SPITTLEJUICE

BEETLEJUICE (1988)
dir: Tim Burton

SPITTLEJUICE
Cracked #239, October 1988
w: Mort Todd
a: John Severin

Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) die in a car crash but don't realize they're dead and go back home.

After finding out they what happened, they realized they can live the rest of their afterlife in the attic, until Charles and Delia move in (Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O'Hara) and decide to change the place.(In the movie, Charles and Delia don't realize the house is haunted initially)

Adam and Barbara have a handbook of the dead that they don't understand, so they go to their case worker's office to find out what to do. They want to scare the new family away. Here in the parody is a riff on Abbott and Costello's “Who's on First?” routine.

Their case worker Juno is overworked as it is, and suggests they find away to haunt the house on their own. They don't have any imagination at first and dress like what the typical image of ghosts are and it doesn't work. The family's goth daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder) is able to see them in their regular form because she is not scared of them.

They don't know what to do so they summon Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) a reverse exorcist who scares living people, that they've seen ads for. He conveniently lives inside a model of the town that it was established Adam had built earlier in the film. (His name is spelled different from the movie title presumably because otherwise people would be pronouncing the title wrong).

They pass on Betelgeuse because he's too vulgar and decide continue to try haunting the family on their own. They possess the family during a dinner party.
The plan backfires because the family now wants to make the home into a paranormal amusement park. So Adam and Barbara go back to their case worker to see what to do.

(The Uggly Family were recurring characters in Cracked in the late eighties, most notable for being the first work of Daniel Clowes.)

Delia's designer friend Otho (Glenn Shadix) has stolen the guidebook and finds out he can kill Adam and Barbara off. In an act of desperation Lydia summons Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse will only help if he can marry Lydia, which she ends up agreeing to. At the last minute they banish him to the netherworld by saying his name three times. In the parody, he is forced to go back to another movie (Michael Keaton was in Mr. Mom with Teri Garr). The family is grateful that Adam and Barbara saved their teenage daughter from a man with no scruples, so everyone's able to peacefully co-exist.

And Harry Belafonte is still alive at 93.