Plot: Fancy Nancy celebrates Halloween!
Breakdown:
*thunderclap*
On the darkest of nights, as Halloween approaches, the spirits of the underworld start seeping into our realm.
Screams in the night.
Thump.
Thud.
Your blood is pumping harder. A cold sweat reaches your brow. You can’t sleep. You shouldn’t have stayed up late watching the most terrifying of Halloween specials. What were you thinking? Why did you do it? Why did you put on….
FANCY NANCY!?
*thunderclap*
Should I mention that when it comes to Halloween and Christmas specials I tend to use the randomizer on the Halloween/Christmas special Fandom pages to select what I watch? Because otherwise I don’t think I’d ever be watching Disney Junior’s Fancy Nancy Halloween Special.
Up until now, I didn’t even realize Fancy Nancy was a thing. It seems like you get what you pay for when it comes to Fancy Nancy. It’s a show about a girl named Nancy who likes her stuff fancy. This is really out of my wheelhouse. I am very much not a girly girl. I don’t care to have my stuff fancy. I am a simple schlub.
So, I’m going to channel my inner fanciness…..Uhm….Hm….How do I do that?
Oh thanks, Patrick!
Our first Halloween story is Nancy’s Costume Clash. Nancy and her friend, Bree, accidentally make the same Nanette the Nice Witch costume for a Halloween party, which is a fashion faux pas. They manage to settle their dispute with a coin flip and Nancy letting Bree wear her old mermaid costume. Everything seems okay until a bitch named Grace shows up wearing her store bought official Nanette the Nice Witch costume.
Like before, they settle this dispute with a coin flip, but Nancy ends up getting the bad end of the deal this time, so she’s forced to change. Her friend, Lionel, offers his old costume, a taco, which doesn’t meet Nancy’s EXCEPTIONAL needs, but she accepts it anyway.
Oh right, the EXCEPTIONAL thing. Nancy has this insanely annoying habit of saying EXCEPTIONAL all the time and needing everything she wears, has or uses being EXCEPTIONAL. Because she’s Fancy Nancy. She needs her stuff fancy. Also, she has a habit of saying French words a lot, which, while being similarly annoying – she’s not French, and really only says those words because French things are fancy by default – is at least educational. She also has a habit of saying ‘fancy’ words, which is meant to help kids with their English vocabulary, which is pretty nice.
She fancifies her taco costume via song break. The song, ‘Exceptional Halloween,’ is actually pretty catchy. When she’s done, the taco costume does look better, but it also looks worse.
….What the hell is on her head? Is that a bowl of ice cream? Why is there stuff seemingly dripping over the edges of the shell? It really comes off more as a weird seashell costume more than a fancy taco, which actually would’ve worked better considering Bree’s a mermaid.
Everyone loves her costume, and Nancy even compliments Grace on her costume. They bob for apples, everyone’s happy, the end.
This story was pretty okay. It showed a very overused plotline resolved in a less conventional way. Usually stories with ‘OMG We’re wearing the same outfit!?’ angles just involve a lot of bitching and trying to force the other girl to change, but here they just come up with solutions on making everything fair for everyone. Bree and Lionel help Nancy out, and Nancy adds her own pizzazz to be fully happy with her ice cream sea shell taco costume.
But urgh….I don’t think I have the fanciness to continue onto the second half of the episode. It’s too much exceptionalism.
*knock knock*
Hm?
Ah, yes, many thanks, Patrick. How could I have been so absent-minded?
The second segment is about the girls trick-or-treating. Nancy is wearing a butterfly costume (with really tiny wings and a tutu, which kinda makes it look like a fairy costume.) Why she’s wearing a different costume than she was for the Halloween party, I don’t know. It’s a little chilly out, so her mom tells her to wear a jacket. Nancy doesn’t want to cover her fancy wings, so she asks if she can wear her cloak instead since she can keep it open most of the time to keep her wings uncovered and wrap it around her if she gets cold. Her mom agrees and they go off trick-or-treating…..by themselves? That’s kinda a weird thing to include in a Disney Junior show. I mean, they only seem to be going to houses they know, but still. They’re like, what, six or seven, and they’re babysitting a kid who’s like four? I didn’t think that going off on your own at that age was kosher anymore.
The kids all start getting spooked by the Halloween decorations in town, but they keep trick-or-treating anyway.
Nancy doesn’t like having her cloak on since it obscures her wings, so she leaves it on the fence of her neighbor, claiming she’ll come back for it later, which is honestly kinda rude. Her little sister, Jojo, who is out as a knight, believes Nancy accidentally left it behind, so she puts it on and rushes to chase after her to give it back.
Cue the misunderstanding – Bree and Nancy think Jojo’s a ghost because her helmet locked in place, obscuring her face and making her voice echo, she’s now all cloaked up, and she accidentally hooked a light-up foggy decoration on the cloak to trail behind her.
The girls and eventually Lionel, whose brilliant costume is just a zombie mask, run away from the ‘ghost’ until they realize it’s Jojo. They laugh it off, Nancy puts her cloak back on, and they all go back to trick-or-treating. The end.
This story was also pretty decent. It was spooky enough for the younglings, but they made it clear that the ‘ghost’ was Jojo so they wouldn’t get too scared. Plus, it was trying to teach a lesson about not letting your imagination run wild and scare you, especially during Halloween where many things are scary, but mostly fake.
Overall, this was a pretty good Halloween special all around. I think I would have tuned in to watch this as a little Twix. My impressions on the show as a whole? Seems all well and good. Nancy IS a little grating just because she’s a very, for lack of a better term, diva-ish character. People were complaining that she’s a brat who always gets what she wants and never learns any lessons, but as far as I saw that’s just flatout not true. She can be a little abrasive, and the EXCEPTIONAL habit is annoying, but she always tries to be fair and nice and does learn lessons when things don’t go her way. She’s a very realistic kid. People need to chill the hell out.
Granted, maybe I’d get really sick of her after watching more episodes, but….I’m probably not gonna do that.
Plus, she’s helping kids develop vocabulary skills, teaching them some very basic French, and the show manages to teach some good lessons while not being overly cheesy, talking down to kids and still managing to be entertaining. I was never bored or really irritated while watching it. In addition, the animation and music are quite high-quality. I did find myself enjoying the theme song and the ‘Exceptional Halloween’ song way more than I anticipated.
I leave off this review with the most important lesson anyone could take away from this.
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