Halloween 2026: How To Train Your Dragon

…or Giant Floating Eyeballs, Part Three.

We got a question a while back asking when we were going to do the dragon theme again.

Dragon? Did we ever do a dragon theme? Contextually, the question was about the Giant Floating Eyeballs which we admit to never really theming, but it seemed time to lean in. If people think the eyes are a dragon, it’s a dragon.

Two things came to mind: We need new, improved eyeball animation and we need to blow smoke rings like a Heffalump.

To explain: Disney’s Winnie the Pooh attraction features Heffalumps and Woozels, one of which blows smoke rings at you as you pass by. This, obviously, is the coolest thing ever and it’s been our intention to build our own smoke ring machine and incorporate it into the next theme that calls out for smoke rings.

Dragons (again, obviously) must be able to blow smoke rings. But then we started working on the eyes.

We try our best to reference recent popular touchstones so that the kids have some hope of understanding the theme. Sometimes we pick a theme for the parents (like Indiana Jones) and just hope they showed the movie to their kids. This time, we knew there had been four How to Train Your Dragon movies, plus video games and other media. Point being, it’s about dragons.

Another thought was that the dragon named Toothless is black and therefore arguably hard to see in the dark. If all we have are eyeballs, we might be forgiven for not building the entire dragon. We were able to get a screenshot of Toothless and AI our way into about two minutes of animation.

Problem: Toothless does not blow smoke rings.

After building and damn-near perfecting the smoke ring machine, we planned not to use it. What we needed was a high velocity plasma blast effect!

Long story short, the plasma effect didn’t work on the night, so we quickly changed back to smoke rings. Shockingly, no one called us out on this departure from HTTYD canon. Criticism could not have mattered though, because the smoke rings worked way better than we thought they would. If the wind didn’t cooperate the effect could have been completely lost, but we got lucky. Rings of smoke were shooting so close to the sidewalk that we were afraid someone might jump off the stairs to catch them and land on their overly enthusiastic faces. If there is one lesson to be learned here though, it’s that Halloween needs more smoke rings.

When it came to props, we stayed true to the movies. Swords and shields with working hand grips were built, capable of fending off any foam and cardboard adversary. Designs closely followed the look and feel of weapons carried by lead characters; thus, guaranteeing that our visitors would quickly identify the theme.

The rest of the setup was pretty simple with a couple lighting scenes and three channels of audio played a little too loud, so as to prevent anyone from questioning our commitment to excellence. 228 kids later, we feel we had trained our dragon.

The Contraption

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Halloween 2025: Jaws

With this being the 25th anniversary of Jaws, it seemed only sensible to bring back the giant fleece shark. With improvements, of course.

We had three goals: make the shark more animated, add a video projection on the door for an additional scare, and add projections on the house for improved atmosphere. Not everything went to plan, but as the song says, two out of three ain’t bad.

In 2010, our Jaws display had a talking Quint. This year we upgraded the talking skeleton with a cap for his head and a flotation barrel for him to lean against while also hiding the speaker system. He also got his own retro-reflective proximity sensor to trigger the spiel and cycle through his recordings and a 12-pack of Narraganset. The beer, as it turns out, was critical in helping people identify the character. More than one parent was heard saying “Look, it’s Quint. He’s got a ‘Ganset!”

This year the house got a video loop taken from the film opening. We were able to rip a long enough shot of the ocean at dusk that could be looped. The buoy gong relentlessly ringing in the distance with the ocean waves gently lapping, provide simultaneous feelings of relaxation and foreboding. It is part of the genius of the movie: You don’t need to see the shark. You feel the shark.

Having Quint rest against the yellow barrel was another reminder of the shark; If you see the barrel, you know the shark is near. We did, however, have a shark. Actually two sharks. 

The first shark was our own Bruce the Shark, this year outfitted with a pneumatic system to articulate the tail in addition to snapping the jaws shut. This unfortunately was our failure for the year. It was grossly under-engineered and was barely able to move under its own weight once assembled.

The second shark was a projection on the door. It’s pretty amazing what you can buy on the Internet these days. Luckily for us, a shark animation video was readily available. All we had to do was cut it to size and load it in the video player.

If anyone was scared, it wasn’t either of the sharks that did the work. The truly terrifying moment came when the blood curdling scream of the girl being eaten at the top of the film was played at a distressingly high volume. Actually, the audio in the film isn’t that scary. There’s a whole lot of “Oh, God. I can’t believe I’m being chewed upon.” That goes on for a bit longer than you might remember, so it was edited down to the most gruesome shrieks. And with a little gurgle at the end for good measure.

For our own personal amusement, we added a second talking skeleton that quoted Brody saying “That’s some bad hat Harry.” Since it has been used by a TV production company (Bad Hat Harry Productions) in a logo at the end of several shows, we made it play when our 220 trick-or-treaters were on their way out. Good on anyone who got that.

Halloween 2024: Jumanji

The Jumanji franchise films of 1995, 2017, and 2019 originally featuring Robin Williams and later Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson are excellent adventure stories liked and remembered by the parents of trick-or-treaters of all ages. Children under 15 have no clue. This will be our Halloween theme.

Jumanji is an idea we have been batting around for years. There’s a lot of material to take from, but streamlining the story down into a small number of visual elements is a challenge. Visually, the movies are generically jungle-ly which makes it difficult to identify at a glance. The first movie has the iconic board game. This is changed into a video game in the later films for no plot-driven reason. There’s the statement about social and racial inequity from the first film, but that will be hard to squeeze in. The rest of the scenes are just people being chased around by plants and animals. That is with exception of one line: “Albino rhinos! They’re indigenous to Jumanji.”

We must build a rhinoceros.

The rhino was one of the more achievable gags that we tried to build. Granted, it was scaled back from making the full animal to just the head, but we’ve gotten pretty good at building large sculptures and mechanisms to move them. In this case it was papier-mâché on a cardboard form.

We figured that projecting the game board and the mysterious riddles that appear in the game on the front of the house was both achievable and would provide enough context for people to get the theme. That and the drum sound that is heard whenever player takes a turn in the game.

About half the people figured it out. There were a lot of good guesses: Jurassic Park, Tarzan, Jungle Cruise. Only people who had seen Jumanji had any real hope of getting it. And this refers only to the adults. None of the kids got it, save maybe two. That was part of the fun… for us.

There’s noting quite like opening the door and exclaiming “Welcome to Jumanji!” only to see utterly dumbfounded children respond “Trick or treat..?” Then, down the stairs, out in the darkness we hear a parent say “I told you it was Jumanji!” That is our definition of success.

As always, there were a bunch of gags that we tried to do, but couldn’t quite make work the way we wanted. There was a visual effect that was intended to emulate the magic green light that sucks you into the game as seen in the movies. This, we knew, would work only if we combined the lighting with fog. There were technical problems with hanging the fog machine close enough to the lighting to make the effect effective, but no matter. The fog blast itself ended up being the jump-scare of the night. C’est la vie.

With such great weather we surprised to receive only 204 kids. Maybe as many adults. These things ebb and flow as the neighborhood changes. It probably means that next year will be huge. We will have to prepare something special and well known. Perhaps our take on Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 film Coffee and Cigarettes? Kidding.