It seems as if the creatures that were laid to rest last Halloween are coming back out, but in the form of a new Renaissance… Monstober.
A well-known pastime for any college student my age, Monstober was a fanfare of television shows and themed-music produced and directed by Disney Channel in the late 2000s. It was Disney’s take on a PG-13 endless Halloween party. Thirty-one days of classic tracks, starting with China Anne McClain “Calling All the Monsters,” the only right way of ringing in the spooky season. Ghouls doing the electric slide? Check. Frankenstein dapping up McClain as they shuffle to the beat of her professing that they are “Coming to get you?” You bet.
I distinctly recall that commercial breaks on Disney weren’t even “breaks.” If anything, it was just another music video, an intro to another intro. Celebrities like Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez, or even Miley Cyrus would tell you that the party would never end because Monstober was “All October. All-day. Every day.” And to add icing on the cake, they would waive their CG wand into the blinking-red dot that was a camera and transform the screen into jack-o-lanterns and skeletons.
That was my youth.
Or the prime of it, at least.
You couldn’t wait for Halloween as a kid. You couldn’t wait for the soft chill in the air. The longer and the shorter nights. Or coming home from a long day at school just to toss your backpack to the side and turn on the Disney Channel, wondering what movie was queued up next.
My favorite film happened to be “Girl vs Monster,” a sci-fi picture of a teenage girl discovering it’s in her destiny to defeat monsters, specifically the ones that come out to play on Halloween night. With a killer soundtrack and a lead like Olivia Holt who was coming off a banger television series that was “Kickin’ It,” it was like magic.
Though I am much older now, and Disney’s glory days are far removed from the present, I still find myself reminiscing on what Monstober meant to me and to kids my age. I didn’t realize how a select month like October queued full of my favorite spooky television shows and songs was going to epitomize my formative years. I still find myself on Netflix watching my “My Babysitter’s a Vampire” and thinking about how awesome Benny’s Grandma was in the show and how I wanted my teenage years to reflect that, to reflect the magic captured in these programs that are no longer with me or this generation.
I miss Monstober. I miss what it used to be.
But even then, every time the Halloween season comes around, I think about calling the monsters, as China McClain sang about all those years ago, and hope they are still calling back to me.