Deck the Halls with Wacky Walls (1983)

              It’s hardly a new idea that the economic and social systems under which art is produced have fundamental effects on its form and content.  The entire field of Art History is essentially the study of exactly that.  Just as “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism,” it’s impossible to create art in a capitalistic society without it having an influence, even if it’s created in opposition to that system.  This is reflected in my choices of viewing material in several ways: whatever I watch was produced by companies paying people for their time and it was distributed by other companies for broadcast, underpinned by either advertising or a business model where people paid directly for access.  No one involved in any step of the process was acting solely out of artistic ambition.  Even if the motive was fundamentally religious propaganda the message was shaped in such a way that it was structured like a typical episode of broadcast television and designed to reach outside of its core demographic.  Even someone today, seized by religious fervor and working on their own to produce a piece of animation, would have to engage with capitalistic distribution models.

              Which is not to say that there’s no artistry involved.  This is something of a sliding scale we’re talking about here, and it goes back and forth between artistic and mercenary extremes from special to special and often within the cartoons themselves.  ‘A Family Circus Christmas’ is a property based on existing IP, to use the parlance of our times, but it’s hard to argue that Bill Keane and company weren’t trying to say something genuine within that exploitative framework.  ‘The City that Forgot About Christmas’ is another adaptation but of a niche, Christian book and the struggle against the commercial constraints is palpable in the ways the message is contorted to hide its straightforward religious meaning.  By definition none of these animated specials can be the work of individuals expressing a singular artistic idea, somewhere along the way compromises were made, even if unconsciously, to conform to capitalistic expectations.  None of these are examples of outsider art, but that’s not to say there’s nothing artistic worth discussing within them, either.  It’s a complicated conversation.

              This idea, that even the most exploitative piece of commercial expression has some inner artistry worth examining, gets really tested when you’ve got something like ‘Deck the Halls with Wacky Walls.’  Aired for the first and likely only time on December 11, 1983 on NBC, this was a joint production between NBC Productions and Buzzco Associates, who were previously responsible for some Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake specials, the bumpers for the USA Cartoon Express, and a lot of commercials and animated title sequences for films such as ‘Munchies.’  The executive producer was Ken Hakuta, the self-styled Dr. Fad, a Japanese toy executive and television personality responsible for importing to America the Wacky Wall Walkers, the toy at the center of a brief craze that was ultimately the cause for this special.

              Toy crazes are often inexplicable in hindsight.  Sometimes they have the excuse of new technology, like a Teddy Ruxpin or calculator watches, sometimes they capture something about the culture, like Garbage Pail Kids or Care Bears.  Others are so specific to the moment that we’re still puzzling over them decades later, like Koosh Balls or Wacky Wall Walkers.  For those who haven’t been lucky enough to enjoy these things and do damage to the paint on their walls, these were tiny little octopuses made of a sticky substance called an elastomer, a portmanteau of ‘elastic polymer,’ something that has the properties of both elasticity and viscosity.  To quote from Wikipedia: “Rubber-like solids …[with] polymer chains … held together … by relatively weak intermolecular bonds, which permit the polymers to stretch in response to macroscopic stresses.”  The upshot of which is they were squishy, sticky little toys you would throw against the wall.  It would weakly cling to the wall and ‘walk’ down it as gravity pulled it down and the limbs would detach and reattach to the wall as it sank slowly to the ground.  It would work great for the first day or so before dust and dirt would accumulate on the surface.  You could clean it a few times but hopefully by then your child had lost interest and you could throw them away.

              This is hardly the worst toy to ever catch fire as a fad, just about every four-year-old in the world would find this briefly hilarious.  The Wacky Wall Walker phenomenon burned itself out fairly quickly but not before selling an estimated 240 million units, being included as a special prize in Corn Pops boxes of cereal, and getting its very own Christmas special.  Having a cartoon to boost the sales of toys during the shopping frenzy around the holidays makes utter sense, but having to craft a narrative around sticky octopuses learning the true meaning of Christmas is going to tax the most creative mind.

              Luckily or unluckily, depending on how you look at it, the mind they tapped to attempt this feat was Mark Evanier, who has one of the most extensive IMDB list of cartoon writing credits I’ve ever seen.  He’s credited with 121 episodes of ‘Garfield & Friends’ alone.  He created the ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ cartoon of the 80’s, he wrote episodes of Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo’ and ‘Thundarr the Barbarian,’ I’m genuinely impressed with the depth of his resume. 

That being said, he was given a monumentally difficult task and he failed.  I can’t criticize him too much for this, I doubt I would have been able to come up with something better that justified its own existence and also told a compelling Christmas tale about sticky plastic octopuses with time for hilarious hijinks in twenty-four minutes, but he did take the job so I figure criticizing him is fair game.  It takes the various holiday special cliches, throws them together in a box, shakes it violently until they cling somewhat together, and then plops them out onto a table to hopefully keep kids entertained long enough to be reminded that Wacky Wall Walkers exist and maybe they want one for Christmas.

The setup is just a worse version of ‘A Cosmic Christmas.’  Far away on the planet of Kling-Kling live the aliens known as Walkers, which is as decent a backstory for them as you could hope for.  Their king spots the Christmas star and so sends a team to investigate it, made up of six lazily designed octopus variations named Wacky, Big Blue, Springette, Stickum, Crazy Legs, and Bouncing Baby Boo.  They all serve various comedic functions, such as the idiot leader, the depressed one, the clumsy one, the grumpy one who comments on the craziness around him, that sort of thing.  It takes them two thousand years to reach modern-day Earth, so again we have confirmation by alien life that there really was some kind of amazing star at the birth of the Baby Jeebs.  The aliens seem none the worse for having spent two millennia cooped up in the cockpit of a tiny spaceship, which gives a pretty good indication of the emotional seriousness of the rest of the cartoon.

              The special is roughly evenly split between the aliens wandering around attempting to learn the meaning of Christmas and being confused by the actions of all of the strange humans and following an absolute little shit named Darryl who’s jealous of the gifts he sees his friend Kendo buying and decides he needs a $1000 toy car for Christmas.  It’s interesting to note that Kendo is apparently based on Ken Hakuta’s son, which if I was a toy mogul bankrolling a Christmas special is exactly what I’d do, so good on him for that.  Darryl discovers the alien presence through shenanigans and threatens to expose them if they don’t help him raise money for the toy car.  They do so through the hyper-specific business model of cutting off the tops of really tall evergreen trees and then decorating them for paying customers.  This seems to be a case where the writer couldn’t think of any other Christmas-related activity involving sticky octopuses, and which is slightly justified in-universe by Darryl living in a rich neighborhood with rich and apparently lazy neighbors, but again we have a case where nobody is putting up Christmas decorations until Christmas Eve.

              The laziest face-turn ever comes when one of the Walkers literally comes up to the others and says, in so many words, “Hey, come check out this orphanage, the true meaning of Christmas is over there.”  They peer in the windows, overhear the story of the Baby Jeebs, and Darryl witnesses Kendo bringing all those toys he was so jealous of as gifts for the orphans.  This causes him to instantly become a completely different person.  He lets the aliens go, starts volunteering at the orphanage, and the aliens fly away, happy to have learned what Christmas is all about.

              I was fine with Ziggy’s climax involving an orphanage because there was a quasi-fairytale tone to that cartoon, something just one step removed from framing the entire thing as a parable.  It’s as unjustified here as everything else, so while I’m not specifically mad about it using the orphan card it just solidifies my cynicism about the cartoon as a whole.  Here we’ve got vague nods to the usual Christmas subjects: people concerned about impressing people with the amount of their decorations, mall Santas being grumbly and overworked, Christmas shopping being chaotic and overwhelming, but it’s just a series of boxes to be checked to fill out time and qualify as a Christmas special.

              There’s possibly some version of this that could work as a Charlie Kaufman ‘Adaptation’-esque commentary on itself, going so deep into overt commercialization that it comes out the other side as some kind of meta-reflection on Christmas specials as a whole, but that wouldn’t sell a whole lot of toys, would it.  This special was soundly rejected at the time and did absolutely terrible in the ratings, coming dead last in its time slot and in the bottom five programs for the entire week.  It’s not even awful enough to be memorable, it is exactly as bad as you’d expect given the subject matter and baldly mercenary existence.  The best I can say is that it maintains a level of professional quality that makes it at least better than something like ‘Why the Bears Dance on Christmas Eve.’  Everyone involved doesn’t necessarily need to be ashamed of what they did but they don’t get to complain when people judge them for it.