We’re getting closer, ever closer to the Christmas specials that are most worth watching every year. That’s not necessarily a bad thing that we’re still kind of in the weeds considering today’s entry covers entries 180 through 171. It’s a reminder that there are a lot of Christmas specials out there. Yesterday’s entries on short subjects is so far the outlier in that some of them are worth watching just because they’re so brief. And there’s some historical value. Today’s entries are not so brief and not so old so they need to get by on entertainment value and nostalgia. And, for me anyway, there’s not a ton of nostalgia to be found in this cast of Christmas specials. Oh, there is some, including one that I pretty much watch every year because of how I know it, but there’s a lot of “filler” here as well. These are mostly from children’s entertainment and if there was a theme I suppose it would be Christmas episodes from cartoons that are not well-remembered. There are a few exceptions and as I look over my list and the days to come I can see some that I could have flip-flopped out of here. Though in the case of many, it’s more an issue of seeing a special yet to come that I really don’t think is all that good and wondering why it’s not here, but then I look at what we’re talking about today and it starts to make more sense. I could tinker with this list all month and never feel like it’s perfect so let’s just move on, shall we?
Donkey Kong managed to elevate himself above his more popular genre-mates Sonic and Mario, but let’s not pretend like his Christmas episode is all that great. For me, it’s most memorable for being the kind of show I had very low expectations for going in and it managed to exceed them. That doesn’t mean it rose to the level of something I’d consider good, but it’s not terrible. There’s some silliness to be found with the long lost brothers plot to the point where it kind of works. What does not and never will are the visuals. If this ranking was purely on visual quality, Donkey Kong might be in last place. It’s hideous. Those early 3D CG shows have not aged well.
This is a Christmas episode that was always going to have to really knock it out of the park to be placed higher in the rankings. That’s because it’s a Christmas in July episode and in it our monstrous protagonists find themselves trapped in the mall after hours. The Christmas element is purely visual as the mall is decorated for a big summer sale, but there’s a lot of actual Christmas episodes that don’t do much more than add a visual element as well. This one is also short since it was only one segment from a half hour television spot and judged strictly on the quality of the entertainment it’s probably better than where I have it. It’s just not very Christmassy. Plus, I’ve never liked the visual style of this show.
This is the one I teased as being a special I watch annually, even if I don’t really like it that much. It was featured on my beloved Christmas tape growing up so I saw it all of the time and I still see it quite often. As a kid, it was the spot on the tape where I was most likely to drop-off. Thankfully, it had Rudolph backing it up so that’s what usually got me through. Had it been last on the tape then I probably would have seen it far less. If you somehow have not seen this Rankin/Bass production, it’s the origin story for Santa Claus and Mickey Rooney’s debut as the character. The story is pretty silly with a local ruler outlawing toys, but the approach isn’t silly. There’s a lack of fun here and it’s just so long and plodding. None of the songs are particularly good either. Sure, “One Foot in Front of the Other” can get lodged in your head, but that doesn’t mean I want it there. For nostalgia’s sake, I’ll sit through this one at least once this month, but that’s all I’m giving it.
For a little while, there was an attempt at making the Flintstones into some sort of holiday tradition in the 90s. There was a A Flintstone Family Christmas and there was this, A Flintstones Christmas Carol. Now, I have some affection for The Flintstones. I never actively sought the show out, but if it was on I’d often watch it as a kid. I do like A Flintstone Christmas and the episode of the show “Christmas Flintstone” it was based on, but that’s sort of my limit. And when you take a dated franchise like The Flintstones and pair it up with one of the most overused Christmas tropes on record by adapting A Christmas Carol, well, you don’t really end up with anything remotely special. I’ll give it some credit in that the special tries to blend a meta component by having it be a production in-show, but Fred lets stardom get to his head to the point where he starts acting like Scrooge. It’s for serious fans of The Flintstones only, the rest need not apply.
There have been many attempts at melding Halloween with Christmas. The most famous is obviously The Nightmare Before Christmas and it’s also probably the most successful. On television in the 90s though, we had stuff like Little Dracula. It’s a cartoon where the cast is basically all monsters, but the approach to the macabre is so tepid that it tends to undermine any real spooky element it could have. In this one, the goal is to capture Santa Claus. I guess that’s what vampires do. It’s very by the numbers for such an unusual plot as we just get a lot of setup where the entertainment is supposed to be seeing how monsters decorate for the holiday, but nothing is particularly clever. The villain of the show, Garlic Man, wants to pose as Santa to enter the house or something, even though he knows they’re trying to capture the big man. And, of course, the real Santa shows up and we all learn something. Or not? It’s not very memorable.
Make way for Don Coyoooooote! Don Coyote hails from a mostly forgotten Hanna-Barbera cartoon and rightly so. The main character is incredibly annoying and he just bumbles his way through adventure after adventure in a model similar to Inspector Gadget, only Don Coyote didn’t have a niece and a really smart dog looking out for his well-being. The only saving grace for the show is that most of the other characters see Don Coyote for what he is: an idiot. The villagers in the town he tries to help in this one all think he sucks and it’s a bit humorous to see. It’s not a big Christmas vibes sort of episode either, it just takes place at Christmas and the bell referenced in the title has some meaning for the holiday. There is a light faith element to the plot, so if you like your Christmas to appeal more to that aspect of the holiday as opposed to Santa and Rudolph then maybe you can appreciate this on that level. Maybe. It’s still not very good.
Heathcliff may have originated close enough to Garfield that the two can be considered peers, but he’s mostly lived in the fat, orange, cat’s shadow in my lifetime. And that’s despite sounding like Bugs Bunny! Heathcliff did have a solid run on television in the 80s getting two similar, but separate, cartoons and around 100 episodes of entertainment. His grand finale is a Christmas episode in which his letter to Santa is returned so he and Spike (all dogs were required to be named Spike in cartoons) head to the north pole to investigate. There they encounter a jerk of an elf who is hell-bent on destroying Christmas, but as is often the case, things work out in the end and it turns out the elf isn’t such a bad guy after all. There aren’t any memorable gags to find and this one does something I hate. It has Santa literally tell the audience that a year of bad behavior can be redeemed at the last second to get on the Nice List. What a crock! I get needing to give kids something to reach for, but to come out and say it like that is just wrong.
Okay, I really didn’t know where to rank this one. Visually, it’s offensive to my eyes. It’s cheap and ugly. It’s also Ace Ventura who is a pretty annoying character. On the big screen, at least the physical acting of Jim Carrey can help make him tolerable, but as an ugly cartoon the charm is gone. This one does have a somewhat clever plot though and it feels pretty original. Since the character is a detective (which allows them to make liberal use of the term dick), there’s a mystery component and it’s not bad. Santa’s reindeer have gone missing, and Ace needs to get them back. It’s a good setup for a pet detective. It’s just…a lot. I can only handle so much of this character. I do think if you really like the character then you’ll like this a lot more than I do. It’s the sort of Christmas episode where I’m glad I did experience it, but once is enough.
The Nickelodeon Christmas special by Ralph Bakshi that doubled as a pilot for a show that never was, Christmas in Tattertown is quite possibly the most uneven special in this countdown. There are moments in this one that look terrific. There’s a throwback quality to the character designs and animation of the 1930s and it mostly works. There’s also moments where the quality dips and then there’s just the uneven performances. This is especially seen in the character Muffet, who is at times sympathetic and at times a horrible villain. She is a doll that doesn’t really want to be a girl’s doll and she’s frustrated that her life has seemingly been decided for her. She just decides to go full villain in response to that. The voice work is also so up and down that watching this is like experiencing whiplash. I wanted to like this because the premise is solid, but there are too many moments for me where I questioned if I actually hated it. It’s exhausting to watch, but it looks so interesting that I think it’s something everyone should see once. At least, everyone who has ever been enchanted by a cartoon.
Our last entry for today comes courtesy of that other children’s cable network, the Cartoon Network. I Am Weasel was a spin-off from Cow and Chicken which in turn was born out of the What a Cartoon workshop. I have no idea why I Am Weasel was chosen to be spun-off. I liked Cow and Chicken to a certain degree, but I did not care at all for I Am Weasel. It’s a setup where the weasel is basically an ideal character and does everything right and he’s juxtaposed with I.R. Baboon, a selfish, stupid, jealous character. He basically tries, and fails, to undermine the weasel and steal the spotlight for himself. In this Christmas edition, Baboon is surprised by his family when they show up for Christmas. He is ill-prepared, so he runs out to get a tree and all the trimmings, but leaves his family out in the cold. Weasel then comes by and notices the frozen solid group of baboons and invites them into his palatial estate. They become rather enamored with Weasel which just makes Baboon jealous when he finds out. He then tries to sabotage Christmas. It has a happy ending, and it’s actually a lot of plot for what is a short cartoon. It’s a solid setup and premise for the show, it’s problem is it’s just not very funny. Maybe I’ve aged out of this era of visually loud humor, but I didn’t really laugh. If you have fond memories of this or Cow and Chicken then maybe you’ll get more out of it.
And that does it for today’s entries. Tomorrow, we take a break from the countdown to spotlight a forgotten Christmas special. I think it’s a bit of a crowd favorite, but maybe the winds have changed for it over the years and I’m mistaken. Or it’s just become properly rated since we are talking about entry #169. What is it? Well, you’ll have to come back tomorrow and find out. Unless you’re not reading this on December 4, 2025. In that case, you can just click the little button for the next entry. I hope you were surprised!
Can’t wait until tomorrow for more Christmas? Check out what we had to say last year on this day and beyond:
Last year, I made an effort to get to a lot of the Nicktoons that I had yet to cover. My initial thinking when I started doing this Christmas blog was to try and avoid the specials that had been covered in depth many times over. Then I realized that, hey, if you want to…
Last year, we covered in depth the inaugural Christmas episodes of Rugrats and The Ren & Stimpy Show, two of the three original Nicktoons that premiered in 1991. Now, we’re going to look at the Christmas episode for the other original Nicktoon: Doug. Doug was created by Jim Jinkins and was one of the first…
Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising were among the first stars of cartoon creation to burst onto the scene. Together, the duo would work for Disney, Warner, and MGM (among others) creating and overseeing some of animation’s most memorable characters from the golden age. After working with Leon Schlesinger’s studio to produce Looney Tunes shorts, the…
There’s going to be a lot of toys in these ones. And some are very familiar looking.
I mentioned yesterday that my rankings of Christmas specials are by quality and personal preference, but also by genre. When it makes sense, I’m trying to keep similar specials together when it comes to the general vibe and the vibe today is public domain shorts. The domain of the short used to be the movie theater and seemingly every major studio had a series of cartoon shorts. Some were bigger than others and a lot of the less popular ones have slipped into the public domain. Most of these shorts fall into that category, but not all. And most of these are going to have a very similar plot. A lot of these shorts liked bringing Christmas to poor kids. And almost all of them have something racist in them which is just incredible from a modern perspective. It got to the point over the years of doing this where it stopped being surprising. Even Mickey gets in on the action. It’s nuts. Anyway, let’s get to it.
Little Audrey and a diverse group of kids want to leave a surprise for Santa.
This is a Little Audrey cartoon who was a rip-off of Little Lulu and probably less successful. Maybe I’m being a little tough on this one by ranking it last because it does have a unique premise. Audrey and her friends decide Santa deserves some presents of his own on Christmas so they sneak into his sleigh and try to do something nice for him. It’s cute. I just don’t care at all about Little Audrey. The group of multi-cultural children that accompany her on this quest are also not the most sensitive depictions of such one is going to find. Usually, stuff like that is what helps get cartoons into the public domain because the companies that owned them originally don’t want to re-release them and if they’re not going to re-release them then they’re worthless.
He may not look like much, but this toy soldier is pretty special.
Here’s our first one where a poor kid gets a visit from Santa Claus. In this one, it’s a kid who lives alone in a shack with his cat. On the way back to his home, he finds a discarded toy soldier in the street and brings it home. When he goes to bed, the toy becomes sentient and uses the radio to call for Santa who shows up and does his thing. Most of the short is just toys doing stuff, the sort of thing we’re going to see a lot of. The kid eventually wakes up, is happy to have toys (and food) and that’s pretty much it. The short looks okay and it is in color. It’s also been re-released since my entry and there is a much better looking version out there now. It’s still a pretty boring short, but at least it will look nice.
Another one that would probably rank a little higher if I cared about the property. The Captain and the Kids is a series I don’t know much about, but it had a brief run of shorts and among them is a Christmas one. It’s basically a Captain character who takes care of some orphans and he’s harassed by the pirate John Silver and his crew. This one is interesting because the Captain is going to dress as Santa to surprise his boys, but John Silver and his crew get to him first. Silver takes the Santa suit for himself and they proceed to enter the dwelling and mess everything up. Because it’s Christmas, the bad guys feel terrible about what they did and eventually make it right. A large portion of the short is dedicated to a song that’s not very good performed by the pirates. It’s not terrible or anything, and the version I was able to find actually looked great, so there are worse ways to kill 8 minutes.
Mickey has had many goes at this whole Christmas thing.
Mickey Mouse’s first Christmas cartoon is among his worst. I rank this ahead of Mickey’s Christmas Chaos mostly out of respect, but that mediocre short might actually be more entertaining than this one. Mickey and Minnie wind up with some orphans in their care and try to give them a decent Christmas, but they’re also jerks. The little orphan cats just destroy the place and don’t seem to care that Mickey made the effort to give them a decent Christmas by playing Santa. There’s no real message here, no lesson to be learned, the kids just destroy everything until the short is over. It’s very bizarre in that aspect. It is in black and white, but the animation is pretty smooth, so it has that going for it.
This is an early Merrie Melodies short. It’s very similar to Gifts from the Air in that it’s another poor boy who seemingly lives alone. It begins almost exactly the same way with the poor kid walking through the snow on Christmas Eve getting progressively more upset over the sounds of other people enjoying Christmas. Only with this one, when the kid gets back to his shack he gets a visit from Santa before he goes to sleep! And not only is Santa there to bring Christmas cheer, he actually takes the kid back to the workshop and that’s where the toy antics come into play. It’s pretty crazy how similar the toy antics are from one short to another, and not just this and Gifts from the Air, but this and other shorts we’ll talk about shortly. This is another that ends abruptly, a fire breaks out and the kid is able to put it out and that’s it. Did he stay at the North Pole? Did he become the next Santa? Is he Santa’s slave? Is this where elves come from?! No one knows.
This one is a sequel to the Silly Symphony short Santa’s Workshop. If you like the part of that one where Santa just demoes the toys and laughs at them then this is for you. Santa delivers some toys to a house and we get to see him play with them. There’s even a Mickey Mouse cameo! Santa just laughs at everything and it gets real obnoxious. Eventually, he has to run and the kids come down and find their stuff. One cute kid gets a puppy. There’s a blackface gag, which is probably why it’s never been added to Disney+ to join its predecessor. It’s fine.
We have a lot of cartoons of kids finding toys under the tree, but not many of puppies finding toys under the tree. We do have this one from Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising and it’s about what you would expect. Santa has made his delivery and the children are up in the middle of the night to check it out. Among them are two puppies who get into all kinds of mischief when it comes to the toys. In particular, there’s a toy tank that apparently has a personality all its own and it battles it out with the puppies. No puppy is seriously harmed, and they are cute. It does run a little long, which is an odd thing to critique a short for doing, but if you’re a dog person then you’ll probably enjoy this on some level.
This is one of the oldest Christmas specials in color out there. And it was also recently restored to look as best as it possibly can. And it is a good looking short. It’s a Fleischer Studios production and there’s some use of live-action references including a spectacular Christmas tree spot at the end, but the cartoon itself is pretty similar to everything else here. Grampy wants to bring Christmas to an orphanage, but since he can’t just will a bunch of toys into existence, he uses household objects to make toys and distribute them. The kids have a good time, and it’s a reasonably merry Christmas. Worth a watch to appreciate the impressive restoration, if anything.
Mickey is going to experience some hardships in this one, but it works out in the end.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, a character wants to bring Christmas to some poor kids and so they do. In this case, it’s Mickey Mouse who is very poor as well. He wants to help a family of cats (again), but in order to do so he needs money and the only thing of value he owns is his dog, Pluto. Some rich asshole’s kid wants Pluto so Mickey reluctantly sells him thinking Pluto will have a better life with the wealthy man than he would on the streets with him. He takes the money, buys a bunch of stuff, and makes a Christmas delivery to the kids. Unfortunately, that spoiled, rich, kid really sucks and is abusive towards Pluto who eventually gets away, but not before he makes off with a turkey. He finds Mickey all alone in the snow and there’s a happy reunion in the end. Thankfully. I get the idea of having a character sacrifice to make Christmas better for the less fortunate, but I don’t want to see them give their dog away! At least it all works out, and the animation is really nice. It was made in black and white, but there is a color version out there if you’re adverse to that.
The more popular Christmas themed Silly Symphony short. This one takes place at the titular workshop where we see toys being made, inspected, and tested. That’s it. I just rank it this high because I think it looks just lovely. There’s a whole bunch of gags similar to other ones we’ve already seen and it also had its own racist gag (which the Disney+ version omits), but at least it doesn’t have any orphans! Seriously, I’m getting a little sick of that trope. And seeing Santa prepare for Christmas is just more interesting to me than the process of infiltrating homes and the aftermath.
That concludes the public domain theatrical shorts category. Not all of those are in the public domain, but they all have a very similar feel to them, and as we saw, similar plots. There isn’t much separating the worst from the best in this case, I mostly ranked them on visual quality as that’s what appeals to me most. And not just how well it’s animated, but the emotive aspect of the characters since we get a lot of inanimate objects doing interesting things. They are all indeed short though and also pretty damn old. The historical aspect makes them worth watching, in my opinion. And they won’t take up much of your time. I bet they’re all on YouTube or Daily Motion too so they should be easy to find. It will give you something to do until tomorrow when we move onto the next group of 10. In looking ahead, there isn’t much of a theme in our next group other than it’s all stuff made for kids and almost all of it is comedic in nature. There might be one surprise in there, but we’re still firmly in the realm of mediocre and not quite to the point where we’re hitting on some essential viewing type stuff.
Can’t wait until tomorrow for more Christmas? Check out what we had to say on this day last year and beyond:
It feels like it has been a minute since we took a look at an American Dad! Christmas episode. The show can be counted on to produce such an episode almost annually and often times the Christmas episode is among the best of the season. 2024 is also the year we had to say goodbye…
Children’s cartoons often take to Christmas when the season rolls around. The holiday is usually ripe for parody or just direct adaptations so it’s easy for the writers to kind of phone it in. What’s not customary is for a cartoon series to feature two dedicated Christmas episodes in a single season! That’s what Animaniacs…
Last year for the Christmas Spot we took a look at the 1960’s TV series Popeye the Sailor and its Christmas episode “Spinach Greetings.” There are a lot of Popeye fans in the world and my assumption is that most would not put Popeye the Sailor above the theatrical shorts that helped catapult Popeye to…
Today, we move on with our Ultimate Christmas Special Rankings starting with number 199. As you can probably guess, we’re going to generally stick to 10 a day in order to have this neatly conclude on Christmas, but we’ll have a couple spots where we’ll have to do more. This isn’t one of those spots as you just get 10 today. Like yesterday, these specials are what I would consider to be genuinely bad, for the most part, but we’re working our way to the “meh” part of the rankings. We’re also going to kick things off with one I probably dislike more than most. There is a part of me that feels like I’m being unreasonable, but I pretty much loathe number 199.
Hah! It’s a snowman with a nut right where…his nuts…you know…
The Ice Age franchise had a nice run for itself, commercially speaking, during the 2000s. I can’t say I really loved any of it, but my memory of the movies I did see are that they were fine. Decent family entertainment that I never have to see again. For some reason, I hate this Christmas special. Maybe I was just in a bad mood when I went back to it last year for the countdown, but I just hate-watched the damn thing. Every plot point irritated me, it was so predictable, cliche, and talked down to the viewer. The attempts at humor were supremely irritating. I think this style of humor just didn’t age well. The competent CG doesn’t come close to rescuing it and I get no feels from it other than white, hot, rage. I honestly expect most people to see my take and not quite get it. Most probably see this as a pretty by the numbers, ho-hum, Christmas special. Let’s move on though as I’m already sick of talking about Ice Age.
Okay, this is a bad Christmas special. Very bad. It’s also entertainingly bad and it helps that I didn’t make my parents spend $30 on a VHS of this thing when I was a kid. It’s brief which helps. If this was your more typical hour long special then it would likely be intolerable. The only bummer for me with this one is that it’s the only Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Christmas special from this era. The ’87 cartoon had an episode where the turtles met the freakin’ Easter Bunny, but no Christmas episode. Instead we got this: repurposed live show costumes with unrecognizable voices and actors. It’s bad, and the budget must have been almost nothing. The songs suck in such a way that they’re funny, and the special is so well known now that we even got some NECA toys last year based on it. What a time to be alive.
He’s laughing, but there’s nothing funny about this one.
This one is barely a Christmas episode as it’s a made-up version of the holiday by Mario to supplicate some cave people he deems as lesser than him. Poor, misguided, cave, people, if only they had a holiday to believe in? Mario the missionary brings them Christmas and it just turns one cave person, Oogtar, into a spoiled brat. He almost ruins Fake Christmas, that little Ratgoo, but everything turns out fine in the end. It’s just phenomenally stupid and the Super Mario World cartoon was pretty terrible. There’s a reason why Nintendo wants nothing to do with it or its predecessors these days.
In this holiday special, the Smurfs are tasked with saving some kids from Satan. Yes, you read that correctly.
Oh boy, this one took a pretty surprising turn. The Smurfs holiday themed episodes manages to be both forgettable and also get mixed up in my brain. The other Smurfs holiday episode I covered is a better Christmas special, but so unmemorable. This one? This is the one where the Smurfs have to take down the god damn devil! What other conclusion is there to draw from the villain? Every other plot point here is pure corn, just garbage, Christmas, stuff. The Smurfs are a pretty terrible franchise that has somehow endured – I guess people really like little, blue, men?
Another video game mascot with a Christmas special, and it’s not much better. This is a cheaply thrown together episode of The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, the wacky cartoon and not the more serious Saturday morning one. I hate the visual style and the plot is nonsense, plus an unspeaking Sally Acorn role? They did her wrong. It just manages to be memorable because of the wild turn at the end. Spoilers if you haven’t seen it, but Santa Claus retires! Yes, the big man hangs them up, but don’t worry as he has a successor ready: Sonic the Hedgehog. In the world of Sonic, he is now Santa Claus. It’s canon and I’ll hear no argument against it, I’m just patiently waiting for one of the video games to acknowledge this fact.
Pretty convenient all of these video game cartoons landed so close together, eh? It’s by design. This list has a subjective element to it where I did try to group things together to some degree. Especially when it comes to kids specials and the more subversive adult comedy ones. And spoiler alert, tomorrow very much has a theme to it. Anyway, this is another lousy Super Mario Bros. cartoon that takes place during Christmas and this one has a more conventional holiday plot. Koopa is out to take over Christmas and Mario and the gang have to save Santa. Toad learns a lesson and Luigi gets to help out. It’s all pretty conventional. There’s some awful animation and if you watch the full episode this is from you get some live-action stuff that has nothing to do with Christmas. Seriously, what a wasted opportunity. The only redeeming element to this one is basically the same as the Super Mario World cartoon: Koopa. I find him entertaining. Oh, and it’s also really short.
The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers had one Christmas episode and it came during the White Ranger era post the departure of the original red, yellow, and black rangers. In other words, it’s from an era of the show I didn’t watch as I fell off during the second season. I came back for the White Ranger mini series falling for the hype, but didn’t stick around. This one is pretty damn stupid. The Rangers have to go to the North Pole and stop the forces of Lord Zed who have taken it over. It’s an episode that was clearly conceived of on the US side because we don’t get a single shot of the Rangers in action. They stay in their teen persona so there’s very little action. Instead, there’s lots of bad acting that wouldn’t even be passable for a soap opera. The storyline back at Angel Grove with the sad kid or whatever? Terrible – no one cares. I wanted to see the Megazord slice and dice some massive reindeer monster or something and this did not deliver.
I have to admit, I don’t remember anything about this one. Or rather I didn’t until I went back to it before writing this. And yeah, it’s not very memorable. It’s from an era of cartoons on television where budgets were very small and the animation was very limited. This thing is capital U Ugly and I find nothing charming about the character designs. The audio quality is poor as well, though that may be a preservation problem and not something that was apparent at the start. It’s very similar in tone and quality to Tennessee Tuxedo, but shorter and therefore better. And for a character named Krazy Kat, she’s not very crazy. The craziest thing about her is her choice in grammar.
It’s big, beefy, dino-men in Santa hats – did you expect something else?
When it comes to cartoon dreck, there isn’t much lower than the direct-to-syndication cartoon that only exists to sell toys. And it gets even worse when that toyline is just a blatant rip-off of a more popular one. That’s Extreme Dinosaurs for you, which was an extension of Street Sharks. It’s terrible. It is the sort of cartoon where it can look okay in still shots because the character designs are big and colorful, but once things start moving around it turns to shit. I hate all of the attempts at “extreme” language or whatever and this is the sort of show that somehow makes dinosaurs seem lame. As for a Christmas special, it’s another let’s help Santa plot. Not a full-on The Santa Clause, but yeah, dinosaurs are going to help save Christmas.
Mickey does not subscribe to the whole “love thy neighbor” thing.
Around the turn of the millennium, Mickey Mouse tried to make it again in shorts and the results were mixed at best. Mickey’s Christmas Chaos is one of those shorts and it’s tonally kind of a mess. Mickey behaves more like a Warner Bros. character here as he goes to war with his neighbor Mortimer as each tries to one-up the other with their Christmas decorating. The animation is so flat that it limits the impact the gags can have. Plus, there’s really nothing new here. There are no pieces of physical comedy that feel original or offer a new twist on an old concept. I get trying to redefine Mickey or show a different side of him, but this isn’t it. Paul Rudish would figure it out much later. At least this one has a nice ending for best boy Pluto, and if you’re someone who disagrees and actually likes this one then good news! There are a pair of Christmas episodes from the House of Mouse series full of crap like this!
That’s all for now. Come back tomorrow as we move into the bland and the meh that also happen to be free and easy to view. We’re going into the public domain, folks!
Can’t wait until tomorrow for more Christmas? Check out what we had to say on this day last year and beyond:
Nothing puts one in the Christmas Spirit like carols about the refrigerator. Or so Dinosaurs would have you believe. Not that Christmas is actually mentioned at all in today’s special because it takes place in a setting on Earth millions of years before the Christ in Christmas was born. Back then, the sentient beings of…
In 1995, Warner Bros felt it was a big enough entity that it could launch its own broadcast television network. Dubbed The WB, it would try to compete with the big four of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox, but never really achieved that level of success which is why it no longer exists. The strategy…
In 1994, Nintendo and developer Rare Ltd. released unto the world Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo. It was a pretty big deal because with Sony prepping its 32-bit PlayStation console for release, and Nintendo no where near ready to unveil the Nintendo 64, the company needed to eke out a few more years…
There are a number of Christmas specials out there that are basically known by all and I’ve written about most of them here. Some have been annual traditions especially when we had more of a monoculture in the US, but the slow death of cable television has made those annual traditions fade away. One holiday icon endures though (well, two counting Rudolph): Frosty the Snowman. The story of a snowman come to life based on a 1950 song premiered on CBS in 1969. There it aired every year until 2023 when CBS at long last let the rights expire. NBC was there to pick it up where it aired in 2024 and is set to air this year on December 4th continuing its run in prime time television for another year.
Specials like Frosty the Snowman were appointment viewing for me as a child even with my beloved Christmas Tape at hand. It was just a thing to get excited for on the road to Christmas and with how popular specials like it have been I’ve always been surprised at the lack of toys. These are Christmas specials, after all, a holiday synonymous with toys. Jada apparently felt the same for it unveiled its own take on Frosty as seen in that Rankin/Bass special which coincidentally arrives a year after Super7 did the same with its ReAction line. Unlike that toy, Jada went all out in making Frosty an actual, modern, action figure. Is this something that’s long overdue for the magical snowman or is there a reason why Frosty has never made the leap to plastic in such a way?
Frosty has some pretty rad packaging.
There may have been some trepidation about wading into the Frosty waters as Jada opted to partner this release with Big Bad Toy Store. It’s an exclusive there where it will set you back $50 and I wouldn’t expect a sale on it anytime soon. That’s a steep price for an action figure, especially one from Jada. I don’t know if they’ve ever done an action figure at this high a price point. I suppose the release is technically a two-pack as it does come with the rabbit, Hocus Pocus. Still, is that enough?
He seems to size pretty well with other 1:12 figures.
The packaging for Frosty is pretty damn fun. The window box is modeled after an old, 80s, television set which is probably similar to the actual set many people saw Frosty on for the first time. It has faux wood paneling and even the rear of the box resembles a CRT television. The bubble is shaped to have a curve in it as well and if you’re an in-box collector this will display pretty well like this. I, of course, am not so I broke into this thing and I do think it will go back together after the holidays just fine, should I choose to pack-up and store Frosty in such a manner.
Until we get a proper Santa, one of these will have to do.
Out of the package, Frosty stands at about 6.375″ to the top of his head. The default portrait has the hat affixed to it so that one will take the snowman over the 7″ mark. From a distance, he’s basically just a big hunk of white plastic, but upon closer examination it’s evident that Jada applied a pearlescent overcoat to the figure to give him a little shine. It’s about as close to approximating the look of snow when the sun hits it they could come up with and it does help to at least give him a little nicer finish, though there’s no hiding from the fact that this is just a big, white, toy. There is paint on the face for the eyes, button nose, and the inner mouth which they opted to paint blue. This had me running back to the special to see if that’s what Rankin/Bass did and, no, they did not. Frosty’s inner mouth was red so I’m not sure why blue was chosen, but it may have been an artistic choice to work off the white. I don’t hate it, it just stood out to me as an odd choice.
And I guess the Peanuts gang will have to stand-in for Karen and the others.
The likeness of the sculpt is decent. The face is pretty much spot-on, though there wasn’t a lot Jada had to get right there. Where I do think the figure comes up a little short is just in the overall shape of the snowman. His torso is very pear-shaped when the character in the show was more round. It’s possible they had to mess with the proportions a bit to better suit the articulation. The head also sits a touch high as it’s not sunk-in at all into the body. Was this done to better accommodate the articulation? It’s possible, but I don’t know if the trade-off was worth it. I feel similarly about the waist cut on Frosty. I appreciate the attempt, and maybe I’ll appreciate it more if we ever get a Karen for him to interact with, but I wouldn’t mind seeing how the figure looked without it. And if I’m going to nitpick further, the hat seems a touch too tall, but on the other hand, it’s not consistent in the special and there are shots where it’s more like it’s presented here and others where it’s more squat.
For some reason, Frosty has acquired a scarf over the years. Even the Super7 ReAction figure (right) came with one.
Frosty does come with a handful of accessories, most of which are basically essential to the look of Frosty. We have his corn cob pipe which plugs into his smile. It’s basically essential since without it he just has a hole in his face that looks kind of lame. It doesn’t bother me as I would never choose to display him with out, but if you want your Frosty to quit his bad habit you may be disappointed. He does have his broom stick which is well-painted and sculpted. It’s basically in solid colors which matches the animation fairly well. He also has some optional parts. For hands, Frosty has a set of relaxed hands, a wide-gripping left hand, a tight-gripping right hand, a pointing left hand, and a right fist for when someone disses his fly girl. There’s also an optional portrait of “dead” Frosty from before the magic hat is applied. It looks fine and has the same hole in the mouth for the pipe and I like having this one as a means of displaying the figure in the lead-up to December. Lastly, there’s a soft goods, red, scarf which is a thing that has sprung up over the years. I’m not sure the origin, but lots of Frosty merch over the years has placed a red scarf around his neck despite him never wearing one in the cartoon (in the sequel, he wears a striped scarf). Super7 did the same thing so I can only assume it’s just something that has been added into the licensing art over the years. It’s here if you want it, though I don’t think I’ll ever use it.
If you prefer your Frosty to be non-animated.
Of course, the other accessory in the box is Hocus Pocus. The little white rabbit stands at just a tick over 2″ and has a goofy looking smile fitting the character. His pupils are not aligned, presumably as intended, though I can’t recall him looking that way in the special (I’m not saying it didn’t happen, just that I can’t remember a specific moment for it). Like Frosty, he’s essentially a lump of white plastic with the only paint being reserved for his red nose, the pink of his eyes and inner ears, and the black of his pupils. He has his freckles sculpted in, but they get lost in the plastic since there’s no outline applied. His whiskers are represented with black wire and his arms are permanently sculpted into the torso. He does feature articulation at the base of his ears, head, waist, hips, and ankles, but it’s pretty limited. He has one accessory – the hat. Hocus is designed to separate at the head which reveals a super long double-ball peg that can plug into the hat. There’s some sculpted out area for his arms inside the hat to get a snug fit and it successfully recreates the look of Hocus from when he makes off with the hat and delivers it to the children. It’s a good idea and a fun way to display him if you’re opting to display Frosty with his “dead” portrait.
This is pretty much the extent of his posing.
Frosty’s articulation is also nothing to write home about. He has the same double-ball peg setup at the “neck,” and another one at the hat. This is where the figure is most expressive as he can rotate and tilt at both the head and hat which provides enough nuance to be fun. He has hinged shoulders, single-hinged elbows, and hinged wrists that rotate. Unlike NECA and their many TMNT figures, Frosty actually has the proper vertical hinge for his broom and any other weapon you feel he should have. That waist joint is a ball joint so Frosty can rotate and tilt, but don’t expect too much forward and back. The legs are connected via ball-sockets, but they’re functionally useless due to the shape of the character. He has no knees and instead some ankles that hinge and rock. If your dream is to recreate Frosty’s marching pose on your shelf then you may have to get a little creative. He also doesn’t have any peg holes on the bottoms of his feet so finding a stand to work with him might be a challenge.
They’re both pipe enthusiasts.
Frosty isn’t going to impress with his poses, but no one likely expected him to. What will sell this figure are the aesthetics and the power of nostalgia. Nostalgia for Christmas. Is that sort of thing worthy of your $50? It’s a legitimate question and one not easily answered. If I were to grade this release on the quality of the figure and the amount of stuff in the box then I’d have to say “No,” this isn’t a $50 release. I’d feel better about it if we got a more expressive Hocus or maybe some optional parts for Frosty to recreate the signature poses from the special. This Frosty can’t even belly-whop because the range at the head doesn’t allow for it. He basically needs a third head with the socket for the ball joint in the back. Perhaps a future Karen release could come with such a thing?
“You want a hit of this, snowman?” “Happy birthday!”
Despite my feelings on the value present, I am happy to have this. I have a huge soft spot for Christmas specials (obviously) and there’s no way I was passing on this. It’s still a better value than a Super7 Ultimates! release (and cheaper) and it looks good enough on my Christmas shelf. And I do selfishly want this release to be successful because I’d like to see more from Jada and Frosty the Snowman. I already name-dropped Karen, but throw-in Santa and Professor Hinkle and that will make me pretty happy. It would be fun if each came with a different Hocus since he had some different looks/poses in the special, and in the case of Karen, that belly-whopping head would be nice. If you’re interested in this release as strictly an action figure, then it probably won’t win you over. If you have a lot of affection for the old television special and won’t miss the $50 then I say go for it. There’s plenty of Christmas magic in this box to take away the sting of the price.
If you’re curious to read my thoughts on the original special or just have an interest in Christmas toys then check these out:
Welcome back, lovers of Christmas, to the 7th edition of The Christmas Spot! If you missed the introduction a few days ago, we’re doing things a little differently this year. Yes, you’re still getting a dedicated write-up each day through Christmas about a beloved or not-so-beloved holiday special, but this year we’re also going retro…
It was looking like we were in for a photo finish this year. Last year, toymaker Fresh Monkey Fiction partnered with online retailer Big Bad Toy Store to launch the Naughty or Nice collection. Structured similar to a Kickstarter campaign, FMF posted several action figures for preorder with a minimum order quantity needed for the…
Fresh Monkey Fiction is back with Naughty or Nice Wave Two and just in time for…(checks calendar)…Valentine’s Day? Okay, so things didn’t go quite as planned with this line. In 2021, Fresh Monkey Fiction partnered with Big Bad Toy Store for this line of action figures based primarily on Santa Claus. That preorder took about…
It has been said before and so it shall be said again, but Christmas is the holiday that is the most commercialized of all. A massive component of that commercialization has been The Christmas Special, that one-off theatrical short, television event, or just a Christmas-themed episode of a popular (or not so popular) show. These often take the form of animation, but are not limited to that. Certainly, there are many live-action sitcoms out there that have made Christmas the subject of an episode or two and there’s no shortage of movies centered on the holiday. It’s impossible to know at this point how many such specials exist. I’m sure folks have tried to catalog them all, but such a task seems futile at best.
Here at The Nostalgia Spot, every December has been turned over to the Christmas holiday. And for the last decade that has meant an advent calendar style rundown of many popular and not so popular Christmas specials. Last year, when the countdown concluded I revealed that I intended to retire The Christmas Spot as an advent calendar countdown and I’m sticking to that. It’s a lot and I feel like I’ve said almost all that I have to say on the subject of Christmas specials in this space, but not everything.
This year, we’re going to go back through them – yes, all of them! It’s time to take the specials that have been covered here and sort them out. The Christmas season is only so long and if you’re in what I consider a typical Christmas-celebrating household, the season begins on the Friday after Thanksgiving. This year, Thanksgiving fell on the 27th of November which is almost as late as it can fall in a calendar year. This is an especially short season – how can one possibly fit all of this essential Christmas viewing into such a short window of time?! And it’s already December 1st!
Fear not, for I am here to help guide you and your viewing schedule. Well, kind of. Since we’ll be unveiling this list in 10 special increments each day that means we won’t get to the good stuff for awhile. I guess this will be more helpful in the years that follow. It obviously can’t be all inclusive. I just said cataloging all Christmas specials would be a futile activity. However, there are a few that I’ve declined to report on in this space that feel like major omissions. When we get to them in the countdown, we’ll do an old school style write-up to make sure a wrong has been righted. I will almost surely miss someone’s favorite or one that simply stands out, but we can’t hit them all. I feel good about this body of work though and if I was only allowed to watch holiday specials from this list for the rest of my life I’d be okay with that.
Before we can get to the good stuff though, we have to talk about the bad stuff. Figuring out the best Christmas special of all-time is easy. It’s the Grinch (sorry, spoiler?), but what’s the worst Christmas special of all time? Now that’s a question with many answers. I’ve seen my share of crap throughout the years, and this dubious honor has more than one contender, but when the dust settled and I looked at my list there was really only one worthy of this title:
What a diaper-filled crap-fest! I wasn’t harsh enough in my rundown of this one back when it was covered. I think because it was so early in the season and I wasn’t feeling run down just yet. This show is brutally ugly, almost offensively so. I’ve seen and laughed at plenty of gross cartoons, but this is too much for me. It’s not particularly funny nor is it memorable. If I have to say one nice thing about it then it’s that it didn’t parody a popular Christmas special. That’s a low bar though and plenty of dreck at the end of this list can claim the same.
This redesign is worse than the one Toucan Sam got.
This special featuring semi-famous character George of the Jungle isn’t as offensively bad as some others, but I loathe its visual style. It has little to say or do to hold my attention and the art is just gross. It’s so cheap looking and comes from an era where everyone was cutting costs when it comes to animation. It’s basically Newgrounds quality and it makes me mad someone thought this was acceptable to put on television. Granted, I think it was on the equivalent of Canadian PBS, but the point stands. It has no reason to exist.
Just look at the dumb expression on the fox’s face. You just know this is going to be bad.
Chucklewood Critters represent something we’ll be seeing more of on this list. It’s a very bland, very boring, inoffensive sort of Christmas special. Well, inoffensive if you’re not offended by having your time wasted. There’s a bunch of stuff like this, but a lot of it is relegated to shorts where not much happens but at least it happens fast. And those shorts mostly look good since the shorts I’m thinking of were theatrical shorts. This is just an ugly, cheap, cloyingly sweet half hour of television. It probably won’t enrage you or anything, but it might put you to sleep. And these little bastards had a whole series of television specials! It’s crazy to think about and those poor children that were forced to watch them. I somehow dodged that bullet, but I took in this one in the interest of Christmas viewing as an adult. In that, I feel I was a worthy sacrifice.
It’s the terrifying story about the murder of a tree!
Speaking of sacrifice. Here we have the story of a tree that just wants to be given a purpose. And that purpose is to be cut down and put on display in front of the UN. Or White House, it depends on what version you saw. This is one of those specials that wants to put the Christ back in Christmas, or at least it appears to, but then it does this weird pivot to putting the Christopher back in Christmas. As in, Christopher Columbus. What an odd thing to insert into a Christmas special. And inappropriate. It’s a dumb special, but I place it slightly higher than something like Chucklewood Critters because it has moments where the animation looks nice. Basically, they blew the budget on the tree and some select sequences while side characters and backgrounds look like trash. I’m guessing there’s not a lot of websites out there that have dedicated as many words to Christopher the Christmas Tree as I have as this one is actually one of my most viewed Christmas entries. Weird, right? I guess it makes sense since there’s tons of places talking about Mickey, Frosty, Popeye, and so on, but what fool wants to waste their time on the tree that gave its life for Christmas? Me. I’m that fool, and because of my sacrifice you don’t have to be too.
And speaking of Popeye (we’re just mastering transitions today), here’s a terrible Christmas cartoon starring the famous sailor! I like Popeye, he’s the reason I ate my spinach as a kid even if I thought it was terrible. We’d get that frozen kind that smells like garbage after it’s cooked so you can’t blame me for not liking it. As an adult, fresh spinach all the way! Anyway, this cartoon sucks, but at least it’s mercifully short. It’s just a dumb Popeye saves Santa bit, but it’s so nonsensical and for some reason Santa flies around in an airplane shaped like a reindeer. It’s the most ludicrous visual I think I’ve seen in a Christmas special yet and that’s saying something because we already talked about Mega Babies. This series is from Popeye’s dark ages, best not to revisit them.
These 1960s cartoons tend to all have one thing in common: sucky animation. Tennessee Tuxedo is one the biggest offenders as characters barely move. Worse though, the whole thing feels incredibly lazy. Nothing happens! This is the Christmas special about nothing, they just have to decorate a stupid tree, but since they’re zoo animals they’re all dumb. We even have to pause so a character can teach us how to make the worst Christmas ornaments around. I don’t blame this thing being bad on whoever wrote it, they were probably charged with writing a whole series in a weekend or something. The only somewhat charming thing about this show is hearing Don Adams in the lead role. It’s just fun hearing the Get Smart/Inspector Gadget voice again.
Yeah, that’s more or less how I feel watching this one.
I tried to leave this one out of here until at least the next entry just because of the whole story surrounding it, but I just couldn’t do it. It sucks too much. This is another one of those inoffensive holiday specials that’s trying to launch a franchise, but it’s so inoffensive that it’s boring and no one cared about it. Really, like at all. This thing was lost media for a long time, but now it’s back. Sort of. I suspect it was really only back for that one magical moment in 2022 and now it’s rightfully forgotten again. The song might get stuck in your head though, so it has that going for it.
Okay, I have this thing way back in the rankings and yet I’m not sure if it’s far enough. That’s the thing with rankings, they’re pretty subjective unless there’s some sort of math behind it. And even then, you may just be using a subjective component to create an objective outcome. That’s probably way more thought already than Pillow People Save Christmas deserves. This thing is awful and it’s a garbage one-off special designed to sell dumb pillows. Watching it made me mad at my mom more than 30 years later for buying me one of those pillows. There is zero subtlety to this one as it’s just a big commercial complete with a tour of available products you can buy now. Well, now when it aired, today no one cares about Pillow People. If you still have a Pillow Person in your possession might I suggest burning it? It won’t take away the stink of this special, but it would make me feel a little better and it would probably do the same for you.
Pillow People is just plain bad, while Santabear commits a different sin: boredom. A lot of these backend specials are going to be placed here because they’re just so boring. The ones that are dull and combine it with bad music and visuals are the biggest offenders. Here we have Santabear, better known for his television spots in a Cinnamon Toast Crunch commercial. It probably would have been better if that’s all he was confined to because “high flying” this one is not. The cast is solid too, but everything is dialed down to a sleepy pace. I don’t want to hate you, Santabear, because you are cute, but I really hope to never watch your Christmas special again.
We end today’s entry with a cartoon that is not exactly sleepy and would prefer to announce its presence with a scream. Well, except for Santa who just kind of strolls in. This is a What a Cartoon original from Cartoon Network’s early days. An attempt to revive the duo of George and his gigantic son Junior. They’re a bit of a rip-off of the bears from the Warner Bros. shorts just minus the mama bear character. This one I actually liked as a kid, but now I can barely watch it. It’s so offensively ugly and the animation is so minimal. I can’t decide if that’s by design or by budget, but it’s bad. The gags are tired and lazy and about the only good thing I can say about it is that it’s brief. When I revisited this one way back in 2017 I wasn’t really expecting to like it, but I definitely didn’t think I’d hate it.
Well, that about covers the worst of the worst. Unfortunately, we still have some crap to get through before we can start talking about the actual good Christmas specials. At least now you know the ones to absolutely avoid. See you tomorrow!
Can’t wait until tomorrow for more Christmas? Check out what we had to say on this day last year and beyond:
It’s December 1st and you know what that means – time for Christmas specials! Not to “well, actually,” myself, but the Christmas special viewing season began before today in my house as it’s annually the day after Thanksgiving. What you may call Black Friday, I dub the start of the Christmas Special Season. And this…
We’re back with another year of The Christmas Spot! And to kick things off this year we’re taking a look at a bonafide Christmas Classic. Christmas Comes But Once A Year may not be the household name that Rudolph and Frosty are, but for Gen X and millennial kids it’s probably familiar because it was…
Welcome back to another year of The Christmas Spot! This year we’re kicking things off with a post I’ve been sitting on for a few years now. When I utter the title “The Christmas Tape,” I’m curious what comes to the minds of readers. It sounds both generic and specific and I suspect a few…
Well folks, we did it! We made it to another Christmas! These things come faster and faster each year which makes something like an online advent calendar helpful as it attempts to keep the season from going by even faster. It’s cliché, but the years go by even faster the older you get and if you have kids it seems worse. It’s great to stop, breathe, and just try to take it all in for I know if I’m fortunate enough to live to be an old man I’ll probably look back on my life and think it went by in a flash.
That’s the sort of melancholy vibes Christmas brings about for me, but it’s important to remember this is a day of fun. Of revelry! I try to save a good one for each December 25th, or at least a weird one (I did go with Samurai Pizza Cats one year), and this year I felt like turning the day over to America’s real first family: The Simpsons.
Homer is going full Grinch in this one. Well, sort of.
The Simpsons has been featured here before. Many times too. The show has staked its claim to Halloween via the Treehouse of Horror anthology series, but it was Christmas that marked the show’s debut. For years the show avoided the topic as how could anyone hope to top the show’s debut episode? Eventually, that fear subsided and the show started cranking them out. Not quite annually, but there’s certainly plenty at this point. And today’s episode comes from the show’s fifteenth season and is appropriately titled “‘Tis the Fifteenth Season.” At the time, it felt like quite the achievement to be on the air so long that it was celebrated, or at least marked, in the very title of the episode. Now, it almost seems quaint. Fifteen seasons isn’t even half the show’s current total. Will The Simpsons ever end? When I was a mopey teen angry the show wasn’t as funny as I remembered it being I would have said it needs to die, but now I’m just curious to see how long it can go. There’s a comfort in knowing that every fall a new season of The Simpsons debuts. It probably won’t go on forever, but that doesn’t mean it can’t try.
In almost any other episode, I would have liked this couch gag, but this is not the holiday couch gag I’m looking for.
The first episode aired of The Simpsons, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” was pretty much a Homer (Dan Castellaneta) story. He was denied a Christmas bonus and Marge (Julie Kavner) spent all of the family’s extra money on getting a tattoo removed off of Bart (Nancy Cartwright). Rather than come clean, Homer takes a part time job as a mall Santa to earn extra money in hopes of providing his family with the kind of gifts he felt they deserved. Or rather, the type of gifts that would make him feel like a successful provider. Following that episode, Homer would take a back seat in future holiday outings. We had episodes centered around Bart, Lisa, and even Marge while Homer was like a sidecar. The kids need his help in the waning moments of “Grift of the Magi” to steal some toys, he and Flanders have a B plot in “Skinner’s Sense of Snow,” and that’s kind of it. In today’s episode, Homer is very much the focal point as he must learn the spirit of giving, then learn to reject materialism, then…become the Grinch? This one ends in a place one wouldn’t have predicted at the start, so let’s jump into it and see how we get there.
How is it that Itchy and Scratchy are able to exist in this space?
This holiday episode of The Simpsons begins with the standard, abbreviated, opening where we just jump right to Marge almost running Homer over in the driveway. The couch gag isn’t even holiday themed, it’s anime, which is a surprise. We’re not off to a good start here. The episode proper then begins not with Christmas, but Thanksgiving. The family is watching a Channel 6 holiday broadcast featuring Krusty (Castellaneta), Sideshow Mel (Castellaneta), Mr. Teeny, and a large woman dressed as a ballerina. Am I supposed to know who she is? Kent Brockman is appearing via cardboard cutout which Krusty informs us he’s contractually allowed to do because he’s in rehab. Again. Oh, and Itchy and Scratchy are present too which is really confusing. Are they someone in costume? Are they animation and we can’t tell because the whole show is animated? Anyway, Krusty informs the viewers for every dollar spent on Krusty merchandise he’ll be nice to a sick kid. And that hookers with a cold count as sick kids. Never change, Krusty.
Homer no like sweater.
It’s now time for Christmas decorating, and set to “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” we see Homer and the kids putting up the decorations. Bart and Lisa (Yeardley Smith) twirl some string lights like a lasso and fling them on the bushes outside. Homer tries to do the same with a tree and inadvertently kills two birds in the process which he slyly covers with snow and walks off. Inside, the stockings are being hung with care one by one until we get to Grandpa (Castellaneta) who hangs an IV bag instead. Marge is shown putting the family dog, Santa’s Little Helper, in a festive sweater which he predictably hates. We pan over to Snowball II who is already in a sweater and doing her best to get it off. The camera continues it’s pan to find Homer also in a sweater and also desperately trying to remove it with his teeth like an animal. Never change, Homer.
Looks like someone forgot Lenny’s present.
We now are taken to the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant where it’s apparently already time to exchange Secret Santa gifts. Carl (Hank Azaria) is Homer’s Secret Santa and he has quite the present for the big guy: a new DVD player and the first season of Magnum P.I. Homer is quite happy with this extravagant offering (come on Carl, there had to have been a limit you blew by), but there’s a problem. No one has a present for Lenny (No, not Lenny!) and that’s because Homer is his Secret Santa. Realizing he forgot, Homer runs offscreen and we get to hear him battle with a vending machine. Lenny (Harry Shearer) can tell what’s going on and a scowl crosses his face before Homer returns with his gift: a roll of Certs. Homer seems pleased with himself, but Lenny doesn’t hold back and tells him that his gift flat-out stinks. Carl piles on too telling Homer he’s the most selfish man he knows (then why did you go all out on Homer’s gift, Carl?). Homer appears offended and tries to defend himself by saying Mr. Burns is the most selfish man around. He starts to bad mouth him, and Skinner, only for Burns to sidle up behind him without him knowing.
I’m surprised this hasn’t been utilized for a current plot.
Burns (Shearer) hears the insults, but laughs startling Homer. He declares that Homer’s very obvious description of him describes “Cathy in personnel” to a tee. Who is this mystery woman? No time for that, for Burns is here to hand out Christmas bonuses. This feels familiar. The bonus this year? A five dollar voucher to the plant cafeteria which no one is happy with. I guess it’s better than the series premiere when they got nothing? Burns has something special for Bart though, I guess because he knows Homer has a son? They’ve obviously crossed paths many a time, but I don’t get the sense that he’s giving Bart a gift because of any of that. The gift is, as Burns puts it, a confectioner’s card of a current baseball player. The way he phrases it he clearly doesn’t place any value on this card, but it’s a Joe DiMaggio card and a pretty famous one in card collecting circles at that. Not that Homer is aware. Burns refers to DiMaggio as a rookie for the New York Nine and when Homer says the name in disbelief (likely because he knows that Joe DiMaggio has long since passed his rookie days) Burns confirms it’s him and adds, “It seems they’re now letting ethnics into the big leagues.” He then turns away from Homer and is surprised to see Cathy (Tress MacNeille), from personnel! She looks exactly like Burns and he asks her how things in personnel are she has a one word response for him: Excellent.
Oh no! He must deftly lick it off!
Homer may not know how valuable the card is, but he knows it’s worth something so he takes it to the only place in town he’d logically go: The Android’s Dungeon. Homer finds Comic Book Guy (Azaria) eating some nachos from his usual perch atop his stool and asks if he can get any money for the card? Comic Book Guy takes one look at it and nearly has a heart attack as he turns up his cash register and empties its contents onto the counter. He greedily snatches the card from Homer, but then immediately begins to fret because he got nacho cheese on it. He reasons the only solution is to deftly lick it off, which he does. Homer just grabs his armful of cash and walks off remarking “Freak,” under his breath. We don’t know how much Homer just got, but probably not a substantial amount? Most stores only keep so much money on-hand, though I suppose a business that buys and sells might have more than usual. Either way, he probably didn’t get full value since that’s a card worth tens of thousands of dollars, but at least he’s happy.
Jesus was a prune? I guess I’ve learned something today.
We return to 742 Evergreen Terrace to find the rest of the family seated in front of the TV. A common past time for the Simpson family. They’re watching the 1986 “classic” Christmas with the California Prunes. Obviously, this is a parody of the 1987 sorta classic A Claymation Christmas which featured the California Raisins, a special I probably should have covered by now, but just have not. This could almost barely be considered a parody as we get to see some of this special which features claymation characters that look almost exactly like the California Raisins. There’s a soulful rendition of “Oh Holy Night” being played (and possibly sung by Karl Wiedergott since he’s listed in the credits, but not assigned a role), but with words adjusted to better fit prunes like “We are the fruit that your grandmother eats.” It’s also a nativity scene so if you ever wanted to see what Jesus would look like as a prune, well now you have. I think this is actually really close to the actual segment it’s parodying so if this seems ridiculous, there’s a more sincere version out there. Lisa declares it offensive to Christians and prunes. You know what it’s not offensive to? Animation fans, because this segment looks way too good to just be a quick gag on an episode of The Simpsons.
Comic Book Guy sure keeps a lot of cash in his register.
Homer then comes bursting into the room with his hands and pockets overflowing with cash. He declares they’re going shopping at the Springfield Heights Promenade. Marge jumps up with excitement declaring “That’s the rich people’s mall! Let’s shop till we droop!” Lisa corrects her to say it’s drop, but Marge just scolds her with “That’s a very violent image, Lisa.” Burl Ives then whisks us into Springfield Heights with his version of “Silver and Gold.” The tagline for this place is “Our prices discriminate because we can’t.” It’s basically a fancy outdoor marketplace. I’m not sure if it’s based on anything specific, but it has a similar vibe to Boston’s Quincy Market and there’s a hint a little ways in that might give that away. For a sight gag, we get an Abercrombie and Rich store and there’s a cart that will put your image on a Rembrandt. Moe is clearly pictured on such a painting. Seems almost too tacky for this place, but if it is anything like Quincy Market then it’s also a tourist trap and tourists buy all kinds of stupid stuff.
Cameos of Christmases Past.
Homer is handing out wads of cash to everyone in the family to go buy Christmas presents with. And when they’re done, he also promises to get a glorious Christmas tree for the home. In fact, he declares it will be so large that its absence from the forest will cause mudslides and flooding. Everyone cheers this except Lisa. That’s some nice attention to detail. We cut to Bart and Lisa shopping together and Lisa has stumbled upon a toy store called The Prodigy Barn. Very quickly there’s a cameo of the rich happiest kid in the world and his mom from “Marge Be Not Proud,” though his hair is now blond instead of brown. Inside, Bart is playing a video game console clearly modeled after the original PlayStation as he’s blasting state capitols on a map of the United States. He soon realizes that this game is trying to teach him stuff and reacts angrily tossing the controller at the screen and declaring “That’ll teach you to teach me!”
This may be more of a gift for Marge.
We jump to Marge shopping at Victor’s Secret, an obvious pun on Victoria’s Secret, where she’s looking to buy a present for her beloved Homie. She’s picked out some very large underwear that’s sort of tiger striped, but she needs the clerk to help her figure out if it’s the right size for Homer. Make that two clerks as they both easily fit into the underwear and Marge is delighted that it’s the right size. They (Castellaneta) then offer to gift wrap it for her and in order to do so they have to fold it like a flag. They stuff it into a tiny box and hand it over to Marge warning her to stand back when she opens it.
This episode is from before everything had Wi-Fi capabilities. I bet that astrolabe was obsolete in less than five years.
Outside of a store called Things Unnecessary, Homer is rummaging through his bag of goods with a contented look on his face. We then find out he’s bought the family all key rings. Cheap, stupid, key rings. He drops his gifts though when he catches a window display for a talking astrolabe. He immediately goes inside where a clerk with a British accent shows it to him. He wants to make it a gift for himself and notes how it is so unnecessary. The clerk (Shearer) laughs and remarks that he has excellent taste then lists the features which include a pad of paper and pen for writing upside down. Homer is pretty much sold, but then he looks at the price tag: 500 bucks. If he buys this he won’t have anything left for a tree. The astrolabe (I think it’s Azaria, but it’s not listed in the credits on IMDB) then announces that today is the birthday of comedian Margaret Cho, which makes this December 5th. We can also see the current coordinates for the location of this device which online sleuths discovered long ago point to Boston, hence my Quincy Market theory. “That’s the birthday I’m always forgetting, I must have it!” And with that, Homer has bought an extremely unnecessary and extremely expensive gift for himself.
What is it with sitcoms and their Christmas suicide jokes? I feel like I should apologize for how many there have been this year.
We cut to the car and the family is on the road. Bart asks if they can get their big tree now and Homer laughs nervously and confirms that they can as he also inspects the cash he has left which totals 2 bucks. He still insists that they’ll get a tree from the finest lot in town as he proceeds to lead the family to a rather unsavory part of town. Lisa is the first one to remark that she doesn’t like this neighborhood, but Homer just tells her to lock her door and avoid eye contact while he turns on the radio. It’s a version of the song “Convoy,” which was part of the plot of “Radio Bart” way back when, only now it’s “Christmas Convoy.” It’s our soundtrack to the sights which includes Gil preparing to hang himself with Christmas lights, some hobos roasting pigeons over a flaming drum, and a bloody snowman with an axe in its head.
Well, sufficient is certainly one way to describe it.
Homer pulls into a pretty sad looking tree lot and buys the best tree 2 bucks will get you, which is pretty brown and lacking in fullness. Homer presents it to the family as a great tree, but Marge points out that it looks a little dry. Homer tries to insist it just needs a little love, but when he rubs it the tree bursts into flames. I’m betting Homer thinks the tree will magically transform when decorated into a glorious one, like it did for Charlie Brown. We cut to the house and the partially burned tree is up. Homer remarks, “Isn’t it sufficient?” and pats it again once again causing the tree to go up in flames. He’s ready with a fire extinguisher and quickly puts it out, but Bart is left to wonder why they couldn’t afford a good tree? Marge asks Homer if there’s something he’s not telling them and right on cue we hear the astrolabe announce that it’s 6:31 PM in Montreal.
A man sobs alone with his astrolabe at Christmas time. Is there a sadder sight?
Marge rightly asks where that voice came from, but Homer tries to play it off as Maggie finally talking. She finds the astrolabe all wrapped up with a tag on it that says “To: Me, From: Santa.” Marge exchanges the gift for Maggie, who Homer was holding, and confronts him on the fact that he wasted their money on an extravagant gift for himself. Homer tries to reason with her that there’s a trickle down theory at play here: If he’s happy then he’s less abusive to the rest of the family. I should try that the next time I buy an expensive action figure. Lisa is the one to inform him that this time he was just plain selfish as sad music plays and the family leaves Homer with his toy. The astrolabe then announces “I am not returnable,” causing Homer to start sobbing. It then announces it will begin testing its smoke alarm for the next three hours which causes Homer to sob louder and announce, “This is sadder than Tuesdays with Morrie.”
Marge has opted for pettiness and I for one support her.
Where do Homer and Marge often settle their disputes? In bed, of course, as we find Homer trying to defend his selfish act. He tries to suggest that she is in fact selfish too for choosing to get her haircut at Supercuts instead of Regular Cuts, the joke being Supercuts is a pretty cheap place to get a haircut. And whoever does Marge’s hair deserves a lot. Marge is obviously not taking the bait and just points out to Homer that Christmas is the time to think of others, but he only cares about himself. He denies this accusation pointing out that he cared what they thought when they found out. She informs him that he can sleep on the couch tonight, but Homer just wants her to yell at him now and get it over with. Marge refuses instead opting to parcel out her anger over the next few days and weeks so she can jab at him when he seems most content. Homer can only groan as he grabs his pillow and flees.
This doesn’t seem like much of a punishment for Homer.
Homer has decided to stay up late watching Christmas specials with his selfish purchase. He’s also opted to unwrap it early as well and even declares that he doesn’t need Marge since he has the astrolabe. It responds to him by telling him that Columbia’s chief export is coffee. On television is The Year Santa Got Lost starring Jimmy Stewart (Castellaneta) as the voice of the mailman. It looks like another claymation piece and the characters all resemble toys from Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, except for the mailman who just looks like a mailman. I guess he’s a nod to Special Delivery from Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town. It’s a very boring story that Jimmy is telling and Homer taps out insisting that Jimmy Stewart as a puppet is just wrong. On the next channel is Mr. Mcgrew’s Christmas Carol, a parody of Mr. Magoo. It’s sort of like the California Prunes from earlier in that this parody is so similar to the thing it’s parodying that it’s almost indistinguishable. Upon stumbling on this, Homer declares he loves that blind, senile, old man! He’s then interrupted by his father knocking on a window in his bathrobe claiming he can’t find his way back to the nursing home. Homer shouts at him, “I heard you the first five times!” then throws his shoe at the window. A bunch of snow falls off the roof and poor Grandpa is buried.
Oh that Magoo McGrew, that’s not a woman, you silly, old man!
We get to see some of McGrew (Castellaneta) which looks a lot like the actual Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, the very first animated Christmas special made for television. I’ve never covered it because it’s, well, terribly boring. We get to watch McGrew mistake a potbelly stove for a pregnant woman which somehow leads to him sticking his head into a roaring fire. Homer laughs for, once again, old McGrew has mistaken something for something. As the special moves along, Homer comes to realize that McGrew is just like him. Well, except for the rich part. When it gets to the climactic scene at the cemetary, Homer is on the floor in front of the TV begging the ghost to spare McGrew and to take Tiny Tim instead! The ghost gestures to the headstone which reads Ebenezer McGrew. Homer then sees it as reading” Homer Simpson – Unloved by All. He cries out “Unloved by Al? No!” then the ghost gestures again and he reads it correctly and yells even louder.
Marge wanted to see more of this Star Trek Christmas Carol and I think I’m with her.
The next morning, Homer is still in the midst of a fretful sleep moaning on the couch “I’ll be good.” Lisa wakes him up with some concern in her voice and Homer just asks her what day is it? She tells him it’s Saturday, December 6h and Homer jumps up saying “Good! There’s still four more days till Christmas!” No one bothers to correct him. We next find the family at breakfast where Homer is talking about the amazing cartoon he watched the night before. He describes it and Lisa has to point out that what he watched was A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and that it’s been around for 160 years. Bart points out that television has been mining that thing for decades and he is certainly not wrong. What’s sort of implausible here is that someone who watches as much TV as Homer would be unfamiliar with it. Bart gets to prove his point by turning on the TV (there sure has been a lot of the family watching TV so far in this one) to reveal an Urkel parody and a Star Trek one. Marge thinks the Star Trek one looks pretty good. Homer then announces that TV and nightmares have joined forces to convince him to be a less selfish man. He vows to become the least selfish man in town and Marge reminds him that he’s made this promise before. Homer points out that this time he’s sober…ish. That’s a bit alarming since it’s only breakfast.
It really is the perfect gift for someone always getting stuff in his eye.
Time to see Homer put his words to action. We find Flanders (Shearer) and his two boys, Rod (Pamela Hayden) and Todd (Cartwright), taking some boxes of old clothes and lima beans to an area frequented by the homeless, only Homer beat them to the punch. He gave them his old clothes and we get to see a whole bunch of unhoused men dressed like Homer. One comes over to remark that these new pants smell worse than his old ones, but Homer just says “You’re welcome.” To the Nuclear Power Plant where Homer owes Lenny a present. A real present. Homer presents Lenny with a photo cube that’s full of pictures of them (and Carl) which Lenny seems to appreciate. And there’s another surprise, Homer filed down all of the corners so it won’t hurt if it comes into contact with Lenny’s frequently injured eye. He demonstrates by jabbing Lenny in the eye and he smiles uncomfortably and announces it only stings a little.
Marge has been waiting fifteen seasons for this.
Back at the house, the family is finishing up dinner when Homer goes to eat the last porkchop, catches himself, and then walks the platter over to Marge. He offers her the last porkchop and Marge is so overcome with emotion she doesn’t know what to do. Homer has never offered her the last porkchop and she happily accepts. She is super emotional about it as she’s basically sobbing while she eats it remarking that his thoughtfulness tastes so good and that tears are the sweetest sauce. She’s not even bothering to use utensils, just her hands, and all the rest of the family can do is stare at her. Homer also adds that she’s starting to creep him out.
I feel like we’ve been here before.
We then cut to the family at church where Ned and Homer are in charge of the collection plates, though they’re really more like baskets on poles. Homer gets to Burns who just deposits a coin into the basket so Homer jabs at him. He drops another coin in, but Homer is still not satisfied so he keeps jabbing him in the face. Burns finally relents by emptying his entire wallet into the basket, including his credit cards and eventually the wallet itself. He then angrily suggests that Homer take his blood too and pricks his finger, but only dust comes out which Burns acknowledges by saying “Yes, I’m old.” Ned happily empties his basket into a sack held by the Reverend Lovejoy (Shearer) who is only too happy to inform Ned that this week he came in a distant second to Homer who has a rather impressive haul. Homer announces he’s not looking for glory, he’s just trying to buy that stairway to Heaven Jesus sang about. When Ned corrects him that it was actually Led Zeppelin who sang that song, he just scoffs and tells him to get back to his bong, hippy! He and the reverend then smugly walk off leaving Ned to stew in anger. His kids come over and Todd asks him if he’s jealous of Homer with some shock in his voice. Ned confesses that he is a little jealous. To try and cheer him up, Rod confesses he’s jealous of girls because they get to wear dresses and Ned angrily responds with “One problem at a time, boy.” This was the era where Ned Flanders became a more bigoted Christian. I know some people don’t like this turn for Ned, but when a show is on for as long as The Simpsons characters are going to change with the times.
Homer: a man of many talents. Or maybe just this one?
We return, yet again, to the Simpson master bedroom only now things are far less frosty. Marge is delighted in Homer’s transformation and he has come to view being unselfish as a natural high like hiking or paint thinner. And he’s not done! Homer then unveils to Marge his latest gift to the town: an ice skating rink in the Simpson backyard. How he built that without Marge’s knowledge is not specified. Similarly, how could he, the man who couldn’t afford a Christmas tree, manage to buy all of the materials needed for a rink? I should stop asking questions. It’s a hit though as numerous people are skating on it. Comic Book Guy demonstrates he’s pretty nimble for a man of his generous waist even though his leap results in a fall. A fall that splits his pants. With a declaration of “Activate cloaking device,” he ties his coat around his waist, only for that to rip too. Overcome with depression, he chooses to engage candy bar sadly.
Nelson is showing off and giving Flanders the business here. What a guy.
Ned is shown making his way to the Springfield Men’s Mission singing “Here comes sandwiches,” to the tune of “Here Comes Santa Claus.” He has a plate of cheese on bread for the homeless who dwell here, but because this is Season 15 Ned we have to get a little peak in his head as he refers to this as Boozy Bum Lane. In other words, this is the Ned who partakes in charity not because it’s right or just a nice thing to do, but because he just wants to get into Heaven. He’s shocked to find the place empty, so shocked he even spells out the H word (no, not that one). And he soon realizes that everyone is at Homer’s where they can rent skates for free (how did he come into possession of all these skates? Shut up, Joe, just go with it) no matter how gross and black their feet may be. Ned is frustrated and dismayed to hear Gil (Castellaneta) refer to Homer as the nicest guy in town. Nelson (Cartwright) is also there to deliver his customary “Ha! Ha!” and add a dash of “Your position has been usurped!” He also makes a couple more passes to rub it in even laughing “You’re sad at Christmas!” While he does he demonstrates some really fine tandem skating with Sherri or Terri. Sometimes a guy surprises you.
Great sight gag, I approve!
After an act break, we return to the TV! Man, this episode has a lot of old Simpsons tropes between the bedroom scenes and the plot-advancing television spots. It’s the nightly news with Kent Brockman (Shearer) delivering a breaking news report on the nicest guy in town: Homer Simpson. He has to deliver it in his Brockman way though by first shocking and horrifying the viewer with the announcement that Santa Claus is dead! This gets a scream out of Bart and Lisa who are, strangely, the only ones watching the news in the house. Bart didn’t seem to believe in Santa way back in the first episode, but I guess he’s had a change of heart? Or maybe it’s just a part of him he can’t let go? This was all a clever setup by Brockman to declare that Santa might as well be dead, because Homer Simpson has stolen his spotlight. They then show a photo of Homer strangling Bart in front of Marge and Lisa, but it’s been digitally altered to replace Bart with an image of a bouquet of flowers.
Ned, you’re starting to freak me out a little bit.
Next door, Ned is practically steaming watching this report. He starts tugging on his moustache and assuring himself “Pain is the cleanser,” in an attempt to banish his jealous thoughts. Mel Gibson would approve. A ring of the doorbell gets him off the couch and it’s a pregnant woman (Hayden) who needs help with her car. An overzealous Ned offers to jump the car, rotate the tires, and even fold the map she’s holding. This just turns her off and, calling Ned a creep, the woman says she was looking for Homer Simpson. That is apparently the last straw as Ned vows to show the whole town that he’s nicer than Homer. That he can be the nicest man who ever lived! He then looks at a picture of Jesus on the wall and tells him he said nicest man, not man-god, and to keep his pants on. I don’t think Jesus wore pants, Ned. Hah!
Skinner and his mother asking the important questions here.
To make good on his boast, Ned has decided to go door-to-door dressed as Santa Claus handing out presents to everyone in town. His first stop is the Skinner residence where Seymour (Shearer) is flabbergasted by Ned’s mission. Agnes (MacNeille) barks at him, “What’s your angle, pervert?” and Ned is actually honest by answering “Giving in this world, living in the next!” In other words, he just wants to get into Heaven. When Skinner asks how he can possibly afford this on a widower’s salary, Ned informs him he rented out his house to a fraternity. We cut back to Ned’s home and there are Greek letters (Sigma, Chi, Sigma? I’m not up on frat business) above the door and a keg goes flying through the front window. We hear an agitated Rod also shouting “Stay out of our medicine cabinet!”
That’s quite an imagination you’ve got there, Homer.
Homer takes note of Flanders’ good deeds and scoffs at them. We see he’s already been to the Simpson house and gifted Bart a Krusty-branded version of Operation. We hear the toy groan when Bart “tweezes my wang.” I feel like they’re usually more subtle than that? Homer, apparently taking Ned’s bait, wants to outdo him and thinks the best way is to buy everyone a car. Lisa, ever the voice of reason, is there to tell her father that he doesn’t need to outdo Mr. Flanders and to remind him to remember the theme of the season. Homer seems to think it’s despair and Lisa goes on to share her feelings on the matter of gifts as a Buddhist. She thinks people would be better off without presents, which gets Homer thinking. We see a car, a Christmas sweater, and then an image of Budai (smiling fat dude often mistaken for Buddha), and they all combine into an image of Budai (Azaria) driving. He offers Homer some sage advice, “[…]attachment to material goods kills the soul.” Then, for some reason, Budai gets pulled over by the cops in Homer’s imagination and vows to never return to jail. Homer is satisfied now and decides he needs to take away everyone’s presents! He then thanks, Buddha which brings back his brain cloud to show Budai getting arrested and threatening the cops that they’re in trouble if he ever gets out.
Look at Santa’s Little Helper! He’s cuter than Bradford II!
And now it’s time for an extended Grinch parody! Homer, with assistance from Santa’s Little Helper, is going to go house to house stealing all the presents under the tree in town on Christmas Eve. And as he does so, he’s going to sing about to the tune of “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” which goes something like this: You’re a hero, Homer Jay. You’re as crafty as a skunk. They’ll thank you in the morning for stealing Flanders’ junk, Homer Jay! You’re a double-bacon genius burger, and just a little drunk!” As he does, we see clips of him walking like the Grinch, slithering like the Grinch, cutting down stockings like the drink, and chloroforming a toddler like the Grinch. Wait! That’s all Homer and not a good look for the big guy.
This sort of thing didn’t work out all that well for the Grinch, but maybe it will for Homer.
At dawn, Homer is seen driving the family station wagon into the center of town with a massive sack of stuff tied to the roof. He hops out of the car and douses the bag in gasoline before hopping onto the ground to put a hand to his ear. There he waits to listen to the thanks coming from the folks of Springfield. It’s a rather clever inverse of the Grinch. He wanted to hear sadness and anger over his stealing Christmas, but heard singing instead. Homer wants to hear the singing, but he just hears anger. First from Lenny, then Dolph (MacNeille), and then we start to jump around. Snake (Azaria) is shown shocked and saddened by the fact that he’s been robbed at Christmas and reflects, “Man, so this is how it feels.” In a season of Simpsons repeating Family Guy gags, I feel like I have to point out that Family Guy did a very similar joke where an inmate stabs himself to see how it feels. We then jump to a rather sad scene at Nelson’s house. He wonders if his dad came back in the night to steal their presents while his mom (MacNeille) just gruffly says “I wouldn’t put it past him.” She references the night he left and Nelson gets defensive insisting he just went to the store and when he gets back he’s going to wave those Pop Tarts right in her face! Poor, delusional, Nelson.
Definitely not a gracious mob.
Homer then pulls back a little disappointment in hearing anger, but he points out happily that a mob is approaching shaking its fists in anger! The show decides to let Cookie Kwan (MacNeille) and Drederick Tatum (Azaria) get some lines in before the mob begins pummeling a confused Homer with snowballs. Even the Simpson family joins in on the beating. And who comes to Homer’s aid? Why, it’s Ned Flanders, of course. He stands protectively between Homer and the mob to tell them what Homer did was wrong, but that maybe he was also wrong to give everyone those gifts? Ned gets bombarded with snowballs for suggesting such and knocked to the ground.
Well, I hope this hurts less than a football to the groin, Hans.
Now, it’s Homer’s turn to rise to Ned’s defense. He shouts out for everyone to wait and look to the sky for there is the Christmas they need. And in the sky high above Springfield is a brilliant, shining, star. Everyone is transfixed with Selma (Kavner) even declaring it a miracle. We cut abruptly to find out that it isn’t a star, but a flare fired by Hans Moleman (Castellaneta) who appears to have gone off the road and is stuck chest-deep in the snow. It’s his last flare too, but don’t worry, for rescue dogs have come to his aid! Oh, actually those are wolves and the McGrew-like Moleman is blind and confused and sure to die.
Homer’s big speech is a thing of beauty. Bravo to writer, Michael Price, who penned this one.
Back in the center of town, Ned is finishing up reading from the Bible, the same passage old Linus referenced in A Charlie Brown Christmas. Before he can finish though, Mayor Quimby (Castellaneta) buts in to say that Ned can’t pray on city property. Homer takes it from there, “Let’s just say that on this day, a million years ago, a dude was born who most of us think was magic, but others don’t, and that’s cool. But we’re probably right. Amen.” The crowd returns with an “Amen” as well, and I just love that summation by Homer. It sums up that Christian smugness so prevalent in American society since that’s the majority opinion.
He’s such a good boy!
Homer then decides, with Ned’s help, to return all the gifts! As the two toss gifts to the mob, we get the expected animation of Santa’s Little Helper doing his Max impression as well. To sneak in an extra joke, we also get to see Professor Frink (Azaria) open his present and find it’s a brassiere (his choice of words), but in the spirit of Christmas, decides to make pretend that he has boobs. Bart is shown sharing his sentiments that this is a great Christmas and that not even Moe’s (Azaria) annual suicide attempt can bring him down. We then cut to Moe on top of City Hall threatening to jump and no one taking him seriously. Moe vows to jump and that they’ll all be sorry, but then laughs and confesses he’s not going to do it, but slips and falls anyway.
And as for Moe…who did NOT die!
No one was paying attention to old Moe for they were busy launching into a rendition of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” because we need to tie this back to Peanuts one more time. Moe actually gets to deliver the “Peace on Earth and mercy mild,” line so we see he’s not dead, just really, really, hurt. As the crowd sings, we cut back to the wrapped astrolabe on the roof of Homer’s car. We hear it say that today is the birth of Jesus, and also the birthday for singer Barbara Mandrell. Snake then steals it for good measure, a nice way to bring the whole story back around to the beginning. We fade out on the crowd singing. Merry Christmas!
I like that they got the astrolabe into the end somehow.
As far as Simpsons Christmas episode go, that is one of the most joke-heavy ones they’ve done. There are tons of one-liners and just silly moments for the sake of comedy. Yeah, there are plenty of holes one can go poking through it, especially if past episodes are brought up. I’m always a little surprised when this turns into a “Homer Loves Flanders” redux in the second half thus leading into the Grinch parody. It’s quite a ride considering where we started. There’s really no B plot as the plot of the episode just moves from one stage to the next. I like that about it and it is reminiscent of “Grift of the Magi,” another Christmas episode that just moved from one situation to the next. The difference there is that one morphed into a Christmas episode where as this one was pretty much committed the whole way through.
The stop-motion segments are great and really help to give the episode a “special” sort of feel.
As I mentioned during the write-up, there are a ton of moments where TV is used to advance the plot. I’m pretty much okay with it though as there was some great comedy to be found there. The Christmas special parodies were all well done, even if some played it mostly straight. The extra surprise of stop-motion utilized was pretty damn cool too and shout out to Chiodo Brothers Productions, Inc. for producing those segments. Some of the jokes could be described as easy or layups, but I found they worked. And try to keep in perspective that some of this stuff was still pretty novel back in 2003. Now, a Grinch parody feels a bit more played-out, though I’m struggling to think of many Magoo parodies so The Simpsons was and is still ahead of the curve there.
“‘Tis the Fifteenth Season” may honestly be the funniest Christmas episode of The Simpsons. That doesn’t mean it’s the best, but there’s a solid amount of laughs to be found. Some don’t like the portrayal of “Jerk Ass” Homer like we see in the first act and I also know folks who don’t like what Flanders morphed into in the 2000s. Such opinions are valid, but for me, it works. This is funny television. It’s not trying to make much of a statement, just lampoon Christmas specials. There isn’t really a cynical message either so if you don’t care for those types of Christmas specials then I don’t think this one qualifies. It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened at Christmas.
Merry Christmas from me and the Simpsons.
And that’s it for the 2024 edition of The Christmas Spot! If it’s the last time I do this 25 specials in 25 days thing then I feel like I went out with a pretty solid selection of Christmas episodes. There was some good, even some great, and some stinkers, but those are fun to read and write about. It was a lot though as I finish writing this one on December 23rd, possibly the latest I’ve taken to finish one of these. That’s partly why I feel like I need to take a step back because it’s become harder and harder to find the time (and material) to keep this up. Whether you read one or 25 of these things this year, thank you, and I hope you had some fun. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, joyous Wednesday, and good luck in the new year!
That’s a wrap on Christmas 2024, but if you must have more here’s what we had to say on this day last Christmas and beyond:
We have reached another Christmas Day! It’s a great time to celebrate and enjoy the moment for tomorrow we mourn the passing of the season. It’s the great come-down every year. For this holiday, I am once again returning to my list of the best of the best when it comes to Christmas specials. This…
Welcome to Christmas Day 2022! We made it another year and another long year is ahead of us until we make it back, but right now, it’s time to celebrate! And in keeping with the theme of this year’s countdown, we are once again looking at another much beloved Christmas special on this day. Before…
We made it! Another year in the books, and another Christmas has come. Indulge in it. Bask in it, for it only comes once a year, and not to get too dramatic, but you never know how many you’re going to get. And we’re ending this year’s edition of The Christmas Spot with another throwback…
When Pixar released Toy Story in 1995 it proved to the world that audiences would accept films created entirely within a computer. Prior to that, 3D animation was thought of as a gimmick, something for commercials and video games, but not something that could carry an entire feature length film. It’s similar to the prejudices traditional animation faced in the early days and in hindsight it was a pretty silly thought. Sure, when the medium was young and crude it wasn’t ready, but it needed to mature. It needed refinement and now it’s practically all we have when it comes to animated movies.
After the success of Toy Story, other companies broke through. Everyone remembers the great ant war of 1998 when Pixar’s A Bug’s Life went toe-to-toe with Dreamworks’ Antz, but not too long after came Ice Age. From Blue Sky Studios, Ice Age would be a commercial hit for 20th Century Fox in the 2000s beginning with the 2002. A franchise was born that technically isn’t yet concluded, but after the release of the third film in 2009, but right before the fourth in 2012, came a Christmas special. It’s not all that dissimilar from what contemporary Shrek did. These movies are expensive and time-consuming so studios found that it was more efficient to create television specials basically alongside film production since the same assets could be utilized. It’s not like hand drawn animation where most of the frames are different, it’s more like virtual stop-motion. These character models and environments already exist on a computer and before they get too outdated they can be put to more use.
After three movies, this was the core group (left to right): Diego, Manny, Ellie, Eddie, Crash, Peaches, Sid.
Ice Age, if you didn’t already figure it out, takes place at the dawn of man and stars a bunch of animals who have human intelligence. There’s a mammoth, saber-toothed cat, sloth, squirrel, and so on and they have their own misadventures which are often comedic in nature. John Leguizamo stars as the dimwitted sloth, Sid. Despite being a sloth, Sid isn’t physically slow, but is mentally, making him a good-natured idiot. By contrast, we have Ray Romano’s Manny the woolly mammoth. He’s a bit irritable and finds himself constantly annoyed by Sid, but he has a big heart so he can’t just find it in himself to ditch the sloth. Denis Leary plays Diego, the saber-toothed cat who starts off as a foe, but is soon turned friend. In the second film, Manny finds a lover in Ellie (Queen Latifah) and in the third film they welcome their daughter, Peaches (Ciara Bavo). Lurking throughout the series is Scrat (Chris Wedge), a squirrel forever chasing an acorn, but never quite getting it. He doesn’t interact with the gang a whole lot and is more like a side story, but he seems to be the most popular character in the franchise with many in the audience just wanting to see him get that nut. It’s sort of like wanting the Trix rabbit to just get some damn cereal once for all.
When it comes to Ice Age I’m pretty sure I saw the first three. I don’t know if I saw anymore than that. I also remember very little about the plots and events that take place in the films. I was older, I didn’t have kids or siblings to bring to the movies, so these were things I caught much later and mostly because I married someone five years younger than me. She had experienced the movies and liked them and wanted to share them with me. They’re kind of just fine. They always looked pretty good and Blue Sky Studios was plenty capable of animating in this style, I just never found myself drawn to the characters. Sid and Scrat work well as comedic relief, but like most comedic relief types there is a limit to how much is too much, more so with Sid than Scrat. Manny is very similar to Ray Romano’s sitcom character so he’s not exactly lovable and Diego is lacking in charisma. There was just nothing in this movies that clicked for me, but I’m willing to set that aside and take in a Christmas special. Maybe these characters will work much better over a 24 minute duration as opposed to a 100 minute one. And since it’s one of those Christmas specials that takes place before the birth of that Christ guy, it’s already interesting just to see where the story goes (or rather, begins).
And who could forget that lovable scamp, Scrat.
This one begins without any big song, or title, or anything like that. It just jumps right into the latest from Scrat, the squirrel who is always on the hunt for acorns. Set to the tune of “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” (a little too obvious a selection, if you ask me), we see Scrat sneaking about and swiping acorns. He first takes one from a setting which includes a few yellow and orange gourds making me think this is Thanksgiving. He then moves onto a snowman which has three acorns set in it like buttons. It’s at least a cute visual as Scrat jumps inside the snowman and his face replaces the snowman’s face before he hops off essentially bisecting the snowman in the process. Then this thieving sequence goes full Grinch as Scrat finds acorns…hung on a clothesline? Just go with it. After swiping those he’s left with a giant sleigh of sorts full of the damn things. He tries to give it a pull, but he’s no Max. The sleigh, which is basically just a slab of bark, falls apart and all of his acorns go rolling away. You got greedy, Scrat.
Manny’s family heirloom is a big, round, rock. Things were simpler back then.
The proper story then begins as we find Manny rolling into frame a giant, round, rock and the actual title hits. Manny calls for his wife Ellie as he wants to surprise Peaches with the Christmas Rock. He says he just pulled it out of storage so I guess they have a cave for living in and maybe another cave for storage? Peaches, on cue, comes sliding down a hillside and collides with her parents knocking them over. She apologizes, but she’s also in the middle of a snowball fight with the possums Eddie (Josh Peck) and Crash (Seann William Scott) and can’t exactly stop running. They miss with their attempts at a volley and Peaches fires back using her snout encasing the two in snow. Upon realizing why her dad was trying to get her attention, Peaches excitedly races over to the Christmas Rock. Before Manny can get out a word of warning though, she decides to kiss it and her mammoth lips adhere to the stone. Rocks don’t really work like that, but it is a cartoon.
Peaches love rock.
Manny frees his daughter from the stone and then explains how this thing is a family heirloom. Ellie fills us in that the object of the rock is to catch Santa’s eye when he goes by on his sleigh. It lets him know that a kid lives there who is deserving of presents. I guess we’re just jumping right into Christmas here. It’s Santa’s show, nothing more. Don’t question it! Manny is so excited that he starts singing “Oh Christmas Rock,” which sounds like the song you think it does. Clearly, this rock is the custom of the ice age and the whole tree thing has yet to be invented. Until now!
Sid has a radical idea: how about a Christmas tree?
Well, first we have to hear from Diego. He questions why Manny is singing to a rock, but he just explains “Duh! It’s Christmas!” He asks Diego if sabers have any Christmas traditions and he explains how his dad used to bring home a gazelle and he and his family would devour it. He demonstrates by fashioning a gazelle out of snow, but once he starts digging in he realizes that he’s terrifying Peaches so he changes the story’s ending to playing with the gazelle and having a wonderful Christmas time. Now, Sid gets to wander over and take a look at this so called Christmas Rock. He wants to touch it, but Manny won’t let him and says he’ll break it. The others think this is preposterous, but Diego seems to agree with the mammoth. Sid then determines that a rock is a poor way to get someone’s attention. He suggests a tree instead which Manny scoffs at the suggestion of a Christmas Tree. Sid then settles on a nearby evergreen and gives it a sprucing up with earthworms, dead fish, a hedgehog for an ornament, and spider webs for garland.
It was so apparent that Sid would find a way to break the rock that there was no way to make it funny.
When Sid’s tree is finished even Diego has to admit it is pretty eye-catching. Sid thinks it could use something else, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. As he sizes up his tree, he’s backing up until he bumps into a tree and his ass gets stuck. When he frees himself from the tree, he finds he has a piece of ice in the shape of a star stuck to his butt. Feeling that’s the thing that will really scream “Sid” when added to the tree, the sloth climbs up it and jams the top of the tree through the center of the star in brutish fashion. Now, he’s satisfied, but the tree bends over all the way to the ground due to his weight. When Sid lets go, the tree snaps back into place sending the “star” whirling through the air like a shuriken. It nearly takes off Manny’s hair in the process and shatters against the Christmas Rock which elicits a gasp from all of the onlookers. Sid sort of laughs off the gasps as he goes to lean on the rock and asks them all what they did they expect? Then the rock cracks and crumbles as was foretold.
Now you’ve gone and made the mammoth mad, you dumb sloth.
All Manny can do is inspect the remains of his family heirloom. Sid has gone into full apology mode, but the angry, shaking, mammoth doesn’t want to hear it. For as angry as he looks, his voice doesn’t really match. Sure, he’s not happy, but I’m not sensing any rage here. He just gestures at Sid and tells him he shouldn’t be worried about how mad he’s made him, but how mad this will make Santa. It’s obvious that Manny is searching for words here as he devises a punishment for Sid: The Naughty List! This is apparently something Manny has just made up, but Sid wails with suffering at the thought of being left out of Christmas. As Manny leaves him to his misery, Ellie questions him about this solution he came up with. Manny dismisses any concern reasoning that Sid will get over it since only kids believe in this Santa stuff. Peaches overhears him though and immediately challenges him on his belief in Santa. Manny tries to take it back, but Peaches fires back that most hurtful of accusations: “The only one who deserves to be on The Naughty List is you, dad!” That sings even more than “I learned it by watching you!”
I think he may even be faster than Frosty, though he isn’t on his belly so it doesn’t count.
Peaches takes off leaving her parents alone. Manny tries to brush it off and says this Santa stuff won’t be hurtful to an adult like Sid. We smash cut to Sid to still wailing, still in tremendous emotional pain about being placed on The Naughty List. Crash and Eddie are there to console him as they tell him to stop crying. When Sid questions why they point out that his tears are freezing to the ground. He looks at his feet to find them encased in ice, then returns to his whimpering which is pretty much unintelligible. His frozen feet start to slide though and soon Sid is off sliding down the hillside leaving Eddie and Crash to look at each other with an uncharacteristic amount of worry in their eyes. At least, I think it’s uncharacteristic. They don’t seem to be the sort that usually cares much about feelings and such. Plus they were basically just shown delighting in being naughty.
Just a squirrel having a romantic dance with his nut.
That’s our act break, and when we return we find Scrat up to his usual antics again. There’s an acorn stuck frozen in a pond. Set to “Dance of Flowers” (I guess I should give them credit for not going with the Ice Skater’s Waltz), Scrat first has some difficulty in reaching the acorn due to his tendency to slip and fall. Eventually he gets a tongue on it and is able to wrap himself around the acorn and pluck it from the ice. So begins an ice skating routine between a squirrel and his nut. He treats the acorn like a dance partner as he skates about carving the image of an acorn in the ice as he goes along. At some point he slides through a hollow log on the surface of the ice and emerges with a big flourish of a finish. At the end of which he realizes he lost his acorn and what he’s holding instead is a giant spider which isn’t too happy to see him. We cut to black as the spider attacks. That certainly killed some time.
It would seem only the kid knows which way is north.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming. Sid is still aghast about being put on The Naughty List. When he asks Diego how he got onto Santa’s bad side he quips “Because he doesn’t have a loser’s list.” As Diego walks off, Sid thanks him for trying to cheer him up completely oblivious to the insult. Peaches then comes over with a solution. She suggests they take their concerns to the source, the big man himself, Santa! To do so, they need to head to the pole (“The north one?”) and the two possums want to join them since they don’t want to be on that list either. As for Peaches, she wants to help out her Uncle Sid, but also prove to her dad that Santa Claus is real. Sid is convinced, but doesn’t think Peaches should go since the North Pole is a desolate, frozen, wasteland. We pull out for dramatic effect to reveal that everything is a frozen, desolate, place though one of the possums (I have no idea who is who) needs to remark that this place isn’t exactly Miami. A pointless joke since the visual did the trick already. Sid relents, then he and the possums quickly demonstrate that they have no idea which way the North Pole is as they all start walking in different directions. It’s the kid, Peaches, who has to point them north. They’re all gonna die.
Quite literally the blind leading the blind.
We next catch up with our clan marching to the tune of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” as sung by Sid. Great. They all join in with their own version of the song: Nine fleas a biting, eight pounds of earwax, seven frosty fingers, six frosty fingers (one snapped off), five…and they don’t get it out. It sounded like they may go with frosty fingers again, but they find themselves in white out conditions. One of the possums thinks they walked off the edge of the Earth, but Sid assures them it’s just your every day white-out and that they’ll be fine if they stick together, so of course they’re all separated. They all start walking around and calling out each other’s names. There’s a decent gag where one of the possums is looking for the other one, Eddie, and then remembers that he in fact is Eddie so even they can’t tell each other apart. They’re all reunited when the possums get squished between the butts of the two larger mammals.
It’s Prancer the rescue reindeer!
Sid, with a good idea for once, instructs them all to hold onto each other as he leads them through the snow since he has a self-assessed good sense of direction. Which means he’s going to march them off a cliff. This thing writes itself. Before Sid does do just that, we get a fake out where he stops to sneeze, but then marches them off the cliff to their certain doom. Only they get deus ex machina’d by a flying reindeer! It’s time to meet Prancer (T.J. Miller), a very modest, flying, reindeer. He celebrates himself and demonstrates his powers, but once he reveals his name the two possums laugh. I don’t get it. He’s annoyed. Sid thanks him for his help and wishes him a merry Christmas as he starts to wander off. Prancer seems shocked that Sid doesn’t want his help, but he assures the reindeer that they can take it from here. Then he walks off the cliff again. This time it’s Peaches who is there to save him ensnaring his neck with his snout as she declares that the reindeer is coming with them. Good idea.
Well, I bet Santa will definitely do a double-take when he sees that monstrosity.
It’s time to check in on the mammoth parents. Manny has reassembled his rock using mud and it looks pretty terrible. When he asks Diego what he thinks he asks him if he wants the Christmas answer or the real answer? It matters little for the thing falls apart soon after. Ellie then comes along in a panic because she can’t find Peaches and Sid and the possums are missing too. Diego informs the parents the last time he saw them they were trying to figure out how to get Sid off Santa’s Naughty List. Manny gets defensive at just hearing that before anyone can even look at him. He asks Diego if he can pick up Sid’s scent. The cat informs him that he can, but it makes his eyes burn. The mammoths insist that he does anyway and sure enough, he’s repulsed. He finds it and starts to follow it, but the effect of Sid’s musk is making him visibly woozy.
It’s so funny that Sid knows what a barf bag is even though it won’t be invented for thousands of years. Hardy har har.
Sid and the gang have resumed their journey along with Prancer. Sid inquires with the reindeer how long it will take them to get to the North Pole and this is apparently the first time the subject has been raised. Prancer is surprised to hear where this is leading and tells the group you can’t walk there, you have to fly. And it just so happens that they’re in the presence of a flying reindeer willing to give them a lift. We cut to them in the air with Sid on his back, the possums wrapped around his legs, and Peaches seated in his antlers. He basically just makes a bunch of standard airline references as he struggles with the weight of the mammoth on his antlers. Peaches asks him if she’s too heavy, but he insists she’s not while whispering under his breath that she very much is. Sid isn’t doing too well either as he asks Prancer if he comes equipped with barf bags. Pretty wild how they know all of this stuff before it’s been invented.
What Christmas miracle number is this? Two? The rock breaking was kind of a miracle too.
Before Sid can blow chunks all over Prancer, we cut back to Manny and Ellie marching through a blizzard in search of their daughter. The fact that they’re now flying is going to make it pretty hard to catch up with them, let alone track via Diego’s nose. And that’s also going to be impossible if Diego is covered in snow, as Manny soon discovers when looking for the cat. He pokes at what appears to be Diego’s head, but when the snow falls away we see it’s actually his butt. Diego’s head pops out the other end and he asks his friend if he’s glad he didn’t kiss him? That’s an odd thing to say. Diego then tries to resume tracking the group, but his sense of direction has been thrown off by the blizzard and he’s apparently lost the scent. He then spies some tracks, but they’re his own and we pull back to see the trio have been walking in circles. Manny is hopeless, but Ellie tells him that he needs to have faith that Peaches will be all right. I think she’s going to stick up for Sid here, even though he’s not the brightest sloth he can look after a kid, but no. She tells Manny to just believe in the magic of Christmas. Manny finds this suggestion absurd, as he should, but she begs him to go along with it. He half-heartedly says that he believes in the magic of Christmas. Then the blizzard stops, the skies open, and the northern lights are visible. Manny insists it was just coincidence while Ellie insists she doesn’t care how it happened, but she’ll take it. This is stupid.
Things are starting to look a bit more Christmassy.
Now, to resume the journey north with the other crew. Prancer lands in an area that doesn’t look like all of the rest. It’s still covered in snow, but there’s also bushes with large, purple, berries and birch trees that have red stripes on them instead of black. Peaches quickly confirms that the berries are sugar plums while the possums declare the bark to be peppermint bark. Sid is excited to find some yellow snow which he goes to consume, but Prancer stops him with a deadpan “No. Just no.” We don’t actually see the yellow snow, but just Sid’s reaction to it. I should have expected a yellow snow joke at some point, but after three movies I had just assumed it had been done before. Possibly more than once.
Look at that cute little guy! I know he’s threatening the mains with a stabbing, but he’s still cute!
Their foraging is soon interrupted by another sloth. He’s much smaller than Sid and blue with a big spear. He (Judah Friedlander) introduces himself as part of the “Santarouge,” that’s a portmanteau of Santa and entourage, if you’re trying to figure out how to pronounce it. He’s also pretty hostile. His purpose, and that of the others in his group, is to keep away those who would disturb Santa from his important work. Peaches doesn’t seem to mind the hostility and is delighted to have the existence of Santa confirmed and practically begs the little guy to let them meet with him. He refuses and points his spear in their direction. Sid, being the bigger mammal, tries to challenge him with the overused line of “You and what army?” The little blue guy snaps his fingers in a sassy way and countless more mini sloths appear each one armed with a spear and shield. He then gives the command to, “Raise heck.” We can joke about eating piss snow and kissing asses, but we draw the line at saying the word hell.
I guess we needed an avalanche.
As the mini sloths move in and surround the crew, Prancer decides he’s seen enough. Announcing that they’re no match for the power of flight, he takes off and…gets his head stuck in the ice. Okay, so somehow the group was backed into a corner of sorts where the environment curled over their heads. It’s pretty preposterous, but it’s one way to account for Prancer basically being able to just fly away. Seeing their new friend stuck, Peaches tells the others to grab a leg and pull. They do, which looks really painful for Prancer, but also causes a bunch of cracks to open in the snow and ice around them. We see a little ball of snow go bouncing away. It rolls and bounces off the side of a cliff and comes to smack Manny in the shoulder. How did they get all the way up there so fast without flying? Shut up! All you need to know is that little snowball was the start of an avalanche that consumes all of our main characters and the other sloths. All dead. The end.
Santa fashion hasn’t changed much since the ice age.
I’m not that lucky. We’re actually somehow only halfway through this snoozefest of a Christmas special. Which means it’s time to finally meet Santa Claus (Billy Gardell)! He has a cozy little cottage located somewhere nearby. He’s outside smacking some wood into the shape of toys while singing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” He basically looks like any old Santa. Not really much going on to make him look different. He tosses whatever he made into a giant sack which is seated on a crude looking sleigh. It’s one he needs to pull on his own so I guess there’s the crudeness I was looking for. You might think that him singing such a song would be a conflict with our plot since it makes mention of a list and checking it to see who is naughty and who is nice. He sings the line about the list, but then hums the rest. Oh, you clever writers! He then looks up from his work to see the incoming avalanche and accepts his certain demise with an utterance of “Nutmeg.”
Oh, look. They survived. Great…
After Santa gets taken out, we’re left to survey the carnage. It’s basically just a bunch of snow with trees sticking out. Oh, and bodies. Lots and lots of bodies. Everyone seems to be in one piece though, and once Manny and the others realize they’ve finally caught up to Sid and company, everyone starts looking for Peaches. Don’t worry though, she’s fine, but while mother Ellie is relieved, father Manny is pissed. He announces that there’s a grounding a coming, but when Peaches apologizes we realize he wasn’t talking to her, but Sid. That’s when Santa makes his entrance. Sid recognizes him as Santa immediately while Manny cautions him not to mistake every fat guy he sees for Santa. Santa takes exception to the fat crack and insists it’s the suit. Sid remarks he’s just as old and decrepit as he expected, which is a dumb thing to say of a healthy looking, well-fed, guy who just happens to have a white beard.
Behold! The Naughty List!
Santa is rather alarmed at what’s happened and notes that everything was destroyed. Sid is just concerned about the whole Naughty List thing, but when Manny interjects to tell him there’s no such thing Santa corrects him by saying, “There is now, Manfred!” He then unfurls a long scroll with a bunch of names on it and Manny’s gets added to it. It’s at this point that Manny realizes that this guy is the real deal. He tries to act astonished and even a tad giddy, but it’s just not in Ray Romano’s range. Diego is confused about seeing all of their names on this newly christened Naughty List and Sid just gestures to their surroundings as reason why. Santa is pretty upset since it’s Christmas Eve and he can’t possibly remake all of the toys and such for the good girls and boys and everyone looks sad.
Manny claims there’s 800 of these little buggers. Anyone want to count?
All except Manny. Now with the magic of Christmas coursing through his veins, the mammoth is unable to concede defeat. He insists there’s still time, but Peaches is there to point out that there’s only eight of them. Manny then draws her attention to the 800 or so other sloths. They’re surprised to see him refer to them and Manny remarks how it’s pretty bad that they never thought to give Santa a hand. Peaches is still skeptical, but Manny tells her to believe in him, just like he believed in her. Or something. That’s all the convincing she needs though as she sidles up to a little sloth with a drum around his neck. She tells him to “Hit it!” and he smacks her on the ass. Dude, she’s a minor! How inappropriate. She angrily instructs him to play the drum and he does as he’s told.
I guess up until now this one had gone rather light on the singing.
This is where Sid takes over because this is his story, I guess. He’s going to provide emotional support by leading everyone in “Deck the Halls.” Fantastic. The lyrics in use are not the traditional ones and there’s a bunch of puns. The possums point out that they don’t know what a hall is, or a season, but Sid insists they just go with it. As he leads the song, others make toys and point out how odd they’re acting. There’s a moment where Sid is picking up objects and declaring what is and isn’t a toy. When he comes to a boomerang-shaped rock he declared it’s not a toy, then throws it, and it boomerangs on him and strikes him in the skull. Little, toy, effigies of Manny, Sid, and Diego are made while one of the blue sloths discards a ball of twin since no one will want that. Except for the cat, Diego, who freakin’ loves the thing.
Are we done now? Please?
Manny is shown holding mistletoe in his trunk and he asks his wife what to do with it. She places it on a structure they have seemingly constructed out of the peppermint birch trees and you think they’re going to kiss, but no, it’s Sid who jumps up and kisses Manny remarking that “There’s just something about mistletoe.” Santa decides it’s his time to join in as we can see it’s getting dark. More visuals of animals putting together toys as the song nears its climax with Sid crediting all of the sloths with making this Christmas magic happen. Diego questions him, and he corrects himself to say it was all because of every one instead. Big finish, pose for an image, please make it stop.
This new sleigh is an improvement, I’ll them that. All of that purple fur trim leads me to believe there are some naked sloths lurking about.
Santa saunters over to show his appreciation for all that everyone has done and to marvel at his new sleigh. It looks pretty good, I guess, and it’s loaded with a massive sack of toys. Sid tells Santa that the mini sloths can help him build toys every year. The head mini sloth is taken aback by this suggestion, but thinks it over for a second and declares that they’re going to need hats. Cute hats. Sid also informs Santa that he probably has enough toys for all the kids in the world. Santa is impressed, but he can’t possibly deliver to the entire world in a single night.
Check out Prancer: the big failure!
That’s when Prancer steps in. He declares he’s going to give Santa the best Christmas present ever: himself. Sid gleefully hooks Prancer up to the sleigh and gives the order to take off, only he can’t. Oh, he tries, but it would seem this load is far too large for one reindeer. So much for that. Prancer is left to ponder failure, his first experience of it, but Manny isn’t ready to settle. He starts headbutting the back of the sleigh in an effort to get it moving. He offers words of encouragement, but it’s not those words Prancer hears. Instead, Manny sarcastically adds “Unless you know ten other reindeer,” and it’s that which catches the reindeer’s ear. He acknowledges he can’t do this by himself and takes off leaving the others stunned. As they watch him go, Santa lets out a grunt of resignation. Sid tries to cheer him up, but it isn’t working. He asks if he’s still on The Naughty List and Santa confirms that he is. Damn. Tough grader.
Oh, hooray! More reindeer!
We cut to Sid with the reigns in his mouth as he tries to pull the sleigh. We pull back to see the others are all hooked up as well, but they’re not moving very far. Sid pauses to inform us that they’ve moved about 30 feet and guesses that they should be able to make it around the world in about 8,000 years. I’m not doing the math to fact check the sloth. Santa lets out a bah humbug, but it’s a short lived feeling of resignation for up in the sky appears Prancer! You knew he was coming back. We all knew, and he brought his family! Do I need to list them off? No, I don’t think I do. For some reason the possums find the name Blitzen funny, funnier than Prancer. He doesn’t have a sense of humor though and flies the pair high into the sky where they’re forced to concede it’s actually a very fine name.
It’s not a moon shot, but a norther lights shot is still pretty good.
The reindeer are all hooked up to the sleigh and all that’s left is to see if they can get this thing off the ground. Well, first Manny and Prancer need to have a brief conversation so we can learn that the moral of this story is that you can’t do everything on your own. That’s it? They’re kind of jamming that in at the end, but okay. With all of the reindeer in place, getting Santa off the ground is no problem. As he takes to the sky, he calls back down to “Manfred” and chucks his list at him. Manny unfurls it to find the Naughty has changed to Nice. We also learn there are 989,000 or so mini sloths, if this list can be trusted. Sid is delighted to see his name on the Nice List as Santa deposits some presents.
Merry Christmas, Scrat. Enjoy the concussion.
Up in the sleigh, we find that little squirrel, Scrat, one more time. He finds his gift from Santa, a massive acorn. When he goes to eat it, the top pops off to reveal a smaller acorn inside. It’s basically an acorn nesting doll and eventually Scrat gets to the end of it to find a rather ordinary sized acorn. Hey, it’s better than nothing. When he goes to eat it he somehow loses his grip on it. It flies off the back of the sleigh and Scrat lunges for it, but he’s caught on a rope of some kind. He swings from the back of the sleigh and under it all the way to the front where he gets kicked in the head by a reindeer. He goes back and forth, this night of misery unlikely to end for him anytime soon.
And that’s it. Through a sloth, some mammoths, and other creatures, we learn the surprising origins of Santa and how he came to have reindeer and elves. I guess. They’re not really elves though, they’re sloths. Or maybe Santa had sloths until he found the elves and then told the sloths to take a hike. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the magic of Christmas lead a father to his child through a blizzard and an avalanche and helped save Christmas. This one tries to make the joke that “Isn’t it funny how corny Christmas specials are?” while also trying to be sincere at the same time. It fails at both. None of the attempts at obvious humor work and the examples of Christmas magic do not resonate at all. I can’t decide if this one is too cynical or not cynical enough? It doesn’t go far enough to be subversive and instead just treads water in this awkward middle ground.
I will say, I expected to hate Sid way more than I did. He was mostly tolerable.
It doesn’t help that I don’t care about any of these characters. The performances are so flat and wooden and the only ones that feel like they’re really trying are John Leguizamo and Ciara Bravo. Denis Leary sounds like he’d rather be anywhere else while Romano is just going through the motions. I just don’t think he’s a very good voice actor. His delivery works in live action where he can use his facial expressions to his advantage, but not here since his face is that of a hairy elephant. There’s not much the character can do except frown a bit. The Ellie character is such a nothing character, only there to offer support or worry about her kid. I felt bad for Queen Latifah since she had nothing to work with.
This is the sort of special that tries to make its viewer laugh and laugh often so there’s at least a few jokes that work here and there, but most lack impact. The story is slow and thank God we had the Scrat stuff to pad it out. That’s honestly the best part. That and the head mini sloth, but he has nothing to do after his initial introduction. Prancer is okay, but there’s obviously no drama since we know how he’s going to get that sleigh off the ground. And again, there’s nothing done to find humor here. They just let it play out so it lands like a wet fart.
Most people who watch this are probably going to have very little to take away. It’s just a thing that exists and there’s a pretty good reason why it’s not a special that has to air on network TV every year. Oh, it had a run, but probably because of the brand. For someone like me who has seen a lot of Christmas specials, I’m a harsher critic. I’m almost offended when a Christmas special so thoroughly wastes my time like this one. The animation is at least good, I’ll give it that, but I’m out on positive things to say. If you would like to waste your time with the characters of Ice Age, then you can find this streaming on Disney+. Hopefully, your Christmas Eve is a lot more fun and exciting than sitting in front of a TV and watching this thing.
Can’t wait until tomorrow for more Christmas? Check out what we had to say on this day last year and beyond:
It feels like, at this point in time, we have hit peek 90s nostalgia. I can recall when it felt like 70s nostalgia hit pretty hard and then the 80s arrived not too far after. It’s inevitable whenever a generation that spent much of their adolescence in a given decade hits adulthood. And by adulthood…
When it comes to doing these write-ups, I naturally trend towards older Christmas specials. The name of the blog is The Nostalgia Spot, after all, so it would only make sense for me to favor stuff that’s at least a decade old, if not more. The fact of the matter is, there’s really not enough…
2021 marked an important anniversary in animation: Shrek turned 20. The animated film from DreamWorks is credited as really helping to launch the company as a viable competitor to Disney’s Pixar. Prior to Shrek, DreamWorks had found success at the box office with Antz and Chicken Run, but Shrek was the first to really explode…
Last year, I made it a point to go through the vast majority of the Nicktoons Christmas specials I was at least somewhat familiar with. My cut-off was basically 1996 which coincided with the premiere of Hey Arnold! That was when I started to fall off of Nicktoons and Nickelodeon in general. I was entering my teen years and other things took priority. Plus, my preferred Nicktoons were more of the gross-out, slapstick, sort of toons like The Ren & Stimpy Show and Rocko’s Modern Life which Hey Arnold! did not resemble at all. However, upon reflection, I would have to say that my real Nicktoons cut-off is CatDog.
CatDog debuted in early 1998 right after that year’s installment of the Kid’s Choice Awards. I had basically long since aged out of that show, but I was at least still watching Nickelodeon enough to be aware of CatDog‘s existence. I’m going to blame that on a crush I had on Summer Sanders, host of the gameshow Figure It Out which I would check out after school. CatDog was something that was heavily promoted, as most new Nicktoons were, and I can recall at least having some interest. By the time it was airing in a more normal timeslot though I had basically checked out. I know I did watch at least an episode or two, but my determination was “This isn’t for me.” And it probably wasn’t nor was it supposed to be.
All that being said, CatDog could possibly entertain me as an adult. I don’t know. It’s basically another take on The Odd Couple. Here we have a paring of naturally opposite animals in Cat (Jim Cummings) and Dog (Tom Kenny) with the wrinkle thrown in that they’re physically conjoined at the hips. Or spine? They don’t really have rear hips. They’re the super pet Bart Simpson created in Fly vs Fly with a cat on one end and a dog on the other. How they poop is anyone’s guess. They both eat so I guess there’s a two-way street running through them which sounds unpleasant. There’s certainly room for humor though, Arnold this is not, and did you see those names in parenthesis? Talk about a cartoon superstar pairing of Jim Cummings and Tom Kenny. I honestly can’t recall ever hearing Cummings on a Nickelodeon show, he was more the domain of Disney and Warner Bros. He’s also been around forever so I’m sure I heard his name on Nickelodeon before (and it looks like I probably did as he did do some work for Aaahh!!! Real Monsters), but it’s interesting to see. Sort of like finding Mel Blanc on a list of Disney credits – it’s not something that happened very often.
There’s two of them so they need two tree, right? That’s why my family of four has four trees in the house. Wait…
The Nicktoons were hardly the equal of the Disney Afternoon when it came to opening numbers, but CatDog begins with one of my least favorite songs out of them all. It’s this country number that just sounds so generic. We’re not off to a great start. When that intro is through, we get a rather simple title card before we’re taken to the home of the titular character, CatDog. Duality is the name of the game here and it informs a lot of the style surrounding CatDog. The house is basically a giant fire hydrant on one side and a dead fish on the other. Inside, it looks like a pretty normal house so I guess that fish isn’t an actual decaying corpse. The two (one?) characters are decorating their Christmas trees. It’s basically two trees in one with one side covered with fish and the other steaks. The two have just finished decorating and now it is time to place their gifts for each other under this double tree. Dog goes first and places a wrapped gift while Cat closes his eyes. We can hear him hoping it’s a sports car (I wouldn’t get my hopes up). When it comes time for Cat to do the same, he has nothing. He fishes around in his “pockets,” which is mysterious fur pockets that appear when the need arises, and comes up with a single jellybean. That would seem to be these two in a nutshell, Dog is the caring and considerate one who is held back only by his lack of intellect. Cat is selfish, like most cats are perceived to be. It’s the inverse of the Ren and Stimpy pairing.
It’s the only way to travel.
Despite Cat’s gift for Dog being an unwrapped piece of candy, he doesn’t take notice and instead is eager to head off on another Christmas tradition. The two put on scarves and Dog adds a stocking cap as they fly out the window. To travel on the snow, Dog basically becomes a toboggan with Cat grasping hold of his hands. As they travel, Dog begins to sing, but his song only has one line, “The best part of Christmas is being together.” After his one line, the scene fades out and then comes back in on a mall shaped like a pig’s head. I guess that works as an analogy.
Via the process of elimination when looking through the credits it would appear that this guy is called Mr. Sunshine. I appreciate the irony.
The camera moves inside the mall where we get a closeup on a Santa figure that appears to be doing The Macarena (remember that?). It’s followed by quick cuts of other cheesy merch and fists full of cash as they fly off the shelves. There’s a snowman that appears to be capable of dropping its pants (it’s wearing jeans for the sole purpose of removing them, resembling one of those novelty Seymour Butts dolls people would have affixed to their rear windshield), a boxing Santa, Mean Bob action figure, dinosaurs in festive attire, and so on. When the cuts are finished the camera lingers on a star atop a massive tree. The star is emblazoned with a dollar sign because this is a mall, after all. The camera pans down this massive tree and a very unenthusiastic individual dressed as an elf moves into frame to say, “Imagine the thrill of meeting Father Christmas,” in a very even, flat, tone of voice. I think it’s Billy West using a similar voice to the one he used for the ghost in the Ren & Stimpy episode “Haunted House.”
Cheer up, Santa, I have a feeling that Dog is your kind of guy. Err, dog.
We then find Santa (Brian Doyle-Murray) seated at the base of that tree with some monkey kid on his lap. He asks the lad what he wants for Christmas and he responds that he’d like a Kung-Fu Kenny with real blood and hands you can slice off into death rays! Santa is not impressed despite the kid standing in his lap and jumping about. When the kid leaves Santa remarks to himself, “So much for the Christmas spirit.” Enter CatDog, who comes sliding up the stairs out front and then rolls through the mall like a runaway tire. The duo soar into the air only to land directly in Santa’s lap. Despite the pair obviously cutting the line, Santa asks Dog what he’d like for Christmas and assumes it will be something expensive with a death ray. Dog sort of chuckles at the suggestion and then, once he confirms that Cat isn’t trying to eavesdrop, whispers in Santa’s ear that all he wants is for Cat to like his present from him. Santa is taken aback, pleasantly at that, at Dog’s selfless desire. The feeling is short-lived as Cat and Dog switch places with Cat, rather loudly hoping that Dog will hear (he’s too busy playing with an ornament), informing the big guy that he’d like a sports car.
Such a lovely little girl.
Santa has no reaction to Cat’s selfish want and Cat doesn’t seem to be at all interested in getting his approval anyway. The two depart, but a call to “Make way,” is soon heard. It’s coming from the mall owner, Rancid (West), who is a big, ugly, green, rabbit that looks like some sort of cross-over between an Arthur character and something from Life in Hell. He wants everyone to move out of the way so that his niece, Rancine (Maria Bamford) can tell Santa what she wants. She’s about as ugly as him, just smaller and in a dress, and she does not look happy. Santa goes through the whole routine with a look on his face that suggests he knows that this kid isn’t going to ask for something selfless. She at first can’t even think of anything since her rich uncle buys her whatever she wants, but then she lays eyes on CatDog.
CatDog is not for sale!
Now, this gets pretty bizarre and also pretty horrific because Rancine informs Santa that she wants to own CatDog. This is a world inhabited entirely by animal people, from what I can see. Santa is a human, and that flat-speaking elf is humanoid, but green, while everyone else appears to be an animal person. Like CatDog. This is like a kid in the real world sitting on Santa and pointing out at a pair of conjoined twins and saying “I want to own them!” Obviously, totally illegal and morally reprehensible. Any parent who raised a kid who thinks they can own another person or persons obviously failed. Naturally, Rancid tries to “buy” CatDog from itself. Themselves? Whatever. They are not for sale and tell Rancid that in no uncertain terms. Santa seemed a bit worried that they’d go for it, but upon hearing that he basically breathes a sigh of relief. What a weird way to have one’s Christmas spirit reenforced. Rancine screams in protest, but surprisingly that’s as far as she goes.
This is unsettling to me for some reason.
In another part of the mall, Cat is admiring himself in a mirror when they’re approached by a gang of dogs. These are the Greaser Dogs and, since they’re dogs, they seem to enjoy picking on Cat. Cliff (Kenny), the leader, is singing Dog’s Christmas song as they come upon the pair. Immediately, they desire to kick the crap out of Cat so the pair have to split. As they run, Cat drops the mirror he had been looking at and all three members of the gang step on it, cracking it. That’s 21 years of bad luck right there. CatDog ducks into a store display Christmas tree to avoid the dogs and lurking inside is their neighbor, Winslow (Carlos Alazraqui), an ugly, blue, mouse. Cat doesn’t ask him why he’s in a tree and instead asks him if he knows what Dog got him for Christmas. When he tells him he hopes it’s a sports car, Winslow gives him a reality check on that one. Cat tries to reassure himself that it would take a Christmas miracle to get such a gift, but Christmas miracles happen all the time! Winslow informs him, “Not to you, they don’t.”
There aren’t enough scenes set inside Christmas trees. Someone needs to make a special that takes place inside a tree the whole time.
Winslow ducks inside the tree which has its own infrastructure, it would seem. It’s not as nice as the tree Chip and Dale take shelter in for Pluto’s Christmas Tree, but it still looks like a place I want to visit. When he emerges from the tree it’s beside Dog. He tells Winslow that he hopes Cat likes his present – a popsicle stick house boat. Winslow tells him there’s no way he’s going to like that, but Dog thinks Cat likes all of his gifts from him. Despite Cat always throwing them away (he thinks he does this to entertain the kids who live at the dump). Winslow breaks the news to him that the only way Cat will like the gift he got him is if it’s a sports car, and he’ll never, ever, be able to get him one. He walks away chuckling to himself how he loves messing with these two on Christmas while Cat and Dog are both left feeling pretty down about Christmas.
Oh Cat, you are wrong to focus only on the material stuff at Christmas. Haven’t you seen any Christmas specials?
We next find the pair exiting a store called Soap Dish. Dog is enjoying a bar of soap which he thinks is delicious. I have no idea if this is a one episode thing or if he always eats soap. As he chews and swallows it, bubbles come out of his mouth. When Cat speaks, bubbles also come out of his mouth thus proving my theory that whatever Dog eats Cat “shits” out his mouth and vice versa. What a horrible existence. Cat is pretty down thanks to Winslow and doesn’t see how their Christmas can possibly turn out well. Dog falls back on what he perceives to be their great traditions like putting up their double star. We just cut to the pair doing so in the past which results in Cat getting flung into a wall which he dubs the “Double Scar.” Dog then tries to cheer him up by talking about how they have their friends and family to spend the holidays with. Cat reminds him that they are their own family and all that happens on Christmas is Winslow, Eddie the Squirrel, and the Greaser dogs all show up uninvited, but Dog considers this a major compliment. Cat, on the other hand, wants stuff (specifically citing a golden toaster oven which seems extravagant) and directs Dog to a display of dog bones. Cat appeals to Dog’s stomach and asks him if he’d like a nice, new, bone. He responds in the affirmative, but in a very plain manner like, “Sure, I wouldn’t mind a new bone.” Cat, on the other hand, really must have that sports car. He has an idea, and he indulges himself by asking Dog the old “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Dog is thinking about drinking out of a toilet, but Cat is most certainly not. He has an idea to get stuff for Christmas, but all he does is laugh. It’s a chilling, evil, sort of laugh and Dog seems rightly unnerved. Until he starts laughing along.
Santa isn’t going to like this.
We return to Santa and Rancine is still on his lap screaming. CatDog comes waltzing up and Rancid remarks, “Look, it’s those freaks you wanted.” Cat has come to make Rancid an offer. He is willing to go along with this proposal and be his niece’s new plaything if it comes with full access to all of Rancid’s stuff. Rancid is in agreement, but what about Dog? He doesn’t like that this deal makes him feel sort of cheap. Cat reassures him by saying this deal gets him access to a sports car and Dog all the T-bones he wants! Rancid then asks him if he likes T-Bones in a suggestive manner indicating that Cat is right. Dog cheers up and says “T-Bone was my nickname at fat camp! Where do I sign?” Santa had been staring at the group with bated breath while Francine rubbed her hands together like an evil sort of person. Rancid tells Dog there’s no signature needed, they’ll shake on it. And they do.
CatDog is one gift among many. That hardly seems special.
Outside a massive, stone, mansion rests a rather cruel and inelegant looking Santa robot. It’s a decoration for Rancid’s home and everything has a very cold presence. The limo pulls up carrying the crew, but only Rancid and Rancine emerge. Rancid has a large, wrapped, box in his arms and once he enters the mansion he chucks it towards a giant tree. As it hits the floor we hear CatDog groaning in pain from inside. The gift comes to rest at the base of the tree as Dog remarks there’s only a few more hours until Christmas and access to all of Rancid’s stuff! Cat is just as giddy and remarks that this is an idea with absolutely no downside. We then cut back to the mall to find Santa seated on the stairs outside looking downright miserable. Mrs. Claus (Bamford) is there beside him trying to ease his mind, but he can’t get over what he saw. CatDog sold itself to Rancid as a Christmas present! That would seemingly make CatDog a prostitute in the eyes of Santa and he just can’t get over that. Meanwhile, that even speaking elf is just flabbergasted that this Santa is the real deal. He asks if that means the Easter Bunny is real too and Santa remarks “He better be, he owes me sixty bucks!”
That’s one cold looking Christmas.
Dog was Santa’s only hope for Christmas spirit in this world, but now that belief has been shattered. Santa feels that he has no other choice: he has to cancel Christmas. The world is no longer deserving, and as Santa flies off in his sleigh with four reindeer (he’s a fake!), Christmas basically just disappears. Lights, decorations, trees, all vanish before our eyes. The giant tree in Rancid’s mansion? Stripped of even its fake pine needles leaving behind a cold, monstrous, spiked, metal contraption. All of the gifts beneath it have vanished, all except the one containing CatDog. It’s been stripped of its festive color, but at least they weren’t wiped from existence too like all of the other stuff.
That must have been a comfortable experience. At least they’re used to being close together.
With Christmas gone, we cut to a news broadcast. The anchor (West) informs the viewing audience that Christmas has been cancelled and that their sources out of the North Pole have indicated it’s all the fault of CatDog! Winslow is shown watching the broadcast from CatDog’s couch and he’s pissed. The Greaser Gang then barges in looking to murder CatDog, but Winslow has no idea where they are. We then return to Rancid’s mansion where Dog is ancy to be opened. And with good reason, that box is way too small to comfortably house a CatDog. Rancine approaches and opens the box and acts surprised it’s a CatDog! The pair flop out and seem oblivious to how empty the place is. Rancine informs them she got screwed this Christmas and warns them that they better be good! Dog happily tells her they’re the best and don’t even require batteries. I’d be wary of this Rancine girl if I were you, CatDog.
Cat got what he wanted. I guess the story’s over.
Or perhaps not? We next find Dog and Rancine having a tea party. Only, instead of tea Dog is being served bones. Rancine looks like her usual, miserable, self so I wonder if she’s capable of experiencing any joy? Cat is eager to take Rancid’s sports car for a drive though so Dog must go too. As he pulls Dog away, Rancine replaces him with a large, green, stuffed, dinosaur with a message of “I Heart You” on its chest which makes me think this is a Barney reference. CatDog goes racing around the interior of the mansion with Cat declaring he’s king of the world, a Titanic reference because it’s 1999. Cat is feeling pretty good about his decision to sell themself for Christmas and Dog appears to be in agreement as he consumes his bone. They then come to a stop beneath the giant, metal, Christmas tree. Dog leaps up to embrace it, but is turned off to find it smells of sweaty metal.
Rancine is not the sort of person one should expect caring or understanding from.
Now, Dog starts to miss Christmas and their usual traditions. Even Cat is in agreement as he reflects upon their double star and the way it caught the light. They both want to return to their old Christmas, so they race back to Rancine in the sports car to inform her of their decision which she will undoubtedly take well. When they initially pull up indicating they’ve made a terrible mistake she’s in agreement for they left giant skid marks in the hall. Cat then informs her they made a different mistake and that they need to go home. Dog tries to bid her farewell, but Rancine clamps onto his snout and informs him that the last person who tried to welch on a bet with her had his shins turned into a coffee table. She then gestures to a table where there’s some guy laying on his stomach with his ankles going through a table surface so the transformation was less gruesome than it sounds. The message is clear though, Rancine isn’t letting the pair leave, and to make sure they won’t she drags them to her room and locks them in a bird cage suspended from the ceiling. As Dog yells to her that she’s a very naughty child, she returns to the room to agree with him and add that she’s proud of it. She’s definitely going to be one of those girls that wears the sweatpants that says “Juicy” across her ass cheeks when she gets to college.
She deserves this.
In the streets of town a mob has formed all demanding an end to CatDog. We see the Greasers, Eddie, and presumably other recognizable faces amongst this crowd with murderous intent. Eddie (Dwight Schultz) is particularly aggrieved since he was supposed to get a Jet Ski this year. Back to CatDog, and Dog is laying at the bottom of the cage with foam coming out his mouth while Cat calls for help. Rancine enters annoyed that all of her toys break on Christmas. She ascends a ladder to the cage and we can see that Dog has achieved this state via another bar of soap. Cat pulls the old switcheroo leaving Rancine dangling from the cage as they make their escape. Dog, always the nicer of the two, tells Cat they can’t just leave her like that. He agrees, and sets the ladder back up that she used to reach the cage. CatDog climbs up and shoves Rancine into the cage and shuts the door. There, problem solved!
Rancid has such a massive ego that his doors and windows are shaped like him. I’m trying to imagine my house if every opening was shaped like me.
CatDog now must escape the mansion, but to do so they need to avoid Rancid. As they creep through the halls they spy the rabbit coming their way. He has his head buried in some paper though and could hardly be bothered as he walks by. They pretend to be one of his many statues anyway and in the process reveal that they can change color like a chameleon. Was this done for comedic effect or is this something they do often? Regardless, with Rancid avoided the pair make their way back to the main living room with the big, metal, tree. There’s a window high up on the wall and Cat takes over to climb the tree to the top. The window is still a ways away, but there’s a chandelier above them and Cat still has his scarf. He twirls it over his head like a lasso and successfully ropes the chandelier. The duo swing for the window…and slam into the wall. He missed, and CatDog falls to the floor, but worry not! The front door is unlocked, so that was a lot easier than expected. Too bad about the pain and misery that was all for nothing.
Free at last!
CatDog goes belly-whopping out the door just like Frosty himself! They slide over the hillsides all the way to their home. They seem completely oblivious to the lack of Christmas decorations in town and on their house, but Cat is just relieved they still have five minutes of Christmas left. Then they enter their home to find no tree. That’s the least of their worries for soon the Greaser Gang shows up with Eddie the Squirrel and Winslow. They’re still pretty pissed about the whole cancelled Christmas thing and are looking to exact a bit of sweet revenge by wailing on CatDog. Well, Cat more than Dog it would seem as old habits die hard. This is also when CatDog finds out that they’re the reason Christmas is cancelled, but before the gang can wail on CatDog, Rancine shows up. She declares CatDog her property (disgusting slaver!) so she gets to wail on them first, followed by Rancid. Cat then breaks down declaring it all his fault, but they just reply with “We know,” and prepare for a beating!
It’s like the reason for the season. Or something.
It’s Dog who cries out for everyone to be quiet. It’s time for a speech. Dog declares they can still have a Christmas even without all of that usual stuff. He then grabs a bunch of junk from around the house, fills a punch bowl with water from the sink (gross), and assembles it all into a double junk tree! He’s pretty proud of himself, but it’s Cliff who points out that it’s just a pile of jump and disgusting dish water. Eddie gets in the best line calling Dog a Noel Nincompoop, but his gesture worked on Cat. Or maybe Cat just doesn’t want to get beat up? Dog points out they’re together just like every Christmas and even Shriek (Bamford) the poodle is forced to admit this is what they do every Christmas. Cat even goes so far as to call them all a family. Sort of. Winslow still thinks they’re stupid, but when Dog takes his picture of a steak and bites it into the shape of a double star and places it on the “tree,” everyone is overcome with awe.
I assumed this would happen at some point.
The room is filled with a wondrous glow. The new double star works just like the old one and finally everyone seems to agree that Christmas is possible even without all the “stuff.” Dog says they didn’t cancel Christmas and Cat adds “Because no one can.” He indicates that Christmas “is in here,” though he can’t quite decide just where in here as he moves his hand around his chest until he finds just the right spot. Now we get the required “Merry Christmas, Dog,” from Cat followed by a “Merry Christmas, Cat,” from Dog as the two embrace. Winslow, overcome with emotion, says “That’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw. With the possible exception of some stuff I saw when I was in the navy.” Is that a gay sailor joke in a children’s cartoon?!
So, wait, we’re just going to let the slavers in on this group hug?
There’s no time to contemplate that one as Winslow says “Merry Christmas, CatDog,” and goes in for a hug too. Then the rest of the gang does the same and we have a big group hug. Winslow adds that now it’s just like that stuff he saw when he was in the navy, except everyone’s clothes are on. Okay, he didn’t really say that, but imagine if he did. This warm, happy, moment is broken up by the sound of a crash outside, followed by laughter. The kind of laughter that can only come from one person: Santa Claus!
You can’t pay Brian Doyle-Murray to play Santa and not have him show up again at the end.
Santa comes in and a more natural light does with him. We were in kind of a cool blue and black environment, but now it’s positively bright. Cat immediately goes to Santa to apologize for what he did. Santa counters that he should apologize to CatDog, even though what they did was among the most vile acts imaginable. He’s really laying it on thick. He definitely equates this whole thing with prostitution. Imagine the naughty stuff Santa must see and he found that to be the most vile? Maybe this world is just way cleaner than I could imagine? Dog accepts Santa’s apology and Christmas is back on, baby! All of the stuff returns and Cat and Dog are each left holding presents from each other. Or Santa. I don’t know anymore.
Now, everybody sing!
Santa departs leaving CatDog to open their presents. Cat gets the popsicle stick house boat he always wanted while Dog gets a delicious bar of soap. All that’s left now is to hang the stockings and sing. It’s an original song, and during it the Greasers get to rough up Cat a bit and Winslow hits him in the face with a snowball. He hands Cat a snowball of his own to basically rub on his head, so I guess this is as nice as he’s going to get. Everyone is then surprised when the quietest, and tallest, Greaser, Lube (Alazraqui) breaks into a lovely solo. Everyone gathers round, well, everyone except CatDog. They’re singing about nothing being better than Christmas with CatDog, but CatDog isn’t around.
Looks like the house is backing to looking nice.
And that’s because they’re with Santa! We cut to an external shot of the house all covered in snow and lights. There’s a magnificent full moon in the sky and Santa’s silhouette goes passing by. There’s four reindeer, and something peculiar leading the team. It’s CatDog, or more like Dog, who is basically a reindeer while Cat is holding on for dear life. He urges Dog to get them down in one piece, but Dog sees a garbage truck. This is bad for Cat, and Santa, as Dog lunges for it taking them with him as we fade to black on this holiday special.
I feel like we’ve had a low number of Santa Moon Shots this year.
That was certainly an unusual Christmas episode. CatDog needs to learn a pretty conventional lesson about how it’s not the material things that make Christmas so special. Well, Cat more than Dog needs to learn that, but it comes via the duo prostituting themselves to a rich, spoiled, kid. Santa reminds us several times that CatDog sold themselves for Christmas and that it’s a truly vile act. It’s so bad it shatters his belief in Christmas which is pretty wild. Maybe you don’t like the prostitution analogy, but the only other one would be CatDog selling themselves into slavery which is pretty abhorrent. I’d argue even more so as that’s really selling one’s dignity. Sex work is just work, selling one’s actual being is something only a desperate person should even consider, not someone who just wants a sports car and bones.
At least it’s an original tale and I only felt semi-lost by the inclusion of recurring characters whom I had no knowledge of. I don’t really need to know why a pack of dogs delights in beating up a cat, especially one who probably lies and cheats his ways out of problems like Cat. Winslow seems like just an asshole and no frame of reference needed there while Eddie is…well, he’s just there. I’m surprised they didn’t use him to make a Cousin Eddie reference. The look of this one passes the Christmas test as there was plenty of that present, until it wasn’t as part of the plot. Rancid and Rancine are as ugly as their names imply which I assume is intentional. Same for Winslow and the gang. There were plenty of not ugly character designs so it’s clear that the ugliness is a choice in places. This isn’t a Klasky-Csupo joint where just everything and everyone is unpleasant to look at.
They certainly have the Christmas spirit so you could do worse than watch CatDog.
Is this episode CatDog good? I don’t know. I felt pretty indifferent about CatDog when I was younger and the show was just starting and I suppose I still feel that way. I get the whole point of the show and the whole opposites attract kind of thing makes sense conceptually, but I mostly felt nothing. Maybe that would come from watching more episodes? Cat seems like he’s mostly intended to be unlikable while Dog is cheerful and sweet. He’s almost too cheerful and sweet here as he’s oblivious to how shitty a friend Cat is to him. I don’t worry about them getting beat up, I’m not begging them to not sell themselves for Christmas, and I’m not really invested in their Christmas experience. I kind of wish the episode went all-in on its messaging and just ended it on the group hug. They didn’t need stuff, so why bring the stuff back? Maybe just cut to Santa flying overhead and looking on with an approving smile? The final visual of CatDog pulling the sleigh was fun, but the special didn’t need it either.
I guess this one gets the absolute lightest of recommends from me. It’s a Christmas episode and there’s some value to be found here. I didn’t hate it, I wasn’t bored, but I don’t anticipate watching it again unless one of my kids suddenly acquires an affinity for CatDog. It’s pretty low on the list of Nicktoons Christmas episodes for me, but I suspect people younger than me who may have been the right age for CatDog when it aired feel different about it. And that’s fine, different strokes and all that. If you would like to check this one out then the easiest way is via Paramount+. There you will find this episode along with every other episode of CatDog waiting for you, should you wish to view them.
Can’t wait until tomorrow for more Christmas? Check out what we had to say on this day last year and beyond:
Let’s try this one more time for 2023 – can we find a good Looney Tunes Christmas special? And more importantly, a good Bugs Bunny one? We’ve looked at two already that were merely okay. Nothing terrible, but hardly holiday classics. For our final go at this, I’m feeling a little more optimistic and that’s…
When it comes to The Christmas Spot, I have very few rules. I definitely favor animated Christmas specials, but that’s not some rule I’ve created for myself. The programs don’t have to be all ages, they don’t have to be “nice,” and they certainly don’t have to be any good as I’ve looked at an…
One of my favorite modern Christmas specials is the DuckTales episode “Last Christmas.” I feel like anytime I talk DuckTales I have to specify which era, though in this case I really shouldn’t since the original DuckTales never did a Christmas episode. To make up for that, the 2017 edition of the show did two…
Ok, so I know we did Prep & Landing last year, and we already did Operation: Secret Santa this year, but I just had to complete the trilogy. Not to be a downer, but I don’t know if I’m going to do this next year so I need to make sure that I feel good about the list of Christmas specials I’ve covered here at The Nostalgia Spot. And Prep & Landing, being perhaps the best series of Christmas specials since the days of Rankin Bass, needs to get the full treatment. Well, all except for Tiny’s BIG Adventure. It’s not that the cartoon short starring the diminutive elf is bad, it’s just not essential. There’s a reason why it’s the only one not on Disney+.
Operation: Secret Santa felt like a little treat for fans of Prep & Landing when it landed in 2009, but Naughty vs. Nice is the true sequel to the original special. It’s maybe not the very next Christmas for our heroes Wayne (Dave Foley) and Lanny (Derek Richardson), but it is another Christmas that sees them sort of on the job. As was the case with Operation: Secret Santa, Lanny and Wayne won’t be asked to actually prep a house in this one. Instead, they’re tasked with saving Christmas from another threat, the dreaded jinglesmell1337! Yeah, it ups the stakes as sequels often do. In the first one, Wayne had to realize the value of his job and preserve Christmas for just one little boy. In this one, the villain threatens to take down the entire Santa Naughty and Nice list grid throwing the entire operation into pure chaos. The kind of chaos that not even Santa can solve quickly putting the entire holiday in jeopardy. Look what technology has done to Christmas!
Like the original, Naughty vs. Nice was essentially created to give the ABC network a Christmas special it could turn to year after year. And since it was the second half hour length cartoon in the series, it gave the network a solid hour of programming it would return to year in and year out. With the creation of Disney+, that network timeslot has probably lost some value, but it still aired this year back on December 10. Apologies for not getting to this one sooner in case you were hoping to go and watch it after this, but at least you still have streaming options.
The coal elves were mentioned in the original special, but now we get to see them in action.
This one begins like the previous one with a licensed Christmas song. This time it’s “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town” as performed by Bing Crosby and The Andrews Sisters over scenes of an idyllic Christmas town. We move into a home and the camera settles on a fireplace with stockings hung with care about it. Then the music cuts out as a puff of black smoke filles the area and out comes The Coal Brigade! We saw a brief glimpse of the Coal Elves in the first special, but they weren’t elaborated on. Not that any was really needed. They were dirty and covered in soot and one could surmise these guys were in charge of delivering coal to the bad kids.
You don’t want to find one of these in your stocking.
As the elves emerge from the fireplace, one cocks his “gun” like a break-action shotgun, though it more resembles a gatling gun made out of roman candles. The other elf takes out his “fruitcake,” a little handheld device from which the elves communicate and document. They spy a drawing on the wall with crayons on the floor around it and the way the shot is framed it’s like they’re two crime scene investigators coming upon a corpse. Wayne’s voice fills our ears explaining the nature of these two as they spy other elements of naughty behavior including a broken lamp and a bad report card. They document everything and then send it back to HQ via a satellite in space. An elf there reviews the findings and confirms the naughty behavior. A supervisor elf then does the same to check it twice. A naughty rating is then relayed back to the elves via the fruitcake and they print out a ribbon that says “Try harder next year.” It’s affixed to a lump of coal and loaded into a gun which is then fired into one of the stockings.
Casey Jones? As a Storm Trooper?
As the elves make their way for the fireplace, they’re intercepted from behind by a masked figure. It’s clearly a child based on their stature sporting a “Not Storm Trooper” mask and towel for a robe. The child activates a toy, robotic, dog which comes running down the hallway at the elves. The elf with the gun unloads on the dog, but it does nothing since their ammo appears to match the sleep grenade we’ve seen the elves use and a robotic dog isn’t going to succumb to that. They scramble to get back up the chimney as the dog bites at them eventually escaping. However, our assailant pats the dog on the head and it opens its jaw to reveal the fruitcake! The child laughs in a distorted voice for it seems that was the goal all along.
Magee is back to coordinate another Christmas and her tree is still dead.
We are taken to the North Pole and a message on the screen alerts us that it is December 22nd, the following year. Magee (Sarah Chalke) is in her office coordinating the lead-up to Christmas and giving Tiny her order for what I assume is eggnog. She grabs the phone to place a call to Mr. Thistleton (Chris Parnell), the elf we saw in the prior scene checking the list twice. He appears to be the head tech elf when it comes to the Naughty and Nice list and coordinating of presents. Magee requests he deliver some good news “baby,” and he responds by calling her “baby” too, but catches himself and immediately seems regretful about it. Hey man, Magee created the hostile work environment first by calling you baby so don’t feel bad about returning with the same.
This kid is up to something. Something very naughty.
Thistleton does, however, have some good news to relay. It’s looking like this year will produce a record number of names on The Nice List and as he explains we see old pal Timmy Twerlep on said list. He’s getting a football. We also get a glimpse at the assembly line for toy production, though it’s mostly gift wrapping. They have conveyor belts of stuff and tubes to suck up the finished product and deposit them in a massive sack already loaded onto Santa’s sleigh. Suddenly, an image in red flashes across the monitor of one of the elves. The image is unmistakably the child we saw in the opening scene, mask and all, and for a moment the assembly line shuts down. It then resumes operation and the elves mostly shrug it off, all except Thistleton. He has the image on every monitor in front of him seemingly preserved as he narrows his gaze and remarks that someone is being very naughty.
Wayne is out doing some Christmas shopping for his favorite elf: himself.
Smash cut to old pal Wayne who appears to be driving a snow mobile while saying he’s been very nice this year. It’s a demo for a new model of snow mobile called a Natalé and it would seem that Wayne intends to get himself a rather expensive Christmas present this year. As he disembarks the floor model, Lanny (Derek Richardson) enters the showroom with his arms full of gifts. Lanny has been out shopping for others while Wayne is shopping for himself. I’m sure there will be no comeuppance later for such selfish behavior. Lanny gets slammed in the automatic door and doesn’t appear to have the wherewithal to just step out of it as he asks Wayne if he wants to come trim the tree with his family. Wayne tells Lanny that this shiny new Natalé is all the family he needs. He even asks the sales elf if he can remove the passenger seat. I guess he no longer has the same girlfriend he had in the prior special.
A Christmas ornament shaped gondola – makes sense.
Lanny’s fruitcake then flashes a dire sign: Cranberry Red. He holds it up to Wayne who springs into action ordering the sales elf not to sell the snow mobile as he’ll be right back. We cut to the pair on a gondola as we hear Magee apologizing for pulling them away from their holiday shopping spree. The gondola is basically a Christmas ornament and inside is like a mobile command center. Thistleton is appearing via hologram while Tiny drives. He informs the pair that someone has acquired a fruitcake conduct calculator and is attempting to hack the Naughty List, which they obviously cannot have. The person is known only by their online handle: jinglesmell1337. Lanny seems particularly taken aback by the image of the perp and their disgusting handle. Thistleton tries to humble brag following the disclosure of this information, but Magee ends transmission. Wayne then attempts to cut to the chase as he’s got this figured out: the big guy wants THE Prep & Landing elf to infiltrate the home of jinglesmell1337 and retrieve the stolen fruitcake. He announces that he will indeed undertake this mission, but Magee has some apparent bad news for him. She relays that the big guy does indeed want he and Lanny to get this item back, but also that he thinks they need the help of someone with expertise in the field of naughty children. In other words: a coal elf.
Either Lanny has a big thirst or the bartender is thirsty for Lanny.
Magee drops the two off in the Coal District and slips in a quick apology towards Wayne before ordering Tiny to floor it. Lanny thinks working with a coal elf is going to be pretty tinsel while Wayne doesn’t see the point. We then head into a coal elf bar. A more rock n’ roll type of song about naughty children (“Naughty Naughty Children (Better Start Actin’ Nice)” by Grace Potter) is played against a backdrop of coal elves shooting pool, tossing axes, and riding a mechanical bull. Because they’re covered in soot, the animation team can get away with making the bar cloudy and smoke-filled like a bar occupied by a bunch of cigar-chomping miscreants. At the bar, Wayne notes that their so-called expert is fifteen minutes late as the bartender delivers their drinks: hot chocolate. Wayne receives a pretty standard sized mug with a single marshmallow while Lanny receives an oversized one with several marshmallows and even some candy canes. He says “Thank you, sir!” as the bartender slides a piece of paper his way. It says Carol and there’s a phone number. Lanny then feels embarrassed as he realizes he just called a woman “Sir” and we finally pan to the bartender who is indeed a rather large, muscled, female elf. She seems unbothered by the slip-up and gives the elf a wink and moves along leaving Lanny to feel rather embarrassed. I say go for it, man.
Wayne, who very much wanted out of Prep & Landing in the first special, is now enjoys being the big shot of the department.
Wayne then looks to his left and sees an old coal elf (the credits would seem to suggest that this is Crumbles, voiced by Phil LaMarr) reading a newspaper. The headline is “Who Will be Elf of the Year?” and Wayne has no inhibition about offering up to the fella that he will be named Elf of the Year. The old guy puts down the paper and appears transfixed as Wayne confirms that he’s THE Prep & Landing guy. The elf has apparently heard of him, but mistakenly calls him Dwayne. He calls out to the other elves that Dwayne from preps and landing is in their presence and that he’s going to be Elf of the Year! Wayne basks in the attention modestly remarking how he’s here to save Christmas and all that while also remarking that their so-called expert is late.
Here’s an elf who knows how to party!
He’s interrupted by the sound of a novelty car horn as we hear an engine being revved. A voice cries out “Jingle Bam!” as a snow mobile comes barging into the bar in a cloud of coal dust. A large, rowdy, coal elf with big sideburns emerges from the snow mobile firing off finger guns to the adoration of all in the bar. He quickly apologizes to Carol for the mess, who shrugs it off indicating that she’s unbothered by his entrance. By the bar, Wayne looks horrified while Lanny is excited as he suspects this is their expert. Wayne just says “Noel” as this elf explains how he just dropped some serious coin on a brand, new, Natalé – it’s a turbo! Lanny notes it’s a lot like the one Wayne was going to buy, but he just says “Noel” again with disbelief. The elf explains that the dealer had another buyer, but he was able to sweet talk him into letting him take it. He then announces that he’s here to save Christmas and repeats his “Jingle Bam!” catchphrase again. The old coal elf then calls attention to Dwayne since he said he was going to do the same. Noel takes one look at “Dwayne” and calls him by his real name, Wayne, but the old elf corrects him and adds “No one ever listens to me.” Noel then orders Wayne to come and dispense with some hugging, but when Wayne doesn’t move Noel tackles him and puts him in a headlock. Through a collapsing wind pipe, Wayne is able to croak out an explanation to Lanny: this is Noel, his little brother.
Ooo, are we going to get some fireworks between these two?!
Lanny is understandably shocked to hear that Wayne has a brother as we next catch up with the trio at headquarters. Noel is in a good mood and happy to be finally teaming up with his big brother, who is in fact much smaller in stature than the coal elf, but Wayne does not seem to share in his brother’s enthusiasm. As they approach the hangar where Thrasher (Hayes MacArthur) resides, Wayne warns his brother that the secret reindeer can be pretty irritable and that it’s best he just doesn’t say anything. When he catches a glimpse of Thrasher, Noel’s face hardens. He marches over to him shouting out “Hey! Bambi! I told you if I ever saw you again I’d put your head on my wall!” Thrasher responds with a snort at him and a threat, but when Noel whips out a box of candy canes, the two erupt with laughter. It would seem they’re old friends making Noel one of the few creatures Thrasher actually likes. He does not feel the same way about Wayne.
Aww, kid Wayne and Noel were so adorable!
As the crew heads for their target, Noel is teaching Lanny how to properly utter a “Jingle Bam!” of his own. He’s having some trouble, but Noel encourages him to keep at it. He then takes a seat by Wayne who is reading a brochure for snow mobiles since he needs to find a new one. Noel informs Lanny that he was Wayne’s original partner, though not in Prep & Landing. We see a flashback of Wayne and Noel playing superheroes as kids. Wayne was Captain Avalanche and Noel was his sidekick Snowball. The flashback is shown like an old 8mm film and it’s a nice effect as we see the two playing to Noel’s narration. He then brings up a toy associated with the product, the Commander Avalanche Super Sled, and how Wayne wanted it so bad, but that Peterson kid (Peterson was also the elf who got the promotion Wayne wanted in the first Prep & Landing) got it instead. Wayne was enjoying the flashback until Noel got to that part and he especially doesn’t like Noel bringing up how he cried like a baby when he didn’t get that toy. Noel sighs wistfully as he says “My big brother, the big baby.”
Okay, this guy might be a little nuts.
Wayne angrily hops off the bench and reminds everyone that they have a mission to do. He asks Thrasher over the intercom how soon until they hit the drop zone, but Thrasher just snaps back, “Do not question me, Wayne! I tell you when we’re over the drop zone!” He then kindly informs Noel that they’re over the drop zone, much to Wayne’s annoyance. He even tosses in some words of encouragement about saving Christmas to old Noel. Wayne then summons Lanny for an equipment check, but Noel interrupts him to say the only thing they need is his big, freakin’, gun. Lanny is impressed with the weapon as Noel chuckles about the two still using parachutes. He then saunters over to the exit, and with a “Jingle Bam!”, jumps out. Wayne angrily removes his hat which contains his parachute and hands it to Lanny as he follows his brother. The two head for land, but as Noel lands on his feet with relative ease, we see Wayne completely miss the roof. Crashing sounds and a car alarm are heard as Lanny comes into frame safely via his parachute.
Noel is packing some serious heat.
It’s time to enter the belly of the beast, as Noel calls it. It must be he that extinguishes the flames of the fireplace for a large plume of smoke emerges before we see Noel and Lanny enter. Noel cautions Lanny that this is a dangerous mission and that one of them might die. He matter-of-factly states “Probably you,” which unnerves Lanny even more. Wayne then pops up between them stretching and cracking his back following that tremendous fall from Thrasher. He tells Noel to stop being dramatic and for the pair to follow his lead saying “Stealth is my middle name.” Lanny whispers to Noel “I thought it was Frances,” who nods in acknowledgement. Wayne then creeps over towards the tree and calls attention to an ornament on the floor. Standing beside it, he says that Noel would have stepped on it and blown their cover, but as he picks it up to put it back on the tree Noel cries out for him to stop!
Wayne, in his attempt to show up his brother, is just sloppy.
That’s because the ornament is connected via string to an iPod dock. Yes, this is from 2011 when an iPod dock could be found in many living rooms across the country. It activates and we get another lively, licensed, Christmas song (“Nuttin’ for Christmas” performed by Plain White T’s) which is sure to alert the residents in this house that someone is lurking downstairs. A quick cut to a teddy bear placed on a staircase with a glowing red light suggests a camera is in place. We then cut quickly to jinglesmell1337 at their computer as further traps are unleashed. A dump truck full of ornaments pulls up beside the trio and unloads on them. Noel gives the order to run and to “Serpentine! Serpentine!” as toys from the hallway fire Nerf-style darts. They reach the stairs with Noel and Wayne seemingly unscathed, but poor Lanny is loaded with darts.
It’s like the mini boss of the mission, the dreaded Hop With Me Bunny!
We cut back to jinglesmell1337 as they handle a video game controller. As the brothers reach the top of the stairs, they’re met by a purple, stuffed, bunny with a voice like Elmo. Hop With Me Bunny (Kevin Deters) is just a toy that hops in place and Wayne thinks he’s up to the task. He runs at the doll, but it drop kicks him back into Noel and Lanny. Noel announces that he’s got this, much to the annoyance of brother Wayne. He tackles the toy and puts it in a headlock. Wayne, ever defiant and determined to prove he’s as tough as his brother, tries to join in, but the rabbit kicks him again. Noel then pins it to the floor and with a mighty yell reaches into the beast’s chest to rip out its heart! I mean battery pack. The bar, gunplay, and now this apparent Mortal Kombat style fatality are all possible thanks to creative use of coal, sleep aids, and toys. Wholesome Disney is marketing violence to your kids, parents.
Lanny is doing his best, but I don’t think he’s cut out for these type of missions.
While this melee is taking place, Lanny decides to go for the fruit cake. We see him nervously darting and rolling towards the lair of jinglesmell1337. The kid is seen just sitting in front of their PC as Lanny removes the pin from a sleep grenade and nervously approaches. He spins the chair around and the head of the kid rolls off and to the floor. Lanny thinks he killed the naughty kid, and in his moment of panic basically forgets that he’s holding a live grenade. It goes off with a puff of sparkles in his face as Wayne and Noel come running down the hall. The bedroom door slams shut trapping Lanny inside as he tries to fight off the effects of the grenade. He rises to his feet as a figure approaches. He asks “Jingle Smell?” and the child emerges from the shadows. It’s a girl sporting a pink Disney Princess sweatshirt and a sour expression. Lanny can only look at her say, “but you’re so adorable!” before he passes out.
Behold! Jinglesmell1337!
After an act break, we find Lanny stuck to the wall being held in place by adhesive give tags. We’re also properly introduced to Grace Goodwin aka jinglesmell1337. Grace (Emily Alyn Lind) wants the password to the fruitcake so she can take her name off the Naughty List, but Lanny isn’t going to be too cooperative. He’s also loopy from the sleep grenade which essentially means he’s drunk. He’s coherent enough to question why he would ever help a kid remove themself from the Naughty List which is when Grace reveals him: Gabriel. Gabriel is her little brother and he’s revealed by her opening a door to his room where he slumbers peacefully in his crib. A connecting door between two kid rooms is rather unusual, but it works for the reveal. Grace says that ever since he was born, she’s essentially been getting blamed for his naughty, toddler, behavior. She details how he destroyed her favorite plush and I guess we’re to assume he’s responsible for the writing on the wall, busted lamp, etc. I’m not sure that we can totally blame the poor grades on the little guy, but maybe that alone isn’t enough to land Grace on the dreaded Naughty List.
Not a cameo I was expecting.
As Grace details her arguments towards Gabriel, Wayne and Noel can be seen lurking in the ductwork above. We also see some of Gabriel’s actions via a cutaway which includes a scene of Grace waiting to see Santa at a mall. A misbehaving Gabriel causes her mother to pull her away before she gets her turn and behind her is a clear reference to A Christmas Story of Ralphie waiting in-line to see Santa and that weird kid in the pilot gear is staring uncomfortably at him. Grace adds that no one notices her ever since her brother was born nearly two years ago (in case you were thinking he wasn’t the cause of her landing on the Naughty List the prior year) and she really needs Lanny’s help to get the password to allow her to access the fruitcake. Unfortunately, Lanny tells her that what he needs is a pizza! Dismayed she turns to her computer, but Lanny then suggests that maybe all she needs to do is say the magic word.
Umm, mission failed?
Grace giddily races to the computer and enters “Please” as the password and is instantly granted access to the fruitcake. She changes her entry on the Naughty List and does a celebratory dance in response. Noel, who has now moved under the bed amongst some stuffed animals, warns us that we don’t want to see what happens next as he basically cocks his gun while Wayne begins his descent from the ventilation – and gets his hat stuck in the grate. As the change is uploaded to the network, we see quick cuts of the satellite and Thistleton as things start beeping and a red image of Grace in costume appears on a screen. This is not good.
Do you even know how to use that thing, Wayne?
Noel decides to make his move as he army crawls across the floor. Unfortunately, he’s spotted by Lanny who calls out to him, “Noel! We’re getting pizza!” Grace then whirls around to see the elf, but Wayne intercepts Noel and yanks his gun from his hands. Declaring this is his mission, Wayne attempts to fire at Grace while Noel cries out a warning, and with good reason. Not only does Wayne miss, but the recoil of the gun sends him flying backwards where he lands in a tackle box full of makeup and has the lid shut on him. Noel then lunges for the fruitcake, but Grace does as well. They fight over it with one grabbing the fruitcake and the other the cable it’s connected to. It ends up getting sent soaring through the air where it smashes through a window to land down in the street. Grace may have been able to blame a lot of naughty stuff on her baby brother, but that broken window is pretty much all on her.
Don’t worry everybody, Noel has saved the day!
Noel springs into action as Wayne calls for him to stop. He tells his brother not to worry, he’ll get the fruitcake. He jumps out of the window and sees the device in the middle of the street. Unfortunately, a snowplow is heading right for it. Noel steals himself and makes a run for it deftly avoiding the plow and snatching up the fruitcake all in one motion. He then places a call to Magee to inform her mission accomplished, they have the fruitcake. She is, of course, delighted and even tells Noel he’s likely to win Elf of the Year for this! She’s interrupted by an emergency call from Thistleton and has to disconnect, but Noel is left feeling pretty good about himself.
Noel has picked up on his brother’s hostility towards him so he isn’t as dense as you might think.
An individual who is not feeling too good right now is Wayne who has followed his brother and is shown staring at his little brother from the sidewalk. When Noel announces to him that Magee said he’s likely to get Elf of the Year is when Wayne seems to feel totally deflated. He seems almost numb as he makes sarcastic quips as he slams his head into a nearby trash barrel causing a pile of snow to fall on him. Noel then finally asks his brother if he’s all right indicating that he’s been getting kind of a vibe from him so he’s not completely oblivious to his older brother’s hostility.
That is not the look of someone happy to see their brother.
From beneath the pile of snow, we see Wayne’s eyes laser-focused on his brother. He shakes the snow off and, despite the obvious cold, he’s steaming like a tea kettle. He starts yelling at Noel and throwing snowballs at him about how his problem is, and has always been, Noel. He accuses him of showing him up all of the time as he chases after him. Noel, to this credit, doesn’t stand his ground even though he could probably wipe the floor with Wayne. He apologizes for “Dolores” and swears he never knew there was mistletoe there. Wayne is apparently still mad about this so-called Dolores, but also the mission, the turbo, and pretty much everything. Grace comes running outside to witness the last of Wayne’s volley. As Noel tries to appeal to him by saying how great it is they got to go on this special mission together, Wayne reveals that he not only didn’t want to have Noel along for this, but he also wishes he never had a brother!
Words hurt, Wayne. Words hurt.
That one cuts deep. Noel stops running and lets the snowballs strike him harmlessly as he stares up at his brother from the street as he’s perched on a car. He has a serious expression his face, one we haven’t seen on the jolly elf yet, and tells Wayne he knows he didn’t mean that as he finally fires a snowball in retaliation. The blast of snow knocks Wayne off the car and to the ground as Wayne tells his brother to tell him he didn’t mean what he said. Wayne says nothing as he dusts himself off and won’t even look at his brother his face still simmering with rage. Noel’s face softens to one of hurt as he details that he always looked up to Wayne and thought of him as a hero, until now. The writers even slip a joke into this otherwise weighty moment by having Noel mention that Wayne taught him how to write his name in the snow. I don’t think we needed that, let the moment be.
I hope you didn’t forget about the sled, because Wayne sure didn’t.
Wayne still doesn’t turn around as Noel produces a gift from behind his back. Where he was concealing it no one really knows. He tosses it at Wayne’s feet with a half-hearted “Merry Christmas.” The box opens and out falls the Captain Avalanche Super Sled. No wonder why Noel mentioned it during their transport, he needed to get his brother fired up to finally get one. Wayne picks it up with awe and looks it over. It’s just as awesome as he remembered it. Now, it’s Noel’s turn to turn his back on his brother as he gathers up his hat. Wayne says the sled is even better than he remembered and adds that Captain Avalanche was nothing without Snowball – never have been, never will be. Noel stares a dagger over his should to quip “You got that right,” seemingly expecting more. Wayne then apologizes and somewhat sheepishly says “Jingle Bam?” Noel turns around with a smile, returns the “Jingle Bam!,” and pulls Wayne in for a great, big, bearhug.
There’s no more time for family drama, they need to get that device to that tower or Christmas is ruined!
Grace has been watching the whole time and a look of relief crosses her face to see the brothers makeup. Behind her, Lanny has apparently broken free to stumble out the front door asking if the pizza is here yet. Grace’s parents must be very heavy sleepers. Wayne gets a jingle in his earpiece and answers with a “Hello, beautiful,” so these elves really need a crash course in workplace etiquette from HR. It’s Magee, naturally, and they have a crisis. She asks if Wayne is in possession of the fruitcake and he indicates that he is. Something is wrong though as they now have a glitch in the system that is placing every child in the world on the Naughty List! Thistleton indicates it’s an issue originating from the fruitcake, but he can’t seem to interface with it. That would be because the antenna is broken. Thistleton instructs Wayne that he needs to basically find a new antenna, but not just any antenna, the most powerful antenna he can source. The elves are dumbfounded when they hear this, but the still drunken Lanny happily points out a giant antenna on a nearby building. Perfect!
These elves have abandoned all notions of stealth at this point.
Grace, who understands this is all her fault and would like to make amends, begins rewiring the fruitcake so that it can accept the new antenna. As the crew races over to the building, we see Lanny is riding in Grace’s backpack. As she finishes what she’s doing, she tosses the device to Wayne and also apologizes for being so naughty. Wayne just encourages her to always be her brother’s hero while Lanny tries to insist that he’s coming with them, only to suddenly pass out. At headquarters, the Naughty List has consumed about 75% of the world’s children and it’s climbing. The implication here is that if it hits 100% there’s somehow no way to undo it because we need some real stakes here, people.
Spider elves, spider elves…
Wayne and Noel race up a tree outside the building and use a cable attached to the building like a zipline. Now they’re actually working together in a functional manner with Wayne using his silly, curled, elf shoes as the zipline handle and Noel grabbing onto his hands. When they reach the side of the building they’re met by a series of lighted snowflakes which have been mounted to the side of it. Noel notes it looks like the lair of Professor Permafrost prompting Wayne to toss him one of those candy cane grapnel launchers with a “Race you to the top, Snowball!” The two elves move with lightning speed up the obstacles like Spider-Man, but a new obstacle awaits them at the top.
Jingle Bam!
When they reach a landing the pair is met by grating above them that they can’t simply scale. There’s also some high voltage warnings indicating that they might not want to go any further even if they could. Noel asks Wayne what they’re to do now, but Wayne has an idea: the Captain Avalanche Super Sled! With it’s suction cup grappling hook and zipline action, they can shoot it through the grating with the fruitcake attached! Wayne then wisely hands the sled to his brother noting that he’s the better shot. Problem is, Noel can’t get a clear view of the tower because of the grating and some flags. Wayne, with Magee chirping in his ear, has one final solution: holiday hug. He tackles his brother off the landing and activates his parachute. The parachute allows the pair to float above the grating clearing the way for Noel to fire the Super Sled at the antenna and activate the zipline feature to bring the fruitcake where it needs to be. Parachutes don’t really work that way, but maybe there was some giant fan below them that wasn’t shown?
And not a speck of mistletoe in sight.
With the fruitcake in position it’s able to sync with the computer at the North Pole. Almost instantly, the Naughty List comes down replaced with a record number of Nice List occupants. Maybe this even worked out for some kids who were supposed to be on the Naughty List? A celebration breaks out up at the North Pole and Magee is so overjoyed that she plants a wet one on Thistleton. This is a full blown HR crisis at this point. Wayne and Noel celebrate as well and a crisis would appear to be averted.
Love your siblings, folks. That’s the message here.
We’re then shown a clip of Christmas morning. Grace, who did not make the Naughty List, receives a brand new Miss Whiskers, her favorite toy her brother destroyed. She’s so happy that she even hugs the little guy and wishes him a merry Christmas. We’re shown this via Santa’s magic snow globe as the big guy is here to put a bow on this thing. The moral of this story is that family is everything. Wayne thanks Santa (W. Morgan Sheppard) for pairing them up with Noel adding it was the best Christmas present ever. Santa then notes the time, 4:30, and how they don’t want to be late.
Oh good, I’m so relieved they got to share the award. Nice dress, Magee.
And what don’t they want to be late for? Why, the Elf of the Year presentation! And wouldn’t you know, the award is being shared this year by both Wayne and Noel. Lanny and Magee are there to celebrate with them as the pair triumphantly hold up their award. The credits then enter with Crumbles, the old elf, looking at the newspaper about it still insisting that Wayne’s name is actually Dwayne. Carol is also present and she reprises the song from earlier seemingly revealing that she is the vocalist of this group? Good for her.
Carol apparently has a set of pipes to go with those biceps.
And that’s the end! A kid mistakenly placed on the Naughty List finds her way onto the Nice List while Wayne the elf learns to appreciate his family above things, glory, and so on. Noel gets celebrated as co-Elf of the Year and demonstrates he’s a very forgiving elf while Lanny is basically just along for the ride. Naughty vs. Nice has a lot of the elements that made the original Prep & Landing so much fun. We get sneaky, super specialized elves who have to overcome personal problems for the greater good. There’s a race against time and Christmas is in jeopardy, but it all works out in the end.
It’s just that Naughty vs. Nice is a bit messy compared with the first special. How is Santa’s Naughty and Nice system so bad that kids are getting blamed for the misdeeds of a baby sibling? That seems like quite a flaw in the system that would impact a lot of children, not just Grace. She also went about addressing her problem in a pretty naughty manner that I guess is just forgiven since she ends up helping Wayne and Noel solve the problem she created, in response to a problem caused by Santa, which was caused by her brother. It’s certainly a thing.
Wayne really didn’t deserve his brother’s forgiveness.
Where this special really doesn’t work as well for me as the original is with Wayne. In the first Prep & Landing, Wayne basically flirts with the Naughty List himself. He maintains some sympathy though in doing so because he feels overlooked and unappreciated. Again, a problem caused by the top of the North Pole hierarchy. What’s that big man do all year? In this one, Wayne is just plain hostile towards his loving, adoring, brother out of pure jealousy. Even before Noel enters the picture, Wayne can be seen downplaying the importance of family and overinflating his own ego with boasts of winning Elf of the Year and being THE Prep & Landing guy. He’s a total dick not just to Noel, but to Lanny who he completely dismisses. And as for Lanny, the special basically treats him the same. He’s basically sidelined in this one. Sure, he gets a couple of funny lines and basically gets to be drunk, but he should be pretty pissed with Wayne too and he gets nothing.
Basically what I’m saying is that Naughty vs. Nice has an unlikable protagonist. We went from moments of frustration with Wayne in the first special to outright detesting him here. He’s basically the villain and he gets off easy. He gets the present he’s always wanted, the award he coveted, and all he had to do was say “I’m sorry.” Noel would have been justified in refusing that apology and maybe he should have? Wayne should not have been rewarded with Elf of the Year. I think it would have been a much better arch for him if he was forced to humbly congratulate Noel for receiving the honor.
Poor Lanny had a tough time in this one. Hopefully the new special is a better experience for him.
In spite of all of that, is Naughty vs. Nice worth a watch? Yes, it’s still entertaining, just a bit frustrating. I think it really needed one more pass by a script doctor or someone who had been separated from the pre-production process who would have recognized that Wayne was awful and needed refinement. It’s similar to the original Toy Story which had to do the same thing with the Woody character when it was realized that he was far too villainous initially and needed refinement. I can excuse the sidelining of Lanny because there’s only so much room in a 23 minute cartoon, but the Wayne character is a tough pill to swallow. There’s still a relatively fun story here and the action is well done. There’s humor, and Michael Giacchino’s score is as excellent as ever. It’s just not as enjoyable an experience as the original Prep & Landing.
If you would like to view this or the first one, Disney+ is the easiest way to do so. The specials are also likely being shown on Freeform if you have cable and may even still have an airing scheduled this late in the game. The special was also released on DVD and Blu Ray with the first one and isn’t terrible expensive should you wish to go that route. And if you love these characters then be on the lookout for a brand new Prep & Landing coming in 2025. I honestly thought the franchise was dead when Disney+ was launched without the promise of a new one, but I’m happy to see it’s going to continue. Hopefully, the next one let’s Lanny do something.
Can’t wait until tomorrow for more Christmas? Check out what we had to say on this day last year and beyond:
I realize we just did a Christmas post the other day set in a mall, but at least this one is actually set at Christmas! And we’re pivoting from Nicktoons to Disney toons (which surprisingly don’t have their own fun branding) with the short-lived cartoon Future-Worm! I’ll be honest, before doing this post I had…
As we’ve maneuvered through the countdown for 2022 the theme of The Christmas Tape has stayed strong. And today, I am going down a rabbit hole because of that tape. If you read the first entry this year, you may recall I talked about a Cinnamon Toast Crunch commercial that contained a contest for kids…
One of the franchises I have great admiration for is The Chipmunks, or Alvin and The Chipmunks. It’s been around since 1958 when Ross Bagdasarian Sr. came up with a novelty song called “The Witch Doctor.” Realizing he could make funny sounds by speeding up his voice, a tactic cartoon makers had been utilizing for…
Kids who did a lot of their growing up in the 90s likely have fond memories of The Disney Afternoon. There were a lot of programs competing for eyeballs in the weekday afternoon timeslot and Disney put forth a pretty compelling block of animation, even though the actual launch wasn’t that exciting. It included two series that had already been on television for sometime: DuckTales and Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers. Both shows were already in the weekday afternoon timeslot, but Disney wanted to market an entire two hour block so they took those shows, paired them with an even older show in Adventures of the Gummi Bears and added a new show: TaleSpin.
TaleSpin was my least favorite of all the Disney Afternoon shows. I usually checked out when it came on. It’s possible that it conflicted with the airing of another show I would have rather watched (like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or The Real Ghostbusters), or maybe I just plain wasn’t interested despite my enjoyment of the other programs in the block. I was aware of, and had seen, the Disney adaptation of The Jungle Book, but it wasn’t a favorite of mine. I didn’t have much of a frame of reference for Scrooge McDuck going into DuckTales, and I just plain liked the characters of Chip and Dale, so those two shows were easy sells for me. The lazy and irresponsible Baloo is now the pilot or a cargo plane? That just seemed too out there for me. And it certainly didn’t help matters that I did not like the introductory theme song. DuckTales and Rescue Rangers have absolute bangers of intro songs, as did Adventures of the Gummi Bears, but that call and response setup of TaleSpin just didn’t do anything for me. I usually didn’t make it past that.
I can accept giant turtles wielding swords but I draw the line at Baloo the pilot.
With the benefit of time, I can look at TaleSpin as just a really bizarre concept. It’s basically The Jungle Book plus Tales of the Gold Monkey plus Cheers with a dash of Casablanca. That is a bananas setup for an afternoon cartoon series aimed at kids. I watched some of Cheers as a kid with my parents, but I never made the connection despite the TaleSpin character of Rebecca (Sally Struthers) being an almost exact duplicate of the character of the same name on Cheers. I also probably didn’t watch enough TaleSpin to make that connection, but that is one crazy pull. Does that eclectic mix all add up to something that works? I can’t say since I haven’t dived into TaleSpin as an adult, but there are plenty of people whose opinion I respect that go to bat for the series.
Ironically, my love of Christmas didn’t extend to the original Disney Afternoon shows that I actually watched. Of the four, only TaleSpin dedicated an episode to Christmas. These were all shows designed to be direct-to-syndication for a weekday slot. Programmers don’t really like holiday episodes because they have to schedule around them since most networks don’t want a Christmas episode popping up in June. I think that’s largely the reason why those shows didn’t address the holiday despite Scrooge McDuck first debuting in a Christmas comic. That attitude would wane though starting with TaleSpin as several Disney Afternoon shows would do a Christmas episode. Perhaps someone saw the appeal of being able to sell a block of cartoons that could also be seasonal? Kids like holiday episodes, for the most part. I know it would get my attention when a network would advertise a bunch of Halloween or Christmas episodes coming my way. And when one show in the programming didn’t follow the theme (snow episodes do not count as Christmas episodes, people) it would bother me. Usually, it was my beloved X-Men that wouldn’t join in on the fun, but even that show gave-in eventually.
Rebecca would like to see it snow for Christmas, but all it ever does is rain in Cape Suzette.
After the opening song that I still don’t care for, I’m surprised to see an honest to goodness title card for this episode. I have no idea if that’s a regular thing, but I applaud any show that invests in title cards for its episodes. When it fades, we’re treated to images of a snow-covered little town. Rebecca is speaking over the images about her memories of Christmas choosing to really zero-in on said snow. We zoom out and realize she’s been staring into a snow globe while holding her daughter, Molly (Janna Michaels). Rebecca wishes it would snow for Christmas for that’s what she misses most about the holiday. Presumably, she grew up in a part of the world where it snowed regularly. Molly suggests there’s still time for snow as they observe the pouring rain outside, but Rebecca kind of laughs off the suggestion noting that it never snows in Cape Suzette. I think they’re located somewhere in the Caribbean where it has quite possibly never snowed period.
Rather than simply replace the candy cane, Baloo decides to enchant young Molly with a story about a Peppermint Fairy. It’s going to backfire in spectacular fashion.
Rebecca has to leave and basically tells everyone to be on their best behavior since Santa’s watching, and all that stuff. Baloo (Ed Gilbert) chuckles and agrees to be good or whatever. A pet peeve of mine is cartoon characters who chuckle and laugh as part of their line delivery for no good reason. Someone decided that Baloo needed to sound extra jolly or something. Nearby, Wildcat (Pat Fraley) is decorating a Christmas tree and Baloo compliments him on his work as he fires an ornament from a slingshot onto the tree. Molly hops up and begins working on a letter to Santa Claus, which we find out from Kit Cloudkicker (R.J. Williams) is actually her second letter for Santa. I have to believe this one is about what her mom wants for Christmas, but as she’s working on it Kit is bouncing around on a pogo stick stringing some garland on the tree and making everything bounce. Molly’s candy cane rolls off the desk and shatters on the floor, drawing a sad reaction from the little cub. Baloo comes over to inspect the mess and share some good news: if Molly puts part of the candy cane under her pillow tonight, the Peppermint Fairy will replace it with a new candy cane! Molly seems dubious, but Baloo insists she’s the cousin of the Tooth Fairy or something. Molly accepts this as true and takes off while Baloo ties a little string around his finger so he doesn’t forget to make the switch later.
Panic has set in for Baloo forgot he was supposed to play a fairy the night before.
The sound of a rooster would seem to indicate morning has come. Baloo and Kit appear to have passed out in front of the television, but are awoken by a panicked Rebecca who comes racing down the stairs. Apparently, the store where she bought a gift for Molly for Christmas gave her the wrong item and she needs to get there and exchange it in time for Christmas (it’s Christmas Eve). Baloo is pretty groggy as he takes his marching orders which are to keep an eye on Molly and to make sure a shipment of soap gets loaded onto the cargo plane. When Rebecca races off, Baloo notices the string on his finger and immediately it dawns on him that he forgot to make the switch. He starts panicking and kind of does a Humphrey Bear impression in the process as he moves back and forth desperate for a candy cane. There just so happens to be two on a wreath directly behind him and he grabs one in hope that he isn’t too late. Assuming that candy cane is real and not plastic, that thing probably has pine needles stuck all over it. I don’t think Molly will be too impressed.
Not only has Baloo destroyed the child’s belief in fairies, but also in Santa Claus as well!
Baloo, rather loudly, exclaims he has a candy cane and runs upstairs to Molly’s room. Then, the big oaf decides to be quiet as he listens for any sounds coming from inside the room. Hearing nothing, he creeps in and we see Molly asleep in her bed with a portion of the broken candy cane peeking out from under her pillow. As Baloo gently reaches in to make the swap, Molly’s eye pops open and she asks, “Did the Peppermint Fairy forget something?” Baloo recoils with a sheepish grin and tries to come up with an explanation, but he can’t get much out as Molly accuses him of lying to a kid! The worst crime of all. She then draws a connection between the Peppermint Fairy and Santa Claus. If the Peppermint Fairy isn’t real, then all of that Santa stuff Baloo told her must be bologna! Wildcat interjects to say Santa hates bologna, but no one seems to be paying attention to him. Baloo tries to recover and insists that there is a Santa Claus, and not only is he real, he’s going to take Molly to see him at the North Pole so she can hand deliver her new letter! As he makes these vows, we see Kit wincing in pain indicating he knows that what Baloo is promising is impossible. Baloo tells the kid to get her coat and then leaves the room whispering under his breath how they need to pull this off before Rebecca gets back. Kit asks him what he’s doing, but Baloo just runs down the stairs and insists he has a plan.
Louie may no longer be a king, but he seems to be doing well for himself.
We then cut to Louie’s Place. It’s basically a giant bar built into a massive tree which is run by the former King Louie (Jim Cummings) from The Jungle Book. I don’t know if he was a king at any point in time in the show, but he seems to have a lot of monkey hirelings so he might as well be. As for how he can get away with running a bar in a kid’s show, I’m guessing it’s referred to as a juice bar. We even see him taking a phone call and stuffing a bunch of fruit into a blender, I suppose making his breakfast. Maybe it’s for punch and we just don’t see him add the rum? At any rate, it’s quite clear that the person on the other end of this conversation is Baloo, and he needs Louie’s help to pull this whole Santa thing off. And Louie is an integral part to the scheme as he shouts “You want me to dress up as who?!” as the blender basically explodes juice all over him. Get ready for Louie Claus, I guess.
Poor Wildcat gets left behind. He just wants to see Santa too.
Back on Cape Suzette, Baloo and the others are getting ready to leave for “The North Pole.” This means that Wildcat doesn’t get to load the cargo of soap flakes onto the plane like he’s expected to. As Baloo and the others run by knocking him over, he calls back to them and his voice actor, Pat Fraley’s, Krang voice sneaks out which sounds really funny to me (he voices the alien brain in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon). Poor Wildcat would like to go with them, but Baloo and the others basically ignore him after he crashes through a crate of soap. They take off, leaving Wildcat to beg for them to bring him along from the end of the dock to no avail. Molly would like it to snow, Wildcat has a shipment of soap flakes…I think I see how these two things will fit together.
Louie really went all out here.
Baloo takes the kid and Kit to Louie’s Place, which now is all decked out for Christmas with a sign indicating it’s now Santa’s Place. Not that any of this is needed for Baloo has decided to blindfold Molly and she’s just going along with it for some reason. I have no idea if she’s ever been to Louie’s Place, doesn’t seem like the kind of place a kid should frequent, but it shows up a lot in the show and this is episode 43 or something. An attendant answers the door sort of like the guy from the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz. It’s a monkey dressed as an elf, and he promptly lets Baloo and the kids in. Once inside, Baloo removes the blindfold and Molly looks around. These monkeys have done a good job decorating the place and have even thrown together a work shop where they appear to actually be making toys. Louie must have owed Baloo some favor. Molly even sees antlers passing by a window and assumes they belong to reindeer, but it’s just a monkey with a lone horn Max style running by the window over and over.
If I didn’t know any better I’d say he seems to enjoy playing Santa.
Kit then encourages Molly to listen for he hears the sound of jingle bells. There’s a commotion by the fireplace and soon a body drops in. It’s Santa Claus! Only, it’s Louie in a Santa suit with black sunglasses. He saunters over to the gang singing like he normally would which prompts Baloo to whisper to him “Ix-nay on the ive-jay!” You can’t take the soul out of this orangatang, Baloo! He’s a different kind of Santa. He does his best to tone down his personality and puts Molly in his chair and whips out his list. Finding “Molly” on it, he insists she’s going to get everything she wanted! He’s got a sack full of all kinds of stuff and starts listing it off as he goes through it all assuming whatever she wants must be in there. She may like some of that stuff, but it mostly appears to be instruments from the bar so that expectation may have been dubious, at best.
Louie didn’t have to go through with the trouble of making toys out of bar wares, she just wanted to give him a letter.
Molly, of course, doesn’t want any of that. She just wants to deliver her letter. Louie finally stops yapping and takes a seat with Molly on his lap ready to scope out this letter of hers. I guess up until now, Baloo and Kit hadn’t noticed that Molly’s wish was for snow to make her mother happy so when Waldo (uncredited, could be Richard Karron) reads the letter out loud spelling out her wish Louie can do nothing except tell her that her wish is his command! Louie then excuses himself to have a chat with a shocked Baloo. He tells him he was asked to play Santa, not Jack Frost! How are they going to pull that off? In a backroom, Baloo tells Louie he just needs to keep up the Santa ruse for a little while longer so he can put Molly’s wish into action. Louie is quite reluctant and is also worried about his customers who are bound to show up eventually. Baloo just tells him to invite them into this little game and sing Christmas carols to entertain the kid while he and Kit take off. Louie reluctantly goes along with Baloo’s suggestion and returns to Molly instructing the other monkey-elves to sing “Jingle Bells.”
Not your typical holly, jolly, bunch.
Baloo and Kit make for the plane and take off to the sound of monkeys singing “Jingle Bells.” Elsewhere, some other folks lurking in a cave are singing the same song, but far worse. It’s the crew of Don Karnage (Cummings), the pirate wolf, and he’s none too happy with his crew for keeping him awake. The only ones credited as speaking are Mad Dog (Charlie Adler) and Dumptruck (Chuck McCann). They’re in a dank cave around a Charlie Brown style tree and looking rather miserable. Karnage, one of the chief villains of the show who speaks with something akin to an Eastern European accent, decides to give his men what they want. They’re pirates, so why not head out and steal their own Merry Christmas? The crew likes this idea as they all make for their planes.
I think Baloo may have a date for under the mistletoe.
Back on Cape Suzette, Rebecca has returned carrying a lot more than the nutcracker she was supposedly on the hunt for. She has a stack of presents so high she can’t even see where she’s going, and her cab driver decided he must hate tips since he doesn’t offer to help. Once she’s able to look past the pile of gifts, Rebecca is pretty surprised to see Wildcat all by himself on the dock with the crates of soap flakes and no seaplane. She asks him where everyone is and, through sobs, Wildcat explains that Baloo took Molly to the North Pole without him! He’s also apparently been trying to get Molly’s snow globe to work and is having a hard time. He’s not a very bright cat. The seaplane then returns and Baloo and Kit race off of it and onto the dock to grab a couple of crates of soap flakes. As they do, they say “Hi!” to Rebecca, then “Bye!” to Rebecca, then finally stop as if they just realized who they were talking to. She’s a bit pissed, but once Kit explains that Baloo is trying to make Molly’s Christmas wish comes true she softens immediately and flashes some rather hungry eyes the big bear’s way (play your cards right, Baloo, and you just might have a very merry Christmas yourself), but there’s no time to bask in Rebecca’s affection. It’s started to rain and Baloo can see his plan going all up in…suds.
The bar flies have arrived and they’re not happy about being denied their booze.
Back at Santa’s, I mean, Louie’s, “Jingle Bells” has apparently been going on for quite some time. Don’t they know more Christmas songs? Worse, the regulars have shown up and they don’t like being left out in the rain. They’re pretty ornery, but Waldo isn’t letting them in. These guys definitely all have the look of alcoholics who need to get their Christmas buzz going on. This show is more like Cheers than I realized. Inside, Louie looks tired and bored as he conducts this deteriorating performance until Molly interrupts him. She politely asks if he’s going to make it snow soon and he can do nothing except answer in the affirmative and hope Baloo comes through.
This doesn’t look good.
A voice comes over a nearby CB radio. It’s Baloo calling for “Santa” as he pilots the seaplane to Louie’s. Louie is relieved to hear him, though I’m curious how they expect to pull this off in the rain. Unfortunately for them though, Don Karnage and his band of pirates are also sailing these unfriendly skies and overhear their conversation. Karnage thinks Baloo is transporting something special by the sound of the conversation and he intends to steal it. Unfortunately for him, it’s just soap. Louie tells Molly to get ready for some snow and as the two share a hug Don Karnage moves in!
Disney allows its villains to fire actual bullets. Take that, Spider-Man!
Baloo gives the order to stand ready to Rebecca and Wildcat who open up two boxes of soap flakes in preparation. I guess they’re just going to go through with this idea and hope it looks like snow even in the driving rain, though this seems rather foolish. Could lead to a fun suds rave at Louie’s though! Before they can start dispensing with the soap, bullets rip through the hull of the SeaDuck. Rebecca and Wildcat are able to duck just in the nick of time to avoid getting their heads ripped apart. I’m a little surprised that this show was able to arm its villains with actual machine guns. Maybe there’s something quaint about the weapons originating from old school airplanes? Looney Tunes had dogfighting in its cartoons and even Snoopy mimed it in Peanuts cartoons. I guess it’s just one of those things deemed acceptable when it came to children’s cartoons, but don’t even think about arming Bebop and Rocksteady with realistic shotguns! Or, this is just Disney doing whatever it wants and no network is going to tell the House of Mouse what to do.
This “I love it,” delivery is so over-the-top both vocally and as animation that I too love it.
Don Karnage announces himself over the radio to Baloo who ordinarily is not happy to run afoul of pirates when doing deliveries, but is really unhappy here since this is messing up his whole plan. Don Karnage does offer Baloo a way out: give him the cargo and he won’t shoot him down. Baloo does not dignify that with a response as Rebecca makes her way into the cockpit to tell “Don Garbage” (hah, nice one!) that this plane is carrying a present for her daughter and he can’t have it! Karnage indicates that there’s a price on her head, I’m not sure if he means Rebecca or Molly, and reasons that this will be like taking candy cane from a baby. Then, in true, silly, villain, fashion he shouts “I love that!” with an overexaggerated smile. The animation here is pretty fluid and is by Wang Film Productions, not the best animation studio to work on the show, but a solid one.
Oh no! Bubbles!
The pirates continue to rip through the hull of the SeaDuck, but somehow it stays aloft. There’s even one shot where the bullets seem to go right through the propellers but the only damage reflected are holes in the hull, which don’t seem to bother the plane one bit. Kit informs Baloo that they have no chance of outrunning the pirates in this storm, but Baloo has no intention of running. He tells the crew to give Karnage and his boys what they want. Rebecca, Kit, and Wildcat all dump a crate of soap flakes out of the cargo bay door. As they do, each one shouts “Merry Christmas” because we have to stay on brand here. Karnage is at first excited to see the doors open, but then is less so when a bunch of bubbles start blowing in his face. Impossibly, these bubbles cause all of the airplanes the pirates are piloting to malfunction. Don’t ask me how, they just do. They all plummet from the sky to crash in the sea below. No one appears harmed, or even bewildered, Karnage just looks pissed as his plane begins to sink. His associates, on the other hand, are delighted by the bubbles and even refer to it as snow. They’re not too bright. They’re also sinking, possibly to their demise (but probably not).
These guys have a serious drinking problem.
Aboard the SeaDuck, Baloo asks if they were able to save any soap for Molly. Wildcat proudly holds up one box, but then realizes it’s basically empty. Baloo mutters “Now, what are we going to do?” as their plane flies through the sudsy skies with ease. Back at Louie’s, the monkeys have seemingly regained their vigor and are putting on an at least passable performance of “Jingle Bells.” Louis is seated on a stage with Molly on his knee as he assures her she’ll get her wish any minute now. He also promises it will be so white she’ll be able to clean her clothes with it, which is true, as far as he knows. Waldo then wanders over to direct Louie’s attention to the front door. Despite a board being laid across it, the door is swelling with banging from the other side. The patrons are beyond restless, they need their booze, and they break down the door!
Aww geez, you guys went and made the kid cry!
When the drunks come barging in they’re surprised to see everyone in costume, especially Louie. One of the guys immediately addresses him by his actual name, and even though he’s trying to get them to shut it, it’s to no avail. Molly has heard, and seen, that this Santa is not he. Her eyes begin to well up with tears as the patrons laugh at the sight of Louie in a Santa suit. They pull off his beard for added affect and we see Molly’s point-of-view as her eyes dart from the various, unsettling, sights. Eventually, she jumps up and runs to Louie and it looks like she’s giving him a hug, but really she just wanted to pull her letter from the imposter’s pocket. She then runs off as Louie calls out to her, but she slips away. He can do nothing but turn around and ask the patrons, “Now, what did you guys go and do that for?”
No, Molly! Don’t lose your faith in Christmas!
Molly runs down to the beach and up a cliffside to a bluff overlooking the sea. She’s in tears, and still in her pajamas from the morning, and clutching her letter to Santa. The rain has at least stopped, but it’s dark and as she ascends to the top of the cliffside she looks down at her letter. Calling it a lie, she tosses it down to the sea then collapses at the base of a tree to sob. Meanwhile, the letter gets caught by the wind and we see it nearly hit the water before soaring high into the air. Almost like a Santa Claus moon-shot, it passes by a full moon and disappears into who knows where?
This whole setting is really reminding me of the intro to The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.
Molly is soon awakened by the calls of her mother. She rises to her feet, and to her credit, she’s not upset about the whole Santa thing being ruined for her, she’s just sad she doesn’t have a gift for her mom. We then see Rebecca, Baloo, Kit, Wildcat, and Louie come up the hill to find Molly bathed in moonlight. She’s just staring at the sky as her mom approaches her and wraps her in her coat and fusses over her wellbeing like a mother should. Then she realizes her daughter is transfixed by something. She asks her what’s going on, and Molly just whispers “I saw him!”
I wonder what’s going to happen next…
Rebecca looks up to the sky and is soon joined by Baloo. Both are acting like they see something, but in the quick shots of the sky we’re treated to, we just see stars. The camera focuses on the sky until a single snowflake flutters down and lands on Rebecca’s nose. Louie remarks, “crazy,” because he apparently has to always be doing something. The snow starts to fall a little heavier and Kit catches one on his tongue while Wildcat seems to hardly notice because he thinks he got the snow globe working. They’re all in awe as Louie approaches Baloo. He quietly asks how he pulled this off and Baloo confirms he didn’t. When Louie inquires who did, he can only say “If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.” Rebecca scoops up Molly in her arms and Molly looks directly in the camera and softly says “I would.” Her mom gives her a smile and Molly says “Merry Christmas, mom.” The camera zooms way out to show Cape Suzette covered in a blanket of snow as the episode fades to black.
And here comes the snow!
I started this post off saying that, as a kid, I didn’t much care for TaleSpin, but I enjoyed this. Maybe I’d enjoy more episode of TaleSpin, or maybe this is just Christmas working its magic on me? There aren’t any surprises in this one. Once the plot is in motion it’s pretty easy to guess where the story is going to take us. It’s almost like the main plot of Miracle on 34th Street condensed into a 23 minute cartoon about bears and jungle animals. Molly is disillusioned and Baloo sets out to prove to her that Santa Claus is real, only she has a mostly impossible ask of the would-be Santa Claus. The only difference is that Louie is not, in fact, Santa and instead he just kind of comes in at the last second to deus ex machina this thing, and it’s okay! Santa has such powers and could do stuff like that. I like that we don’t actually see him (even though I’m wondering what Santa in this world looks like, and if DuckTales (2017) would have stuck with the look) and we just see the awe struck faces of the protagonists. It’s enough.
“I would.”
The animation in this one is quite good with some very nice character work. Louie and his monkey minions are rather emotive and I really feel a cohesive approach to the material with other Disney Afternoon works, especially Adventures of the Gummi Bears. Molly practically looks like an unused design from that show at times and the work done with her when she realizes that Louie isn’t who he said he is was fantastic. My heart broke for her, even if I knew it was coming. And I really liked that the carefree Louie was shown to be pretty broken up by it too. He was too sad for Molly to really get mad at the bar flies, though they could have handled that whole situation better. Just tell them if they want to come in and drink they need to sing Christmas tunes for the kid – no problem!
The animators did a great job translating Molly’s heartbreak during this sequence.
I may not have covered all of the Disney Afternoon Christmas episodes in this space, but I think I have seen them all. And of them all, to my surprise, TaleSpin might be the most enjoyable. It’s between this and the Goof Troop one. That one tries a little too hard to tug on the heart strings where as this episode is pretty simple and effective at doing so. Even though I knew it was coming, I still got a little teary eyed when Molly ran off into the night because it was handled well. The whole diversion with Don Karnage was a brief bit of comedy, for the most part, that tried to be a little suspenseful. It mostly existed just to make sure Baloo failed to deliver on Molly’s wish himself, though I think the soap flakes rapidly turning into suds might have accomplished that too, but at least we spared Baloo the embarrassment.
Merry Christmas had by all.
If you want to check out this episode of TaleSpin before the holidays come and go then the easiest way to do so is via Disney+. There you will find it as the 43rd episode of the series. The show was also released on DVD if you prefer to go physical. I can’t vouch for the series as a whole, and I still think it’s theme song is mid, but this is a damn fine Christmas episode that I enjoyed quite a bit.
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