[rating: 2.5] When Eric assigned me to write A Charlie Brown Christmas, I'm not sure he knew what he was getting himself into. See, I'm not much like other merrymakers who fall all over themselves praising any little thing which carries the smallest iota of warmhearted nostalgia.  I can't ignore things like horrible dialog, an annoying plot with laughable transitions, and just general bad direction and production all around. No amount of feeling like I'm "supposed" to love something (and I do feel that it's a sweet little piece of pop history) can make me ignore all of that. It's a cute story with some touching moments, but all things considered it's rather absurd and it doesn't even try to make sense. The story opens with Charlie Brown feeling depressed about Christmas, God only knows why (FORESHADOWING, THANK YOU!). Apparently he thinks Christmas has become too commercialized, though we only learn that through a few meandering and mumbling scenes with Linus, Snoopy, and Lucy. Finally, five minutes into this barely 30-minute piece, we have a reason why it exists. So Charlie is depressed and basically disowns Snoopy because decorating his dog house is far too "commercial" an activity, and Lucy names him director of ...

[rating: 4] Damn but Pinky and the Brain was a great show, wasn't it? Easily among the greatest kids' cartoons of the 1990s and arguably of all time. Thankfully, this Christmas episode is no exception. If for some unfathomable reason you're unfamiliar with the concept behind Pinky and the Brain, permit me to elucidate. As the theme song says, "They're laboratory mice. Their genes have been spliced." Each night, Brain comes up with a new scheme to take over the world. He and his dopey sidekick Pinky attempt to carry out the scheme with hilarious results. Comedy gold. On this particular occasion, Brain has invented a hypnosis device that will allow him to bend all the citizens of the world to his will. The devices are put into Noodle Noggin, a children's doll Brain's designed—in his own likeness, as befits a megalomaniac. All Pinky and the Brain need to do is get one of these dolls under every tree come Christmas morning and the world will be theirs to command. Naturally, they need an assembly line to produce enough Noodle Noggins in time, and when it's Christmas only one assembly line fits that bill. After answering an ad in the paper reading "Elves wanted for ...

[rating: 4] A Claymation Christmas Celebration is a 1987 TV special from the sometimes awesome, sometimes awful Will Vinton. Fortunately for all you holiday celebrants, this musical program falls on the awesome side of the scale. Our hosts are Herb and Rex, a wackily mismatched pair of dinosaurs (don't your Christmas traditions involve dinosaurs?). These two thunder lizards will be our guides on a voyage of yuletide magic. Or, more accurately, they'll throw a few facts our way about the various Christmas carols that are showcased in this musical extravaganza. Either way. WE THREE KINGS Our old friends Melchior, Caspar and Balthasar sing their signature tune, and they sing it with all the seriousness and gravitas Christian types like to imagine their holy days deserve. Fortunately, there are some camels taking the choruses, and they sing like a swingin' 1950s vocal group. I think we all agree that anything with singing camels is awesome. CAROL OF THE BELLS Nobody knows more about bells than deformed weirdos, and so "Carol of the Bells" is an instrumental number conducted by none other than everyone's favorite hunchback, Quasimodo (not to be confused with everyone's favorite hatchback, the Toyota Starlet). The instruments being played—playing themselves, actually—are anthropomorphic bells. Creepy looking, anthropomorphic bells. One ...

[rating: 0] Before today, I didn't know anything about the Care Bears beyond the fact of their existence, and I sort of assumed that would stay true until the day I died. But now, having seen Care Bears: The Nutcracker (originally aired as Care Bears Nutcracker Suite), I know one thing for sure: I really wish I still didn't know anything about the Care Bears. This thing was just awful. To say it was the longest 61 minutes of my life doesn't begin to describe it—that would be akin to saying Abell 1835 IR1916 is pretty far away. Every moment of this cartoon was an exercise in torture both mental and physical, in maddening inanity, in record-breaking tedium. The story it tells is a loose approximation of "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King," but there are some Care Bears thrown into it, too. I don't even want to talk about it. Fuck this stupid cartoon. Here are some facts I learned about the Care Bears. 1. They are not all bears. There were definitely a lion and an elephant. In what sense an elephant can be considered a bear, I assure you I do not know. 2. The Care Bears fire rainbow-lasers out of their stomachs, ...

[rating: 5] Oh, man, here we go. This is the one you've been waiting for, the very first and very best of all the Rankin/Bass stop-motion puppet shows. In fact, with an annual broadcast every year since its premiere in 1964, it might be safe to call Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer the king of all Christmas specials. The show is worthy of all the devotion it gets—and even of some that other shows get. I rather suspect that at least some of the love people feel for the subsequent Rankin/Bass specials is actually residual adoration for Rudolph and Hermey and Yukon Cornelius. Of all the modern stories that are intended to expand on existing Christmas lore, this is the one that feels most natural, like an actual story waiting to be told rather than something more obviously expanded from a thin premise. The essential story is the same one told in the familiar song, an ugly duckling story with a nasally noteworthy reindeer instead of a Medusan waterfowl. Everyone laughs at Rudolph and his shiny proboscis and they bar him from participating in reindder games (is his nose's glow the result of steroid use, perhaps?), but ultimately Rudolph proves himself of value and saves ...

[rating: 2] Mickey Rooney returns as the voice of Santa Claus in this 1974 Rankin-Bass Christmas special, but instead of being the jolly, generosity-obsessed man we know from Santa Claus is Coming to Down, he's a cynical old turd. As the show starts, he decides he's not going to make his annual flight this year, in part because he feels the world is a cruel place lacking in Christmas spirit but mostly because he just doesn't feel like it and would rather stay in bed. I must say, this is a side of Santa we don't often see. However he rationalizes it to himself, his decision is final. Santa Claus ain't givin' presents to nobody this year! This is big news. Front page stuff. Now, I'm no professional journalist, but what in the hell kind of punctuation is that? "Santa says-" too tired! Somebody working at The Daily Tribune needs to consult his AP Style Manual, methinks. Don't quotation marks generally go around, you know, the quote part of something? And what the hell is that hyphen doing in there? But that's a digression. Mrs. Claus doesn't like her new lazy grouch of a husband, so she sends two elves, Jingle and Jangle, out into ...

[rating: 3] Here's how I imagine the creative process that led to Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey. "Hey, remember that Rudolph thing? People love it! We should do that but with, I don't know, a donkey." "A red-nosed donkey?" "That's a little on the nose, don't you think?" "Haw haw!" "No, we need something else, something like..." "Long ears?" "Perfect!" "But how does that help Santa? I guess if he flapped his ears he could help with the flying sleigh." "No, no, no good. Santa's sleigh isn't pulled by donkeys, people won't stand for it. We need someone Christmasey who could use a donkey." "...Jesus?" "Beautiful! I think somebody's earned himself Chinese takeout for lunch." Yes, this 1977 Rankin-Bass special is another story of a cute little animal with a physical deformity, in this case long ears. And I mean comically long. Long enough for Nestor, at one point, to ski down a hill on them. Because nobody wants to use this long-eared weirdo to do the usual donkey stuff, all of the other donkeys laugh and call him names. His human owner laughs at him, too. At every turn, Nestor is thoroughly shat upon. Of course, I imagine everything around him is thoroughly shat upon, too. He does live in a barn. Eventually his ...

[rating: 3] Everybody needs an origin story. Batman's got one, James Bond's got one, even Captain Kirk's got one. So you'd better believe Santa Claus has got one. Granted, it's a little strange to think of Santa, of all people, as a fresh faced youngster just starting on a promising career like, I don't know, Scarlett Johansson in Scoop, but there it is. Boy, that was a weird example, wasn't it? Anyway, that's not really important (though Scoop is a pretty good movie). Courtesy of our narrator, Fred Astaire, we learn the story of where Santa came from, how he met Mrs. Claus, how he came to deliver toys on Christmas Eve—just about everything you'd want to know about ol' Kris Kringle. It's almost as if Fred Astaire did some serious investigative reporting about Santa, like how in Scoop Scarlett Johansson is investigating Hugh Jackman. It turns out that Santa was once just a wee baby like the rest of us—a foundling, in fact, who was taken in by a family of toy-making midgets named the Kringles. And not just any toymakers, these Kringles. In days gone by they manufactured the greatest playthings in all the world and were the First Toymakers to the ...

[rating: 3.5] I quite like 1968's The Little Drummer Boy, one of the most enduring of the many Rankin Bass Christmas specials. In a way, it's representative of the contradiction of sorts in my relationship with Christmas as a whole. Though I'm militantly anti-theist, I'm totally gaga for Christmas and within Christmas I'm very fond of this little cartoon about Jesus. Of course, Jesus only puts in an appearance at the end of the show. The Little Drummer Boy is really the story, if you can believe it, of a little drummer boy. His name is Aaron and we first meet him as he's being kidnapped and forced to perform by an obese desert showman. We then learn that, some time before, people burned down his house and killed his parents. As a result, he hates all people and has love only for his animals, a camel a donkey and a sheep. (Sometimes Camels are buy-one-get-one-free at the Village Pantry, so I can understand his fondness for them. But donkeys and sheep?) So right in the first few minutes we've got kidnapping, slavery, murder, misanthropy, and an unnatural love for sheep. Merry Christmas! After enraging the crowd that has gathered to see him perform ...

[rating: 1.5] A Charlie Brown Christmas is a classic in the world of animation and is beloved the world over by millions of people young and old. That's why I'm saving it for later in the month. On the other hand, I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown is a rambling, plotless mess that can't be considered a classic of any kind and is beloved by nobody. In style, it is similar to the equally forgettable It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown. That is, instead of having an actual story developed over the course of a half hour, it's just an assemblage of individual Peanuts strips that are sort of about the same three or four things. Each strip is recreated word for word to make the dialogue. When only one strip appears in the paper each day, it's not really a big deal for the first panel to say the same thing about what's going on; when one strip appears every twenty seconds, it gets a little tiresome to have every third sentence be: "Maybe Santa will bring me a dog." Since the special is so weak on story, at least we can take solace in the fact that it ...