlit the project.
Both men were excited about the project, especially Bradbury, who wrote, "I’m writing a film. It’s going to be a cartoon by Chuck Jones. A wonderful man to work with. It’s a history of Halloween in cartoon form. It’s going to be a heck of a lot of fun,"
But the spirit of Halloween had one more trick for Jones and Bradbury - MGM shut down its animation division before the cartoon could be produced. So, Bradbury went on to write The Halloween Tree as a novel and, twenty years later, eventually created the cartoon version produced by Hanna-Barbera. For the 1993 cartoon, Bradbury won a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Writing in an Animated Program.
