all my life I’ve somehow only ever seen the gifs of this. I never even knew that the pumpkin man was dancing to the Ghostbusters theme. This whole thing is so much better than I ever could have expected from the gifs omg
I just idly googled if this person was someone of note, and it turns out his name is Matt Geiler.
In 2006, Matt Geiler was the anchor of the 10 o'clock nightly newscast at KXVO, the Omaha CW affiliate. The program had a nominal budget ($1,000 for the year) to create 22 minutes of programming five nights a week. Geiler and his producers often had to improvise last-minute to fill the show. In the days leading up to Halloween 2006, they pitched several ideas, including grown men falling down in a pumpkin patch, a fictional murder mystery, and dressing up as grandmothers for a cooking segment. Then there was the pièce de résistance: “I’ve got this one thing where I put on a unitard and a pumpkin head and dance at people’s graves,” Geiler recalls pitching his manager, thinking it would never fly. “I want to call it ‘Happy Jack: The Grave Dancer.’”
Geiler never made it to an actual cemetery, but the idea worked even better because of it. He picked up a unitard from his local costume store, cut a foam pumpkin decoration in half, and jumped in front of a green screen. They pre-recorded the segment, featured it alongside live coverage the night of October 31 (Geiler is actually the blond guy who follows the Pumpkin Dance segment), and didn’t think much of it for the next few weeks. Then Christmas came around, they were short on content, so they did it again.