Halloween episodes of cartoons aren't supposed to warm your heart and put a lump in your throat, but the Proud Family episode "A Hero For Halloween" somehow ends up doing the kind of thing you'd expect from Christmas episodes and specials.
All of Penny Proud's friends are psyched for the Wizard Kelly Fright-tacular... except for Penny Proud herself. She doesn't have any moral objections to the upcoming holiday, like some fundamentalist Christians would, she's just not into it(Hey, we have something in common. Maybe the Disney Channel is right when they say their characters are just like me.). Anyway, not only are her friends psyched about it, but her family and her neighbors are as well. And when Oscar demands that she dons a costume and give Proud Scary Snacks away for Halloween, she has no other choice but to obey him.
Papi(Alvaro Guttierz) is his usual self, delivering his tirade of insults towards Suga-Mama in Spanish. When she tells Penny she's dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein, he barks in, "I don't think Frankenstein would have ever been that desperate." Basic literacy, and a tolerance for subtitles, is not only important for any episode of "The Proud Family," but it's always quite rewarding! Tim Conway gives former landlord Mr. Petersen a bad accent, in hopes that nobody will recognize him. I can't tell if he's supposed to be speaking Italian, Spanish, or some West-Balkan dialect, but he tries to warn Oscar that his house is haunted, by the ghost of Garrett Krebbs(Pulp Fiction's Ving Rhames), a former owner who was a bachelor that couldn't pay the rent and died of a broken heart. Needless to say, Oscar blows him off.
The producers of the show, with their tendency to offer no plausible explanation for the weirdness that goes on, makes a big swirling storm cloud hover over Penny, causing her to become a REAL superhero! And it's at this point that the episode becomes the inadvertent heart-warmer that you'd expect from various adaptations of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," which is what makes it one of the better episodes of this series.
All of Penny Proud's friends are psyched for the Wizard Kelly Fright-tacular... except for Penny Proud herself. She doesn't have any moral objections to the upcoming holiday, like some fundamentalist Christians would, she's just not into it(Hey, we have something in common. Maybe the Disney Channel is right when they say their characters are just like me.). Anyway, not only are her friends psyched about it, but her family and her neighbors are as well. And when Oscar demands that she dons a costume and give Proud Scary Snacks away for Halloween, she has no other choice but to obey him.
Papi(Alvaro Guttierz) is his usual self, delivering his tirade of insults towards Suga-Mama in Spanish. When she tells Penny she's dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein, he barks in, "I don't think Frankenstein would have ever been that desperate." Basic literacy, and a tolerance for subtitles, is not only important for any episode of "The Proud Family," but it's always quite rewarding! Tim Conway gives former landlord Mr. Petersen a bad accent, in hopes that nobody will recognize him. I can't tell if he's supposed to be speaking Italian, Spanish, or some West-Balkan dialect, but he tries to warn Oscar that his house is haunted, by the ghost of Garrett Krebbs(Pulp Fiction's Ving Rhames), a former owner who was a bachelor that couldn't pay the rent and died of a broken heart. Needless to say, Oscar blows him off.
The producers of the show, with their tendency to offer no plausible explanation for the weirdness that goes on, makes a big swirling storm cloud hover over Penny, causing her to become a REAL superhero! And it's at this point that the episode becomes the inadvertent heart-warmer that you'd expect from various adaptations of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," which is what makes it one of the better episodes of this series.
