Casper is a movie that, until I popped the tape into the VCR last night, I hadn't seen in about 24 or 25 years. We never owned it on any home media platforms when I was a kid, but we rented it at some point. To be honest I don't remember when we rented or how many times we watched it. I just remember watching it with my family in the family room of whatever house we were living in at the time we watched it. I also don't remember much about the movie aside from the theme song (unsurprisingly sung by Little Richard), Casper being brought back to life for an hour, and Dan Akroyd running out of Whipstaff Manor dressed as Ray Stantz in full Ghostbusters gear saying, "Who are you going to call? Somebody else!" before running off screen. That was the extent of my memory of the movie before sitting down to watch it last night for this review.
Casper, the Friendly Ghost is a character that I was quite familiar with growing up. I had a couple of issues of the comic that was being published in the early '90s, I watched Casper and Friends on TV, I saw this movie, and I watched the Fox Kids cartoon based on this movie, The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper as it was on before Power Rangers Zeo on Saturday mornings and it was also on weekday afternoons. I also had a VHS tape that contained two of the original 1940s Casper theatrical cartoon shorts and All's Well, which was a Gabby cartoon. Gabby was a character created by Max Fleischer but was unrelated to Casper. But I digress.
Even before I saw the movie, I was excited for it, because it was Casper in live action. Of course I shouldn't've been so surprised when I first saw the trailer for it on TV because this was in the '90s when pretty much every cartoon was either being turned into a live action movie or getting a theatrical feature film. Or at the very least a direct to video feature film. The Jetsons had had an animated feature film in 1990, the Flintstones got a live action movie in 1994, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm was based on Batman: The Animated Series, Dennis the Menace had a live action movie in 1993 and Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin was based on The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. And those are just the ones that I know of. I'm sure there are more of them that I don't know about too. That's also not taking into account some of the live action movies coming out of old live action TV shows either like The Addams Family, Leave It to Beaver and The Little Rascals. Yet I was surprised and positively excited that Casper was going to be the star of a live action movie. C'mon guys I was eight years old when this movie came out, of course I was going to be excited for it and not care if it was good or not.
Casper is not a great movie. It's not even a good movie. But I quite enjoyed revisiting it 20+ years after seeing it for the first and only time. Like I said, I didn't necessarily remember a whole lot about the movie before I sat down to watch it last night before bed. For example, I completely forgot about the pointless subplot of Kat's jerk classmates Amber and Vic or that the Halloween party at Whipstaff was Kat's idea, or that there was a Halloween party in the movie. But even if I had remembered the entire movie from start to finish, I don't think I would've enjoyed it any less than I did. It's a harmless film that is actually entertaining and not boring or vomit inducing.
The cast in this movie is pretty great though. I totally forgot that Bill Pullman played Dr. Harvey, only a year before he would play the United States President in Independence Day (1996) and only eight years after he played Lone Starr in Spaceballs (1987). He was also in a bunch of other movies that I've never even heard of throughout the '90s. Christina Ricci was in a bunch of stuff in the '90s as well. Besides playing Kat in Casper and Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family (1991) and Addams Family Values (1993), she also voiced the Gwendy dolls in Small Soldiers (1998) and was in a movie called Now and Then (1995) as a character named Roberta. I've never seen this movie but Christina and her fellow cast members were interviewed in an issue of Disney Adventures. That issue was my first one ever of that magazine and I still own my original copy today. Also how did I not know/remember that Eric Idle, of Monty Python fame, and Brad Garrett, who would go on to play Ray Romano's brother on Everybody Loves Raymond, were in this movie? Eric Idle plays Dibs, the assistant to the "villain" of the movie, Carrigan (Cathy Moriarty) and Brad Garrett is the voice of Fatso, one of Casper's uncles.
Speaking of the "villains" they don't actually do much. Carrigan and Dibs are both greedy, but aside from trying to get to a treasure that is supposedly being hidden at Whipstaff, they don't do anything, except kill each other. I'm not even kidding, they kill each other so that Carrigan can become a ghost and enter the vault that Casper's "treasure" is kept in. Yeah, you can probably guess how that goes considering it's a '90s kids movie. Carrigan is probably the worst part of the movie for me because she makes Tweeg, Lord Zedd and Rita Repulsa look competent in their respective shows. At least those three are actual villains, Carrigan is just in this movie because it's a '90s kids movie and apparently '90s kids movies need villains. That's pretty much it. Dibs is funny, dumber than Goldar and L.B., but is tolerable as a villain. Well, more tolerable than Carrigan is anyway.
I like the music in this movie. Again, because it's a '90s kids movie it has that cute sounding incidental score that isn't scary or ominous in any way, but it works for the film because Casper, despite being a ghost, isn't supposed to be scary or ominous and that's the whole point of the character. To act as a little bit of a balance against the more scary Ghostly Trio, Stinkie, Stretch and Fatso. The movie reflects that tone extremely well. Even though I remembered that Casper came back to life for an hour in this movie, I didn't remember the song that played while Casper and Kat danced. The song is called "Remember Me This Way" and it's sung by Jordan Hill, who I only know from her duet with Jim Brickman from 1999 called "Destiny".
Final Thoughts and Rating: Overall, Casper is not a great movie. But it's an entertaining movie with lots of nods to other shows and movies like Ghostbusters and Casper at one point is shown watching an episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood on the TV in his bedroom. It's not a movie that I would buy a copy of on DVD or Blu-ray though. It's definitely one of those movies that is perfectly fine to watch on VHS and just enjoy as a stupid '90s kids movie. For that reason alone I am giving Casper 9/10 stars. It's not a great story and it doesn't need to be. It set out to entertain people and it succeeded. At least for me.
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