Earlier this year, I arbitrarily remembered a Halloween special I watched a bit of when I was a kid, so pardon me if the scenes are a bit disjointed as I present them. If anyone can get me a link to an online video so I can refresh my memory, it'd be appreciated.
Anyway, this blog post is brought to you by our favorite stop-motion animation show declared blasphemous by one of the young Flanderses: David & Goliath.
The earliest scene I recall from the episode is David being out with his dad, doing some beekeeping. David, noticing how effectively the mesh conceals faces from a distance comments, "Gee Dad, I bet no one could see me under this!" Thus begins David's realization of the fell power of anonymizing headgear, only to be interrupted with his dad's comment, "God can see you."
Even when I was a kid, the anviliciousness caused a bit of head trauma. Yeah, God's tougher than Superman. God can see through lead, and he's not afraid of little green rocks. The Sunday school teachers can stop drilling that into my head. They did it a little too well, though, since I grew up to realize the various paradoxes, contradictions, and so forth. Anyway, back to the claymation.
Halloween's come, and David's dressed up in a cheap astronaut costume, complete with a helmet that obscures everything except his eyes. Granted, most of us probably had cheap costumes when we were kids, but I guess I'm just used to characters on TV shows having better ones than me. He's also put Goliath in a tiger-striped dog shirt, thus getting the canine in on some potential trick-or-treating. Hope chocolate's not involved. Anyway, he gets to a party and wins the prize for best costume as 'the man from Mars'.
Next scene I recall involves Orel, I mean David going out trick-or-treating with some Bad Kids, and the emphasis turns towards tricking. I forget if it was egging, TPing, or whatever, but they get interrupted by the objections of their target and run off into the night, with David pausing long enough to display guilt in front of the camera. In the next scene, he's out of costume and trying to rationalize his actions by blaming his Halloween persona. Goliath is trying to do the same with his Tiger personal for biting David in some scene I have no recollection of.
I suspect this is the point I tuned out because I just couldn't buy the characters. Looking back with my adult eyes, I think I can imagine God being mentioned a lot, and given the anvilicious setup from dad at the beginning, the lesson was going to be "Can't Get Away With Nuthin'."
The real lesson: You can hurt someone (or, in David's case, horribly inconvenience someone with otherwise unnecessary cleanup), and even if you don't get caught, you'll know it. You can't blame it on the mask you wear (and you're stupid if try) because you're responsible for your own actions.