Casper

Release Date: May 26, 1995

Watch Date: October 8 – October 12, 2025

“When a ‘ghost therapist’ and his daughter move into a drafty old mansion to exorcise its otherworldly inhabitants, they meet a friendly but lonely young ghost named Casper (who’s just looking for a friend) and his outrageous uncles Stretch, Stinkie and Fatso.”

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Our kids are getting older, and as they’ve gotten older they’ve definitely noticed that me and their dad pretty much exclusively only watch Disney movies, who has time for anything else at this point, and they are now aware of the blog, and our son, well he wants to participate as much as he can. He likes to watch the movie with us, and he likes me to ask him questions about how he felt about it by the end. Our daughter? She’s just obsessed with Halloween, even though she hates scary things (go figure) so while we’re doing on our mini marathon on top of our busy schedules, we’ve also made a separate list of kid friendly movies that I’m pretty positive won’t terrify a four-year-old and we’re allowing them to pick from that in whatever order they want. My son, being the older brother, decided he got to pick first, and so Casper it was.

I don’t know a lot about Casper, to be honest, other than that he’s a friendly ghost, and I’m pretty sure I can sing “Casper the Friendly Ghost” to whatever tune that’s meant to be sung to, and I mean literally only the words Casper the Friendly Ghost not the entire song. I know what he looks like, because that feels like a fact that’s invaded pop culture, and I knew he has three gross uncles. Beyond that, how accurate this movie is to the original show…newspaper cartoon? I’m not really sure.

What I will say, again having no way of knowing this, is it feels like it adds a lot of depth to Casper’s story, though absolutely none to his ‘uncles’, and it feels like there may be references to the original source material that I’m not getting but if you were a major fan you would probably enjoy. I don’t know, but I highly doubt, that the source material got into why Casper became a ghost in the first place, or what his life was like before his death.

Really, the only characters that get no backstory are Dibs, evil henchman that’s fine, and the three other main characters – namely Casper’s uncles. Because, their existence in the house makes even less sense. It sounds like Casper died, and then his dad was carted off to an insane asylum and the house has sat abandoned ever since. So how did three gross aggressive ghosts end up at the house that’s not theirs? And then how did they come to bully the actual owner, Casper, into basically being their servant?

Also, if ghosts are only made when someone has unfinished business, wouldn’t Casper’s father have become a ghost upon his death, and if ghosts can leave the place they died, which we see that they can, and do, frequently. Would he not have gone back to where he knew his son was? I mean, I would have, if I knew my son was just an eternal ghost who had basically sacrificed his ability to cross over to be with me. But maybe that’s just who I am as a parent.

The kids loved the movie, our son from the moment it started, our daughter from the moment I convinced her that the uncle ghosts were goofy and loud, but not particularly scary – and definitely not about to hurt anybody. So maybe it’s a little too up there for a four year old, but eight feels like an appropriate age. Bob checked out for the first half of the movie, but he stayed present in the second half, and the movie does, I admit, get off to a bit of a slow start, having to establish the motivations and presence of several different characters. Still, if you’re looking for something Halloween-y, but not too scary, to get your kids in the seasonal mood, Casper is a very solid choice.