Bah, Humbug! Eight Lousy Lessons From Classic Christmas TV Specials
Kids today just don’t get it. Back in the TV dark ages, stations would actually sign off between midnight and 5 a.m., cartoons were limited to Saturday morning, and the occasional holiday special was what marked the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Just the announcement that a special program was about to start drew a Pavlovian response. These days, kids can watch all of these specials on demand, which makes them less of an event. But back then, they were definitely special.
Of course, time has not always been kind to the delights of our youth, and the classic Christmas specials are no exception. Each one has a moral — whether intended or accidental — and considering that moral from a modern perspective sort of ruins it, or at least reveals the differences between the era of its creation and the place we are in American culture today. Still, you shouldn't let these foibles detract from the overall goodness of these TV holiday artifacts — thus our list of the eight worst moments in Christmas specials is wrapped up in nothing but love.
8. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Despite the list of complaints about this rightly beloved classic from 1964 (awful sexism displayed by the reindeer, the fact that Santa is a complete asshat to everyone), Rudolph’s story is all about social assimilation. Sure, it pretends to be the opposite — all the misfits find places in the end, though they didn’t in the original: The end credits, where Santa delivers the misfit toys to the boys and girls of the world was added in the second year of airing, after those boys and girls all over the world complained that they were still stranded on Moonracer’s island. Still, Rudolph only wins a place on the team because Santa finds a need for his abnormality; it’s sort of like saying that the kid in the wheelchair can only come to the mall if he carries all the packages on his lap.
7. Year Without a Santa Claus
This 1974 Rankin-Bass special is best remembered for Heatmiser and Snowmiser, the two wayward children of Mother Nature. And therein lies the problem: Snowmiser controls the North Pole and Heatmiser controls Southtown (wherever that is), and the central problem somehow isn’t that these two thermal despots don’t have the right to control an entire region and its population. In the end, the only thing that convinces these two stop-motion animated dictators to give it up is — you guessed it — when their mom shoots lightning at them and threatens them. So the lesson is that tyranny is only beaten by more powerful tyranny. You know, like Trump’s America.
Read more: http://www.westword.com/arts/bah-humbug-eight-lousy-lessons-from-classic-christmas-tv-specials-8601743
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