A Closer Look At “Spooky Scary Skeletons”
And It’s Crazy Online Afterlife
Spooky season is here!
Some naysayers, nitpickers, and general purveyors of negative energy might disagree and insist on waiting until October to get into the Halloween spirit.
To this, I say BOO, no treats for you! Also, I hope your house gets haunted and a pumpkin bites your face off! But everybody else is cordially invited to join me in celebrating this most magical, pleasantly spooky time of the year.
I was inspired to write about Halloween-related music by two lists of spooky songs I recently encountered. The first is Daniella Montage’s “My Top 10 Halloween Hits”:
The other is “Shiver! 10 Chilling Songs for Your Halloween Playlist” by Ginger Cook:
I loved reading those stories and encourage you all to explore them for yourselves. But one thing I was struck by was the shocking, horrifying, and downright eerie absence in both lists of what I consider to be the quintessential Halloween song: Spooky Scary Skeletons!
So I knew I had to do a little tribute of my own. Get ready for a wild ride!
Spooky Scary Skeletons was originally released by Andrew Gold on his 1996 album “Halloween Howls: Fun & Scary Music.”
If you’re familiar with later versions that became popular online, you might be surprised at how slow this track is. But before we can go on the wild ride that is Spooky Scary Skeleton’s afterlife on the web, we need to go back to 1929. This was when Disney released “The Skeleton Dance” as part of their “Silly Symphonies” series:
The two were later brought together, creating the first wave of online excitement. As you can see, the appeal was audiovisual from the start — it’s not just this fun Halloween song; it’s skeletons dancing to this fun Halloween song!
But it’s still pretty slow!
That all changed in 2013, when “The Living Tombstone” uploaded a remix to YouTube that was much faster and more “club-oriented” than Andrew Gold’s song. This version became the most well-known and the first to be associated with Spooky Scary Skeletons as a meme.
In addition to a remix of the song, a video of a dancing man wearing a pumpkin on his head started being used frequently.
Those two changes — a remix of the song and a second video to source footage — meant that there were four “canonical” versions of the meme: 1) Original with skeleton dance. 2) Original with pumpkin dance. 3) Remix with skeleton dance. 4) Remix with pumpkin dance.
I think you get the idea, but just keep in mind that all of those can be freely combined, added to, changed, and reinterpreted — and you have the building blocks of a beautiful Internet meme with real staying power.
And at this point, the Internet started doing what it is best at — going absolutely buck wild! It would be insane to pretend I can even present a fraction of the different versions and create new spins on the concept here.
Plus, I wouldn’t want to ruin your joy of exploration.
But here are just three that stood out to me:
Thank you for reading my story! I hope this got you into a pleasantly spooky mood! If you would like to read more of my stuff on The Riff, you can do so here:
And here is Nichola Scurry’s incredible deep dive into “Spooky” by Dusty Springfield (and many other artists) that I enjoyed a lot:
