Mainlining Christmas

This is the last of the "four pillars" of the classical animated Christmas specials.  No, wait.  It's the last of the four AMERICAN animated Christmas classics. There is... another.  But we'll leave that ominous assertion for another day. Rudolph is a tough nut to crack.  It's a decent special, but it certainly lacks the consistency or quality control of How the Grinch Stole Christmas or A Charlie Brown Christmas.  This is a flawed gem, that much is certain.  There are some slow spots, some weak writing, and some songs that are hard to sit through year after year.  Plus, all character growth takes place off screen: between scenes, Rudolph miraculously decides he can't run away from his problems, even as everyone at Santa's workshop realizes they were ripe bastards. Despite all that, it's really intriguing.  It's just so damned imaginative, it's impossible not to like.  Between the elf wanting to be a dentist, Yukon's team of show do

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

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

Erin is going to take this movie WAY too seriously, so I'm offering a rebuttal. It isn't good, of course it isn't good.  It's a CG Barbie movie.  But it's not crime-against-humanity levels.  It's pink and girly and very G-rated.  They gender swap all the characters (which is more than fine with me) and make the story more about the sin of vanity than the sin of greed.  Frankly, except for a few particularly painful scenes, I'd put this squarely into “so-bad-it's-good”.  Not quite good enough to seek out, but pair it with Beauty and The Beast: Enchanted Christmas, some sort of pink champagne, and a room full of enthusiastic young women, and you might have a very amusing time. I mean. it's produced by Mattel Entertainment!  HA! The DVD has a sing-along mode.  The main character has a fat tag-a-long cat named after a different Dickens book.  The Ghost of Christmas Past is a completely manic Tinkerbell. The whole thing is nuts. The animation is c

I just got through watching Barbie: A Christmas Carol, and wanted to write down a few thoughts while the movie was still fresh in my mind. My first thought isn't so much a thought, per se, as it is an overall emotional response; a desire, in fact.  Right now, I want to find a Barbie doll - any Barbie doll - and yank its head off its shoulders.  I want to snap every goddamn joint on that thing, and, if possible, I'd really like to feed the pieces through a wood chipper. And before you ask, no: I'm not overreacting.  It was really that bad.  It was worse - WORSE - than you'd expect a direct-to-DVD Barbie reinterpretation of A Christmas Carol to be.  In every imaginable way, it was worse. The animation... oh, God.  Dear, God.  Why?  The characters were less lifelike than the toys they were based on.  They weren't just soulless: it was like some demonic spirit crawled up from the depths of Hell and inhabited these empty, plastic shells and brought them to a stat

This is from the first round of direct-to-video sequels that Disney was beginning to crank out in earnest in the 90's.  As such, it's kinda bad. I think it has enjoyable moments, as well as some so-bad-it's-funny parts, but Erin despised it. That is a totally fair reaction. Given that Beauty and the Beast is sort of a self-contained story, the plot of the movie is a flashback that takes place in the middle of the original.  Sounds great already, doesn't it? The villain is a computer animated pipe organ, of all things, that fears Belle threatens his "special relationship" with Beast.  Yeah, it's kinda weird. I felt for the voice cast during some of the worst scenes. All of the actors from the original movie reprise their roles, plus Tim Curry (as the organ, naturally), and Bernadette Peters as a decorator turned Christmas Angel. There are moments of really terrible writing, acting, like most of the lines given to Beast throughout.  Especially when

"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

You know, if it weren't for Halloween's pending lawsuit for custody, I think I could just proclaim this the best Christmas movie of the past fifty years and be done with it. As it is, I'm pretty sure this is the only full length movie in color I'll be seeing this season I like more than Elf.* I find it interesting that both this and Elf share the same inspiration: both movies are set in worlds extrapolated from Rankin/Bass Christmas specials, and both take those settings surprisingly seriously. While Nightmare Before Christmas and Elf couldn't really be described as being in continuity with each other, either could easily be imagined in continuity with Rudoph. At any rate, there's a long list of reasons for why Nightmare has become the classic it has. In addition to its ties to existing classics, it's brilliantly designed, beautifully animated, and the music is amazing. I'm always a little surprised by just how much of the movie is devoted to s

Hooray!  Now I'm in the Halloween spirit.  Uh, Christmas spirit, Christmas spirit, that's what I said, right? Seriously, the scene in which Jack discovers Christmas Town I find to be one of the most holiday-cheer inducing scenes on film.  I get a big stupid grin on my face just listening to the song. It's a modern classic.  The animation is outstanding, the writing brilliant, the music amazing, the story inspired.  I have basically no complaints. I really sympathize with Jack. He discovers this wonderful thing that makes him feel warm and happy, and he starts out by trying to share it with his friends.  Everything spirals out of control, but it starts with a both selfish and unselfish instinct: Jack wants to have Christmas for himself because it makes him feel good, and he wants to share it, so his friends can feel it too. It doesn't work out, because despite their best efforts, the residents of Halloween Town just don't understand the whole "spreadin

This one hurt a bit. I don't think I've ever actually seen this before, at least not in its entirety.  It's not exactly a bad movie, but it's got a lot of problems, starting with the pace.  This movie crept along at a painfully slow pace, and I was ready to slam my head into a brick wall before this was a third of the way through. Unfortunately, that wasn't part of the deal.  I said I'd watch it, so watch it I did.  Through the slow-moving songs, the cheesy villains, and the entire swirling technicolor nightmare. The sad thing is that I can actually respect this.  Sure, it's slow and tedious, but it's also quite beautiful.  The sets are incredibly inventive (even if they do look like a closed-down amusement park), and the ingenious use of animation to weave comic-book like sound effects into the imagery predates similar techniques in movies like Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and Speed Racer by half a century.  On some level, th

Oh, I love old technicolor musicals. I love the silliness, the energy, the big dance numbers.  If you do not love old technicolor musicals, then by all means skip this one. This is particularly surreal, even for a holiday musical.  The whole thing takes place in Mother Goose Land, or something, in which Mary (quite contrary) has a lot of foster kids and a big secret inheritance.  There is a sappy love story and a mustache twirling villain, but first there is a ridiculously long song and dance number.  Overall there are a few too many songs, and many of the dances go a little too long, even for me. Plus one really odd scene that is apparently about the tragedy of a single woman not confident in her math ability.  Very odd. After about half the movie, the action moves to the Forest of No Return, the plot gets simpler, the music more fun, and the whole thing more enjoyable.  My favorite part might be the menacing singing trees.  The costumes and sets are a lot of fun throughout. W

We had barely recovered from Santa Claus (1959) the first time, when we went back in to watch MST3K go at it.  It was highly therapeutic watching others hate that stupid surreal film.  Read Erin's post about the original movie before going on, because I am not subjecting you to another full writeup of the plot. Some notable thoughts and quotes: During the hideous imitation of "It's a Small World" that opens the film: the sad and bored looking children are funny for the first 3 minutes or so, then they're just depressing. “If there is a soundtrack to Seasonal Affective Disorder, this is it” The ethnic stereotypes joked about by the robots aren't nearly so offensive as the ones in the movie. “Santa's laughter mocks the poor.” The interstitial puppet segments are cute but forgettable, which is pretty common for MST3K. FYI: This version cuts both the horrid nightmarish nutcracker rip-off dream sequence and the endless Merlin scenes. Because

If you thought you'd have to wait a while for something "worse than the Star Wars Christmas Special," have I got a surprise for you.  I stumbled across this dubbed version of an Mexican production from 1959 on Netflix. They also have an Mystery Science Theater 3000 version.  I haven't seen that just yet, but we're planning to get around to it next. What really concerns me - what horrifies me - is that Netflix predicted I'd consider this a three-star movie. I kind of wish I'd visited Wikipedia before watching this instead of afterward, so I'd have known it ranks on the IMDB's top 100 worst movies of all time list . For the record, I would still have watched it; I just wouldn't have done so sober. This is more a morality play than a movie.  Santa is a clear stand-in for Jesus, who gets name-dropped once or twice.  The moral of the story isn't exactly nuanced: do good, and you'll be rewarded in the end - this is actually stated