Mad Monster Party Little Tibia and The Fibias — Halloween's greatest jam band, bones down.

Halloween may be the hippest music holiday on Earth. Monsters, vampires, ghosts and more have haunted rock, pop and beyond for decades. Listening Post celebrates this merge all October, starting with … Little Tibia and the Fibias?

Why not? The mop-topped skeletons thrash out a funky garage jam that makes Phyllis Diller want to mosh with a mummy (and Igor, too). The band’s song “The Mummy” is the coolest tune found in Rankin-Bass’ 1967 stop-motion classic Mad Monster Party which, when teamed with the riotous Murder By Death, forms a Halloween comedy double-feature that is hard to beat.

Of course, it can rock out on its own merits. Starring Boris Karloff, penned by Mad Magazine creator Harvey Kurtzman and featuring avatars for Jimmy Stewart and Peter Lorre, the film went on to inspire Tim Burton’s equally awesome Nightmare Before Christmas and still retains a cult following. Thanks to that cult, the soundtrack was finally released in 1998.
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But it’s not all good news: The actual band that performed Little Tibia and the Fibias’ most excellent “The Mummy” has yet to be identified, on the soundtrack or anywhere else. Listening Post contacted Rankin-Bass historian Rick Goldschmidt for help, but he explained even the film’s composer Maury Laws couldn’t remember the band’s real-world counterparts.

“I read a DVD review that said it was Dyke & the Blazers,” Goldschmidt explained. “But I’m not positivethat is true.”