Prep & Landing: The Snowball Protocol (2025)

The original Prep & Landing continues to rank among my all-time favorite holiday specials. I love the way it reimagines Christmas elves through the lens of secret agents and high-pressure missions, building to a tense climax with stakes that feel important while still remaining within the scale of the story. Likewise, while Operation Secret Santa was only a short, it manages to capture the magic of the original, giving us the excitement of a life-or-death spy movie in the package of a sweet Christmas cartoon. Good stuff.

After that, we got Naughty vs. Nice, a full-length special that sort of abandoned the tone of the original. There are still some good moments in there, but it's missing the sense of suspense. It's more a kid's cartoon playing with spy movie concepts, while the first two were legitimate spy stories told within a world of Christmas specials.

But at least it remembered its roots. The third special in the series, The Snowball Protocol (directed by Shane Zalvin, who did some animation for the 1995 holiday movie, Four Rooms, along with numerous other projects), just abandons the spy stuff entirely, aside from a brief intro and (arguably) a few references within the first of two shorts embedded within the frame story. For all intents and purposes, though, the tone, setting, and genre have been stripped out entirely, leaving nothing but a fairly rote animated holiday special about some Christmas elves. Even that's giving this too much credit: aside from the frame story, you could pretty much have done either section with any generic cartoon characters in any setting. These are about cartoon workers trying to catch a pet they're supposed to be watching and dealing with a fiasco during a tropical vacation. The fact these are Christmas elves is essentially irrelevant.

The frame story kicks off with Lanny and Wayne on assignment. Wayne somehow sets his high tech gadget to self-destruct and is unable to deactivate it before it destroys some decorations outside a house they're preparing. Rather than own up to the mistake, he tells Lanny he's invoking "Snowball Protocol," which in effect swears his partner to secrecy.

Lanny then invites Wayne over for Christmas, but Wayne declines, suggesting Lanny would be better off celebrating with friends (and, by extension, inadvertently implying they're not really friends). Soon after, they're called in by Santa, who speaks with Lanny first off camera, leaving Wayne anxious about what was revealed. Wayne is then called in to talk with the big man alone and starts saying more than he should, revealing past incidents that went poorly.

Cut to the animated shorts comprising this special. First, Lanny and Wayne are enlisted by Magee to look after a gingerbread-loving seal, which gets loose almost immediately, leading to an extended chase through the North Pole. This culminates with the seal eating far too much gingerbread and vomiting in Wayne's hat. Still, they manage to set everything right with Magee, who's none the wiser.

The second short is about a post-Christmas tropical vacation the elves take. Magee has planned activities, while Wayne just wants to lounge around. When her itinerary cuts into his relaxation time, he books her some spa time overseen by a non-Christmas elf she has a crush on. During this, everything falls apart in her absence. At first, Wayne has no interest in helping to rein the chaos in, but eventually he starts to realize things are going too far. He needs Magee's managerial skills and apologizes. He also apologizes to Lanny, who got a sunburn because Wayne didn't apply sunscreen to his friend's back.

Cut back to the workshop. Santa is amused by Wayne's stories, but they're not the reason he wanted to see the elf. Wayne blurts out a confession about the debacle at the beginning, but that's not it, either. Instead, he reveals Wayne's file, which contains a birthday card circulated by Lanny revealing Wayne's birthday is secretly (cue dramatic music) Christmas Day. Santa apologizes for the oversight and reminds him of the importance of friendship. Wayne then goes to Lanny's house to celebrate with his friend.

And that's about it. With the spy stuff gone, there's not much here to distinguish this from countless other specials, aside from the fact the animation has Disney money behind it. The only arguably substantive connections left are some character details (this does give us more time with Magee than earlier versions, though without the threat of danger in the work, she's reduced to a relatively generic middle-manager). Likewise, this recycles elements of Wayne's exchange with Santa in the original, absent the investment we'd formed to the story.

You're left with the sense you're seeing a fairly typical episode in a cartoon series about these characters, which is more than a little disappointing given the fourteen year gap. That's not remotely as interesting.

It's also not as funny. The joke in the original was that they were approaching Christmas elves like highly trained spies. The premise is the punchline, and the fact it works on that level, as a secret agent adventure - and as a sweet holiday special - is the reason it endures. This pays homage to none of that, and all we have is a run-of-the-mill cartoon.

All that being said, it'd be fine - if unremarkable - in a vacuum. There are some decent gags and well animated bits - again, this is being financed by Disney. But even setting aside the disappointment of having this offered as a continuation of Prep & Landing, there's just nothing here elevating this to the level where you should care.