day 9

rankin\/bass gave us the classics. rudolph. frosty. jack frost.

the year without a santa clause.

truthfully, the title is misleading, as santa gets off his arse and decides not to get a well deserved rest. it's overall a great story, really, showing the importance of the christmas spirit of giving, etc. but the whole heat miser/snow miser portion of the plot...

umm...

what?

are they villains? they're certainly set up that way at first, but then when we see them again, they're petulant children, with song and dance numbers too boot...



what's with the mini-them dancing around and singing with them? creepy! and there's something just a little... well... i don't think heat miser's the only one who's "flaming." if you get what i mean (i'm amazed paul lynde didn't do one of the voices) but they're definitely not villains, just minor nuisance/antagonists who get dealt with pretty easily.

so, to help get the south to have christmas spirit (because it's hot! amazingly, though there's not a single colored person in "southland USA", the christmas spirit has nothing to do with jim crow, which given the apparent time period, is definitely in effect), two elves and mrs claus have to get it to snow. so they contact these two brothers, and ultimately their mother -mother nature, of course, the family resemblance completely lacking - to make it happen. and guess what! it doesn't work! well... wait... does it? no, i guess not, because it's not the snow that makes santa believe that people believe again. it's a sappy rendition of "blue christmas" sung by a sad little girl (featuring puppets with huge, disproportionate blobs of glycerine on their eyes) and then, a bunch of racial/ethnic stereotyped children - though i guess it's a little more like the small world ride at disney get together and give santa presents.

they did a tv remake a few years ago, with john goodman playing santa (yeah, goodman taking part in another ruining remake/sequel to a rankin-bass classic!... i'll talk about frosty returns another day). they kept the heatmiser/snowmiser songs sort of - harvey firestein played the heat miser? wtf?!?! was that necessary? ugh.

(i feel sad putting this here, but...)


the dancing girls are unnecessary, though i'm guessing nbc lacked the budget to make mini-michael mckean/harvey feirsteins, but it made me think of the one bad thing about "viva variety" which was the dancing girls thrown into every musical act's number... regardless of the song/act (yeah. viva variety. with the state DVD in limbo, i'm assuming we'll NEVER see that either....)