Johnny Hart’s B.C. A Special Christmas (1981)

              I was all set to write a brief examination of how the long tradition of the comedy double act was in recent decline until I bothered to do the slightest bit of research and discovered that instead I’m just completely out of touch with the current comedy landscape.  I was about to hearken back to a lost tradition of acts such as Laurel & Hardy, Abbot & Costello, even Hope & Crosby, but then the internet reminded me of Garfunkel & Oates, Tim & Eric, even Mitchell & Webb.  Most modern forms of the double act trace their lineage back to various European traditions that culminated in the English music hall style and the American vaudeville format of the late nineteenth century but there’s a fascinating global aspect to it as well.  I was aware of the Japanese manzai form of comedy but there’s also the Chinese xiangsheng style, both of which evolved completely independent of the European tradition.  These are all variations on a form: the funny guy and the straight man, the idiot and the reasonable person, the one providing the setup and the one providing the response.  It’s such an obvious formula for comedy that it even worked in the silent movie era when it was physical slapstick and reaction shots.

That is one awkward title.

              Bob and Ray were such an act.  Made of up of Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, they were a comedy duo from roughly 1946 until 1988.  Like many such acts they were able to translate their routine across many different formats.  Since their comedy was verbal in nature they could easily move between radio and television, they could adapt their personas to commercials or do cameos in other people’s works.  They specialized in a kind of deadpan absurdity, escalating situations into increasingly surreal heights while maintaining a faux-reasonableness that threw the events into stark contrast.  A decent example would be their Mr. Science segments lampooning children’s educational programming, where a calm, straightforward radio scientist would explain the most basic of concepts, like gravity or heat expansion, to an increasingly amazed child, often ending in a massive explosion.  It was based on the interplay between the two, quickly riffing on concepts and handing the comedy baton back and forth.  It was a pretty good act.

              Which explains why they were a part of the 1981 special ‘Johnny Hart’s B.C. A Special Christmas,’ but not especially why their routine makes up almost the entire runtime. 

              B.C. is a daily cartoon strip that’s been stubbornly existing since 1958.  It’s original artist and writer, Johnny Hart, died in 2007, and since then it’s been drawn and written by his grandson, Mason Mastroianni.  It’s perhaps most notable for the various controversies that arose from Hart’s inclusion of overt Christian messaging in the strips since a religious awaking in 1984.  This was accompanied by more strident reactionary political messaging that led to such wonderful quotes such as in 1999 when he told The Washington Post that "Jews and Muslims who don't accept Jesus will burn in Hell" and that "homosexuality is the handiwork of Satan."  Often the proselytizing in his stripes was so overt they were moved to the religious section of the papers.

              That would start several years after this was produced, however, and aside from a brief closing scene the cartoon is entirely secular in nature.  The production information is fairly sketchy, as the company behind it, Hardlake Animated Pictures Corp., seems to have been a company set up just to produce this special.  It was directed and produced by Vlad Goetzelman with Cinera Productions, a Toronto-based cartoon studio which did primarily commercials and short educational films for the US market.  With the exception of Bob and Ray the voice cast is made up of professional voice actors.

              In keeping with the bare aesthetic of the cartoon strip, being set basically in a featureless wasteland broken up with mountains in the distance and possibly trees and rocks in the foreground, the special takes the first five minutes to run through what little cast exists as a character named Thor wanders around looking for his calendar.  He variously runs into Clumsy Carp, Curls, the titular character B.C. (bet you didn’t know that the title comes from a name), before finally handing off the special to the main character, Peter.

              Thor also runs into the two characters I guess we have to somewhat address, the only two women in the cast: Fat Broad and Cute Chick.  It took until 2019 for the characters to get actual names, which are Jane and Grace, respectively.  That is such a late name upgrade that I almost admire them for sticking to their guns for so long.  If that’s what you really think of women you kind of owe it to the rest of us to be that honest about it.  I don’t have a lot to say about them, the way the strip and this special treats them is exactly what you’d expect, they don’t have any more depth than the names imply.  Fat Broad is big and mean and scares the men, Cute Chick is thin and stupid and sexually available, although being even then a fairly Christian text the men really don’t do anything about it.  Don’t bother looking for hidden meanings here, it’s all surface, and thankfully we can pretty much ignore them along with all of the other characters not named Peter and Wiley.

              After Thor hands off the narrative baton to Peter he ends up giving a flower to Cute Chick for cartoon reasons and he’s amazed to discover the concept of gift giving.  As far as justifications for caveman Christmas antics go the invention of the concept of altruism is not a bad one.  The character of Peter is voiced by Bob Elliott and he’s characterized here as a greedy but not malevolent businessman, always out for a buck.  He goes to wake up his friend Wiley, voiced by Ray Goulding.  Wiley is described on Wikiepedia as “peg-legged, superstitious, unshaven, woman-fearing, water-hating poet.”  That characterization is not really replicated here, other than having him sport a peg-leg and being good with words, instead he’s morphed into Ray’s straight man to bounce off of Bob’s unscrupulous schemer.

              Together they decide to introduce the concept of gift giving to the tribe in order to convince them to buy the gifts they’ve come up with in order to give them to each other.  They also figure that to really sell this they need to pretend to discover a long-long piece of writing from even earlier in caveman times containing a legend they’ll cook up about some forgotten tradition.  They brainstorm and come up with the idea of Santa Claus, complete with the red suit and reindeer.  The comedy comes from cavemen talking through the process of inventing a gift-giving mythological figure and arriving at the exact same conception of Santa Claus as contemporary America does.

              Although the script is credited to Johnny Hart I have a hard time believing that most of the dialogue wasn’t riffed into existence by Bob and Ray in the studio and then handed off to the animators to work with.  I suppose it’s possible that Hart was able to independently come up with the back and forth banter that typified they style the duo had been working on for thirty-five years, but I’m just going to assume they were giving either the basic premise or a script they deviated from, leaving us with about half of the runtime of the cartoon being a Bob and Ray routine that just happened to involve the B.C. cast.

              The joke of the special is that after this primitive exercise in corporate myth-making their creation instantly exists and provides gifts to the entire cast, ruining their scheme to sell presents to the other members of the tribe.  After introducing the concept to everyone around the fire they all go to sleep.  During the night Santa creeps into their caves and leaves little Christmas trees and gifts tailored to each person, all of them much better than the simple rocks that Peter and Wiley were planning to sell.  It culminates with Peter and Wiley each receiving gifts for the other one and exchanging them, leaving us with a happy ending.

              I was in a severe defensive crouch for the first ten minutes of this special, mostly remembering Johnny Hart for his reactionary shenanigans in his later life, fully aware of the fact that he’d named his women characters Fat Broad and Cute Chick.  I slowly unwound as I realized that this is more a showcase for a classic comedy double act than any kind of statement by Mr. Hart himself, as clearly his religious convictions really took a turn in 1984 if he’s willing to showcase two such cynical characters for his Christmas special, even if they do learn a very special lesson by the end.  They do throw in a scene at the end of Peter being woken up at night by the three wise men riding camels past his cave and walking out to witness the Christmas star, all while “Away in a Manger” tinkles away in the background, but it’s a Christmas special, so that fine.

              There are also a number of B.C. running gags in the margins, like overly sophisticated ants taking passive-aggressive verbal snipes at each other, the Ur-caveman Grog running around being a menace, Clumsy Carp sticking his head in the water, all stuff that’s pretty incoherent if you’re unfamiliar with the original strip, but if you’re not a fan then why are you watching this special in the first place?  To my knowledge this has never been issued on home video and is not available to stream, what copies exist online are rough VHS copies that seem to be hasty captures off of the few times it was rerun on HBO back in the 80’s.  I can’t recommend this unless you’re a fan of the comic strip or, more likely, you’re a fan of Bob and Ray and have never caught the version of them in this special.  Watching this was worth it just to be reminded of their act and to go back and relisten to some old Mr. Science sketches.