by Panpardus » October 14th, 2016, 3:50 pm
I was a bit worried about having a Halloween-themed episode -- though this generally applies to any Western holiday -- in part just because I've never been keen on the holiday (I always thought it was kinda pointless), but also because this is still a story set in Africa, which is literally the last continent to be celebrating Halloween. (It's actually a very new phenomenon in the few countries it's currently being exported to -- for reference, Valentine's Day wasn't really a thing across much of the continent until the '90s -- like Ghana, and there's been a lot of pushback against it, the criticism being Why are you so open to embracing [often commercialized] Western traditions at the expense of your own?.)
That said, I just watched the episode; it was pretty harmless and the storyline was self-contained. I liked the fact that the entire episode was at night -- although every time we've seen a nighttime shot of the Pride Lands in this show, it's always been a full moon -- and the visual aesthetic of Rafiki's musical number was cool; it reminded me of "spooky" Caribbean stories like the jumbee. The song itself, while mildly catchy (and I do mean mildly), I found pretty meh; I've noticed that Beau Black only seems to have one rhythmic motif for his "scary" songs for this show, which is a bit of a letdown. (I'm still waiting for an Afrobeat/kwaito-based tune.) On the other hand, Christopher Willis continues to do a great job with the underscore; nothing really new from him here, it's just nice to hear how many variations of his "Call of the Guard" themes he's come up with so far. (I'd actually pay for an album of his work on this show.) Other than that, nothing really stood out to me about this episode; it was decent but not too compelling either way. I guess this'll have to tide us all over until the big one next month...