Behold, a stop-motion child is born!
Maybe it’s just because I’ve been sick as a dog and still wearing myself out running around chasing the boy, but somehow Christmas just hasn’t settled into my mental landscape as a reality this year. I know it’s only about a dozen days out, but for some reason this year it’s just not “real” for me. This isn’t a “bah humbug” thing, but more of an “oh well” thing. It’s there, I’m aware of it, but that’s about it.
If there’s one thing that has gotten me almost in the Christmas mood this year, it’s been ABC Family’s relentless showing of every Rankin/Bass stop-motion Christmas special…ever. They’re showing stuff that I’ve never even heard of, and here I thought I was a consummate fan of that particular sub-genre of Christmas special. Some of the stuff is just about Krofft Saturday Supershow trippy, shoehorning Christmas imagery into bizarre quasi-pagan-new-age storylines. I’ve seen no fewer than three completely different “origin stories” for Santa produced by Rankin/Bass. Heck, there was even one I’d never heard of before that jammed Leprechaun legends into a Christmas story – one begins to sense the faint sound of the bottom of the barrel being scraped. But it’s all good fun.
I’m not sure what to think of this new special airing tonight that’s supposedly produced in Rankin/Bass style; I’ll have to wait and see. If they pull it off without even a CGI assist, then I say bravo – they will have single-handedly resuscitated a style of filmmaking that, if it wasn’t already dead, was at least on life support. If it’s just CGI animated to look like stop-motion, then…bleh. At any rate, they’d be hard pressed to match this loving tribute to the Rankin/Bass Christmas specials that aired way back in the first season of MadTV in the mid-1990s – you know, the season when it was good.
I remember this being a big hit when I was working at the Fox station at the time; around Christmas time, Marty Houston and I would sing the “we’ll get even” song incessantly around the building, and didn’t give a crap who was listening in. Good times.… Read more
