Jeff Goldblum Once Starred in ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’
And you can watch the whole thing on YouTube!
Jeff Goldblum is an enduring internet zaddy and style icon, a man whose appealing peculiarity is so irresistible that it should have its own holiday.
We’re still waiting on that, but while we are, we can spend Halloween—or at least one hour and 34 minutes—thinking about him because, as it turns out, in 1980, Goldblum starred in a mostly forgotten made-for-television version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the classic Halloween tale written by Washington Irving in 1820 about a bizarre schoolmaster with the absurdly WASP name Ichabod Crane, whose supreme superstitions are terrifyingly tested by the local legend of the Headless Horseman, the ghost of a Hessian soldier said to have lost his head to a cannonball during the Revolutionary War.
Goldblum’s wiry frame is perfectly suited to the dweeby gangle of Ichabod Crane. He has a deep and jovial relationship with an owl, his black hair looks great in a braid, and his Goldblumian weirdness is in its gorgeous infancy. “I don’t believe in ghosts, so stop it right now!” Goldblum-as-Crane yells at a practical joker pretending to be the ghost of a Native American chief. Catchphrase material!
There is really nothing you have ever needed more in your Halloween life than Jeff Goldblum being stalked by a horse-bound ghost while wearing a tricorn hat, so enjoy the entire thing on YouTube:
And if that isn’t enough spooky weirdness for you, Disney’s 1959 animated version, narrated by Bing Crosby (!!!), is also online:
