Christmas in Tattertown (1988)

              By the time of this cartoon Christmas animated television specials had been a part of mainstream culture for over 25 years.  If anything, the idea of standalone specials unconnected to larger properties was on its way out.  If you were lucky you’d get a special Christmas adaptation of something that already existed or a Christmas pilot setting up a longer set of episodes.  That’s what happened with ‘Christmas in Tattertown.’  In 1988 Nickelodeon commissioned ‘Tattertown’ as its first piece of original animation.  Previously they had licensed cartoons and other programs from within the MTV network ecosystem or, for it’s Nick at Nick block, whoever owned the rights to the various classic sitcoms it aired.  They approached Ralph Bakshi, who at the time was overseeing ‘Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures’ for CBS, to develop something for them and he revisited an idea he’d been working on since high school.

This is just not the title card of something originally meant as a Chriastmas special.

I could spend a whole lot of time detailing the history of Ralph Bakshi but let’s just hit the highlights.  After running into several roadblocks in the animation field through the 50’s and early 60’s, frustrated by the politics and corporate shuffling that kept him from making the kind of cartoons he wanted, Bakshi went independent in the late 60’s.  He worked on a few interesting television projects like the original Spider-Man cartoon before starting an ambitious run of adult oriented films.  This included ‘Fritz the Cat’ and an unfinished adaptation of ‘The Lord of the Rings.’  I’m skipping a whole lot here.  Bakshi included sex, drugs, profanity, and examinations of societal ills such as police brutality and racism, and not in particularly subtle ways. 

Eventually in the mid-80’s he found himself pitching ideas to CBS and they bit on a new version of Mighty Mouse.  Bakshi came up with the idea out of desperation at the end of an otherwise unproductive meeting, claiming he held the rights, which he did not.  After selling it to the executives he furiously researched who did own the rights and learned that it was CBS itself.  As he would later brag, he sold them their own property.  The cartoon was important for any number of reasons, not least of which it provided a career boost for artists such as Doug Moench, Bruce Timm, and, well, John Kricfalusi.  It’s been heralded as the beginning of the 90’s revolution in quality television animation.  There’s a very strong argument to be made that without Bakshi’s ‘Mighty Mouse’ there would have been no ‘Batman: the Animated Series,’ ‘Tiny Toon Adventures,’ or ‘Finding Nemo.’ 

Having Bakshi, with his deliberately provocative filmography, as such a prominent member of production on a Saturday morning cartoon for kids was not without its problems. Any number of conservative organizations were actively looking for reasons to protest his involvement and he did not make it particularly hard for them.  In the now infamous episode ‘The Littlest Tramp’ Mighty Mouse crushes a flower into powder and inhales it.  Before the episode even aired various members of the production flagged it as possibly being too close to snorting cocaine.  It was variously taken out and included before being explicitly cleared by CBS management and airing.  It went largely unnoticed on its initial broadcast.  A full eight months later the concerned citizens of the American Family Association accused the cartoon of promoting drug use, and despite Bakshi’s protests that it was nothing of the sort he did agree to remove the images from future broadcasts, which the AFA claimed proved they were right.  CBS issued a statement supporting the team and then cancelled the series.

Unfortunately for Baskshi this controversy hit during production of the pilot for ‘Tattertown’ and Nickelodeon bailed on the series.  The completed pilot was retitled ‘Christmas in Tattertown’ and aired on December 21, 1988 during the Nick at Night programming block.  The series was pitched as 39 episodes and would have premiered in 1989.  Instead the first set of original Nicktoons wouldn’t appear until the middle of 1991, with ‘Doug,’ ‘Rugrats,’ and Kricfalusi’s ‘The Ren & Stimpy Show.’ 

The basic concept of ‘Tattertown’ is one that Bakshi had been working on since he’d been a teenager: a place where everything discarded by the rest of society ends up.  Originally called ‘Junktown,’ it’s where objects and ideas that society no longer deems useful go when everyone decides they’re not needed anymore.  This would have allowed the show to comment on basically any segment of society that the writers could think up and also allow for a wider breadth of animating styles since there’s no reason to develop a homogenized look if it could draw from all of animation history.  This is indicated in the special by mixing very old techniques such as using all key frames with relatively modern techniques like smear frames.  They integrated an older 30’s aesthetic with updated 70’s and 80’s references.  It also hearkened back to very old animated shorts by giving everything, from telephone poles to trees to the narrating saxophone voiced by Keith David, the ability to spout some eyes and walk around at any moment.

Even though every source online agrees that this was produced as the pilot for the eventual series it’s not really structured like the kind of pilot episode we’ve gotten used to.  For most of the running time all of the characters seem to be familiar with each other and the ongoing narrative.  The first minute and forty-five seconds seems to be a rushed encapsulation of what I’d normally consider the plot of a pilot episode.  Narrating saxaphone Keith David explains that once there was a girl named Debbie who had two dolls, a dog and Miss Muffet.  They get sucked up into a book and arrive in Tattertown, which causes her dolls to come to life.  The dog, named Dog, snuffles along behind Debbie like always, but Muffet, reveling in her newfound agency, immediately runs away from Debbie, refusing to take part in any more dress-ups or tea parties.

The inclusion of Christmas in this special is fairly ornamental.  It’s more the b-plot than anything else.  The actual story of the special is the continued rebellion of Muffet.  She escapes from Debbie, declares herself Muffet the Merciless, and travels to The Deadster Zone, which is the next town over filled with “war toys and tvs and other unsavory characters.”  There she rules with an iron fist and eventually leads the dangerous toys on a full-on assault on Tattertown, which is foiled by their own stupidity and Debbie playing Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”

This is because during the a-plot Debbie semi-randomly decides to teach the citizens of Tattertown what Christmas is all about.  She finds a cigar-selling Christmas wreath, persuades a Yiddish-speaking, bookstore-owning tree to act as a Christmas tree, and converts a couple of Muffet’s thugs to act as ornaments.  Despite her best efforts, which aren’t all that great, the townspeople still don’t understand anything she’s talking about.  She plays “White Christmas” at them in a final desperate effort.  Instantly everyone in town is overcome with emotions, forming perfect little Christmas scenes, and when Muffet’s flying spider drops her due to his own tears Muffet ends up in Tattertown jail, where Debbie celebrates all the fun they’re going to have together.

There’s a lot going on here, and unlike a lot of the other specials, where I had to dig in to figure out the socio-political implications might be, it’s all out in the open here.  This is not subtle commentary.  When Debbie and company first wander into the tree-owned bookstore a talking magazine from 1935, sporting a variation on the United State Eagle with the letters NRA emblazoned beneath it on the cover, falls open and a little montage ensues showing a brief scene at a USO tour, a mobster robbing a bank, a G-Man complete with badge shooting a machine after him before producing a plate of spaghetti and intoning, “I love Italian food.”  When Muffet addresses her assembled troops she does so in front of a massive flag, aping the famous scene from ‘Patton.’  The quote above describing The Deadster Zone equating war-toys and television is about as subtle as any messaging in the special.

And that includes the not-very-subtle portrayal of Debbie as an absolute terror to her dolls.  She refuses to allow Muffet to exist independently of her, constantly chasing her in a very Roadrunner / Coyote way, and she is not the Roadrunner.  Dog, the dog, is always hanging off of her to her constant annoyance and abuse.  On the other hand whatever sympathies we might have for Muffet are offset by her being utterly unfazed by henchman Sidney the Spider attempting to kidnap a child doll and describing her as his “proud beauty.”  At one point she passes Santa in the sky (a Santa who pointedly does not stop to wish Christmas cheer to the citizens of Tattertown) and instantly moves to attack him.  There are no good people in this show.

A criticism that’s often made about Bakshi is that while it’s clear he’s very passionate about his work and definitely has a point of view it’s hard to say what that point of view actually is.  Some of it is very clear, such as his deep distrust and often hatred of authority figures, especially the police, his general anti-war stance, and his sympathy for the underclasses, especially lower-class women and minorities.  However, this tends to clash with his deep, deep cynicism, which causes him to view those who act on any sincere beliefs he may well share as naïve and ineffectual at best and easily coopted at worst.

This means that a lot of things that I would point to as internal contradictions or oddities in other specials, how Debbie is oddly unsympathetic for a main character, how everyone, both good and bad guys, are often smoking on screen,  how characters in what is supposed a Christmas special commit actual suicide when the war toys start killing each other, are all conscious decisions by Bakshi and the other creatives.  The craziness isn’t something buried in the subtext that I’m digging out and examining, it’s all out there right on the surface.  You’re supposed to notice these things.

Does that make it any good?  It’s certainly interesting.  If you’ve seen ‘Mighty Mouse: the New Adventures’ it’s a very similar style: huge, exaggerated movements, a lot of yelling, a lot of choppy animation where the movement isn’t particularly smooth but you do understand what’s going on, a very Tex-Avery style of mayhem and violence, and a constant flow of visuals gags and pratfalls.  The line between this and cartoons like ‘Tiny Toon Adventures’ is a pretty straight one.  That being said, having no sympathetic carriers and being so deeply cynical does keep it from connecting in any real way and the tossed-in nature of the Christmas plot doesn’t particularly help.  If you’re a fan of Bakshi’s it’s absolutely essential viewing, and if you grew up in the 90’s and want to see where all of your favorite series came from it’s incredibly revealing.  But it’s not a real Christmas special and marketing it as such was basically just a way for Nickelodeon to save face after folding to the very mild pressure from the AFA.  Baskhi has made noises about a DVD release but that’s never going to happen.  It used to occasionally be shown in syndication but it seems unlikely it’ll ever be made available outside of some niche streaming service.  Like so many of his other productions I’m torn between thinking Bakshi got a raw deal and wondering how anyone of his sensibilities could possibly have done any better working inside the machine that is Hollywood.