All the planning in the world to drop a new post the week the sequel was released failed. I had 36 years to do this. I even had time to collect all the books. But, better late than never, so here goes my two Beetlejuice stories.

In September 1988 I was five years old, going on six at the end of the year. Our family is generationally spread out so my mother’s nephew is only three years younger than she is. They both wanted muchly to see this new comedy. Having been fans of Michael Keaton thus far, they were expecting a laugh riot. They also wanted me to go as well.

Now, at this age I was practically afraid of everything. Not the full level of Wade Duck on Garfield and Friends, but enough to consider him and Scooby and Shaggy close allies. I had seen the trailer and wanted nothing to do with its nonsense. “It’ll be more funny than scary.” Famous last words.

I made it maybe 15 minutes or so into the film, not really following on the scaring people out of the house they used to live in plot, until Gina Davis rips off her face in the closet. That was it for me. Check, Please! The movie theatre was in town 20 minutes from where we lived. Luckily it was a small enough theatre that the manager, a very nice man named W.S. Rosser, let us call my grandfather to come pick me up and let me stay in his office until my ride arrived.

Incidentally, Mr. Rosser, worked at that movie theatre for over 65 years, starting there as a boy making popcorn. He passed away back in 2013, and would have been 100 this December. He always made sure the kids didn’t have their feet up on the seats and weren’t being unruly or loud, so a lot of problem kids didn’t like him. I never once had a problem with him, and from 1988 until I wasn’t going to Pines Theatre anymore he would always smile and wave to me or say hi if he had the time.

I didn’t see the movie in full until I was a teenager. I did however thoroughly enjoy the animated series that began the following year. Remember, it was the 80s so a lot of things that wouldn’t be readily marketed to children were animated and serialized. This, Toxic Crusaders (so that was 1991, but still), Rambo, Garbage Pail Kids, etc.

The cartoon has to hold some record for most puns per minute. It’s 22 minutes of insanity and sight–and unsightly–gags. I loved the whole geopolitical madness of the Neetherworld. The jogging French skeleton, the Cowboy Monster from Texas, and the car with eh abnormal brain (“The faster we go the more bugs I can catch!”) stand out as quality character development.

There were also a handful of 1991 ish comic books on the animated series model, 100. I think by this point I had one or two of the action figures from the movie I hadn’t seen, too. And here is where the other Beetlejuice story takes shape. But before we move on, I’d like to point out that Danny Elfman scored the animated series, as well as the film. I have the film score, and it would be nice to have the animated series score and cues released on vinyl as well.

Through the course of looking for books for my son I was going back through books I remember having or had bought from book fairs or Troll and Scholastic paper order forms and through the wonder of algorithmic shopping thriftbooks dropped some suggestions on my plate: One was the New Adventures of Jonny Quest and the other was Beetlejuice.

I had never seen the Beetlejuice ones before. I never read Goosebumps, but my wife had saved about 90% of the original run. These aren’t that. These are just as zany as the cartoon show, but the problem was they are, ahem, “rare.” In the scrub all book listings online so we can price 1990s books for $200 or more.

I was able to play the long game and get most of them in a lot from another site, and then picked up a “like new” one for $10. The last one though, was tough. Twisted Tours was available on Thriftbooks for almost $300 because automatic pricing didn’t see another one of the ISBN listings anywhere else online.

EXCEPT when I did a larger search I saw it available on Amazon.de for 30 euro. When I tried to ship it to me I couldn’t purchase it from the German site. When I looked to see where the seller was located it was THRIFTBOOKS CHICAGO. I even emailed corporate and was like, look, this is in Chicago, it’s 30 euro on the German site, can you match that and just send it to me here in the states?

No. Everything is automatic, we have to power, the key has turned on and customer service is limited to scripts. Not knocking their customer service for 99% of everything else it’s been great, but this was insane.

Luckily, and this is where it gets really funny, a friend of mine and her family moved to an army base in Germany a couple years ago. I messaged her with this plan that was so crazy it just might work, and you know what? It did.

I sent her the money and she was able to buy the book from German Amazon, have it shipped FROM CHICAGO to their address on base IN GERMANY, and then ship if FROM GERMANY BACK to the United States. We ordered it on 9/28/23, she got it on 10/11/23, and shipped it out. We got it on Halloween day.

I mean the timing was fun, but how crazy is it that it had to cross the Atlantic twice to save $250?

The set is complete now, and happily waiting until my son gets old enough to read them. I still have two to get in the Jonny Quest series, I finally bought one of the “Collectible” ones from thriftbooks only to have it arrive with a torn cover. So I am still waiting on that one, it’s not even available cheaply with this kind of Magellanic shipping.

To date, I have not seen the newest rendition of the (hopefully) trilogy–I mean it has to, right, the whole name three times, let’s make three movies, you know, whatever. But one thing I did really like about it, after I watched it was the practical effects and the same sort of genre defined trope that your afterlife is spent in the shape you died in.

When the movie was announced and the release date coming, I couldn’t help but think about the parallels of me seeing the first one at 5, and my son being 6 now and how many people would think “oh we can go together and see it” and I think “nah, I’ve been on the other side of that, and it sucks. We didn’t’ do that with Ghostbusters, either. We did see the Garfield movie together. It was fun for what it was, but we like the cartoon more. The only thing that came out of that is my son saying that the Pool playing cat in Schoolhouse Rock’s Naughty Number Nine video is Garfield’s dad.

If you’ve made it this far expecting a turn to astronomy or music in order to make sense of the other two spellings of Beetlejuice in the title, I am sorry you’ll have to leave disappointed, but thanks for playing and you can take along a copy of our home game.