Happy Halloween!

Welcome to the best day of the year! Since I missed a day this month, today will feature not one but two songs from the great Vincent Price! If you thought his recording career started and ended with the "Thriller" monologue, then come closer my dear.

The first song is from Price's character Professor Ratigan, from the 1986 Disney animated film The Great Mouse Detective. It's sort of a children's Sherlock Holmes, with mice instead of people, and of course Vincent Price is the dastardly villain. The hero mouse is named Basil in honor of former Sherlock Basil Rathbone, and although Rathbone was dead by the time this movie was made, his voice (sampled from a 1966 Sherlock Holmes reading) makes a cameo as Basil the mouse's upstairs human neighbor. Of course Vincent Price steals the show, though, as his deliciosly evil Professor Ratigan plots to take control of the British monarchy. Here he is extolling his own michievous virtues in "The World's Greatest Criminal Mind." Tricky and wicked, of course!

And the final song of the season is... "The Monster Mash"! But wait, you say, this cannot be. Oh, but yes it can! Rules are made to be broken, after all, even my own. In fairness, this "Monster Mash" isn't the Bobby Boris Pickett one that crowds the October airwaves to the exclusion of so many other fine spooky songs, but a version by Vincent Price from a 1980 movie called The Monster Club. It's an anthology film hosted by Price as a vampire named Eramus, with monstrous musical interludes between the anthology segments. One of these interludes is "The Monster Mash," and I have to say that Price's take on "humes" (humans) at the beginning of this segment is spot-on. We're some of the scariest monsters of all, and he knows it! So just for today, the Transylvania Twist is now the Mash. Remember when you get to his door, tell them Vincent sent you...

Until next year, creep it real, ghouls! Now get out there and raise hell.