A Cosmic Christmas (1977)

              We continue our international tour with a Canadian special that first aired on December 4, 1977 on CBC and on various other days in syndication in the United States.  It was the first fully animated production for the company then known as Nelvana Limited.  It was founded by Michael Hirsh, Patrick Loubert, and Clive A. Smith.  The first two served as producers of this special and the last as the director.  Nelvana would eventually grow to be one of the most substantial producers of Canadian animated content, responsible for the Care Bears cartoons of the 80’s, the absolute classic ‘Eek! The Cat,’ ‘The Magic School Bus,’ and numerous other productions.  Now a wholly owned subsidiary of Corus Entertainment, the founders having long since left, if you’ve ever seen a production logo at the end of a cartoon showing a polar bear gazing towards a star you’ve just seen one of their works.

              In addition to being the first cartoon production of such as storied company this special is also notable for drawing the attention of George Lucas, who because of this special tapped them to make an animated segment for a little holiday special of his own he was throwing together.  This ended up being “The Faithful Wookie,” generally regarded as one of the better sections of what is otherwise an ill-considered effort.  It also led to further Star Wars animated endeavors such as ‘Droids’ and ‘Ewoks,’ both of which are still kicking around on the internet.

              Nelvana had been around since 1971 producing hybrid live action / cartoon shorts and assisting with live-action documentaries, as well as making short cartoon time fillers for CBC.  This wasn’t even their first Christmas special, having made the mostly live-action ‘Christmas Two Step’ two years earlier.  That tells the story of a little girl who wants to be the lead dancer at the Christmas pageant.  Although ‘A Cosmic Christmas’ was their first fully animated production of any substantial length they weren’t new to the industry and it shows in the finished product, which is very well put together and enjoyable.  I can understand why Lucas was impressed.

              The only member of production that seems to have stayed in the industry long-term was its director, Clive A. Smith.  He cheated a little, though, by co-founding the company that made it.  Its writers, Ida Nelson and Laura Paull, don’t seem to have done much else, which is surprising because the script isn’t bad.  The voice actors are the usual mix of industry veterans and child actors who dropped out after a few years.  It’s been released on VHS a couple of times but apparently there are no plans to release it on DVD any time soon.  It is available for streaming on something called Ameba, available through Amazon, which is one of the thousand incredibly specific micro-streaming sites that must somehow make enough money to exist, although I cannot fathom how.  Also Hoopla, which I completely forgot is an app that I have on my phone until just now.

              The special follows a boy named Peter and his pet goose Lucy (Canadians using the clever tactic of making fun of themselves so the rest of us can’t) on the evening of Christmas Eve.  For reasons that are never quite explained he and his goose are hanging out in some kind of department store.  It’s crowded and noisy, with irate customers and frazzled staff, the entire thing very reminiscent of the opening moments of ‘A Very Merry Cricket.’  Peter is oddly calm in the middle of the chaos, vaguely looking for his goose, who’s apparently wandered outside.  The animation is much better than any of the examples I’ve seen in a while, very fluid and distinctive.  I hate to use such an obvious example but if you’ve seen the animated segment in ‘The Star Wars Holiday Special’ that’ll give you a pretty good idea.  After so many stylized and scratchy backgrounds or cookie-cutter Hannah-Barbera knockoffs it’s good to see some genuine art thrown at the screen.

              Once outside the Christmas abuse continues.  A mopey, scrawny Santa faintly asks for donations and gets abused by some neighborhood teenagers for his troubles.  While gazing into a shop window Peter notices a reflection and looks up, spotting a flying saucer.  He attempts to tell the local cop, who’s busy writing tickets and blows him off.  The troublesome teenagers have overheard this and begin teasing Peter, who refreshingly just brushes them off and doesn’t seem to give a shit what they say.  I’m so used to bullies being utterly traumatic to our cartoon protagonists that to have one emotionally balanced enough to just shrug it off is refreshing.  One of the bullies makes the mistake of antagonizing the goose, who goes right for his face and starts a fight with the entire group of them.  You’d think Canadian kids of all people know that you do not fuck with a goose.  Peter extricates Lucy from the fight and leaves the visibly battered kids behind.  Marvin, the leader of the teenagers, grimly glares after the goose.  This will come up again.

              On his way home Peter spots the light in the sky again, which quickly lands and disgorges three aliens.  Only momentarily taken aback, Peter greets them and they explain that they’re on a mission to investigate a celestial phenomenon that happened two thousand of your Earth years ago.

              And right here is where, by all accounts, this special should have gone right off of the rails.  The idea that the star of Bethlehem was an actual cosmic event that’s drawn the attention of aliens who come to Earth to be taught to worship the Baby Jeebs is bonkers on several different levels at once.  So it’s lucky that that’s not what the special chooses to do.  It certainly starts down that road but ends up somewhere a bit more interesting and smart.

              The head alien explains that the star was seen on many worlds and they’re searching for the meaning of the phenomenon.  Although it’s not explicitly stated, if you follow this logic it implies that these aliens are scientists who have been traveling from world to world trying to understand what happened.  Presumably this means that they’ve traveled to other worlds to ask their thoughts on the star and gotten other answers.  Maybe a thousand worlds have a thousand different explanations, religious or otherwise, and this trio are just cataloguing them all.  A spacefaring set of sociologists.  Although Peter does briefly mention the whole Bethlehem thing the special does a quick right turn into trying to explain the concept of Christmas itself to the aliens and the whole religious part of it is dropped very quickly, so nothing necessarily negates this interpretation.

              Peter beings showing the aliens around town, trying to find illustrative examples of Christmas.  The town obliges by displaying a series of assholes.  The owner of the store is completely done with the holiday season, yelling at everyone as he closes up the store for the night.  The mayor and the cop from before are at city hall complaining about all of the reports they’re getting about flying saucers.  They bitch about the citizens and eventually agree they might as well look into the reports, but they’re not happy about it.  In desperation Peter finally takes the aliens to his home, where his grandmother is giving what must the latest in a long series of monologues about how Christmas was so much better in her day, when people made the decorations by hand and didn’t just buy everything.

              When Peter shows up with the aliens everyone’s a little tense, but when Peter explains he’s trying to teach the aliens about Christmas his grandmother is happy to start going on about the good old days.  One of the aliens is apparently psychic and fills the house with projections based on her memories, which provides a good distraction for Marvin, the surly teen from before, to sneak up and kidnap Lucy. 

              There ensues a Benny Hill-style chase as Peter, his family, the aliens, and eventually the cops and citizens are all chasing after Marvin and the goose on his bike.  It all comes to a halt when Marvin accidentally steers his bike off of a short cliff and crashes through the ice of a pond.  I like the detail that the goose is instantly out of the hole and just fine.  Peter attempts to help him and falls in as well, the cop and the citizens start forming a human chain to snake out over the ice and grab them both, the aliens debate whether they should strictly remain observers then help as well, and everyone is returned safely to the edge of the pond, although apparently nobody needs to be rushed to the hospital despite being in the water for several minutes in the dead of a Canadian winter.

              Everyone starts to gang up on Marvin for being a little shit when the grandmother pipes up to say it was really all their fault for only thinking about themselves and not other people, that Marvin only stole the goose because he was hungry.  Which, no, special, no that is not the reason he stole the goose, he kidnapped Lucy because he’s a little shit who’d just gotten his ass kicked.  Nothing over the course of the special leads the audience to think he’s anything but a bully and a thug who certainly didn’t deserve to drown in an icy lake but is not exactly a good person.  I don’t mind that Marvin and everyone else is invited back to Peter’s house for a big Christmas dinner and party, that’s a great note to end a Christmas special on, but I don’t like that they decided that goose-napper Marvin was merely misunderstood and really isn’t society to blame?

              The special ends with everyone at the party, all of the minor characters get little butons on their characters, like the wan Santa stealing a massive sandwich from the teenagers, the cop getting his badge stolen to make the star for the tree, the grandmother being all smug that everyone likes her homemade decorations, and then the aliens take off and make a big Christmas display in the sky in their wake, having apparently learned that Christmas means being nice to people for bullshit reasons.

              I want to say some more good things about the production.  In addition to the decent script there’s a lot of comic business in the margins that took a lot of attention and care to put in.  While the cop is complaining about people calling in UFO sightings he’s putting some kind of gel in his hair and spends the next few scenes flicking it from his fingers.  There’s a brief insert scene of the goose dancing with the little floating robot that follows the aliens around and doesn’t really do much but adds a lot to their scenes just by floating around in the background.  There’s a running gag about a rabbit who keeps getting trampled, teleported, and otherwise inconvenienced by all the shenanigans that goes utterly unnoted by the other characters.  The amount of effort that went into this production is very noticeable and even forty-five years later it holds up as a very solid production.  It manages to dodge the seriously trickly theological implications of aliens following up on the Star of Bethlehem by diverting the narrative into another ‘the true meaning of Christmas’ discussion, and although it doesn’t come up with anything like a decent answer none of these specials do, so I can hardly hold that against it.  Considering I threw this in at the last minute to avoid watching the just dreadful-looking ‘Bugs Bunny’s Looney Christmas Tales’ this was a very pleasant surprise.