BUGS BUNNY'S LOONEY CHRISTMAS TALES (1979)
The first minute or so of this is lost to time, as the tape begins right at Yosemite Sam as Scrooge counting his money. I actually found that first minute online and it was weird to watch the complete version of something I had ages ago. Anyway, this is just three Christmas-themed Looney Tunes cartoons with some tiny linking bits. The first one is a Looney Tunes-themed Christmas Carol rendition, which isn't even the best Christmas Carol rendition on this tape. It's notable for two things to me; one, Bugs Bunny pretending to be a Christmas ghost implies that he is going to take Yosemite Scrooge to hell. Two, this cartoon was used in that scene in Lethal Weapon where Mel Gibson tries to work up the nerve to kill himself. DISSONANCE! The other two cartoons are pretty good. One's a Road Runner one involving wintery business and Road Runner cartoons are always good. The other has Bugs Bunny messing around with the Tasmanian Devil who is unexpectedly pretending to be Santa. It's nice. HEY SPEAKING OF WEIRDOS PRETENDING TO BE SANTA, WHAT'S NEXT?
HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS (1966)
Holy shit, this turned 50 this year? Goddamn. It's an outright classic and it's not hard to love it... but it is also weird as shit. Befitting Dr. Seuss, I suppose. This is one of those specials where, after watching it over and over, you start to peck at the logic of it. Like, just how goddamned loud is Christmas in Whoville if the Grinch, way up on a high mountain in a cave, can not only hear it but is bothered by it? It's wild, this one. I think the version on this tape is edited for TV a little, but not by too much. What else is there to say about the Grinch? That that line about Christmas meaning a little bit more makes my own heart grow a size or two every time? Or I could talk about how the airing of this special on the tape actually includes 5 seconds of some COMMERCIALS? They're mostly cut out here, but we get pieces of ads for a Little Miss Singing Mermaid doll... and Chicken Tonight. I NEED MORE OF THAT STUPID 90'S DANCE! Enough of that though, it's on to...
A GARFIELD CHRISTMAS (1987)
I put this on a top 10 cartoons list some years ago. Now that I've seen loads of great cartoons it might not make it on there... but this is still my favorite thing on the tape. Garfield And Friends was my jam back in these days, and this is a lovely little special where Lorenzo Music gets to voice Christmas cynicism. There are so many good moments in this one, I don't know where to begin. The song as Jon drives to the farm and Garfield is a total cynic about Christmas. Any funny moment involving Jon's grandma. EVERYTHING about the dinner scene. It's an almost nonstop series of hilarity... and then, just as you're settled into the laughs, it whaps you across the face with feelings. The scene in which Grandma is rocking in her chair with Garfield on her lap is utterly heartbreaking. She's wistfully talking about how Grandpa, who's dead now, always loved Christmas. It always got me as a kid, and as an adult who's lost some special old people it gets me even more. Right in the middle of your Christmas special, you get an old woman talking about how much her dead husband loved Christmas and how this is the night she misses him the most. Who wouldn't sob at that? Then there's a payoff where Garfield finds old love letters from Grandpa and oh god I'm gonna sob here move on to the next one.
WILL VINTON'S CLAYMATION CHRISTMAS CELEBRATION (1987)
See, they're not all well-known ones! At least, this one doesn't seem like it gets much air time in this day and age. This is an odd one. It's all done in claymation, obviously, but what we have is a framing device where two dinosaurs are hosting and setting up Christmas carol... music videos. There's the side story of animals who keep getting "Here We Come A-Wassailing" mixed up with other words. The music videos themselves are okay, but weird. Carol Of The Bells has actual bells performing it (or I WOULD know that if my young ass hadn't taped over that bit with part of Fred Penner's Place. Look it up, it's extremely Canadian.), there's walruses doing a figure skating routine to Angels We Have Heard On High, and THE GODDAMNED CALIFORNIA RAISINS DO RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER. It leans more towards Christmas hymn adaptations than it does Santa and presents for whatever reason. The highlight of this is Joy To The World, which just has phenomenal animation and a very soulful rendition. This one's okay, I dig it. Next, please!
THE CHRISTMAS RACCOONS (1980)
NOW we're getting into Canadian territory here. The Raccoons is a Canadian cartoon classic from the late 80's/early 90's and thanks to reruns and whatnot I've seen a bunch of it. It's a fun little show from what I remember, but it actually started out as a bunch of specials. This Christmas one is the very first, and it's the debut of the whole thing! What we have here is a tale involving a forest being cut down en masse and a ranger going off to investigate while his kids go out to look for a Christmas tree. It turns out that an evil pink...aardvark? I think that's what he is? Anyway his name's Cyril Sneer and he's cutting down the trees because he's basically an evil version of Scrooge McDuck. He cuts down the tree that our titular raccoons live in and the kids take it off with them, leaving the raccoons homeless. This is a good little special, and it's even better with the songs by Rupert Holmes and Rita Coolidge (who also voices Melissa Raccoon and did the theme tune to Octopussy). There's no Run With Us yet, sorry, but this airing does include the TV series bumper where the announcer says "THE RACCOONS WILL BE RIGHT BACK" and the logo EXPLODES. Though the tape cuts off two of those bumpers before the explosion, THANKS MOM. This is a great special, though. The next one, however...
BLUETOES THE CHRISTMAS ELF (1988)
I'll say it. This is the low point of the tape. At least it's the one where my family forgot to hit pause on the VCR to cut out the commercials, so I got ads for Zellers and Bell telephones and the movie Hook. Boy, the movie Hook looks GREAT from that trailer. Oh yeah, Bluetoes. I think part of why I hate this one is personal reasons. I'm kind of an anxious idiot, and one of my anxious fears is the fear that people don't actually like me all that well and are only tolerating me and will one day get fed up with me and abandon me cold turkey. What, then, of this special? We have a small little elf at the North Pole who wants to help out with the Christmas preparations. NOBODY LIKES HIM. All the other elves want NOTHING TO DO WITH HIM. Do they tell him this? NO! They shittalk the poor little guy BEHIND HIS BACK while sweet-talking him into doing random errands. His errands keep getting messed up by a polar bear and they end up with collateral damage, but nobody believes there's a polar bear. Then later in the special, the little elf is bringing up Christmas socks he fixed and everyone ELSE sees the polar bear and is running from it. The polar bear slams into the little guy and fucks up the Christmas socks AND THEY GET MAD AT HIM FOR THE STOCKINGS BEING RUINED! YOU ASSHOLES KNOW THERE'S A POLAR BEAR NOW! DO YOU HATE HIM THAT MUCH? JUST SAY IT! SAY IT! GOD DAMN IT! Oh yeah, and then the kid ends up on Santa's sleigh but some presents get left behind and the little guy puts tiny presents in his socks for those kids and invents Christmas stocking stuffers... AT THE COST OF GETTING FROSTBITE AND HIS TOES TURNING BLUE. OH NOW ALL THE ELVES LOVE HIM! Christmas elves are a bunch of petty little assholes in this special and I hate them and I don't like this.
A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS (1965)
Well, here's another absolute classic. It's okay, I guess. The best parts are the witty dialogue coming from little kids. Personal highlights for me: Lucy's psychiatric session where she lists a bunch of phobias, Sally's Christmas letter to Santa and Charlie Brown's shocked declaration "TENS AND TWENTIES???", anything that Snoopy gets up to-- hey wait, that reminds me of the Christmas song about Snoopy and the Red Baron. If that didn't come from here then where the HELL did that come from? I love the idea of aluminum Christmas trees, was that a real thing in the 60's? I mean, we have an artificial one up now because real ones are a hell of a piece of work... but it doesn't clang when you knock on it! The whole Jingle Bells bit is lovely as well. Then there's Linus telling Charlie Brown what Christmas is all about by literally just reading from the fucking Bible. I'm sure it was meant to be played straight in 1965, but today I just read it as Linus being a snarky little shit. All in all, this is... okay I guess. There's a reason why it's stayed around for 50 years but it's not my favorite on the tape.
TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1974)
This one's weird. It's a Rankin-Bass cartoon and they have a whole stable of Christmas classics, but this one I never really hear anyone talk about. Also this airing was "brought to you by" this weird new machine called the Super Nintendo. Of which we get another 5 seconds of ads. My family had to be there pressing pause to skip all of the commercials. They sat there and watched these cartoons in 1991. Anyway, this one is a retelling of the famous poem. You thought the elves in Bluetoes were jerks, get a load of this plot. A smartass mouse writes to the paper anonymously about how Santa Claus isn't real and undersigns it "All of us". Santa replies by returning to sender everyone's letters to him and basically cutting the town off from Christmas. Holy SHIT. There's the story of a clockmaker who makes a giant clock that will play a happy Christmas tune at midnight Christmas Eve, in the hope that Santa will hear it and come on down knowing that people do like him. Unfortunatly the clock breaks and nobody trusts the clockmaker... because that smartass mouse went into the clock to see how it works and broke it. The poor little kid is bawling his eyes out over ruining Christmas and it makes me cry too but he goes to fix the clock and everything's okay and then we follow the poem. I like the character design on the little cartoon mice, but all the people in this one just look weird. Especially Santa. He has a beard but only on his chin and it looks WEIRD AS SHIT. This is... okay. We're winding down here now, only a few left.
MICKEY'S CHRISTMAS CAROL (1983)
THERE'S the better Christmas Carol adaptation on this tape. To fill time it has some quick winter-themed Disney cartoons at the start; one with Donald Duck and his nephews having a snowball fight, and one where Chip and Dale are in Mickey's Christmas tree and Pluto goes bonkers trying to get them. This is a nice adaptation of A Christmas Carol, and my favorite until I saw the Muppet one. You've got the dear departed Alan Young as Scrooge, who would go on to play the nicer Scrooge we all know and love. There's lots of Disney character cameos in this from the old days, even. Of course, these faithful Christmas Carol adaptations run into the issue where you cast your main lead from the original work as Bob Crachitt... who then has to mourn his dead son in the Ghost Of Christmas Future bit. Thus, the sight of Mickey Mouse standing over the grave of his dead son, crying a tear. Holy shit. Also the hardcore business of Scrooge falling into his own fiery grave. Despite all that, it's a short but well-done Christmas Carol rendition. I like it.
FROSTY THE SNOWMAN (1969)
Rankin-Bass back at it again. This one's nice, I suppose... and it does keep showing up on TV these days so it's one of the ones with lasting power. Who could forget "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" or that asshole magician getting ten kinds of messed up chasing after his magic hat? This is another nice one where it's just a series of nostalgic memories of weird shit in it. Like the traffic guy who swallows his whistle, or the rabbit, or the ticket guy who seriously thinks a ten year-old is going to buy a $3000 train ticket to the North Pole. Then there's that sad moment where Frosty melts and the little girl has a cry about it, but everything's okay in the end. This is nice, for the penultimate cartoon of the tape. That's right, there's only one left... and it's a doozy of an obscurity.
A WISH FOR WINGS THAT WORK (1991)
Judging by the other things I can date on this tape, the airing I have archived is the broadcast debut of this. For years I had no idea who these idiots were, this penguin who wanted to fly and this dumb gross alley cat. It turns out they're characters from newspaper strips! Bloom County, or Outland, or something like that. I was a kid living in rural Newfoundland, I didn't know what any of this was. All I knew was that this special was... different. It's very strange and very silly. The penguin, Opus, wants to fly like other birds but he's a flightless bird so he can't. There's an idiotic stray cat named Bill and a whole bunch of other odd shit. The thing that made me laugh my head off as an adult is Opus's flightless bird support group, where a kiwi bird secretly voiced by Robin Williams is screaming about how his wife left him for AN AAAAAALBATROSS!!, the joke being that the albatross had big "wings". IT'S A DICK JOKE. OH MY GOD. Though it must be said as of this viewing, I don't know if the "crossdressing cockroaches anonymous" joke would fly right today. Santa's sleigh ends up crash-landing in a lake near Opus's town, and Opus has a nightmare where he can't fly a plane because penguins can't fly and the plane crashes. Except the nightmare is actually inserting Opus into an old black-and-white movie, Roger Rabbit style. I looked it up, the movie is Lost Horizon from 1937. I didn't know that until now. This is a nice one, and I had lots to say about it. It being quite unlike anything else on the tape made it stick in my mind more than others, and that's where the tape ends.
I hope you enjoyed this journey with me! All of these cartoons are worth a look if you've not seen them before. While we're here, I'm going to give you TWO MORE QUICK SUGGESTIONS FOR CHRISTMAS! My gift to you; stuff that's not on this tape, but is absolutely worth a look. We'll start with the more festive of them, and these will include Youtube links because they're actually there for you to watch!
HE-MAN AND SHE-RA: A CHRISTMAS SPECIAL (1985)
I include this on the list not because I am nostalgic for He-Man. I think we had a toy of his big green tiger friend, but that's it. No, the less you know about He-Man going into this, the better. This special is absolutely off-the-wall weird. You've got a rocket that warps one of He-Man's friends to Earth, and he meets some kids who tell him about Christmas and Jesus. Yes. That happens. There's all sorts of weird monsters that get fought, an alien puppy, a villain being overwhelmed by the spirit of Christmas and wanting to NOT be a nice guy... it's just so out there that it's worth the time to watch it. As for the other one?
KATE (1979)
I'll be real with you; the only two things this has to do with Christmas are the following. One, it aired around Christmas. Two, it has one Christmas song in it. That still makes it more Christmas-like than the Star Wars Holiday Special, so we have a leg up on that. Also no growling furry people or all the other weird shit. No, instead we have famed British songstress Kate Bush performing tunes on stage for 40 minutes! Peter Gabriel is also there! She even plays some songs from her third album that actually wasn't out yet in Christmas 1979. What a nice sneak preview! Look, I'm just putting it here because I adore Kate Bush and any excuse to spread the joy of Kate is a good one.
ALRIGHT THAT'S IT FOR REAL! I hope you all have a very good holiday season! There's a lot more business to write up for this blog in the next week, so we're going to have some fun here before the sun sets on 2016. Enjoy yourselves, spend time with people you care about, and do things that make you happy. Share the happiness with gifts and whatnot if you can. Just... have a good time, okay? Much love to you all, and have a good one. <3
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