Mainlining Christmas

The premise of Die Hard 2 is incredibly similar to that of the original: John McClane is meeting his wife on Christmas Eve, only for her to be taken hostage by terrorists along with others. McClane has a short amount of time to figure out their plans and save her. I grew up thinking this was written to be a facsimile of part one, but a few minutes on Wikipedia reveals that the truth is a bit more complicated. Die Hard 2 was based on a novel called 58 Minutes, which wasn't in the same series as the book the first Die Hard was based on. 58 Minutes was published a year before Die Hard came out, meaning it couldn't have been inspired by the movie's success. I suppose the writer might have been inspired by the novel "Nothing Lasts Forever" (there are a lot of parallels), but I don't see any evidence for that. Interestingly, both novels involved the hero (whose name wasn't John McClane in either) trying to save his daughter. The movies changed it to his w

Life is sometimes unfair. So it serves to reason that Christmas is sometimes unfair. If this were not so, if we truly lived in the best of all possible Christmases as Leibniz thought, then Jingle all the Way would have no defenders, and Santa with Muscles wouldn't be entirely unknown. While it probably doesn't need to be said, I will state it now for the record: Santa with Muscles is not a good movie. It is - objectively - pretty bad, a vehicle for Hulk Hogan produced years after the wrestler's fame had waned. When it opened, it made $120k in its opening weekend and closed after two weeks. However, unlike 99% of zany holiday comedies, it is absolutely watchable. There are even moments when the filmmakers attempted to be funny that resulted in funny scenes. If you don't watch many movies in this genre, you'll be forgiven for not realizing how rare this is. The movie opens with a girl writing a letter to Santa. The girl's town is being terrorized by some sor

The Knights of Christmas Suzanne Barclay, Margaret Moore, Deborah Simmons, 1997 Crossposted from The Blue Fairy’s Bookshelf Yup, it’s officially a theme. MORE SHORT STORIES. These ones are a little more like novellas, though. This is a Harlequin Historical compilation, three short works set at Christmas. I thought it might be a somewhat entertaining read: a bit of fluffy medieval holiday romance. Well, I was right, sort of, in that it was fluffy (in a shallow way) and medieval (in its uneasy gender roles). The first story, Kara’s Gift , was the one I actually liked. It has in common with its sibling stories awkward and somewhat off-putting description in the sex scenes, but the characters are at least likable, the story super-cliche but amusing. Duncan is a landless knight, back from the crusades with enough treasure to wed his childhood sweetheart, but instead he’s swept up in a Scottish clan-war and a wild-hearted pagan lass. It’s actually kind of sweet by the end, and th

It's strange that it took me so long to see The Ref . It's relatively well known, but somehow it always slipped below my radar. But it finally came up on my Netflix queue. The plot revolves around a thief who takes a dysfunctional family hostage on Christmas Eve to hide out from the cops. By and large, comedies about families with issues are just about the worst genre holiday entertainment has to offer, but miraculously, The Ref is actually pretty good. While there's a long list of things this movie did wrong, the filmmakers made several extremely smart decisions that elevate this to something worth watching. First of all, they cut the slapstick down to a minimum. Second - and maybe more important - they wrote some depth into the main characters. If the husband and wife had been two-dimensional, this thing would probably have been as bad as Surviving Christmas . Well, maybe not that bad, but you get the point. Fortunately, the husband and wife were well cast (Judy D

This isn’t a full episode, just a short. The nice thing about shorts is they don’t overplay their gimmick. In this piece, Dexter disbelieves in Santa, while DeeDee says he’s real. To prove his sister wrong, Dexter sets up a series of elaborate traps to prove that their father is Santa. I, uh, may sympathize with this a little too much . Due to classic cartoon logic, Santa is real, and Dexter ends up chasing him all over town using a rocketship built in their chimney. He’s convinced until the very end that it’s his dad, breaking out the special effects to trick the kids. This ends badly for all involved. It’s not brilliant, but it’s an amusing few minutes. If you want to hunt it down, it's part of Episode 37 in Season two.

The name on this thing is somewhat ambiguous - the DVD is simply labeled "Saturday Night Live Christmas", but the special includes the word "Past." I'm going with that, because it's a more interesting name. I'm pretty sure I saw this compilation when it aired in 1999 (the selection of shorts was really familiar). It's a mix of old stuff, along with stuff that was new when it aired, but is now just slightly less old. In total, there are 18 skits on this DVD, which comes out to around an hour-fifteen. They didn't bother including any extras, which is a little baffling. The skits aren't all great, but with twenty-four seasons of holiday shows to pick and choose from, they were certainly able to find some entertaining bits. Like most SNL compilations, this makes the show look a hell of a lot better than it's ever actually been. There are a handful of high points, including "The Lost Ending of It's a Wonderful Life," wher

It turns out I remember Nicktoons better than I thought I did, because I remembered this episode as we watched it. That’s always an odd feeling. It was also odd that it never once came up in this heavily Christmas-themed episode that one of the adults is Jewish, and the main kid is thus half-Jewish. At first I thought: maybe they hadn’t decided that about the characters at this point in the show (The Rugrats Chanukah special didn’t hit ‘til 1996) but a little googling tells me that it was in the first episode. So… that’s weird. I guess they didn’t think the viewing kids could handle more than one religion at a time. And anyway, this one’s all about Santa. For most of the episode, it’s actually quite well done. The episode is just packed with intertwining plots. Angelica’s dad is concerned about her being traumatized by the unmasking of a mall Santa (she’s just pissed that the toys the store gave her for her temper tantrum aren’t the expensive stuff she wants). Chuckie is afraid

This was highly ranked on a list over at Rotten Tomatoes , so I decided to check it out. It's a Christmas war movie, which seems to be a fairly sparse sub-genre, especially when compared to the almost absurdly large Christmas action movie genre. It's a stark and fascinating film, at times sad, beautiful, and funny. It's got some issues which hold it back from being a bona fide classic, but it's still worth watching. The movie follows a unit of "whiz kid" soldiers in World War II who are sent to gather intelligence. When the movie opens, half of their unit is already dead and most of the rest are sick of combat. Every synopsis I've seen focuses on the movie's second act, when they have a series of bizarre encounters with a German squad culminating in a Christmas celebration. There's some good film making on display here. These scenes are tense, funny, and engaging. Gradually, we learn the Germans want to surrender, but there are some complicat

This special episode of T he Magic School Bus was equal parts awesome and awful; a bizarre work of propaganda that removes the education from edutainment, yet is strangely intriguing. There's a moment in this episode where the titular vehicle is hit by its own recycling-nullification ray and transforms into junk. That's an absolutely perfect metaphor for the episode. Maybe for the series. But damned if it isn't fun to watch. The episode begins right before holiday break. It's definitely a 90's conception of the "holiday," too, complete with pine trees, green and red decorations, multicolored lights, and an near endless number of Christmas tunes with new recycling-themed lyrics. I don't think they said the word, "Christmas" once, though they did mention Hanukkah several times. My favorite shot in the special is one of a chalkboard with a picture of a menorah and other Hanukkah paraphernalia surrounded by a Christmas garland. They tried s

This is a collection of South Park episodes I found on Netflix. I guess it was released on DVD originally. I'm not the world's biggest South Park fan, but I've seen a handful of episodes, some of which were brilliant. Others... not so much. Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo (1997) Jesus, really? All right, the premise of this episode revolves around magical, talking Christmas poop. I think there's supposed to be some sort of message about political correctness or something, but mostly it's just juvenile humor about poo. Oh. Okay. Wikipedia sheds some light on this. Apparently, Mr. Hankey was supposed to be the main character of the show. Not this episode; I'm talking about South Park as a whole. An earlier version of their pitch was for "The Mr. Hankey Show." Yeah. That would have been much, much worse. Merry Christmas, Charlie Manson (1998) This was a little better, thanks in no small part to Mr. Hankey playing a far smaller role. The epis

Christmas on Ganymede and Other Stories Edited by Martin H Greenberg, 1990 Crossposted from The Blue Fairy’s Bookshelf I was so excited when I found this book! A collection of sci-fi themed Christmas stories, just the thing to break up the Christmas monotony, right? Now I know why I kept finding copies of it for a dollar. It’s not all bad. There are some stories I liked, but most of the authors are phoning it in here. It’s like everyone had one mediocre holiday story in them, and instead of reading it in a collection of other good stories on other topics or other good stories by the same author, it’s bundled with every other author’s one mediocre story. But let’s be more specific, shall we? “To Hell with the Stars” Jack McDevitt, 1987 To hell with your pessimistic cliche attitude, Mr. McDevitt, warp drive might still be possible - 1 Star “A Midwinter's Tale” Michael Swanwick, 1988 A nicely creepy Solstice tale, well done - 4 Stars “Christmas on Ganymede” Isaac

I loved this movie when I was in high school, but - despite having a copy - I haven't actually sat down and watched it in years. I'd more or less forgotten it was set at Christmas until I saw it on a list of holiday movies. I figured it would be cheating to count this as a "Christmas movie" and decided it would be a good time to re-watch it. Turns out I was wrong about it being a stretch: the holiday elements permeate the setting, tone, and music of the film. This is definitely a Christmas movie, and a fantastic one at that. The Long Kiss Goodnight is directed by Renny Harlin, better known for Die Hard 2. The writing is credited to Shane Black (hence the Christmas setting, I suppose), though Wikipedia mentions there was some script-doctoring involved. The movie is, among other things, absurd and implausible: if you can't suspend your disbelief, don't bother putting it on. But it's clearly not intended to be realistic. This is unapologetically pul

Olive, the Other Reindeer is an animated special produced by Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons and Futurama, and features Drew Barrymore in the lead role. With that kind of muscle behind it, you'd expect Olive to be pretty good. And you'd be completely and totally wrong. The design and animation tops the long list of problems plaguing this thing. The majority of the special is done using 2-D animation on 3-D environments. The backgrounds are fine, if underwhelming (think video games from a decade ago). The characters, on the other hand, are astonishingly and unbelievably awful. The special is based on a picture book, which uses highly stylized two-dimensional images that resemble (intentionally) something a kid might draw. The special attempts to recreate this effect and winds up with something resembling what a first-year college student might animate. It's painful to look at. A few years later, this would probably have been done in Flash, and the results would ha

Man, I forgot how freaking weird this show is! It’s really, really weird. Watching this episode, about how one kid’s attempt to keep Christmas around a bit longer spirals into a battle for the ages between the Christmas Spirit and an evil Garbage Man with his own theme song is... well, there’s nothing else quite like it. Overall I’m glad we saw this. It certainly wasn’t boring. It was an exceptionally surreal experience and it suffered from the abuse of sound effects, but at least it wasn’t boring. If you’re looking to relive what you liked about Pete & Pete, you might want to start elsewhere. But if you want a very unique tale of holiday cheer, give this a shot. I found it on YouTube.

The episode opens with Frasier excited about spending Christmas with his family. There's a sequence at his office Christmas party introducing several elements: there's a drunk woman he's supposed to drive home, Ross got him a better gift than he got her, and one of his coworkers wants him to take his Christmas shift. Only one of these actually extends beyond the opening sequence and influences the episode at all. The others, which feel like plot hooks, just evaporate. I'm not really complaining: the amorous drunken woman and a gift imbalance aren't exactly episode premises I needed to see developed, but I'm baffled as to why they were included then left unresolved. Frasier gets home and receives some bad news: his son will be spending Christmas with his ex-wife instead of him. This leaves him depressed, which leads into a fight with his father. Rather than go to the family cabin, Frasier decides to work on Christmas (yeah, that required us to sit through t

Remember That ‘70s Show? That freaking show ran FOREVER, but it was one of those things you always could turn on and it would usually be funny. There were a total of five Christmas episodes over the eight seasons, and they were all pretty enjoyable to watch. That '70s Show: The Best Christmas Ever (1998) It took us awhile to get into this episode from the first season. As the complications and subplots mounted, we were amused, but weren’t engaged. By the end, though, it started to come together. Among other threads, this followed Eric’s attempt to throw a Christmas party (with beer) in the basement, Red having to work Christmas Eve, and Hyde trying to impress Donna with a gift. Not a bad little Christmas episode. That '70s Show: Hyde's Christmas Rager (2000) By the time we were watching this one, we were back in the rhythm of the show (and we were watching a later episode, so the quality had picked up a little). I know I’ve seen this episode before: it's about the boy

This is not one the best episodes of Bonkers, but it has moments of amusement. But then again, I liked Bonkers, and plenty of people just plain did not. I get it, it was a farcical comedy for the most part, and it was loosely based on the world of Who Framed Roger Rabbit while being entirely animated. But hey, I thought the show (about a toon who joins the human police force to help them deal with toon crimes) was cute and had promise. I’ll admit this Christmas episode was pretty weak, though. Santa has a malfunction testing a new sleigh, and ends up at Fall-Apart Rabbit’s home with some amnesia. Fall-Apart takes his new friend “Jim” on some unseasonal adventures, which mostly seemed there to kill time with bad jokes. Meanwhile, some elves show up at the police station to enlist their help in tracking down the missing Santa. Bonkers takes on the case (though he doesn’t seem to get very far), while the elves try to get his partner, Lucky, to train to be a Santa stand-in in case they

Holy crud-muffins. I thought I vaguely remembered this show, and a lot more came back to me as I watched, but I had forgotten just how utterly insane it is. If you were not a Nicktoons watcher in the 90’s, you might have missed this one. It’s about Rocko, a wallaby who moves to the city with his dog Spunky, and his friends (a neurotic turtle-thing and a big dumb cow raised by wolves) and his enemies (the catfish-thing that lives down the street). It’s sometimes satirical, often subtly adult, and sometimes just gross-out. It wasn’t as biting or as gross as something like Ren and Stimpy, though. In this episode, Rocko’s feeling down about being on his own for the holidays, so he invites his friends over. A game of telephone later, and the whole town’s invited to a party, along with some magic Christmas elves that moved in across the street. Of course, professional jerkass Mr. Bighead gets involved, and it looks like Rocko will be alone for Christmas after all, until his new friend th

A few years ago, I looked at Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire , the series' pilot/Christmas special. It held up incredibly well. But while that was the first, the series has certainly racked up some additional Christmas episodes in its twenty-four seasons on the air. The two I'm looking at today were included on a DVD called "The Simpsons Christmas," along with the pilot and two others which really shouldn't count as Christmas episodes at all. But the DVD was released in 2003, back when they only had a handful of actual holiday episodes to choose from. First up, we've got "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace," from season nine. I remember those years: we used to debate whether it was time for the show to wrap up. It seems almost quaint now. At any rate, Bart accidentally destroys the family's presents and Christmas tree, hides the evidence, and blames their disappearance on a burglar. While the plot meanders from there, the jokes are solid and th

While I maintain the previous year's 2-parter about Scully's genetically engineered baby represents what was bad about X-Files, this is a perfect example of the show at its best. Whimsical, darkly humorous, and fun, this was a fantastic episode which works as a standalone. It's better if you've seen a few other episodes of the show, but it's really not required. This one opens with Scully joining Mulder outside a cliche haunted house on Christmas Eve. The two immediately start sniping at each other like a married couple. The dialogue is witty and clever and sets up the premise quickly: long ago, two young lovers killed themselves here and, according to legend, their ghosts still haunt the mansion every Christmas Eve. Scully dismisses the story and is ready to take off. Unfortunately, she can't find her keys. Reluctantly, she follows Mulder inside, and they begin investigating. Things escalate quickly, and they soon uncover two decomposed bodies that bear