Entertainment careers are interesting things. Actors can morph into producers, singers can turn into actors, musicians can turn their hand to directing, it’s a mix between genuine talents who can move between mediums with success (David Byrne has a movie in the Criterion collection, Lady Gaga got nominated for an Oscar) and those who cannot (Sia directed ‘Music,’ Hailee Steinfeld keeps trying to be a pop star). Then you’ve got the workhorses, the people who are never going to become world famous, never going to change the world, but just keep plugging away within the industry slowly getting things made and put out there and eventually build up a pretty solid resume.
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| No, not those other raccoons, the Christmas raccoons. |
Kevin Gillis was a host on the Canadian children’s television show “Yes You Can” from 1980 to 1983. It was a sports-themed comedic variety show which featured professional athletes, puppets and sketches, with songs performed by Kevin. The internet has stubbornly refused to find me clips of this. He would go on to be the co-founder and CEO of Skywriter Media and produce some things I’ve actually heard of, like ‘F/X: The Series’ and the second and third ‘Universal Soldier’ movies. He’s also the creator and main creative force behind the long-running Canadian cartoon series ‘The Raccoons,’ a property I’ve been vaguely aware of for several years due to the meme-status of its principal antagonist, Cyril Sneer.
First broadcast on CBC on December 17, 1980, this was the first of four specials that led into a 60-episode television series that ran from 1985 to 1991, with a threatened revival bubbling under the surface since 2017. This established the core cast of Bert, Ralph, and Melissa Raccoon, their dog friend Schaeffer, the evil Cyril Sneer, and his put-upon son Cedric Sneer. As all decently long-running series do it filled out its cast over the years with various other friends and relatives, but the core cast seems to have been kept pretty consistent, although their roles in the show did change over the years. For example, Schaeffer is introduced here as just a normal park ranger’s dog and by the end of the series he owns and operates a café. Cartoon logic creep can be fun.
It's lucky for this special that’s it generally amiable and well-animated because it really is not very good at all and I should be a lot angrier with it. The point of view swings around at random so it’s unclear which if any characters we should be following, the central conflict is both too large and too abstract to really matter and hyper-specific, and in general it’s not very funny. Then again it does have some decent voice acting from some people who were almost big at the time (Rich Little! Rupert Holmes! Rita Coolidge!), Cyril Sneer has been a memorable villain this long for a reason, and one of the main characters wanders around in a hockey jersey. I can’t get that mad at it.
I’m growing increasingly interested in the wraparound sections that often bookend the narratives for these specials. It seems roughly evenly split between specials who just tell the stories without them and those who feel the need to provide some kind of hand-holding entry point for the kiddies at home. For some of these specials they’re completely unnecessary, like Benji’s unjustified presence in ‘The City that Forgot About Christmas,’ and some of them lack one where it could’ve really used the context, like ‘The Night Before Christmas.’ Bookends have ranged from being relatively charming in “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus’ to distracting in ‘The Tiny Tree,’ to actively creepy in ‘Santa and the Three Bears.’ An odd subset is specials where the framing infects the narrative, such as in ‘Why the Bears Dance on Christmas Eve,’ which is so obviously being told by the main character reflecting back on his childhood that it’s genuinely distracting.
Now we have this special, where the actual events that transpire with the titular Christmas Raccoons is deeply unsatisfying but internally consistent and understandable as far as these things go, but because of the framing device that narrative becomes fractured and twisted to the point where it’s deliberately obfuscating what parts of the special are and are not real.
Let’s ignore the reality-warping framing device for now and instead focus on how the cartoon’s story itself sucks. We’re introduced to a national park in which our raccoons live and then told that around half the forest has suddenly gone missing, apparently overnight. This is due to the actions of our villain, Cyril Sneer, a quasi-human elephantine logging baron (he is apparently an aardvark) who’s cutting far over his quota of trees. How he was able to devastate half of a national park before anyone noticed is anyone’s guess, and put a pin in this thought because this isn’t just the normal cartoon nonsense, we’ll circle back around to it. His stated goal in this over-harvesting is simple greed: the more trees he cuts down the more money he makes. He ignores the feeble protests of his son and continues to cut down them down, including the one housing our raccoon heroes: Ralph and Melissa, a married couple who … own? the tree, and their friend Bert, who quickly becomes the series’ main character.
After their shock they see the tree being hauled away by a couple of human kids and their dog. The cartoon shows that they just happened across the tree and are bringing it home to use as a Christmas tree because it’s December 24th and nobody in these specials ever puts in any effort to prepare for Christmas until immediately beforehand. They follow them back to their house and break in to retrieve their Christmas stockings, only to be chased away by the family dog, Schaeffer. Various cartoon shenanigans occur which end with them all smashing against the outside of Cyril Sneer’s lumber mill, where it’s revealed that the dog talks, much to the raccoons’ surprise. I will not be indulging in my usual rant on the depiction of animal sapience in animated spaces, please note my restraint.
The animals recognize their common enemy and put their heads together to put together plan, at which Rich Little intones, “If Cyril Sneer had known that three raccoons and a dog were plotting against him, he’d probably just keel over laughing. Never had anyone been able to stop him from doing what he wanted. Never.” And on those ominous words the special breaks for commercial, after which it returns to show Cyril and his son leaving the factory to get the last few trees remaining and our heroes springing their plan into action.
Which is literally just beating them up and threatening them. Apparently it isn’t very hard to stop Cyril Sneer after all.
They yell at him for a while, which leads to a moderately funny scene where Cyril tries to snow them with a story of how he was just working hard to provide for his son that’s transparent enough to play for laughs. The logic of this section bothers me, as the characters simply assert that his over-logging days are over and Cyril doesn’t really dispute this, just arguing that everyone else is doing it too. The raccoons counter that all of the other loggers are doing so responsibly, which even in 1980 is a pretty bold claim to make, and this leads to the raccoons introducing the idea of planting new trees to the established and successful logger baron. He apparently buys their assertion that there’s money to be made in reforesting, which sure is true long-term but is not in and of itself profitable, but the issue is a bit more complicated than I guess they’re willing to get into in a children’s cartoon. Reassured that by telling Cyril Sneer, the industrialist, that responsible loggers plant new trees, the raccoons and dog declare victory and leave. Hooray?
The kids from before call for Schaeffer so they all head back to the dog’s cabin. As they do so the raccoons are sad that their home is gone and the dog is sad he can’t do anything to help. The dog goes inside and stares out at the miserable raccoons huddled together for warmth as a sad song plays. After a scene transition the kids find the raccoons’ abandoned stockings and Schaeffer drags them to the window, where they see the sad animals and deduce their new Christmas tree was their house. They call up their dad to find them a new one, the dog goes outside to tell them the good news, and then the wavy effects hit the screen and the kids wake up because everything up to this point was just a dream.
The framing device for this special is that all of the events involving the raccoons were just part of a collective dream between those two kids from before, Julie and Tommy. The actual start of the cartoon is their father the park ranger getting a phone call on the night of December 23rd telling him that about half of the trees in the forest have gone missing. This is the pin we’re returning to, the premise that overlogging has ravished the forest was introduced in the real world at the start of the story and thus can’t just be dismissed as cartoon mayhem done by an anthropomorphic aardvark. This supposedly happened and got the authorities involved. Before heading out to investigate the ranger put his two children and their dog to bed and everything from that point to just after they phoned their dad to get a home for the raccoons was just a dream.
And a shared one at that, because both kids wake up exclaiming that it’s Christmas morning and are shocked to learn that not only is it only December 24,th there’s also no Christmas tree in the house. None of what we saw actually happened despite both kids vividly remembering every detail. It is unclear if the dog also remembers the shared delusion, and it’s also left unclear what parts of the dream the kids did and did not experience, as they don’t get into any details other than both remembering the tree and the existence of raccoons.
This is all bad enough but then the kids ask about the disappearing trees and the dad shrugs and says he never figured it out but that they just stopped disappearing. During the at-most twelve hours he was investigating overnight. He goes on to say that during that same half-day stretch of time thousands of seedlings were planted by parties unknown. The dog woofs to get their attention and directs them to look outside at the random human worker planting a random tree. Immediately the dream raccoons are there in the real world, still wearing their dream clothes, and rush over to inhabit the new tree. The racoons, the kids, and the dog all exchange happy waves and the special closes with Rich Little informing us, “The mystery of those new trees never was solved by the rangers …and the Evergreen Forest was never again in danger because, from that Christmas on, it was protected by three raccoons and a dog.” Which is as blatant a plug for a series as I’ve heard.
The levels of reality this dream sequence business is playing with is maddening to the point where I’m starting to think it involves actual malice. The special deliberately informs us that the actions that occurred took place on December 24th, the narrator specifically tells us at the beginning it is December 23rd and at the end it is the morning of December 24th. The events depicted involving trees, raccoons, and the physical assaulting of aardvarks all took place on a day that did not occur but the special cheerily implies with a wink that they did as their effects are reflected in the real world. Which I could kind of shrug off but the kids and the raccoons wearing clothes recognize each other and interact in the not-dream world, so who knows what’s true anymore. Was the human worker an employee of Cyril Sneer? Did that day actually happen but then get removed by some kind of omniscient forest god who stitched reality back together causing everyone who inhabited the lost day to remember it as a dream? Was the dream so real because the kids have been exposed to massive quantities of ergot from ill-stored grain kept by their survivalist father and thus the ending raccoons were a continued hallucination?
The “or did it?” wink and nod to the audience at the end of a piece of children’s entertainment is nothing new and I can usually give it a pass but this example is so convoluted and deliberately self-contradicting that it’s managed to genuinely annoy me. The eventual cartoon show would phase out the ranger character and his kids pretty quickly but I guess they weren’t sure what balance to strike this early in its development. The inaccuracies of its depiction of the logging industry would be much more understandable if the intended audience was American children but frankly I expected more for a Canadian production. Like I said on the whole the cartoon is inoffensive and the character of Cyril Sneer is so over the top that he loops back around to be fairly awesome, there’s something about a villain who is so unrepentantly evil that his self-assurance brings you quite close to being on his side. There’s something attractive about someone who’s so secure in who they are and what they want. The foundation laid by this special is solid enough that I’m not surprised that it was turned into a series, but it’s not really one I have any curiosity about following up on.
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