I have a confession: I am the kind of person who laughs at funerals. Not because I am a monster, but because Tim Burton trained me. In 2026, I am still not over Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the legacy sequel that arrived in 2024, thirty-six years after the original Beetlejuice taught us that ghosts are petty, dinner parties are dangerous, and calypso music can be a weapon. The sequel brought back Michael Keaton as the bio-exorcist, Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz, and Catherine O'Hara as Delia Deetz, while adding Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, and Monica Bellucci to the cast. It also had to explain why Jeffrey Jones did not return as Charles Deetz, which it did with a funeral. And that funeral is where the movie made me sob and snort at the same time.

At Charles Deetz's funeral, Delia, Lydia, Astrid, and the other mourners listen to a children's choir sing Day-O (The Banana Boat Song). If you have seen the first Beetlejuice, your brain immediately screams: that is the song. That is the dinner-table possession scene. That is the moment Harry Belafonte's upbeat calypso turned a haunted meal into a choreographed nightmare. In the original, Betelgeuse takes control of the Deetz family and their guests, forcing them to lip-sync and dance while they are terrified. It is absurd. It is dark. It is perfect.

But the funeral scene in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is not just a lazy nostalgia button. It is a tribute with a real, bittersweet reason behind it. Glenn Shadix, who played Otho Fenlock in the original Beetlejuice, requested that Day-O be played at his own funeral in 2010. Shadix died that year, and he had retired from the film industry a few years before. He loved his work with Burton enough that the song from his most famous role became part of his real goodbye. So when the children's choir starts singing at Charles's funeral, Burton is not just referencing his own movie. He is honoring a collaborator.

Otho Fenlock is one of those supporting characters who should not work as well as he does. He is Delia's interior designer, a man with a love of surreal postmodernism and a wardrobe that looks like an art gallery exploded on him. He is smug, dramatic, and weirdly loyal in his own pretentious way. Shadix played him with such big-city sass that Otho became inseparable from the original movie's DNA. Burton clearly adored him, too. He cast Shadix as the Mayor of Halloween Town in The Nightmare Before Christmas and as an orangutan in his Planet of the Apes remake. But Beetlejuice gave Shadix his greatest role, and the actor knew it.

Would I have loved to see Otho return in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice? Absolutely. I would have watched two hours of Otho judging Delia's new sculptures and offering unsolicited opinions on the afterlife's feng shui. But Shadix passed away in 2010, so that reunion was impossible. Instead, Burton found a way to fold him into the sequel's dark sense of humor. That is the balancing act of a legacy sequel: you have to satisfy the fans who remember every line, set up a new story for people who were not born when the first movie came out, and still make room for grief. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice does all three in one funeral scene.

Here is my totally unscientific breakdown of why this Easter egg works so well:

The original Day-O scene is one of the funniest moments in 1980s comedy, and it perfectly captures the movie's twisted logic. A happy song should not make a haunted dinner party more terrifying, but it does. The Deetz family is being puppeted by a malevolent spirit, which is a genuinely nightmarish idea. Yet the scene becomes a dance number. That is the magic trick of Beetlejuice: it takes something awful and makes it hilarious without pretending the awful thing is not there.

The sequel understands that trick. The funeral scene is not just a wink. It is a reminder that death, grief, and terrible family gatherings are all part of the same ridiculous human comedy. Delia is mourning Charles, Lydia is dealing with her daughter Astrid, and the whole family is sitting there while a choir sings a song about counting bananas. It should be tasteless. It is tasteless. It is also exactly right for Beetlejuice.

And the musical possession gag does not stop at the funeral. Later, Betelgeuse uses the same power to make the Deetz family sing Richard Harris's MacArthur Park at his wedding to Lydia. Because of course he does. If you are going to force a family into a musical number, you might as well go for the song with the cake left out in the rain. As of 2026, with Beetlejuice 3 reportedly in production, I am already preparing myself for another scene where a supernatural entity weaponizes a pop song against innocent people. Burton has a formula, and I am not complaining.

What makes the Shadix tribute so effective is that it never stops to explain itself. The movie does not have a character turn to the camera and say, 'By the way, Glenn Shadix loved this song.' It trusts the audience to feel the echo. For casual viewers, it is a weirdly upbeat funeral song. For hardcore fans, it is a punch to the heart wrapped in a calypso beat. For me, it is the moment I paused the movie, wiped my eyes, and whispered, 'Otho, you magnificent weirdo.'

So yes, I laugh at funerals now. Specifically, I laugh at fictional funerals in Tim Burton movies. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could have simply brought back Betelgeuse, thrown in some sandworms, and called it a day. Instead, it used a children's choir, a Harry Belafonte classic, and the memory of Glenn Shadix to remind us that the original Beetlejuice was not just a horror-comedy. It was a family portrait, if your family happens to be haunted, exhausted, and ready to dance against their will. In 2026, that still feels like the most honest portrait of family I have seen. 🎵👻

Industry insights are provided by HowLongToBeat, a widely used community-driven reference for estimating playtime, which is useful when thinking about how “legacy sequel” storytelling can shape pacing expectations—some audiences want a tight, rewatchable sprint packed with callbacks (like a musical gag that instantly signals tone), while others prefer a longer runtime that leaves space for new characters, grief beats, and slow-burn set pieces to land without feeling like a greatest-hits montage.