Customer Reviews

Mad Mad Mad Monsters [VHS]

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Many Rankin/Bass fanatics are familiar with "Mad Monster Party" nowadays, but few still know about "Mad, Mad, Mad Monsters," which was something of a mini prequel to the theatrical animagic feature. Done a few years later in traditional animation, "Mad, Mad, Mad Monsters" tells the story of the Frankenstein Monster's marriage to his newly created Mate. The Baron, extremely proud of his new creation, feels the wedding must be done up right. He rents out a luxurious hotel for himself and his monster friends, much to the distress of the staff and other guests. The monsters quickly wreak havoc throughout, while Igor does his darnedest to steal the Mate for himself. Everything is chaos, and until the last minute, there's no way to be sure if the wedding will ever really happen at all.

As with "Mad Monster Party," the story has no mention of Halloween, so those R&B fans hoping they have a new holiday special on their hands may be a bit disappointed. Still, if you are the type who just associates anything having to do with classic monsters with the Halloween season, you'll enjoy this one as a new tradition. It's not the most charming of Rankin/Bass specials, but it's an excellent companion piece to "Mad Monster Party," and an enjoyable film in its own right too. But it's a shame that it's only available on VHS right now, when it would have been a lovely extra on the recent, wonderful "Mad Monster Party" DVD release.

THE STORY: This is a very comical story of Baron Von Frankenstein (who looks like Boris Karloff), and his plans to create a bride for his monster Frankenstein. After he creates the monsters mate, he decides to make arrangements for a lavish wedding at the Transylvania Astoria, where most of the story takes place. Of course when the other monsters that are invited to the wedding begin to show, it turns the whole hotel into a nut house of terrified guests and staff. Igor is jealous of the monster and wants the bride for his own and plots to steal her. One of the prominent characters is Norman, a direct steal of the Jerry Lewis character in "The Bellboy". One running gag is about a mailman who was scared nearly to death delivering the invitations to the monsters, and lands up quitting his job to take a job at his uncles' hotel. The same hotel the monsters went to of course, and the bits about his trying to explain all this to his psychiatrist are hilarious.

The studio writers wrote a really good script, full of running gags and inside jokes. Many of the jokes are aimed at the adult side of the audience, probably more so than any other special produced by this studio. And it works, it is a very fun special for all ages, enjoyable to watch with the kids.

BEHIND THE SCENES: This is an animated special from the Rankin Bass studio, famous for their holiday specials such as Rudolph, Frosty, the Little Drummer Boy, and more. For this special they used traditional cel drawn animation rather than the 3D "Animagic" stop motion technique they are so well known for. The show was created as part of series of TV specials created for the "The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie", which ran for one hour each. The Rankin/Bass studio produced a total of 4 episodes for this series, including "That Girl in Wonderland", "Willie Mays and Say-Hey Kid", "The Red Baron", and "Mad, Mad, Mad Monsters". This was definitely the best of the group.

The crew for this special featured quite a few studio veterans that had worked on so many other specials. The background musical is from Rankin/Bass composer Maury Laws. Character design was by Paul Coker, another studio veteran and a Mad Magazine artist. The writing was done by William Keenan and Lou Silverman who worked on so many of their projects.

The premiere release of this cel animated TV special was on ABC on Saturday September 23, 1972. This was 5 years after the studio released its stop motion musical "Animagic" theatrical release titled "Mad Monster Party", in theaters for the Fall season of 1967. Many of the characters and plot elements from the theatrical movie appear in the TV special.

This special is now owned by Golden Books Entertainment, as is most of the Rankin/Bass catalog. They have done a good job of re-mastering and releasing high quality DVD versions of the most popular Rankin/Bass titles and loading some of them with extras. They are now getting to the more obscure titles and we can only hope this is one of them. In the meantime enjoy this VHS version, I really recommend it. All in all, a great show, it's hilarious.