Mainlining Christmas

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. 

I've never seen an episode of Eureka before, but a friend recommended it and it was on Hulu.  Overall, I thought this was pretty good, though it had some issues.  The main problem was the drama.  Some writers can handle it; others can't.  If you're working in television (or any other media for that matter) a good rule of thumb is never to start a monologue with the words, "When I was young."  If you must go down this path, make sure you do so no more than once per episode. Yeah, this one was really slow at times.  Fortunately, there were enough clever moments and fun ideas to pick up the slack.  The episode took an interesting approach to the legend of Santa Claus, all the while dealing with your requisite Christmas cliches.  Fortunately, it offered a twist to just about everything going on, and there were some great jokes. As for the rest, I can't speculate whether I'd have liked it better if I knew the characters or premise.  Regardless, seeing as

The Fraggles are usually pretty great, and this episode is no exception. In this Christmas/Solstice themed episode, Gobo questions the utility of their holiday, The Festival of the Bells. He sets out to challenge the myth and find out whether or not the Great Bell actually exists. There's a surprising amount of existential angst in this episode for a children's show starring puppets. Meantime, Doc and Sprocket do a bit of exploring of different holiday traditions, and Doc teaches Sprocket about the link between Saturnalia and Christmas in about ten seconds. It's awesome. There's more than a bit of sappy “look inside for the truth” type stuff by the end, but it really amuses me that not having their festival has actual measurable implications. Also, I'm a sucker for Fraggles, and a sucker for Solstice-themed holiday episodes. I really enjoy the main song of the episode: “There's a Promise” aka “Raise Your Voices” is fun. And Cantus is in it! What'

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

In Attleboro, Massachusetts, there exists a magical place where, every year, the baby Jesus spits up two metric tons of Christmas cheer. This place is La Salette. La Salette Shrines is a ministry which takes the holidays very seriously.  How seriously, you might ask.  Well, to put it mildly, they bring in a fried dough stand. Yes, their grounds includes numerous shrines and sculptures, all of which are wired up in the gaudiest Christmas lights imaginable.  They have an animatronic Virgin mother, and a real live donkey for kids to fawn over. The following slide show offers a vague idea of the magnitude of the place, but it's something you really need to see for yourself. Before leaving La Salette, we picked up a mug of cider, which came in a commemorative plastic cup.  I think, better than anything else, this captures the spirit of La Salette.  The spirit of Christmas:

You've probably all seen pictures of the tree at Rockefeller Center before.  It's always a very large tree.  I went a couple of times this year to document a few things you might not have seen.