The Bogeyman

A common scare-tactic used by parents is to threaten misbehaving children that they must be good or the bogeyman will get them.  No description is given of such a monster, but the idea of the bogeyman has popped up around the world as a creature that kidnaps, eats, or kills misbehaving children, with a Christmas variant being Krampus, an evil version of Santa Claus.  A common theme regarding the bogeyman is that it hides in either the child’s closet or under the bed.

Arguably the most well-known version of the monster in the closet is seen in Monsters Inc and Monsters University.  The Monster World is inhabited by various creatures that go bump in the night, with the dream job being able to enter the human world through a door network and harvest the screams of children every night.  Mike and Sulley originally attended MU to become full-fledged scarers, only to drop out after a single year due to complications with the Scare Games and the CDA, but they did end up becoming the top Scarer-Assistant duo by the 1970’s, based on the ending montage of MU, with Sulley eventually suplanting Waternoose as the President of the company and switching to laughs.  The concept art above was from an unused idea for MU where it was to be a sequel.  Sulley heavily resembles a bugbear, a variant of the bogeyman said to resemble a monstrous bear that lurked in the woods to scare children for its own entertainment, and is said to be the largest of the four types of goblins (In size order goblins. hobgoblins, orcs, bugbears).

No discussion of Disney bogeymen would be complete without talking about Oogie Boogie.  He is the most evil resident of Halloweentown, as he did not originally hail from our favorite haunt.  Instead, he hailed from a forgotten holiday called “Bug Day,” and his first endeavors into Halloweentown were to take over and convert it into a new Bugtown.  This helps explain his strange appetite of snake and spider stew.  The staff of the film have described Oogie’s overall inspirations in various ways.  His profession as a gambler is a combination of both jazz artist Fats Waller and dancer Cab Callowayeven lifting one of Calloway’s lines from the Betty Boop cartoon “The Old Man of the Mountain” (“I’m gon’ do the best I can!”).  Coincidentally enough, the idea of a gambler based on Calloway was revived last year in the game Cuphead with the character of King Dice, the game’s second to last boss, before the fight with the Devil.  Ken Page, who voiced the character, descibed his performance as being a mix between Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz and Mercedes McCambridge as Pazuzu from the Exorcist.

Interestingly enough, Oogie can technically exist in two places at once, with the second existence being “The Shadow on the Moon at night”.  While it isn’t directly confirmed in the film, the 2005 game “Oogie’s Revenge” and various shows at Disneyland and Walt Disney World confirm the connection between the two: the Shadow is actually’s Oogie’s shadow.  This is backed up by Ken Page singing the Shadow’s line in the game’s version of “This is Halloween.”  The Shadow even appears as the first boss in the game, singing a version of Oogie’s Song, acting as a loudspeaker to Oogie from his lair while Jack faces him in Town Hall.  The Shadow even got his own animation that was cut from the film, but still referenced in the soundtrack:

So remember kids, the next time your parents tell you to behave, you better, otherwise you’ll end up as this guy’s lunch.