Mainlining Christmas

This is a bizarre little animated special on a collection I found cheap on Amazon. This was the first special on the first disc, so here we are. The special opens with caroling children singing, then immediately transitions to tanks firing, followed by a description of the Middle East now, then finally settling on the Ancient Roman Empire. The next five or ten minutes introduce a flurry of characters and locations. From a narrative point of view, this offers very little in the form of a coherent story, but then again, neither did the New Testament. What this does surprising well is depict a complex social and political landscape, complete with intrigue and danger. When we follow a couple Roman soldiers through the streets of Bethlehem, it's genuinely fascinating, and the special's depiction of Herod - while certainly not even-handed - makes for an interesting foil. Things start to drag when the story shifts to Mary and Joseph, who are obnoxiously two-dimensional (as usual

Okay, this was kind of awesome. Well, it was weird and bemusing, cheesy and very surreal, but that can be a kind of awesome, right? I had never seen a full episode of this series, but I think I'm going to have to watch more after seeing this one. The cheese factor is right on the level that I really enjoy: the occasional wink and nudge in good fun, charming, affable characters, somewhat silly fight sequences and dated but well-meaning special effects. This episode isn't that impressive itself, though. Diana (in her civilian life as agent Diana Prince) is assigned to protect a trio of scientists. They each have knowledge of a piece of some doomsday weapon, and one of them has been kidnapped and... replaced with a lifelike android. If someone were to get all three scientists, then clearly, disaster! So Diana investigates, both in and out of costume, and eventually figures out the plot and rescues the scientists. No surprise there. In the process there are more androids (w

I remembered this one from my childhood and wanted to track it down. It might be my favorite Christmas Carol I've seen yet this year, but it's a very odd one. This is actually an animated remake of a live action musical version (also a TV special) from 1956. It's full of songs and music; there's actually very little dialogue. I really like the music, although bear in mind the style has a lot in common with old-fashioned movie musicals. Some of the songs are wonderfully surreal. Near the start, Erin asked me to confirm that we'd just heard a bunch of alley cats singing about how Scrooge was so stingy that Satan was going to complain about him in Hell. Yes, yes we had. They manage to fit digressions about both Santa Claus and Jesus into an hour-long Christmas Carol, so there are a few common scenes missing from this adaptation. Nothing about young Scrooge at school, and if you blink you'll miss the Ghost of Christmas Future. I like the voice acting most

Jack Frost is one of the later Rankin-Bass stop-motion specials, and as such represents a trade off. The animation is far more refined than most of the more famous specials: the movement is far more fluid and natural than Rudolph, Year Without a Santa Claus, or Santa Claus is Comin' to Town, for example. However, the special is missing any of the charm that made those work, which is probably why this hasn't endured in the same way. I think a lot of the blame goes to the concept of the narrator, a groundhog named Pardon-Me-Pete, who drains the energy from the special every second he's on screen. Say what you will about the best Rankin-Bass specials, but there's a sort of fairy-tale mythology they seem to inhabit. Pete just doesn't belong in that world, and he kills any chance this might have had to gain some gravitas. And it does try: the story used in Jack Frost is actually structured as a sort of tragedy, with the main character having to sacrifice his chanc

I suppose even the Muppets can have an less-than-stellar special. This is far from terrible, but not actually all that good either. Really, the big problem is there aren't enough Muppets. Whenever the Muppets are on screen, the energy picks up, the jokes are actually funny, and the acting improves. When the camera is focused on John Denver and legions of bland back-up dancers, it's dull as dirt. Now I generally like John Denver, or at least don't dislike him. But here he's incapable of acting like a human being, and he looks sort of like a robot. Plus he keeps adding boring religious stuff in between scenes of Muppets being sweet. Also this isn't particularly well directed or well shot. Or even well structured: this special flirts with the idea of having a plot, but ultimately abandons it for ill-thought out musical numbers. It's not all bad: Rowlf and Kermit both get in pretty songs, the opening Twelve Days of Christmas is classic, and Miss Piggy

Overall, this is a better version of The Nutcracker, but it still isn't great. After our experiences with Nutcracker: The Motion Picture , I was leery of anything that crossed the line between filming a stage production and making a movie. This special made this error less, but I yelled at the screen several times anyway. “Stop with the poor special effects and just film the dancing!”or something. Maybe Erin recalls, I was somewhat incoherent in my frustration. Happily, when they did film the dancing here, the dancing is very strong. The costumes were better, the choreography was better, it was just overall better done than the blatant cheesiness of the first one we watched. Now, there are a few aspects of the costuming that make it clear that this is ballet, filmed in the 1970's. There is no hiding of bodies, no shying away from ridiculously tight shiny pants. So be aware of that. This version does actually manage to get across my favorite thing about prof

Good horror movies differ from bad ones more in the moments that aren't scary than those that are.  It's the time between the deaths and bloodshed that develop tone and build characters we care about, thus giving their deaths meaning. A good horror movie cherishes these moments, making the most of every second.  Black Christmas, on the other hand, does not.  The characters remain dull, often coming across as being as bored with the movie as I was.  Time drags between killings.  Which isn't to say the deaths are all that interesting, either: by and large, they're as ridiculous and slow-paced as the rest of the film. As far as the plot's concerned, logic is a stranger to this film.  A sorority girl disappears, and the police conduct a thorough search of the park.  But not the house she lived in.  If they'd bothered to look there, they'd have found her body in the attic.  Along with the killer. It's not so much that the movie is absurd that bothers

I have serious memories tied up in this special. This means I even like the sappy parts. It's such great classic Sesame Street, though, that I suspect you'll like a few of the sappy parts too. I was going to start off by saying that the opening with the oversized skating costumed characters is pretty useless, but on re-watching, Bird Bird skating with the little girl is pretty cute, even though it isn't the same little girl he's friends with through the rest of the special. Living in New York City adds a whole other level to watching Sesame Street, and something like this from the '70s makes the original target audience (inner-city kids) really clear. There is a sequence based in the old subway, with beat-up turnstiles and a guy who sells tokens. (The subway car and the station are obviously sets, but I don't know about the platforms.) I love that it's set so firmly in New York. I love Oscar in this, he's so delightfully snarky. I even love him t

Is this really as bad as you've heard?  Yeah.  It might be worse. If you haven't had the pleasure, this is a variety show featuring a surprising number of cast members from the movie.  Most of the established characters get a scene or two, although Chewbacca has a larger role.  It's his family celebrating "Life Day," after all, and he's trying to get past an imperial blockade to get home in time. Of course the real stars are Chewbacca's family, who are given extended scenes in which they go about their lives, talking and arguing without translation.  When they bother to call humans, we find out - again and again - that they're worried Chewie won't make it back. Around this riveting frame story, we get a number of short "comedic" bits, as well as some "musical" numbers (yes, those quotation marks are called for).  A few of the musical acts aren't awful - Jefferson Starship's number is fine.  The there's the Di

Just about everyone my age has some memory of watching this when they were young, although most of us can't seem to remember the details all that well.  Lindsay and I came across this in a drug store about a year ago and snatched it up. This viewing actually helped me put this in perspective.  By the time we got around to it, we'd already seen around seventy or eighty Christmas specials.  You'd think the burnout would work against this one, but, if anything, the contrast underlined just how good this special is. Before I get involved with that, let me take a moment to explain why such context might be needed.  The thing about Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas (and, just to be clear, it is a THING, not an ISSUE), is that it's slow.  Last year, when I saw this for the first time in two decades, I found it a little too slow for my tastes.  If it makes sense, I wouldn't call the special "boring," but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't bored. T

If you're a Muppet fan, you may have heard of this, but you may not have seen it. It is technically a special episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, and hasn't been released on DVD. All the great early Muppet staff worked on it: Jerry Juhl, Joe Raposo, Frank Oz, and of course Jim Henson. It's obviously early work, but solid.  The plot revolves around Cosmo Scam (an evil wizard) and his plan to replace Santa Claus.  Both Cosmo and Santa are played by Art Carney, everyone else is a Muppet. Sesame Street would have been just in its second year, and this feels very much in tone with Sesame Street.  There's nothing too scary for kids (all of Cosmo's monster lackeys have soft hearts) and there's moments of sly humor on the side for adults.  Also, plenty of very bad puns. The music is sweet and funny, and overall I found the hour charming, although it was slow here and there.  Later work would learn from this, tighten the pace, reuse puppets and ideas created here. 

Of all the Rankin/Bass specials I've seen this year, I think I like this one least. Oh, it's not all bad by a long stretch.  The Snow Miser and Heat Miser are fantastic, inventive characters: hell, they're the reason everyone remembers this as fondly as they do. The thing is, those two are just about the only aspects of this special that are any good.  The rest of it is an incoherent mess.  There's no real rhyme or reason for anything that occurs, and the vast majority of characters are just bizarre and random.  There's a song that emotionally blackmails a kid into believing in Santa Claus I find particularly disturbing.  I'm all for encouraging kids to hold on to imagination and fantasy, but that doesn't mean it's okay to suppress rational thought and skepticism. I like the idea of giving Mrs. Claus a chance to shine, but she mostly comes off as incompetent here (not to mention reckless: she almost gets a couple elves and a reindeer killed, then

This was almost good.  Almost.  I remember enjoying Pink Panther cartoons when I was young, but memories are tricky things. Mostly it was just too long, and too much of the same joke over and over. The Panther is poor and hungry, and goes through a long series of misadventures trying to get his hands on Christmas dinner.  It's discouraging watching him come close, only to fail, over and over.  I'm sure this is the point, to inspire a sense of seasonal charity, but I felt it missed slightly.  I can't decide if it belabored the point slightly too much, or should have just been more direct, as well as shorter. If you're already feeling the holiday spirit, this might be a pleasant half-hour.  The ending is sweet,  (although the very last moment kind of ruins it) and it's close to being touching. It's just slightly too long, slightly too boring, and so it deflates. If you'd like to see if you disagree, A Pink Christmas is currently streaming on Hulu.

"Santa Claus is Coming to Town" is the Rankin/Bass you can never quite remember.  That isn't to say it's the least well known: that's probably "The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus" (we couldn't find that one this year).  But, of the ones you've seen multiple times, this seems to be the hardest to recall. A pity: it's actually one of the better ones.  Actually, there's a case to be made that it might be the best. "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" borrows heavily from L. Frank Baum's writings on Santa (the orphan adopted by elves and even aspects of his capture all seem to have come from there).  Of course, Baum's work would later be adapted more directly in the aforementioned "Life and Times of Santa Claus," but that's irrelevant, since hardly anyone's ever seen it. The aspects of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" that seem to strike a chord are the Winter Warlock and the Burgermeister M

We saw this on a VHS tape we dug out of a box in Lindsay's parents house in Massachusetts.  It wasn't the worst thing we saw that weekend, but it certainly deserves an honorable mention.   First up, this deserves a spot on the list of unintentionally creepy animated production.  Some of the expressions the bears display are downright horrific.  Also, there's a scene towards the end where an eagle, upset that Papa Bear was considering turning his home into a Christmas tree, chucks an axe at the Bear family.  Almost got them, too.   For what it's worth, that eagle wound up having a change of heart.  After Papa Bear realized the inherent hypocrisy in cutting down someone's home for a holiday that was supposed to honor all life, the eagle, along with a brigade of other animals, did some Christmas decorating to ensure the Bear family had the best Christmas ever.   I think if I have to watch another special where a family, down on their luck, miraculously wi

This is the second Christmas special I've seen from the 1970's that focuses on the idea of bears delaying hibernation in order to learn about Christmas, the first being 1973's " The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas ." This one is quite a bit less surreal.  While the bears can speak, they're significantly less anthropomorphic.  Living in a cave in Yellowstone Park, they're friends with the park ranger, one of only four characters to receive any real screen time. Like a lot of specials, this is artistically impressive, while still being a complete and total failure.   The story would feel stretched at thirty minutes, making the special's hour-long running time superfluous and tedious.  A significant portion of the special is spent cycling through reused animation while music plays in the background.  In terms of actual content, this is one of the sparsest Christmas specials I've seen so far this year. Apparently, I

This half-hour special from the 1970s tells the heartwarming story of a stoned bear who is tricked into a life of slavery by Santa Claus. At least, that's what I got out of it. The first few minutes are somewhat intriguing.  There's a "bear city", where a large number of anthropomorphic bears live and work.  There's a lot of attempted comedy around the supporting characters and the honey factory where they all work; a few of the jokes are actually worth a chuckle.  The designs exist somewhere in that nebulous region between Yellow Submarine and Dr. Seuss, and, while they're not bad, they're not exactly inspired. While the rest of the bears are getting ready to hibernate for the winter, our intrepid hero, named... ergh... Ted E. Bear... wants to stay up and find Christmas. Spoiler alert: he finds it in the most trite, obvious place possible, with the help of a strange man in a red suit Ted can't identify, despite having been obsessed with Chri

This is one of four specials included on a DVD I fished out of the bargain bin at Best Buy labeled, "The New Christmas Classics."  I'm not exactly sure what qualifies all of these as "New", let alone "classics." If the internet is to be believed, The Fat Albert Christmas Special premiered in 1977, so it's been around for a while.  I put this on not having any idea what to expect - if I've ever seen an episode of this series before, I was too young to remember. All right, let's get this out of the way.  This special is boring.  Not mind-numbing or painful, but it definitely drags. The comedy doesn't help, either.  I don't know if the jokes are just anachronistic or what, but they didn't age well. That said, the special is far from a total waste.  While the jokes fall flat, the drama hits its mark.  The story plays out surprisingly well, and the writing is heartfelt and intelligent.  The special weaves elements of the Ch