The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas (1973)

 Originally airing on December 17, 1973, “The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas” was co-produced by DePatie-Freleng enterprises, mostly known for their work on the Dr. Suess animated specials and the Pink Panther shorts, and Sed-Bar Productions, who never made anything else.  It was directed by Gerry Chiniquy and Hawley Pratt, both veterans of television animation.  It was based on a story by John Barrett, writer and producer of “Tom Smothers' Organic Prime Time Space Ride,” which would explain why the bear of the title is voiced by Tom Smothers.  The name to focus on, I feel, is the credited writer Larry Spiegel, for though the special retains a lot of the whimsical counterculture feel of the The Smothers Brothers there’s a kernel of madness here that I need to examine.

An entire decade defined by pallette choices.

Larry Spiegel’s first credit on IMDB is a writing credit for the 1972 movie ‘Hail.’  The IMDB description reads “A presidential advisor discovers that the President has assembled a secret army of vigilantes to suppress dissent and is setting up concentration camps in which to imprison protesters, hippies and other ‘social undesirables.’”  It is apparently a black comedy and not a badly regarded one, but there doesn’t seem to be a circulating copy, a rare instance where Tubi has failed me.  The same year as ‘The Bear who Slept Through Christmas’ he also adapted for the screen the 1969 novel Book of Numbers by Robert Deane Pharr, a tale of crime and corruption and ‘the numbers racket,’ the name for the lottery before it became legal when managed by the government, in a poor African American community in the South.  It was also generally well regarded, with Roger Ebert giving it three stars.  Spiegel later found some success as a producer with the cult classic “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins” and the 2015 Keanu Reeves vehicle “Knock Knock,” directed by Eli Roth.  There’s also the rabbit hole of “Evil Town” a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of a movie cobbled together in the mid 80’s from parts of the 1977 horror movie ‘God Damn Dr. Shagetz’ about a mad scientist stealing the fluid from people’s pituitary glands to seek the secret of eternal life which was directed and written by Spiegel.

Which is not to say that all of my forthcoming venom should be directed solely at Spiegel, rather I think it’s a combination of his clear eccentricities together with the almost aggressive hippie-era whimsy of Tom Smothers and John Barrett that I would argue takes what starts as a simple Christmas tale and ends up with a kind of blissed-out nihilism that I’m still unwrapping. 

A common complaint I have with one-off animated specials is that they establish rules that make no sense within the confines of their own universes.  It’s one thing to have anything go in a gag cartoon starring Bugs Bunny and quite another to violate internal rules in a cartoon that’s at least attempting some kind of message.  For example in this special animals and humans have parallel but segregated fully developed modern societies.  The special goes to great lengths to establish that not only do bears talk and have their own civilization they also have cities and jobs and television networks exactly like humans do.  They even have their own airline which ferries sleepy bears to far away locations in which to hibernate.  The fact that they have intercontinental flight is important because halfway through the special it also establishes that this entire bear society exists within walking distance of the fully human New York City.  Although this is not a surprise to the bears, as they are fully aware of the existence of humankind, the two cultures seem entirely separated in a way that raises immediate questions.  Is this the shaky aftermath of centuries of bloody conflict?  Have they both independently decided to simply be uninterested in each other?  I would like to read a history of the delicate negotiations between the bears and the humans as they worked out which flight plans would have priority at which times.  Would bear Reagan go on to fire the bear air traffic controllers in 1981?  A throw-away line later states they also put a bear on the moon, which raises the question of a bear factor in the Cold War space race, so did there also exist a Soviet bear Russia, making it a four-way race to the moon?  This is further made muddy when our bear hero encounters humans and they are entirely unsurprised to be interacting with a talking, clothes-wearing bear. 

It's also inconsistent in its portrayal of overall sapience.  After having established that bears think and talk it also establishes that bees do the same.  Our hero bear works in a honey factory in which bees are seen as fellow workers, and after a meeting the head of the company asks that the bees get a copy of a memo.  However later our hero seeks shelter in a cave and is chased out by growling, unspeaking wolves, so as far as I can tell this is a world in which the three sentient species are bears, humans, and bees.  The possibility of a bee space program goes frustratingly unaddressed.

D'oh.

The entire hook of the cartoon is a ‘Royal Tenenbaums’ joke: everyone knows that bears sleep through Christmas, what this special presupposes is, maybe one didn’t?  This is hardly new territory, off the top of my head there’s 1970’s ‘Santa and the Three Bears’ with a similar idea.  But the problem here lies in how this bear civilization treats Christmas and how it’s never explained over the course of the cartoon.  The special fails to consider beyond the surface what kind of society it takes place in and fails to explain itself to the audience.  Normally this isn’t a problem in a cartoon unless the point of it is that it’s substantially different from our own.  That’s when the first ten minutes explains exactly how Care Bear society functions so we can later get to the scary talking book.  In a lot of ways this bear society is just an analogue for our own except in so far as it diverges in its treatment of Christmas, and that’s what causes the disconnect.  In one scene our hero becomes distracted while working on the production line and causes honey to overflow the jar he’s filling and spread onto the floor, going so far as to flood the entire production area and even seep into the boss’s office.  He is yelled at for this misdeed but in the end is given a warning, not even getting suspended or being docked any pay.  In and of itself this is fine, perhaps the boss is just being understanding, but in the same scene he’s threatened with termination for expressing mere curiosity about the concept of Christmas.  This is either just inconsistent or there’s a much darker story lurking underneath about the policing of cultural norms that the special refuses to address.  There’s a message on the company bulletin board announcing the scheduled hibernation time, and although it’s not made entirely explicit it seems like the company is the one setting an official start to the hibernation season, even though the special opens with bears already settling down for hibernation and our hero’s roommate actually collapsing into unconsciousness while walking to work that day.  It can never decide if hibernation is a necessity of bear physiology or just a societal norm.  The plot of the special involves our hero pledging to stay awake and not hibernate, with other characters openly laughing at him for this, and until the very end it’s never portrayed as being difficult for him to stay awake, making the distinction between hibernation as an inevitability or a simple choice extremely fuzzy.  It refuses to articulate its stance on biological determinism or societal hegemony as the true final authority.

So far I’m not being all that serious, none of these are enough to make me actually angry.  It’s just having some fun nitpicking and applying overly strict logic to a children’s cartoon.  However.  There are three things that make me honestly upset.  I thought the first one was enough and I was already mapping out my response as I watched the special, but then I got to the ending and the second and third problems absolutely dwarf the first.  This ending will be a thing unto itself, but let’s first talk about how the humor of the hippie movement has aged.

I mentioned above the television show “Tom Smothers' Organic Prime Time Space Ride.”  This was a syndicated half hour show that aired twelve episodes in 1971, consisting mainly of comedy sketches, cartoons, and musical acts.  It also seems to have been lost to time.  It was one of a number of series that tried and failed to recreate the success of ‘The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.’  That show ran from 1967 to 1969 on CBS and was the closest thing network television had to counter-culture on the airwaves up to that time.  It was widely considered as controversial for addressing racism, the presidency of Richard Nixon, and the Vietnam war in direct terms.  Although tame by today’s standard or even the standards of a decade later it was seen as fairly radical at the time and has since become something of a legend in tv history.

It also wasn’t very funny.  I’m old enough to remember sitting at my grandparent’s house watching reruns of this and “Laugh-In” on Nick at Night and even at the time it was just background noise while we waited for something actually funny to come on.  A lot of the humor was based on the mannerisms of the two brothers, with Dick acting as the straight man and Tom the spacey, stuttery one, which is fine as a double act but not enough to build an entire hour-long variety show around.  Much of the rest of it was hyper-topical to the time or so on-the-nose political it was clearly looking for an appreciative round of applause rather than an actual laugh.  Like other variety shows of the time it had random inserts of contemporary musical or stand-up acts.  The musical performances especially have aged just fine.  Also, as has been painfully established by the memory-holing of the Tonight Show tenure of Jay Leno, being topical and political in and of themselves do not make classic comedy.  There’s a reason people still consider ‘I Love Lucy’ and ‘The Dick Van Dyke’ show to be funny but don’t bring up the Smothers Brothers nearly as much.  It’s certainly important historically but like old episodes of “The Daily Show” it hasn’t aged gracefully.

I refuse to explain the context.

Which is to say that while I do in fact have a problem with the vocal portrayal by Tom Smothers of our hero, giving him a stop/start, loose cadence to his speech that makes even his bold proclamations of intent seem offhand and vaguely apologetic, that is not the main issue I have with the hippie roots of this special.  It’s that the ethos of the special, the animating impulse, is a general, vague rebelliousness against prevailing society not based in any specific issue or gripe with any system or form of oppression but a kind of overall idea that something, somewhere could be better so it’s our job to be nonspecifically nonconformist in a blandly useless way.  To shoehorn in some terminology, it’s signaling with no praxis.

To be specific our hero, who I can no longer avoid naming as Ted E. Bear (as far as I can tell unassociated with the Ty brand bear of the same name from the 80's), wants to resist hibernating so he can experience Christmas.  This is a fine premise for a children’s Christmas cartoon.  The concept of Christmas is vague at best within bear society, but it does exist before the start of the special.  Although it is not unfamiliar to any of Ted’s fellow bears there is a distinct lack of specificity to it.  It is variously treated by Ted and the other bears as a place, a thing, a feeling, and confusingly in one instance for what it actually is, a human belief.  At one point he’s asked if, when he finds Christmas, he’s worried he won’t be able to find his way back, while at another he attempts to buy a plane ticket there only to be publicly mocked and told it isn’t a place.  The point is that he intends to ‘find’ Christmas, whatever that means, and is derided for that ambition.  The reason for this derision is never established or explained, it’s just asserted, which encapsulates the general sense of the special, that ‘society’ is to blame in some nebulous, unspecific way that we don’t really need to think about that much, just generally resist.

To give an idea of how this comes across, here’s a raw chunk of my notes from when I watched the special.  This is after he’s caused the accident at work and his boss is yelling at him:

 

“he gets called into said office, gets rightfully reamed out, apologizes, explains he was thinking about Christmas, as if that’s exculpatory, then [the boss] goes off about how the foundation of a bear’s life is work, and one shouldn’t think, and says if he hears anything else about Christmas he’ll be fired, so they’ve done a trick I hate where they turn us against the very reasonable authority figure by making his objections to the actions of the protagonist unreasonable where there do in fact exist completely reasonable objections to his actions that have nothing to do with the philosophical point that the special espouses, the secretary later underlines this point by pointing out that he has a college degree and could be very successful at business, then explicitly underlines the point I was just making by directly stating “I think it’s dangerous to mess around with philosophical concepts.”  In the context of a bear society with an at-best nebulous relationship to a human society a fixation on the HUMAN concept of Santa and Christmas is indeed odd, and the objections of those others in that bear society to that fixation are not, on the face of them, insincere, and the way they have disingenuously tied that to a very post-hippy idea of society=work is conflating things in a frankly dishonest way, I may actually be getting a bit upset because the issues raised are both valid but very much separate and by mixing the two together in such a slapdash way they are doing a disservice to both, back to cartoon bears”

 So my objections are not necessarily to the ideas contained in the special, that I believe that going against what everyone in a society is saying is inherently wrong, it’s just that going all the other way and treating these impulses as in and of themselves good regardless of the aims or outcomes is potentially a waste of time or possibly dangerous at worst.  Ted is never given any kind of reason for this seeking of Christmas, it’s never explained from where he first learned of the idea or what drives him to want to stay awake to look for it, it’s simply established as part of his character and is never explored further.  The mere fact that he has a desire to rebel against society and seek out something seen as generally unwanted or unvalued by his society is treated by the special as inherently good and thus need be examined no further.  Again, it’s not that in and of itself it’s a problematic impulse but it’s coupled with an unwillingness to give it any kind of scrutiny or specificity that drags nails against the chalkboard of my soul.  Why you believe what you believes matters, not just the fact that you believe it.

I was also annoyed by characters directly stating things like ‘work is the only valid reason to live’ and ’philosophy is inherently dangerous.’  The aforementioned secretary actually says the line, “Things won’t be different, it’s you who are different.  Oh, Ted, they’re all laughing at you!”  Thanks for making the villains so obvious, special.  It’s fine to have bad guys and I know it’s just a half-hour cartoon but it’s of a piece with the rest of it.  There’s no examination of the assumptions behind these statements, no interrogation of why these are bad statements, they just are and can therefore be blindly resisted.

Such societal scorn.

              This is my general annoyance with how hippie humor has aged.  Sure it’s rebellious, which is a great impulse, but it’s not directed in any productive way.  It’s never aimed at a specific target, just at “the man” or “society” or “the system” without ever really delving into why things are the way they are and what could possibly be done.  Instead of anger being at the core there’s a kind of waspish dissatisfaction.  “Turn on, tune in, drop out” isn’t a declaration of revolution, it’s a declaration that I’ll be over there doing something else and I’d rather not be bothered.  In the end Ted does in fact find this cartoon’s version of Christmas but it never occurs to either him or the special that he then needs to bring it back to the rest of bear society, instead they’re completely forgotten.  Hippies suck because in the end they’re just selfish.

All this was going through my head in real time as I watched this, it’s there in my notes.  But then there’s the ending.  In order to explain how the ending to this special trumps all of that, how it’s managed to inspire me to hate something more than vacuous hippie bullshit, I must first explain how we get there.  So, after he gets fired (for going on the news and talking about Christmas and bringing the name of the company into it after being explicitly told he would be fired if he did that specific thing) and is publicly mocked for his beliefs Ted E. Bear decides to strike out on his own to find Christmas.  Despite it having been firmly established as not being a place this involves our hero marching out into the woods with just a vest, a scarf, a hat, and a suitcase.  Apparently having just picked a random direction he runs afoul of the wolves mentioned before, falls in a river, loses his suitcase between scene transitions, and suddenly comes upon New York City, which doesn’t have surrounding cities or developments in this world but just rolling hills until a hard start at a toll booth.  Ted asks the completely unperturbed toll booth operator for directions and is advised to go to 33^rd street.

Yup, 1973.

This brings us to a montage of scary 70’s cartoon New York.  He gets confused at a crosswalk (which apparently don’t exist in bear society despite the shown existence of bear cars), he gazes in awe at a parade, is chased by a dog, that sort of thing.  He’s portrayed as much smaller than the surrounding humans, which will come into play later.  Through shenanigans he finds himself inside a toy store display window, frolicking with randomly sentient toys, which just are alive without any kind of justification, a development that crops up more often in these specials than you’d think.  The toys drop some hippy-dippy stuff about how if they don’t get sold they won’t get Christmas, the special waving a vague hand at anti-capitalism, before the store closes he’s suddenly locked in for the night.  This is portrayed as a dangerous moment for ol’ Ted until you realize he’s locked inside and could conceivably just unlock any of the doors but instead he finds himself falling out of a garbage chute into a back alley.  As he exits the alley he’s greeted by a man dressed as a charity Santa, bell and everything.  Like every other human he’s completely unfazed by the small bear in clothes and asks if he can help him.  Apparently these few minutes in the human world have beaten Ted entirely down because he sadly claims that no one can, that he was looking for Christmas but maybe he was crazy for even trying.

Having none of this Santa tells him that Christmas is not a place, it’s inside himself.  When pressed for details by Ted he suddenly gets awfully vague, rattling off some generalities about how it’s a way of acting and feeling and above all giving.  It’s a problem with the script that it keeps posing the question of the True Meaning of Christmas but doesn’t seem to have any answer.  To this Ted replies he has nothing to give, which is just another meaningless line the first time through but hits like a freight train when you know where all this ends up.  Santa then sends him on his way to a specific address up the street with the promise that he’ll find Christmas there.  After some stuttery thanks Ted’s on his way.

Santa is unimpressed.

For the first time in the special we cut away from Ted where at the address we find a family made up of a Mom, a Dad, and a little girl portrayed with cartoon shorthand for ‘poor but loving.’  After establishing their economic status they go to bed for the night, after which Ted breaks into their apartment and, confused, settles down for a nap under the Christmas tree.  He’s barely shut his eyes when suddenly Santa is there, who is apparently either the real Santa or just very interested in this one family, and says increasingly vague statements on the nature of Christmas until he bails just before the family comes back into the room to find a small, sentient bear who until very recently worked at a factory, having not fully capitalized on his college degree, sitting under their tree and looking at them in confusion.  At this point the girl, upon seeing Ted, happily states that she’d asked Santa for ‘a little bear’ for Christmas, runs over, and picks him up, twirling him around as the music swells and we get a sudden montage of psychedelic Christmas imagery.  Next there’s a push-in on a final scene of the girl in bed with Ted in a smaller bed at her side, narrator Casey Kasem intoning, “And, at that, Ted Edward Bear smiled and went to sleep.  He found Christmas.”  Roll credits.

And that’s it.  That’s the end.  I’m not sure where I expected this thing to wind up but a fully sentient, albeit small, adult bear with an entire life history including, again, college and working at a factory, being the … companion of a human child for presumably the rest of his life having given himself to a stranger for Christmas … was not it. 

The questions write themselves.  Presumably this is the beginning of his hibernation, so the family is going to be presented with an immobile bear for three months curled up in their child’s bedroom.  When the spring comes what kind of awkward conversations will they have as they establish how he’s going to function as a member of the household.  What will he do while the daughter is at school?  Is he going to get a job?  What happens when she gets older and isn’t so invested in having a little bear at her constant disposal?  Does he write letters to his friends back home trying to explain his current whereabouts?  Do they come looking for him if he doesn’t and it ends up with a super tense dinner where Ted has to justify himself?

I was left frankly dumbfounded by the ending.  I was already upset for vaguely philosophical reasons, being as always annoyed by hippies and how I generally agree with them morally and philosophically but grow increasingly frustrated as they kind of wander away before they ever bother with such trivial things as specifics, but as the special drew to a close and I saw there were maybe two minutes left I was genuinely confused as to what could possibly happen, then suddenly an actual bear is absorbed into a human family and this is presented as the true meaning of Christmas.

The reason I harped on so much about how firmly this special establishes bear society is that it portrays Ted as a fully-functioning member of that society.  He has a job, has friends, attempts to buy airlines tickets, gets interviewed by the news, has hopes and dreams and struggles against a society that misunderstands and oppresses him.  He yearns for an understanding of Christmas, he seeks something beyond himself, he has the courage to seek it out and experiences setbacks but struggles on.  It doesn’t establish these things very well, but it does establish them.  And the answer he is given, the moment of catharsis the entire special has been building towards, is just a pun on the name of Ted E. Bear.

The true meaning of Christmas.

And then there’s my third and final problem with this special, the one that wraps the entire thing up into a neat little bow of utter frustration.  The title of the special is “The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas.” The entire point, the premise, the galvanizing impulse behind this story is that our main character, the one persecuted and looked down upon by the entire nation of bear people for his beliefs, a bear who left all he knows and loves for the prospect of knowing the unknowable, finding the unfindable, who risked life and limb and wolves, who braved sentient toys and toll booth attendants, counseled by possibly Santa himself, is, in fact, the one bear who does not sleep through Christmas.