REVIEW: The Loud House “Great Lakes Freakout!”

Overview

The Louds team up with the Casagrandes for a Halloween storefront decorating competition, but things get out of hand when they use Lucy’s spell book to make the Mercado extra spooky to impress a local celebrity named Ernesto Estrella (George Lopez)…

Our Take

As predicted, the Casagrande’s family are back, sort of… but now reduced to recurring character roles within the mainline The Loud House series much in the same way the canceled The Cleveland Show characters are now part of Family Guy’s ever-expanding cast. Of course, that isn’t always a bad thing as we’re seeing character interactions and crossover possibilities we’d never imagine between both franchises.

There are multiple subplots in combination with running jokes leading to a comedy of errors that are sprinkled throughout the proceedings, and while every character plays a major role within the plot in some form or another, the story doesn’t pick up until Lucy recites a spell involving the introduction of a Ghost named “Buzz” (voiced by Joey D’auria doing a toned down Gilbert Gottfried impression) who proceeds to make an unthinkable decision that indirectly escalates the chaos in unexpected ways. And arguably, if Buzz didn’t do what he did, none of this would’ve happened to begin with…

Overall, a decent Halloween special that delivers on the kid-friendly scares with a series of comedic setups and major payoffs. For fans of The Casagrandes, it sort of puts their worries to rest that their favorite characters aren’t going to waste. Often times when a show integrates more characters in its universe, it’s hard to write for all of them or give them an actual purpose in the narrative but thankfully this is delivered in spades. Of course, I’m curious how far they’ll go with this in later episodes/seasons somewhere down the line.