2836: A Halloween Carol

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A Halloween Carol

Title text: [after a minute] "Okay, I think I've got it, thanks. Can I--" "oOOOooOOooo!"

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a GHOST... oOOOooOOooo - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

In the classic Charles Dickens story A Christmas Carol, the protagonist of the tale is visited by various ghosts, first that of his old business partner and then (successively) the spirits of Christmases Past, Present and Yet To Come, in order to rehabilitate him from his anti-Christmas ways and generally improve his humanity and spiritual future. In this case, however, three Halloween-style ghosts arrive as a spoof of that tale. They represent similar phases of the actual festival of Halloween, but have turned up to pester Cueball in his bed all at the same time. And the 'lesson' they convey to him is far less transformative in nature. Since the ghosts say nothing more than minor variations of "oOOOOOOOOo," the lesson may be that Halloween has no "true meaning" different from what is obvious (compare 1108: Cautionary Ghost), or that the true meaning of Halloween consists merely of the kind of silly "scariness" represented by the sound "oOOOOOOOOo."

In the title text, in fact, it would appear that the very simple message has been received and taken to heart, but the apparitions feel the need to continue their haunting regardless.

Caroling, though these days almost exclusively associated with Christmas, had long been a term for festive songs and dances, and arguably it is largely through Dickens's use as his story title that we associate it so strongly with this particular annual festival.

A similar ghost saying "ooOOOOOOOOooo" appears in 1393: Timeghost.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

[Cueball is half sitting up in bed, his lower body underneath the blankets. He is looking at three ghosts flying above him.]

Middle ghost: ooOOOOOooOOOoo

[The "ooooo" of the ghosts is written in wavy letters of varying sizes]

Middle ghost: We are the ghosts of halloween past, present and future

[Just the middle ghost]

Ghost: here to teach you the true meaning of halloween!

[Back to the full scene]

Left ghost: ooOOOOOOOooo

Middle ghost: ooOOOOOooo

[Again, the full scene]

Left ghost: ooooooOOOooOooo

Right ghost: ooOoooOOOoooo

Trivia

• This trivia section was created by a BOT
• The standard size image was uploaded with a resolution/size larger than the supposed 2x version.
• This may have been an error.

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Discussion

The 'standard' and '2x' sized images had unexpected sizes, so a Trivia section has been automatically generated, and an imagesize paramter has been added (at half size) to render the image consistently with other comics on this website. --TheusafBOT (talk) 19:12, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Oooohh... Nice. (Not a ghostly ooOOoooOOooo, just appreciation of the 'Bot now having the functionality to deal with the (now several times repeated) publishing errors at Randall's end.) Good Bot. Nice detection/stopgap behaviour! 141.101.76.91 20:13, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

the link it gave to the standard size image is actually a link to the 2x image, so maybe this functionality doesn't work right --162.158.154.213 01:26, 3 October 2023 (UTC)