The Great Christmas Specialpaloozorama : Part VI

When my boyfriend and I first started dating, he told me that I looked like Garfield. Because Garfield is awesome, I took this as a compliment. In the Garfield Christmas special, Jon takes Garfield and Odie to his parents' farm, where Garfield bonds with Jon's sassy G-Ma--a lady who says sassy G-Ma stuff like, "I remember back when all we had were wood-burning cats." This special is great, I'd watch it every year (and probably have), but there are a few things that I find kind of disturbing.

The Great Christmas Specialpaloozorama : Part V

Most cartoons pander to kids; they tell simple, inconsequential stories in simple, inconsequential ways. The jokes are, for the most part, dumb or obvious relying on slapstick and obtrusive sound effects to inspire yucks; it’s virtually impossible for anyone over the age of twelve to sit through twenty minutes of this and for anyone who understands capitalism (or who’s watched an episode of Mad Men) not to see all of the mindless animated mayhem as anything more than an excuse for a lot of toy and cereal commercials. But every now and then a cartoon like Rugrats comes along, defying this paradigm through thoughtful plotting and legitimate comedy.

Rugrats operated on two levels; the jokes were basic and cute, which made them accessible to children but there was a lot of wordplay (usually having to do with the babies misunderstanding grown-up phenomena) which made the show appealing to adults. There were several Rugrats Christmas specials over the years but for this little project of mine I decided to spice things up a bit and revisit the Rugrats Chanukah and Kwanzaa episodes.

Tommy Pickles, the bediapered Rugrat leader is half Jewish and if you can think of another openly Jewish cartoon character (in a kids show) I’d be interested in hearing from you. The Rugrats Chanukah special presents the story of the Maccabees in a way that is both droll and poignant. We get to see Tommy as Judah the Maccabee reading pop-up Torah scrolls, hear him say things like, “A Macca baby’s gotta do, what a Macca baby’s gotta do,” while also getting an accurate but easily digested version of the Chanukah story.

The writing in “A Rugrats Kwanzaa” isn’t as tight as the writing in the Chanukah episode but still, I think, it’s worth watching, if only because most people, including African-Americans, don’t know what the hell Kwanzaa is. As the poindextery older brother of Susie Carmichael (the lone black Rugrat and evil Angelica’s foil) explains, “Kwanzaa is a cultural holiday established in 1966 commemorating the first harvest celebrations of Africa.” So now you know!

After watching both of these episodes and the Doug Christmas special, it’s clear that Nickelodeon’s 1990s animated fare was progressive. But I wonder if these shows, the Rugrats episodes in particular, were too consciously progressive.

Eh, I’m probably putting way too much thought into all of this.

The Great Christmas Specialpaloozorama : Part IV

As a kid I watched TaleSpin daily but I can’t remember if I actually enjoyed the experience or if I just suffered through it because this odd, Jungle Book offshoot aired before Darkwing Duck or some other infinitely cooler cartoon. After sitting through an episode as an adult, I pray that I didn’t like it because if I did, it would completely shatter the image I have of myself as this totally shrewd and perspicacious little eight-year-old.

I hate to spoil anyone’s fond memories of this show, but TaleSpin is thoroughly blah.

This being said, one thing that I did appreciate about "A Jolly Molly Christmas," was its rejection of that tedious Scroogey villain plot. Unfortunately, the episode heartily embraces the all-I-want-for-Christmas-is-snow trope.

First, for those who can’t remember what TaleSpin is about, here’s the basic gist: Mowgli-less Baloo lives in the harbor-town of Cape Suzette (pun) where he is a sea-pilot, delivering stuff to people (or I guess, animals) and thwarting Air Pirates. He works for this chick bear named Rebecca who has a daughter, Molly. There’s this little orphan bear named Kit Cloudkicker who kicks clouds and stuff and a mechanic named Wildcat, who looks a lot like Thomas Haden Church when he was on Wings. Louie, a king no more, owns the bar that Baloo frequents and remains the jive-talking, borderline racist caricature he was in The Jungle Book.

"A Jolly Molly Christmas" finds everyone bending over backward to sustain the illusion of Santa Clause for six-year-old Molly (another Christmas special trope) by trying to give her the snow she so desires. Since Cape Suzette is, I imagine, somewhere in the West Indies, snow is an impossibility but, what do you know, the episode closes with substantial snowfall. That’s the magic of Christmas for ya (or perhaps the precursor to some global climate catastrophe). During the improbable finale, all of the classic I-can't-believe-it's-snowing moments are represented:

Snow lands on someone’s nose...

 
snow lands in someone’s hand (or paw, as it were)...

snow lands on someone’s tongue...

 someone spins around in the snow...

 someone holds a snow-globe mid snowfall...Whaaa?

Seeing that sort of redeemed this Christmas special for me.

The Great Christmas Specialpaloozorama : Part III

Of the three Christmas specials that I’ve watched thus far, Doug’s Christmas Story is by far the most subversive. Well, perhaps “subversive” isn’t quite right but it’s definitely kind of political—something that I’m sure I didn’t detect when I was nine or ten or whatever.

So, Porkchop—that’s Doug’s dog for the uninitiated—is accused of biting Beebe Bluff—the town’s rich bitch (Really, he latched onto her leg in an attempt to prevent her from skating across thin ice.) As I’m sure you’ve guessed, everything works out for Doug and Porkchop in the end but before Doug’s Christmas Story reaches its inevitable conclusion, Mayor White—Bluffington’s inexplicably Southern, former mayor and host of a conservative Rush Limbaugh-esque radio talk show—launches this crusade against poor, anthropomorphized Porkchop. 




He says that he’s trying to uphold morals and values and that he wants to protect little girls from dog maulings, but it’s all just political posturing. Because Mayor White is so blatantly bad—and tan—it would seem that Doug’s Christmas Story is promoting liberalism whilst promoting holiday cheer. 

The Great Christmas Specialpaloozorama : Part II

A Flintstones Christmas Carol

I’m a fan of over the top anachrony, so despite never really laughing at an episode of the Flintstones, I appreciate the show’s bastardization of historical fact. At the same time, I think that anachronistic humor only works if there’s some sort of logic—even if it’s flimsy—governing all of the silliness. For instance, Fred Flintstone has a car—something that an actual caveman probably wouldn’t have—however, that car is powered by Fred’s feet. The primitive mechanics of the thing allow me to accept its existence—if a caveman were to have a car, it wouldn’t have an internal combustion engine and the wheels would be made of stone. It’s a visual pun and everything makes sense. Yabba-dabba-do.

A Flintstone Christmas Carol, on the other hand, is not only a full-blown paradox it also happens to be really, really stupid. I imagine it goes without saying, but Fred Flintstone is a caveman, which means that he’s living in an era before the birth of Christ—so there can be no Christmas—and before the birth of Charles Dickens—so Fred can not play Ebenezer Scrooge in the Bedrock community theater’s production of A Christmas Carol. Simply changing Scrooge’s first name from Ebenezer to Ebonezer is not enough to excuse this level of stupidity. If that weren’t bad enough, A Flintstones Christmas Carol has the audacity to be almost 70 minutes long.

The Great Christmas Specialpaloozorama : Part I

My mission: Watch as many animated Christmas TV specials as possible. Up first: He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special.

With age, I may have actually lost the ability to make sense of He-Man. But I’ll try to recap anyway (SPOILER ALERT):

So Skeletor does something, I think, that causes Orko, that weird floating elfy guy, to wind up on Earth, where he meets two Earth children who tell him all about Jesus and presents and stuff. Orko brings the kids back to Eternia with him—essentially kidnapping them. Some other things happen, there’s some talk of man-chines, before peace is ultimately restored and the kids—Alicia and Miguel—are returned to their surprisingly indifferent parents.

I expect Christmas movies/specials to be thematically rigid, but one thing that I absolutely can’t stand is the notion that Christmas has this transformative power—i.e., hard-hearted individuals can undergo a total reversal of character after being infected by the Christmas spirit. In the disappointing finale of He-Man and She-Ra: A Christmas Special, Skeletor doesn’t maim the two Earth children; he saves them and in doing so loses all credibility.