Spoilers below for the animated holiday special Family Guy: A Little Fright Music for anyone who hasn’t yet streamed it via Hulu subscription or Disney+ subscription, so be warned!
The Halloween season has arrived in all of its cobwebby glory, and Family Guy is celebrating the occasion with the new streaming special A Little Fright Music, which tackles the idea that there aren’t actually any great Halloween songs out there, and that all the usual playlist-ready tunes like “Thriller” and the Ghostbusters theme aren’t actually holiday-centric. It’s a fun follow-up to the show’s first standalone Halloween special in 2024, and had me laughing out loud more times than I can count on these mummified fingers of mine.
Co-showrunner Alec Sulkin talked to CinemaBlend about giving the Griffins more Halloween havoc, and I asked him about quite a few of the episode’s most memorable moments and visuals. So let’s dive in.
Zombie Travis Kelce Timing
Easily the most timely gag in the episode was Chris dressing up as zombie Travis Kelce (after first donning a costume referencing fellow Fox animated series Grimsburg). It's pretty wild that Family Guy sent up the Kansas City Chiefs tight end less than two months after his and Taylor Swift's headline-sparking engagement, and mere days after Swift's latest album The Life of a Showgirl topped music charts and won the weekend box office.
When I asked the co-showrunner about the timing for the episode's details (that were first written many months ago), he said it was indeed a case of coincidence working in Family Guy's favor.
Sometimes things like that just kind of work out. But yeah, it is a good time to have that Kelce jersey in there, because now everybody knows what that is, so that's just luck.
Really, I think the majority of people who get online or watch TV on a daily basis are well aware of who Travis Kelce is, but I’ll allow that there’s possibly a subsection of Family Guy’s fandom that has completely tuned out all things Swift-related in recent years. So those folks likely appreciated the contexual joke that amusingly allowed for them to either still be together or to have broken up.
I joked that the costume could turn prophetic at some point, earning a laugh from the co-showrunner.
- NICK VENABLE: And if he ever does reanimate from the dead, then you just look like geniuses.
- ALEC SULKIN: Exactly. [Laughs.] It'll be like, 'Family Guy does it again.'
For now, we'll just have to assume that hugely popular NFL players / podcasters won't start up a zombie apocalypse. That may be the only thing that'll bring back Peter's chicken rival who was killed off last season.
Abbott & Costello Elementary
One of the goofiest sequences in Family Guy's Halloween special is an Abbott & Costello quasi-parody that doesn't really have anything to do with Abbott or Halloween, and is instead a perfectly crafted riff on the forever-iconic "Who's on First?" sketch, with oddly named baseball players swapped out for a roll call of oddly named students. It's very easy to create a terrible version of this gag, but I was beyond amused by how things played out here.
When I expressed my admiration, the co-showrunner shared that he wasn't the one who originated the idea, and said:
That's the thing, because I feel like we've probably even done a 'Who's on First?' thing before this. So the challenge then becomes, if we're going to do that, it had better be different or, you know, funny in some different, new way. Abbott and Costello Elementary. I can confidently say that that joke grew out of that title. The cart was before that horse.
Just hearing the TV announcer voice introduce "Abbbot and Costello Elementary" made me immediately hope for a "Who's on First?" riff, so it is not surprising to hear that the punny title led the charge. When life hands you golden lemons...
Stewie And Brian's Quest To Write A Halloween Song
From here on out, I think that Family Guy's Halloween song plot should be as much of a holiday-timed debate as "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?" since there are legit arguments against most songs falling under that specific category, despite having lyrics and tones that read as spooky. When I asked Alec Sulkin if that argument was a thorn in his paw in particular, he pointed to episode writer and lyrical maestro Danny Smith as likely being the inspiration, but first said:
I don't. I mean, it may have been for somebody, but not for me. That's one of the great things when you know you're on the right track, story wise, is when something like that is brought up and you think to yourself, 'That's exactly right. Like, there aren't any good Halloween songs!' . . . But yeah, that is a funny idea. I really like starting from there, and anytime you can get Stewie and Brian working on something together, particularly something creative, it's always fun. Because you get to make fun of Brian for being pretentious, and Stewie's even worse. It starts off with the best of intentions, and they're instantly at each other's throats.
The idea led to Stewie and Brian parodying "We Didn't Start The Fire" with candies, so whoever did come up with it deserves the biggest gold star sticker on the planet. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a full-length version of that song just waiting to be unleashed.
However, the original final number that the crafty toddler comes up with, the non-cryptically titled "Stewie's Spooky Quahog Nightmare Dance,” does indeed exist in a longer form, and fans may one day get to hear it. As the writer and EP told me:
There is a longer cut of the song that's in this episode. One of our great writers, Danny Smith, definitely wrote that song. He writes songs very well, but he also is not great at self-editing. [Laughs.] We will get like a 'Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' and have to kind of pare it down to a more radio-friendly cut. But somewhere it exists, I think, because we had Seth sing it. Maybe it'll be bonus content someday.
Maybe if enough fans send memes of Chris about to dunk his Kelce jersey in the trash to Family Guy, they'll release the Stewie Cut of the final song. Or maybe everyone involved will just get annoyed, and also won't understand that the point was to release the longer version of the song. There's got to be a better way!
Until we find one, Family Guy: A LIttle Fright Music is available to stream on both Hulu and Disney+.
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