One Giant Leap For Otto Griebling

I stopped my car at the traffic light, to allow my friends Dracula and Superman to cross the road. They waved happily at me, and as I returned a cheerful smile, my nose fell off.

“Ha!” jeered Superman. “What are you? Some kind of clown?”

“Er... actually yes!” I called back, trying not to smudge my makeup.

In the parking lot, I switched my regular glasses to a much funnier pair, with large eyes on springs that bulged out every time I turned my head. I made sure that my multicolored hair looked ridiculous, and that my huge bow tie was sufficiently crooked. Then I adopted my silliest walk and marched toward my office, to begin a very unusual Thursday at work.

This was the start of Halloween in 1996, as I arrived at the Disney Feature Animation Studio in Florida. I was working there on the artistic crew for Disney's 36th animated feature, "Mulan", but on that particular Thursday, very little work was planned for the day. 

Everyone had told me what a huge event Halloween was going to be, but I still wasn’t prepared for the reality. The entrance to our animation office building was transformed into a large wooden barnyard, recreating a scene from Disney’s 17th animated feature film, "One Hundred and One Dalmatians". A thick layer of straw lined the ground, and cardboard puppies were everywhere, as Cruella De Vil wandered around making sure that everything was on course for the day’s fun and games.

Inside the office, another transformation had taken place. Dry ice bubbled spooky smoke from large black cauldrons. Black and white balloons hung around our desks, as flashing purple and orange lights illuminated the Mickey Mouse murals on the walls.

After a morning spent with a lot of candy, some fun games and plenty of laughter, a grand stage was prepared for the highlight of the day: The Costume Competition. In later years I won prizes for this event, but as this was my first Halloween at the studio, I wanted to show my participation with a decent, (if unimaginative) costume, and to watch how things were done.

My biggest surprise was that most of the costumes were not limited to Disney characters. To the left of me I watched the cast from The Wizard of Oz add the finishing touches to their hair and makeup. To the right, "Marvin the Martian" looked spectacular, "Rosey the Robot" was an amazing feat of craftsmanship, and our Director of Production set aside his regular job, in order to become a reindeer. As the competition got underway, I stood in line behind Catwoman, waiting for my turn to go up on stage.

To make sure that the costume procession flowed smoothly, a lady walked along the line, noting details about each participant that she could announce to the judges. Eventually she arrived at me.

“Is that... Daniel?” she asked, trying to squint past the makeup.

“Yes, it is,” I replied in my best and wackiest clown voice.

“Great," she replied. "And what is your costume?”

In answer to this I pointed to my white face and big red nose. I tugged at the orange side of my hair, and wiggled my ludicrously large blue bow tie, and said:

“I’m an astronaut.”

The lady nodded, and wrote "Astronaut" on a card next to my name.

“No, no!” I corrected. “I’m not really an astronaut. I’m a clown. A Crazy Bug-Eyed Clown.”

She looked up at me, shrugged, then corrected her card.

Soon, Catwoman was slinking her way across the stage, blowing farewell kisses to the judges, and the Crazy Bug-Eyed Clown was announced. I climbed up the steps and into the spotlight, and received a modest ripple of applause from the audience as I strutted around. This was followed by a larger laugh when I suddenly realized that without my real glasses, I couldn’t actually find my way off the stage again. To help see the exit a little clearer, I pulled my springy eyeballs out of the glasses, which acted as a neat but unintentional comic finale to my performance.

Rosey the Robot won the grand prize, but to me, the best and bravest costumes were worn by the two ladies dressed in gardening outfits, selling themselves as the most delightfully unwholesome, extremely un-Disney: "Two-bit HOE-ers"!

Over the years, the animation studio grew, to work on movies like "Tarzan", "Brother Bear" and "Lilo & Stitch". As more artists filled the building, the amazing Halloween celebrations at Disney became larger in scale, creating memories and bonds between everyone that will last forever.

Modern day Halloween customs can often seem sacrilegious, or even satanic, but the roots of the holiday can be traced back to Ireland, and the Celtic celebration of Samhain (pronounced "Saw-win"). This marked the end of the harvest season, and the beginning of the darker, colder part of the year. In preparation for the harsher weeks ahead, people would take careful stock of their food supplies, and choose which animals to slaughter for winter meat.

Fires were lit to help cleanse the land and hold back the darkness of winter. Interestingly, the bones of recently slaughtered cattle were often thrown into the fire, coining the term “bone fire”, which eventually became the modern word “bonfire”. A custom then arose to carry around this protective fire by placing a hot coal inside a hollowed-out turnip, potato or beet.

The name for these makeshift lanterns originates in an old Irish myth about a man nicknamed “Stingy Jack”. As the story goes, he was denied entry into both heaven and hell, and was forced instead, to wander the Earth forever, with nothing but a coal nestled inside a hollowed-out turnip for light. Stingy Jack’s ghost was referred to as “Jack of the Lantern,” and in the 1800s, the Irish immigrants brought this story to the U.S.A. The American version was modified by a lack of turnips in the New World, so instead, the people started to carve out pumpkins. Eventually, "Jack of the Lantern" became the “jack-o’-lanterns” that we are more familiar with today.

This week, my neighbor called me over, to admire the incredible pumpkins that she grew this year. They looked so huge, I couldn’t believe that they hadn’t been destroyed by squirrels, like their tomatoes had been. My protective netting had worked well to keep the critters from my raised bed, but it seemed like every time I looked over at my neighbor’s garden this year, I saw raiding thieves pulling their plants apart.

There were several squirrel scratches on the side of the pumpkins, but the vegetables remained in great shape. Unfortunately, due to the Coronapocalypse pandemic this year, they won’t be turned into jack-o’-lanterns to carry from house to house. Instead, they will be cursed to walk the Earth, socially distancing themselves from others.

During World War II, trick or treating was interrupted because of a sugar shortage. Sadly, this year we will also be discouraging the neighborhood children from going door to door, to collect candy and COVID.

Maybe next year we can make Dracula, Astronauts and Clowns fun again, but for now, my only costume is a surgical mask, a hope, and a prayer that we are all led safely out of the darkness.