The Under 700 Club: Night of the Headless Horseman (1999)

"This is pretty spooky, but it really sucks."

The Under 700 Club: Reviews in under 700 words for movies with less than 700 logs on Letterboxd (log count as of this publication: 232)

Memory is a funny thing. We don't really know why we remember what we remember or how or why we change reality in our memories.

I say that to say this: I have a memory that I really don't think happened. Right? It couldn't have. In memory, it was about the second or third grade and we went on a class trip to a local nature park to take in the trees or whatever it was they taught us. After all the boring stuff, they sat us down on some tree stumps and an older colonially-dressed gentleman recited an abridged version of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the famous Ichabod Crane and Headless Horseman story. When the climactic chase scene came around, an actual freakin' headless horseman dude turned the corner of the trees and threw a fiery pumpkin, killing the storyteller. He galloped away along the nearby wooden bridge, never to be seen again.

That didn't happen, obviously. I mean...right?

I say that to say this: I probably just sat through a dry, lispy rendition of the archaic text and wished that happened. My mother raised me on a handful of Sleepy Hollow adaptations on VHS and I loved the story. I probably just wanted a little more action - like in the movies. The Ichabod half of Disney's The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is a masterpiece. Jeff Goldblum was the perfect choice in a 1980 television version. I seem to remember a Wishbone retelling. The Tim Burton/Johnny Depp collaboration was off-limits to this young boy. 

And then there was Night of the Headless Horseman...

This 1999 animated special originally aired on FOX and was pretty cutting-edge for the time. Not only was it early in the days of feature-length computer animation, motion capture was mainly used exclusively for video games. That is, of course, why the movie just feels a little off. I didn't play enough video games as a kid to be able to say, "This looks like a video game and not a movie," but I definitely knew it didn't look or feel like a movie. It's easy now to say that it's "ugly" because it "looks like an N64 game" because that's absolutely correct. But you can't hold their attempt at trying something against them in the present day. 

I say that to say this: you can hold their changes to the original story against them. That would've been a problem in any format. Irving's original story is bulletproof, has the perfect narrative arc, and is one of our great mysteries. I don't know if they thought they had to dumb it down for kids, but they throw out the tale's usual story progression and instead opt for newly created little vignettes that show Ichabod being weird, Brom being a jerk, and Katrina's vapid self. It's like all the crappy stage adaptations of A Christmas Carol that realize the story only takes like 30 minutes to play out and they have to vamp with their filler that is always significantly worse than the Dickens text. 

It gets back on track at Katrina's party, but it's funky until then. It's sufficiently spooky after that and obviously turns around when it gets back to the Irving stuff. 

The movie's saving grace is the cast, a pretty star-studded affair that might not have been the best thing about it at the time but absolutely is now. William H. Macy as Ichabod is inspired casting and would've been a great live-action pick, disregarding his non-lanky stature. Tia Carrere (Lilo & Stitch) gives Katrina more personality than the part usually requires and Luke Perry does a fine job as Brom - and must've been a pretty big get at the time. 

You'll recognize a couple of Spongebob voices, Bill Fagerbakke (Patrick) and Clancy Brown (Mr. Krabs), and I can always hear when Mark Hamill appears in something.

After reading the story in my class, I showed this version to my middle school students. One girl summed it all up when she said, "This is pretty spooky, but it really sucks."

I think that's what I said when I was a kid.