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Festive Favourites

It’s that time of the year again—Christmas Special Overload!  There are the stalwart classics, of course, starring The Grinch, Rudolph, Charlie Brown, and Clark Griswold, but here are some of my other favourites:

A CLAYMATION CHRISTMAS
Who knew that when Will Vinton created a simple commerical for the California Raisin Board that it would lead to such magnificently substandard holiday fare!  Along with a sequence with his famous singing raisins, I can recall “We Three Kings” sung doo-wop style by some camels and a dinosaur who thought “Here We Come A-Wassailing” was actually “Here We Come A-Waffling”.

A CHRISTMAS STORY
“You’ll shoot your eye out!” This movie is really unlike any other holday movie.  This isn’t a movie about magic, or that warm fuzzy feeling of sitting around the tree with a cuppa warm eggnog—this is a movie about pure disappointment and hating your family, which probably explains why it’s on the IMDb Top 250 List!  The leg lamp, the decoder ring, the frozen tongue, the snowsuit, the Red Rider BB gun, the soap—Holy Fudge! It’s all brilliant!

THE MUPPET FAMILY CHRISTMAS
Everyone’s familar with the Muppet Christmas Carol with Michael Caine as Scrooge, but this was a made-for-TV special in which all the muppets went up to Fozzie’s mom’s farmhouse for Christmas (Fozzie’s mom was just Fozzie in a floral dress and a grey wig—sort of a furry Norman Bates).  They were joined by the Sesame Street muppets which gave us great moments such as The Swedish Chef trying to cook and eat a juicy, fattened Big Bird and the Christmas pageant in which The Two-Headed Monster plays a retarded Santa Claus.  We’re also visited by The Fraggles and are treated to their pagan “pass it on” holiday ritual.  Watch out for that icy patch.

CHRISTMAS EVE ON SESAME STREET
The most vivid memory I have of this special was the opening skating scene.  A bunch of fully grown adults in Muppet constumes skate around an ice rink, playing jump-the-barrel and, when Cookie Monster suggests it to the cue of some ominous music, CRACK THE WHIP!  I had never heard of Crack the Whip as a child, but this movie warned me of its dangers!  It’s so suspenseful I wouldn’t have been surprised if I actually had a heart attack watching it at the age of six.  Other highlights include the Muppety retelling of O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi in which Ernie sells his rubber duckie to buy a cigar box for Bert’s paperclip collection, but—oh no!—Bert sells his paperclips to buy Ernie a soapdish for the rubber duckie!  The song “True Blue Miracle” sung by the original 1970s cast in bellbottoms and muttonchops is still a damn fine song!  The best thing about this whole special, however, is that it predates Elmo.

SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN
Sure everybody loves Rudolph, but secretly my favourite Rankin-Bass holiday special is this origin story of the Santa.  The Burl Ives snowman is replaced with a letter carrier voiced by Fred Astaire, and the red-haired St. Nick is voiced by the inimitable Mickey Rooney, giving us the most homosexual Santa Claus in film history!  I love the story, though.  Santa Claus starts out as a revolutionary—a guerilla toymaker helping out the children oppressed by the anti-toy regime of Boris Badinov Burgermeister Meisterburger.  The movie teaches children of all ages how to stage a government coup and rage against the machine!  Fight the power!  Ho Ho Ho!

TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS
Not as famous as their patented Animagic stop motion films, Rankin Bass also did a handful of traditionally animated specials.  This film attempts to build a story around the famous Clement Moore poem.  In it we meet Albert, a pesky instigator of a mouse who is most definitely stirring.  He gets the bright idea to write a letter to Santa telling him that thanks, but no thanks, he’s not needed and that he should stay the hell away.  So he does!  I don’t really remember how the movie was resolved, but I recall it involved clockworks and singing.  The moral: don’t cheese off the big cheese!

SANTA CLAUS: THE MOVIE
What a definitive title!  Dudley Moore plays a disgruntled elf who decides to quit his gig at the North Pole, but not before he steals the reindeer’s secret flying formula which he sells to a greedy candy manufacturer played to malicious perfection by John Lithgow who injects the formula into some puce lollipops guaranteed to make him millions (How 80s is THAT storyline?).  Throw in a romance between an upper class rich girl and a grubby street kid and you’ve got yourself Santa Claus: THE MOVIE!  And, yes, it’s as awful as it sounds!

ONE MAGIC CHRISTMAS
I somehow manage to see this movie every year.  Filmed in Owen Sound and starring Mary Steenburgen as a mother who’s lost her Christmas spirit, it’s a rather unlikely holiday movie in that not much happens that’s happy.  In fact, it’s downright gruesome.  The father is an unemployed bike-maker, the mother works packing groceries at a Knechtel’s, the family gets evicted from their house, they can’t afford presents, every one in the town is miserable and impoverished, then the father gets shot in a bank robbery, the thief steals his car in which the kids were waiting, and drives into a river where—sploosh—they all drown!  Mary Steenburgen witnesses her entire family violently die on Christmas Eve and we’re supposed to wonder why she has no Christmas spirit.  But with the help of Gideon, the Christmas Angel who looks like a child molestor played by Harry Dean Stanton and a Santa Claus with a thick Czech accent, the family actually comes back to life and there’s a happy ending afterall.  But not before I’ve shed a few tears… sniff.  I’m getting weepy just thinking about it!  (Film highlight: Mary Steenburgen’s southern-fried pronunciation of Mista Patayta Head… and we’re supposed to believe she’s from Owen Sound!)