CASPER: A SPIRITED BEGINNING

Intended as the first video installment in what producer James A. Montgomery hopes will become a long series of Casper the Friendly Ghost direct-to-video movies, CASPER: A SPIRITED BEGINNING starts as Casper (voice of Jeremy Foley) rides an animated death train filled with ghosts on its way to Ghost Central Station where a giant green blob named Kibosh (voice of James Earl Jones) awaits to train the ghosts in how to scare people. Naïve, Casper asks fellow ghostly death train passengers where the train is going and what fate awaits them. A hostile, delinquent ghost drops Casper out of the train’s window. He spends the rest of the movie trying to get back to where he belongs.

Lost, Casper pops up in Deeds Town, a mythical mid-American town with a typical town square, and local high school. He tries to befriend the townspeople, but they are scared. Some even do somersaults to try to escape him as soon as they see him. However, when he shows himself to a lonely fifth grader, named Chris, Chris declares that he is not afraid of ghosts and engages Casper in conversation. Soon, Chris and Casper are fast friends. Casper even helps Chris escape from the school yard bullies, who pounce on him as soon as they see him.

Meanwhile, Chris’ workaholic, widower father, Tim (Steve Guttenberg), is too preoccupied by his job as site manager of a greedy millionaire’s new shopping mall even to eat the cereal Chris prepared. (There is an obvious need for father-son reconciliation). Tim’s first job is to manage the demolition of a haunted mansion landmark which Sheila Fister (Lori Loughlin), Chris’s teacher, wants to preserve. Coincidentally, Sheila leads the local preservationist-activists, who picket the mansion and insert themselves between the mansion and the front end loader poised to begin the demolition. Frustrated, Sheila shouts at Tim, who shouts back from atop the front end loader blade. The verbal duel between preservationists and developers ends in a stalemate.

Enter the demons. The Ghostly Trio, who talk and act like New York hustlers, Fatso (voice of Jess Harnell), Stinkie (voice of Bill Farmer) and Stretch (voice of James K. Ward) scare away the would-be demolition crew, who abandon their front-end loaders when they see demonic interference. Sheila rejoices, because she thinks she has won. She tells Chris in class that “Imagining is a powerful tool.” She doesn’t reckon with Tim’s resourcefulness, who hires a renegade army bomb expert to blow up the house. He plants a bomb in the basement, timed to go off the next morning.

Meanwhile, still abandoned by his peers, Chris finds solace in communing with Casper, the disembodied spirit who resolves to use his powers to help people. Casper foils a robbery and rescues the store owner, who unsuccessfully tries to reward him with a piece of beef jerky. Chris enters the abandoned mansion and plays around with the smart aleck Ghostly Trio, who insult him and then leave. Chris goes home, only to be waylaid by the bullies, who tie him up and dump him in the mansion’s basement as the bomb ticks in the next room.

The movie concludes with a predictable rescue and hokey ending as the town’s mayor declares the mansion to be worthy of preservation, and Chris and Tim reconcile. Casper impresses the green blob enough with his occult powers to win permission to haunt the world on his own. Furthermore, the Ghostly Trio get to continue to haunt the mansion forever. Great. What an anti-finale.

CASPER: A SPIRITED BEGINNING, ostensibly tells the story which many Americans have asked: “How did Casper become a friendly ghost?” This movie attempts to answer that question by postulating that a giant green, hellish spirit named Kibosh sticks to the “old-school” method of training ghosts to scare people, while an opposing Ghostly Trio rebel against his methods and become outlaw ghosts. It is difficult as well as unnecessary to see the distinction between a ghost who allegedly conforms to mystical rules and ghosts which rebel against them. They both rebel against God. Demons are devils. By definition, devils are bad and should be eschewed.

The problem with CASPER: A SPIRITED BEGINNING is that the underlying worldview directly conflicts with biblical truths, and as it pretends to solve Casper’s dilemma of being a lost ghost trying to return to where he belongs through an occult premise in which the main character is a disembodied spirit who befriends a human boy. CASPER: A SPIRITED BEGINNING is not recommended for moral parents who want to inculcate a friendship between their children and Jesus Christ rather than between their children and demons.