First-time watching Beetlejuice (1988) – Tim Burton's wild horror-comedy classic – and dropping my raw, unfiltered first impressions! I'd never seen it before, only knew the memes, the striped suit, and "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" chant. Went in blind in 2026... and wow, this thing is a chaotic fever dream!The story: Sweet ghost couple Barbara (Geena Davis) and Adam (Alec Baldwin) die in a freak accident and haunt their dream home to scare away the obnoxious new owners – yuppie Charles (Jeffrey Jones) and dramatic Delia Deetz (Catherine O'Hara), plus goth teen Lydia (Winona Ryder). They summon sleazy "bio-exorcist" Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton in absolute manic mode) to help... and chaos ensues with sandworms, shrinking heads, possession dances, and afterlife bureaucracy gone wrong.My thoughts: The visuals are bonkers – stop-motion, practical effects, Danny Elfman's quirky score, that striped afterlife waiting room, the iconic "Day-O" banana boat dinner scene possession (hilarious and creepy!), the snake transformation, the sandworm ride finale. Keaton steals every second he's on screen with over-the-top gross-out humor and energy. It's dark, weird, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt with the Maitlands' innocence vs. the living's absurdity.But does it live up to the legendary 80s status? Absolutely yes – it's peak Tim Burton weirdness that influenced so much (from Addams Family vibes to modern goth comedy). The humor holds up (some bits feel dated, but the creativity doesn't), the effects still pop, and it's endlessly quotable/re-watchable. Went from "what even is this?" to instant fan – total Halloween staple!No big spoilers early, then full first-impression breakdown: highs (Keaton's performance, visuals, Lydia's goth queen energy), any lows (pacing in spots), and verdict on its iconic legacy.
#Beetlejuice #Beetlejuice1988 #FirstTimeWatching #BeetlejuiceReaction #TimBurton #MichaelKeaton #WinonaRyder #GeenaDavis #80sMovies #HorrorComedy #Iconic80s #DayOBeetlejuice #Sandworm #BeetlejuiceMovie #CultClassic
#Beetlejuice #Beetlejuice1988 #FirstTimeWatching #BeetlejuiceReaction #TimBurton #MichaelKeaton #WinonaRyder #GeenaDavis #80sMovies #HorrorComedy #Iconic80s #DayOBeetlejuice #Sandworm #BeetlejuiceMovie #CultClassic
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FunTranscript
00:00Hey, today's movie or TV show that I haven't seen is Beetlejuice.
00:04Um, going into it, I'm thinking, how have I not watched this?
00:09I'm an 80s guy. I love this stuff.
00:12I love quirky, imaginative stuff that people have merchandised the hell out of.
00:17I remember the cartoon. I remember the theme song to the cartoon.
00:27I got toys from the cartoon.
00:29We've decorated. I got this shirt.
00:31I feel like I should have actually seen the actual movie.
00:34And I might have.
00:35It's kind of one of those, have I never seen it?
00:37Or I just don't remember a thing from it.
00:39Cause I'm thinking this was the type of movie that was always on TV when I was a kid.
00:43But was I paying attention? Did I care?
00:46Or did I go, this isn't the cartoon.
00:50And the cartoon wasn't one of those ones that I was like, in love with, in love with.
00:55It was just sort of, eh, this is a good show. Leave it on.
00:58So I think for Halloween, I'm going to rectify that.
01:01You know, the only scene I kind of remember being on TV is the waiting room scene.
01:08Uh, but now seeing clips online, I'm like, who waited in the waiting room?
01:13Was Beetlejuice in there?
01:15But this says the couple? The couple of who? Lydia's parents?
01:19Alright, so questions like that make me really want to go into this movie.
01:24And I'll be honest, I'm going in this with high hopes.
01:27Why else would everyone still be talking about this movie so many years later if it wasn't somewhat good?
01:33And I want to know why they just all break out singing Deyo.
01:37It's a famous scene. I have seen that.
01:41And when you ever hear the daylight coming, you got to go home.
01:45People always bring out Beetlejuice.
01:47So why does that scene happen?
01:49The other reason I have high hopes going into this movie is Tim Burton, Michael Keaton.
01:55And, you know, they work together for Batman Returns.
01:59And I love Batman Returns.
02:01I honestly want to own this duck boat that the penguin has.
02:05That's always been a dream of mine.
02:06I have weird dreams and that's one of them.
02:10Because this also gives off the Addams Family movie vibes, which is a great movie.
02:15I kind of like that fun spooky horror, but, you know, it's not gory.
02:20It's not horror horror, but it's macabre, right?
02:24That's what they call it.
02:25Now granted, other Tim Burton stuff I haven't been as in love with.
02:30I had no idea with what I was watching when I saw Dark Shadows with Johnny Depp.
02:34And I'm one of those people.
02:36Now granted, this will probably be a future video.
02:38But I don't recall loving Nightmare Before Christmas.
02:42Yeah, I know, with all the merchandise around and the Halloween decor where there is a Jack Skellington section.
02:50I didn't love it.
02:51I remember when the VHS was over being like, hmm, probably not going to put that on repeat.
02:59It's showtime.
03:01Yeah.
03:03Okay.
03:04Yeah, that was a classic.
03:05I understand completely why people still love this movie.
03:09It's very interesting visually.
03:11It's one of those movies, though, where like if you didn't totally love quirky effects or practical stuff and the
03:21weird stop motion, you would be like, hmm, that's kind of cheesy.
03:25Like when they hop between the living and then the outside and the sandworm and the dimensions and how they
03:33did this stuff back in the day.
03:34And just that Tim Burton style.
03:37But that speaks to me.
03:39That absolutely speaks to me.
03:40What also speaks to me is yuppie love.
03:43I want it.
03:44I need it.
03:45And I'm envious.
03:47I'll just get them.
03:51Maybe you should get them.
03:53Okay.
03:54This couple is, it's very cute.
03:56Okay.
03:56And I heard that they weren't in the sequel.
03:58So that sucks.
04:01I kind of dug their storyline more than I dug the Lydia storyline.
04:05And Lydia was the only other character other than Beetlejuice that I knew going into this.
04:09I'm guessing that when people start talking about their awakening to goth girls, it was because of Lydia.
04:17It took me a few seconds to grasp what they were doing here because I was expecting Lydia from the
04:23jump.
04:24But no, it takes a little while before we get introduced to Lydia and her family.
04:28It starts off with this, what could nowadays be done through a drone, but an overhead shot of the town
04:35that then morphs into this couple's home.
04:39And he's got like a life-sized version of a city up in his attic.
04:45And from what I could gather, the couple is trying for a kid, can't have a kid.
04:53And their realtor slash her cousin is like, you guys got to get out of this house.
04:58It's too big for you.
04:59Too much.
05:00I got somebody who would buy this property.
05:02And the couple is, no, they're not hearing it.
05:05You know what?
05:06It'll happen when it'll happen.
05:08Stop pressuring us.
05:10And they just go about their life until they die because they don't want to hit a dog in the
05:16middle of the road.
05:17And that dog ends up causing them to fall off the side of the bridge.
05:21And now they're in, wait.
05:24Okay.
05:25So they didn't survive.
05:26They're in purgatory.
05:28They can stay in their home.
05:30They can haunt.
05:31It's kind of like a government work is what basically being a ghost is now.
05:39My snarky side was like, hey, you know, when Alec Baldwin's character is trying to haunt these people, let's make
05:47a rust joke.
05:47Or the magazine that Jeffrey Jones is looking at.
05:51Just what exactly is he looking at?
05:55Or that this might be the perfect place for John Cena to live.
05:59You know, cause they can't see him.
06:01Won't, can't.
06:02It just says won't.
06:04God, this book is so stupid.
06:05I can't understand anything in this.
06:07Alright, I'll see myself out.
06:09I probably, I'll leave through the green portal door.
06:12You know, kind of like this green portal door.
06:15I wish my attic had a green portal door.
06:18They got to wait for their paperwork.
06:20They got like filing systems, people they got to speak to, hierarchies.
06:26So being dead does not sound like that much fun.
06:29You still got to deal with all this bureaucracy.
06:33But hey, at least now when I go to Spirit of Halloween, I know what this is.
06:44Handbook for the recently diseased.
06:46Deceased.
06:50Deceased.
06:51And the film is kind of clever in how it plays itself out.
06:55You'd think for a movie called Beetlejuice, you'd see the guy all the time.
06:58But you don't.
06:59First he pops up in this kind of infomercial and he sells his services.
07:04Alright, I kind of dig the idea that even in the afterlife, you still have your Billy
07:10Mays, Vince from ShamWow, Phil Swift pitchman.
07:15That Beetlejuice, who they still keep calling Beetleguice.
07:19Beetleguice.
07:19Has to go and pitch his services and do it so over the top, he has to advertise.
07:26So even though he's dead, he still has to work a 9 to 5.
07:30There's no escaping it.
07:32Your bureaucracy at a 9 to 5 even if you're dead.
07:36Even if you've been impaled.
07:37If you've been burned alive.
07:39Your fiancé kills you.
07:41You still gotta go to work.
07:42That's depressing.
07:43He's gonna teach the newly undead how to properly scare away people who may want to live in their
07:50old home.
07:51And Ghost can stay in the house, but living beings can't see him.
07:55So when they try to scare off Captain O'Hara's character and the Realtor, nothing happens.
08:01Ugh.
08:02Deliver me from L.L.
08:03Bean.
08:05And as a Mainer, because, you know, it's a high amount of our industry here, I took personal
08:11offense that they made fun of L.L. Bean.
08:13We find out that Lydia can actually see the dead.
08:17And you know what?
08:18There's no, like, cool dead people here.
08:20It's not like the Tales from the Crypt Christmas song where it's about all the famous dead people.
08:26You know, you're not seeing your Aussies, your Hogans, your Billy from the Game Chasers.
08:29No.
08:30Not the cool people you want to see again.
08:32You just get the guy from 30 Rock who I guess this dog's not a fan of.
08:37And you know what?
08:39Seeing how Lydia turned out for the sequel, which, you know, again, I watched ahead and
08:44then edited this video after taking the notes.
08:47Was she ever destined to have a happy childhood?
08:50Because it seems to me between the haunting, the child bride-ness, and her family basically
08:55almost being final destination, there was never a happy moment.
08:59Yep.
09:00This is the scene.
09:01This is the scene I saw when I was little.
09:03This is what I remember about the movie is this kind of waiting room in a DMV-like place.
09:10And all these freaks.
09:12Like this guy with the shrunken head.
09:14And that's how the Howard Stern Whackpacker Beetlejuice got his name.
09:18From this guy.
09:19Not from actual Beetlejuice, but from a character in Beetlejuice.
09:23Yeah.
09:24You can really see why people gravitated to this movie.
09:28It's so interesting visually.
09:32And it's just, it's fun.
09:34That's what this movie is.
09:36Yeah.
09:36So, the child bride thing.
09:38Uh, that was not what I remembered from this movie.
09:41Besides, I'm not exposing that little girl to that pervert down there.
09:45Beetle.
09:46Don't even say his name.
09:48You leave her alone, you-
09:49I thought they were just friends.
09:52Because that's how the cartoon was?
09:54From what I remember.
09:56I didn't remember him being a sex past or just a bum in general.
10:01And this is another one of those, like, 80s properties where the movie has F-bombs and then there's a
10:07kid's cartoon.
10:12Nice fucking model!
10:14Like Rambo and Robocop.
10:16Even Police Academy.
10:17The 80s were cool, okay?
10:19They just did what they wanted to do.
10:21And that's probably why these films just last.
10:24This is why you can go into a Spirit of Halloween and buy props from this movie.
10:28Including the sandworm, which kind of looks like a, uh...
10:33Yeah, doesn't it?
10:34Kind of look phallic.
10:36Alright, now knowing what we know about Jeffrey Jones,
10:39most of the interactions he has with his daughter in this movie can be interpreted a little differently.
10:45I'll just say that much.
10:46The yuppie couple tries to haunt once more and really scare these people away.
10:52But all it does is attract attention.
10:55Because now the house is a confirmed haunted house.
10:59Which is going to make it incredibly valuable to somebody marketing around that.
11:04Come to this house if you want to see actual ghosts.
11:08Okay, so now I'm finally seeing the Dayo scene in context.
11:12I thought it was just some sort of weird art house thing.
11:14But it was actually the spirits of the couple, the yuppie couple,
11:20deciding that this is how we're going to manipulate and scare the people who are now in our house.
11:26That makes a lot more sense.
11:27I just thought this was some, I don't know, art piece.
11:30And I gotta be honest, I would have chosen a different song than Dayo.
11:33I would have chosen the, if you want to be happy for the rest of your life,
11:36get an ugly woman to become your wife.
11:40I like that song better.
11:49Beetlejuice himself is super over the top.
11:52I think they said he's only in it for like 14 to 15 minutes total.
11:56But every time you see him, he's got a crazy energy.
12:00He's, he's going to sell you something. He's got to do this.
12:02Hey!
12:03What?
12:04Ah, well, I attended Juilliard.
12:06I'm a graduate of the Harvard Business School.
12:07I travel quite extensively.
12:08I lived through the Black Plague and I had a pretty good time during that.
12:11Like, oh my God.
12:12It's, it's like Don West meets the riff tracks mocking of Nick Nolte.
12:18I've seen The Exorcist about 167 times and it keeps getting funnier every single time I see it.
12:25Not to mention the fact that you're talking to a dead guy.
12:28Now what do you think?
12:29And even though I talked about, uh, Pedo Bear earlier, Jeffrey Jones,
12:35half this movie, uh, seems to be about Beetlejuice's infatuation with marrying Lydia.
12:42Did they bring that up in the cartoon or did they just silently drop that?
12:46Because I don't know how well that would play out for an entire run of his show.
12:51And how old is Beetlejuice?
12:53How old's Lydia?
12:55Yeah, you can see the problem here.
12:57There's horror creepy and then just creepy creepy.
13:01And besides, Beetlejuice should find himself a girl in the strip club,
13:05which is Dante's Inferno.
13:07And I feel like a poser because I bought this without actually knowing what it was,
13:11but thinking it was incredibly cool.
13:13I have this from Spirit of Halloween.
13:18You see that?
13:20Yeah, I bought the Dante's Inferno.
13:22Think of it as a marriage of inconvenience.
13:24Okay.
13:24We both get something.
13:25I get out.
13:26You get to say you're hitched.
13:27Most eligible bachelors and Valentino came over.
13:30We're even, babe.
13:31So Beetlejuice is a real swell guy.
13:33He's only going to help if Lydia agrees to become his child bride.
13:37Yeah, that's, that's the character we're rooting for here.
13:39That's the guy who almost 30 years later, people were like,
13:42come on, make the sequel.
13:43Like you wanted to do the Hawaiian movie, but you didn't make that happen.
13:47So I mean, let's just do it now.
13:49Right?
13:50Let's make the guy who wanted his child bride.
13:52Let's bring him back.
13:53The yuppie couple messed up big time.
13:56You aren't actually supposed to let humans know that there's an actual connection between the living and the dead.
14:02And by doing so, you've kind of set things in motion.
14:06And if this is allowed to stand, it's bad for everybody.
14:10So it got super Tim Burton-y when we got to the end.
14:14Beetlejuice is trying to stop them from saying his name three times and getting him to disappear.
14:18Because if you say it three times, he'll show up.
14:20But if you also say it three more times, he'll leave.
14:23Beetlejuice.
14:26Beetlejuice.
14:31Beetlejuice.
14:32He wants to marry Lydia because Lydia sold herself to him as a child bride.
14:42Okay.
14:43And that would allow her parents to live and also save the couple who she forms a relationship with.
14:52Beetlejuice, he's not a good guy.
14:55He's not like the worst guy, but he's just kind of a lowlife.
14:58I wonder how that plays out in the sequel.
15:01Do you bring him back because something's even worse than he is?
15:06So it's like to fight evil, you got to have another type of evil.
15:10And one evil is a little bit more than the other.
15:12And where's Lydia's red dress?
15:14That's what I know from the cartoon.
15:16And I was pleased because we do actually eventually get Lydia in the red dress.
15:20I love how whimsical this movie is.
15:23I think that's what makes this a classic.
15:25It's the old school effects.
15:27It's that stop motion that's, you know, kind of realistic, but also at the same time, super fake.
15:34Much in the same way as this car jump.
15:37Yeah, that's just a prop.
15:39And that's the exact thing when they were making the AVGN movie.
15:41People were like, really?
15:42Look at the fake car.
15:44That's your special effects.
15:45Where if you were to, you know, actually know what you were talking about, not just trying to hate on
15:50a movie.
15:50You'd be like, oh, it's the Tim Burton influence.
15:53That's what it is.
15:54And it's a good thing that there was a sandworm on the loose that stopped Beetlejuice from marrying Lydia.
16:08And because she saved this adopted couple and they never really had their own kid, I guess Lydia is almost
16:17their adopted child, even though her parents are still around.
16:21Which I know I saw the trailer for the second one and they were all around a gravestone in like
16:27a few seconds of that trailer.
16:30Because the Jeffrey Jones character was killed off for obvious reasons, multiple obvious reasons.
16:36Then if the couple's not there, did they just kind of leave her?
16:40Or I guess somebody said that they found a way out, like a loophole.
16:46So that's what it was.
16:48Anyway, yeah, Beetlejuice was I'm going to watch it again.
16:53It's definitely one that you'd be like, hey, younger nephew, I think you dig this movie.
17:01I'd put it right there with the 90s Addams Family movie.
17:05All right.
17:05If you got another horror movie or any movie, some big tentpole thing that I really should have seen or
17:12something that for some reason I'm wearing something but never have actually watched.
17:17Let me know if you become a member on this channel.
17:20You have more weight in what you say and what you suggest.
17:23Work, work, work Sonora. Work it all the time.
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