"Ye Olde Candy Shoppe of Horrors" is the fifty-third episode of the Disney Channel animated series Kiff.
Synopsis[]
Kiff and Barry are set to spend their Halloween passing out candy, but when they run out, they are determined to make everything right.
Plot[]
For Halloween, Kiff has opted to skip trick-or-treating and instead spend the evening at the Buns residence to help Barry babysit Kristophe and hand out candy to trick-or-treaters. After buying candy at Slim Pickins, Kiff heads to the Buns home, where she and Barry put up decorations and prepare a spooky routine to perform for visiting trick-or-treaters, with Kiff playing a mad scientist, Barry playing a test subject, and Kristophe playing a head sprouting out of the test subject's torso.
At nightfall, Kiff, Barry, and Kristophe receive their first visitors, for whom they perform their routine. Their excitement ends up being short-lived, however, as the visitors turn out to be a trio of uncostumed teenagers, who swipe all their candy before taking off. As a result, Kiff and Barry are left with no candy to give their next visitor, a little boy in a knight costume. Kiff and Barry babble over each other while trying to explain the situation to the boy, confusing him and causing him to fall backwards and break his costume, exposing his underwear. Embarrassed, the boy runs off.
With Kristophe staying strapped to Barry through their shared costume, Kiff and Barry head downtown to buy more candy from Slim Pickins, but the store is closed. In the parking lot, they spot the boy from earlier, but he quickly runs away from them. While chasing after the boy, Kiff and Barry come across an old candy shop located next to the cemetery. Entering the creepy, darkly-lit shop to buy some candy, they meet the shop's unsettling owner, who performs a musical number for them in which he ominously alludes to a curse. After paying for their candy, Kiff and Barry step outside and find themselves in a place much more antiquated than the Table Town they know. Thinking they may have exited through the wrong door, they head back to the candy shop, but it has mysteriously vanished. They approach a man they assume to be Principal Secretaryfor help, but he instead identifies himself as Constable Secretary and threatens to take them to the police station, suspicious of their behavior. Suddenly, time mysteriously freezes for everyone except Kiff, Barry, and Kristophe. Two hooded ghouls emerge from the fog and pursue the children, who quickly flee. They manage to evade their pursuers by hiding in an alley, and time then unfreezes.
While hiding, the children stumble upon a newspaper dated 200 years before their time. Kiff and Barry realize that they have somehow been transported to the distant past, with virtually everyone they know still many years away from being born. At that moment, Kiff and Barry hear a familiar voice scolding trick-or-treaters in the apartment building next door, and it then occurs to them that there is one familiar face they can turn to for help: Helen. Upon being visited by the children, Helen, although confused as to how they know who she is, lets them inside her apartment. Over tea and biscuits, Kiff and Barry introduce themselves and give Helen a rundown of the next 200 years, though they are unable to give her any useful information for her sports bets, to her disappointment.
Looking out the apartment's window, Kiff and Barry notice a trick-or-treater who looks exactly like the boy in the knight costume. In a similar turn of events to what happened at the Buns home, the boy knocks on the door of a woman resembling Beverly, only to get no candy, then fall backwards and break his costume, embarrassing himself. After Kiff and Barry point out the similarities between these events and the events of their own time, Helen is able to identify the boy as a "time phantom" who will experience something terrible that night that will drive him to haunt Halloweens for centuries to come. She further surmises that by preventing this occurrence, and thus undoing the events that led to them getting sent to the past, the children can return to the present.
After leaving the apartment, Kiff and Barry witness the boy being teased by the townspeople for his misfortune. Thinking this might be the traumatic occurrence Helen mentioned, the duo decide to cheer him up by giving him some of their candy, but he runs away before they can do so. They follow him all the way to the cemetery, where they are finally able to get through to him and offer him a licorice lozenge, his favorite candy. Despite this kind act, Kiff, Barry, and Kristophe remain stuck in the past. Some trick-or-treaters then pass by, leading Kiff to wonder if the boy's trauma was actually caused by him never being able to successfully trick-or-treat.
Kiff and Barry return to Helen's apartment and meet with her again, handing her some candy and asking her to give the boy "the full trick-or-treat experience". To convince her to participate in their plan, they compare it to acting out a scene – and although Helen, at this point in time, has apparently never done so before, she finds the idea of being an actress intriguing and agrees to help. Kiff and Barry make a new Chubbles Wubbington costume for the boy to wear and learn his name: Little Crumble Smallsmith. After Crumble receives his candy from Helen, however, time suddenly freezes once more, and Kiff, Barry, and Kristophe, still stuck in the past, are again pursued by the ghouls, whom Helen identifies as "time goblinoids".
After a chase through the streets of Table Town, Kiff, Barry, and Kristophe, with Crumble tagging along, find themselves stuck hiding in an alley. However, Kristophe wanders off to eat from a nearby pickle barrel and Barry calls out to him, blowing the children's cover. Seeing the goblinoids approaching Kristophe, Kiff and Barry quickly get in front of Kristophe to protect him from harm. Puzzled by the situation, the goblinoids then clarify that time goblinoids are in fact friendly bureaucrats tasked with tracking down lost time travelers and returning them to their own times.
The goblinoids return Kiff, Barry, and Kristophe to the present, and the children find themselves back in the candy shop, which no longer looks creepy, but instead bright and welcoming. The shop owner tells the children that he has waited "a long time" for them and reveals himself to be Crumble. Crumble explains that the hurt he originally experienced that Halloween night 200 years ago was so strong that it manifested into an annual Halloween curse. He thus spent the next two centuries sending random people back in time in the hope of finding somebody to undo the pain that caused the curse, yet nobody succeeded until Kiff, Barry, and Kristophe came along and gave Crumble's young self what he truly needed: not candy, but friendship. Their actions then changed the entire course of history, preventing the curse from being born and allowing Crumble to grow up into a nice, well-adjusted person.
With the curse undone, Crumble gives the children a thankful embrace and declares that he can finally rest, then fades away into dust. The children follow the dust to the cemetery and see that Crumble now has a gravestone, which they place a licorice lozenge in front of to pay him their final respects. Looking at her phone, Kiff sees that it is 6:00 p.m., and that she, Barry, and Kristophe still have the entire Halloween evening ahead of them. Realizing that they can now stop the teenagers from taking their candy, Kiff calls up the time goblinoids. At Kiff's request, the goblinoids join Kiff, Barry, and Kristophe in their routine later that night at the Buns home and scare the teenagers into fleeing in fear.
Cast[]
- Kimiko Glenn as Kiff Chatterley
- H. Michael Croner as Barry Buns
- Michael Cusack as Old Crumb
- Charley Rowan McCain as Little Crumble Smallsmith
- Lucy Heavens as Helen
- Eric Bauza as Roy Fox and Nana Chubbs
- Nic Smal as Principal Secretary
- Lauren Ash as Beverly
Song[]
Trivia[]
- Opening Sponsor: Barrel's Pickles
- This marks the sixth double-length episode in the series, following "Principal Dance Socks", "Trevor's Rockin' Halloween Bash", "The Haunting Of Miss McGravy's House", "Lore Of The Ring Light", and "Kiff And Barry Save Halfway There Day".
- This is the third Halloween special in the series, following "Trevor's Rockin' Halloween Bash" and "The Haunting Of Miss McGravy's House".
- The title is likley a parody of the musical and film Little Shop of Horrors.
Continuity[]
- The Fox mansion spiders make their fourth appearance, following "Trevor's Rockin' Halloween Bash", "Snow More Ketchup", and "The Haunting Of Miss McGravy's House".
- Helen wraps up her first meeting with Kiff, Barry, and Kristophe because she has a date with "a centaur", indicating that she already knew Centaur Claus 200 years before the present day.
- Kiff and Barry's actions in the 19th century are revealed to have inspired Helen to pursue acting, as well as inspired a pregnant woman resembling Nana Chubbs to name her child "Chubbles".
- Given that the Chubbles of the present day is established in "Trevor's Rockin' Halloween Bash" to have been a young actor in the 1980s, it can be inferred that this woman is an ancestor of Nana Chubbs and by extension Chubbles, with the name "Chubbles" being passed down to different individuals in their family across generations.
- Kiff's cellphone wallpaper is the selfie she and Barry took with Chubbles in "Never Meet Your Mailboxes".
International premieres[]
- October 18, 2025 (Canada)
Gallery[]
External links[]
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