It’s been 50 years since Paul Lynde hosted TV’s craziest Halloween party.
Airing on Oct. 29, 1976, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special starred the Hollywood Squares middleman and a list of popular TV stars of the time: The Carol Burnett Show’s Tim Conway, Happy Days’ Roz Kelly, Brady Bunch mom Florence Henderson, Betty White, Donny and Marie and two famous witches: The Wizard of Oz’s Margaret Hamilton and H.R. Pufnstuf’s “Witchiepoo” Billie Hayes.
The special also marked the primetime TV debut of KISS, who performed the songs “Detroit Rock City,” “Beth” and “King of the Night Time World.”
The variety special’s storyline, co-written by Bruce Vilanch, centered on Lynde being granted three wishes from the witches—and they were all over the place: Lynde appeared as a CB-talking trucker, a chic sheik and host at a disco. For 60 minutes, Lynde and his eclectic list of guest stars took viewers on a trippy mishmash of sketches and musical numbers that’s still remembered 50 years later.
The Boston Globe described The Paul Lynde Halloween Special as “a vision of horror” and “a phantasmagoric, polyester-clad, rhinestone-studded time capsule of bad jokes and disco medleys with a nonsensical storyline.”
In other words, it was exactly what the writers wanted.
Vilanch looked back on The Paul Lynde Halloween Special in an interview with The Television Academy Foundation. He noted that at the time, the comedian was already well known on ABC for his stints on Bewitched and a couple of short-lived sitcoms, including a self-titled one that pegged him as a family man, but was better suited for the network as “a multi-millionaire utility player” delivering quick one-liners.
“Paul was best taken as a flavor in a recipe,” Vilanch noted of the star, who died in 1982 at 55. “You’d bring Paul in, he’d do one line and just kill with that one line. …And one of the things [the network] gave him to make him happy was his own special. But because it was Paul, it just couldn’t be the Paul Lynde show because that was too non-specific. But marrying Paul Lynde to Halloween was a Fred Silverman idea. … He thought those two elements worked well because there’s something essentially witchy about Paul Lynde and we dressed him up as a witch.”
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Vilanch told Woman’s World that the advertising campaign for the special centered on Lynde dressed up as a witch.
“We also brought in famous witches to play his sisters, because it turned out he was from a family of witches,” he explained the storyline. “From there, we loaded it with guest stars like Tim Conway, who was huge off of The Carol Burnett Show; Roz Kelly, who played a character on Happy Days named Pinky Tuscadero, who was Fonzie’s girlfriend; Florence Henderson because she was the star of The Brady Bunch and a big ABC star, Betty White, who was on The Mary Tyler Moore Show at the time and KISS, who hadn’t been on primetime television before, but their makeup was perfect for the show.”
Indeed, the inclusion of KISS was one of the weirdest elements of the TV special.
Lead singer Paul Stanley told The Guardian that the appearance marked a turning point for the glam rock band. “It signified us being maybe embraced by middle America. We were suddenly on a family holiday variety special,” he shared.
In his memoir Makeup to Breakup: My Life In and Out of KISS, drummer Peter Criss recalled filming the special at ABC Studios in Hollywood, California from Oct. 19-21, 1976.
“We flew out to L.A. to tape Paul Lynde’s Halloween TV special. My mother was thrilled. Paul Lynde was her favorite comedian,” he wrote. “We were a little out of place on the show, with guests like Margaret Hamilton, Tim Conway, Florence Henderson, Betty White, and Donny and Marie Osmond.”
While The Paul Lynde Halloween Special only aired on ABC once, it found a new life on DVD and online where it became a “thing,” Vilanch once said.
“One of the gifts of the internet is that crap you did 40 years ago shows up and a whole new audience begins to enjoy it and wonder how it got made,” the screenwriter told BK magazine in 2023. “The Paul Lynde Halloween Special is one of those.”
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