Halloween anthem reworded, travels the web as Bush-bashing Climate Mash

TORONTO (CP) Sun Oct 23, 2005 - For 44 years his deep voice has been doing the Monster Mash with ghoulish gusto every October.

Now the co-creator and singer of what's perhaps the biggest Halloween anthem to date has turned the corny song on its side to make an appeal to stop global warming.

"We were hiking past the White House late one night/When our eyes beheld an eerie sight/The president appeared, with folks very strange/The zombies and vampires of global climate change," sings Bobby Pickett in the Climate Mash.

The Flash animation accompanying the track, sponsored by the advocacy group Clean The Air, features images of U.S. President George W. Bush bathing in oil and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice riding a broom stick.

With its catchy refrain of "They're doing the climate mash (the climate mash)," the song is catching fire in the online world as it is forwarded from friend to friend.

Lambasting Bush has become a thriving industry on the web in recent years with dozens of jokes, altered photos, animated shorts and satirical songs making the e-mail rounds with gusto.

Sites like TheOnion.com, TheHammer.ca and JibJab.com routinely satirize news events.

Most recently, the hurricane Katrina aftermath inspired a slew of online activity including the song George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People.

Performed by rap duo The Legendary K.O., the song was spurred by rapper Kanye West's tongue-lashing of the U.S. president during a televised Katrina benefit concert. It samples West's hit song Gold Digger and intercuts images of Bush golfing with displaced Katrina victims. The producers of the song say it's been downloaded more than one million times.

The Hammer's Trevor Thompson says there's so much activity online because the web gives regular citizens freedom to showcase opinions and writing without starting a printing press.

"The medium itself makes it very conducive to spreading your message without going cap-in-hand to a TV network," said Ottawa's Thompson, whose online persona is Buford McGraw.

Adds Climate Mash singer Bobby Pickett: "The Internet is ideal for this type of thing. You reach so many more people than in the old days of radio and then TV."

Originally released in 1962, the Monster Mash was a spoof of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi horror flicks. It quickly became a Halloween staple. It returns every October to radio and TV show soundtracks. It's also been used in several Halloween-themed films.

Pickett, 67, who co-wrote the original track with Lenny Capizzi, says the novelty song naturally lends itself to political roasting.

"It was a satire originally, in and of its own so it lends itself to satire," he said from his home in Santa Monica, Calif.

"You can write a hundred songs with Monster Mash with something that rhymes with it."

Last year he used the song to to protest the U.S. forestry policies. The video was downloaded nearly 500,000 times in the two weeks before Halloween.

While Pickett finds himself in demand every October, he's shocked at the popularity of his two protest songs.

"It's always surprising when something comes out of left field like this," said Pickett, whose mother comes from Antigonish, N.S.

"The time has come," he added. "The (Bush) empire is crumbling very rapidly."