FINAL BATTY INDUCTEE NUMBER 31

WELL, WE'VE MADE IT AT LAST!  The final inductee into the 2013 Batty Halloween Hall of Fame.  And while there is no official ranking for the order in which I've inducted each song, this last one is surely one of the greatest.  Again, it's from me childhood when I used to regularly get a copy of DYNAMITE MAGAZINE from my school's Scholastic Books catalog.  One of my favourite features from that magazine once included an Evatone Soundsheet (love love LOVE them!) inside the mag which happens to be the 31st inductee into my Batty Halloween Hall of Fame . . .

COUNT MORBIDA'S CHAMBER OF HORRORS by DYNAMITE MAGAZINE

The insidious Count Morbida featured in the back of every issue of Dynamite in a two-page comic book spread of "puzzle pages"; he would attempt to trip up the young readers by providing them with brain teasers.  This soundsheet was bound into one particular issue (I believe it was the Halloween issue, natch) and I've treasured it ever since.  For those out of the know, an Evatone Soundsheet was the original "floppy disc", you might say:  a thin, flexible sheet of plastic with grooves on it and you could play it on your record player (albeit usually with a coin or two placed on top so the soundsheet wouldn't slip because it was so light).  Evatone was the company that made these "records" would be bound into a magazine; often they would be an advertisement (I have quite a few advertising various Time-Life record collections from "The Swing Era" to "Great Men of Music" featuring classical composers. 

Here is what the soundsheet would look like in the magazine itself; you merely tore it out and placed it on your turntable - you had the option, if you wanted, to cut it into the round shape of a record.  As a kid, I was fascinated with Evatone Soundsheets and had standing orders for everyone I knew to grab them for me if they ever came across them in a magazine; I didn't care what was on it - I just collected them!  I have them all to this day and there are even several advertising Evatone's service itself as an advertising aid.  The entire soundsheet you can hear in the box on the right hand column (along with every inductee).  It features Count Morbida and his main squeeze Horribella trying once again to ensnare wayward kiddies with his puzzles and brain teasers.  A perfect way to wrap up this Countdown to Halloween! 

For those of you with short term memory loss (or your brain has been lifted from your skull by Ygor and spirited away in a sack), here's the complete list of the  31 inductees into the Batty Halloween Hall of Fame:

• IT'S HALLOWEEN by The Shaggs
• PLEASE MR. GRAVEDIGGER by David Bowie
• TIMOTHY by The Buoys
• MONSTER MASH by Bobby "Boris" Pickett
• DINNER WITH DRAC PT. 1 by Zacherley
• BORIS THE SPIDER by The Who
• THE WOBBLIN' GOBLIN by Rosemary Clooney
• THE FLYING SAUCER PT. 1 & 2 by Buchanan and Goodman
• BLACK SABBATH by Black Sabbath
• THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN by Kay Starr
• HALLOWEEN by Heywood Banks
• MYSTERIOUS MOSE by Harry Reser & the Radio All-Stars
• GRIM GRINNING GHOSTS by Thurl Ravenscroft
• I WANT MY BABY BACK by Jimmy Cross
• SCIENCE FICTION/DOUBLE FEATURE by Richard O'Brien
• THE BLOB by The Five Blobs
• CHICKEN HEART by Bill Cosby
• WITH HER HEAD TUCKED UNDERNEATH HER ARM by Stanley Holloway
• SAMAIN NIGHT by Loreena McKennitt
• WHITE ZOMBIE by The Joel Shaw Orchestra
• SONG FROM SPIDER BABY by Lon Chaney Jr. and Ronald Stein
• THE CREATURE by Buchanan and Ancell
• HALLOWEEN by The Misfits
• THE SCARECROW by Mike Waterson
• GHOSTLY SOUNDS INTRO/NIGHT FALLS by Gershon Kingsley and Peter Waldron
• LAST NIGHT I HAD A DREAM by Randy Newman
• THE ROCKIN' GHOST by The Modernaires
• DIRTY CREATURE by Split Enz
• JUMBEE by Paul Roland
• TOCCATA & FUGUE FOR ORGAN IN D MINOR, BMV 565: I. TOCCATA by Johann Sebastian Bach
• COUNT MORBIDA'S CHAMBER OF HORRORS by Dynamite Magazine