By the start of the 1980’s there were still a few hundred fully independent television stations scattered around the United States, enough for a syndication market to exist if not exactly thrive. These stations had to manage their entire schedules, they weren’t just broadcasting the big networks’ primetime programs and inserting their own local news segments. That meant there were a lot of small animation studios scrambling to be their own bosses and turn out cartoon specials that they could sell into that syndication marketplace. This often took the form of holiday specials that could potentially run year after year, earning repeat broadcast fees. They could also use these as opportunities to introduce characters that might go on to star in other specials or syndicated television series.
Thus do we get Buttons and Rusty, the Chucklewood Critters. A young bear and fox duo, they and their families were first introduced in this special. They’d go on to star in Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Easter cartoons before eventually getting a 26-episode series in the late 90’s. No, I’ve never heard of them either, but I bet these characters lurk mostly-forgotten in the backs of a lot of people’s minds. They likely aired at too-early hours on that weird channel on the dial that wasn’t a big-three network, the one that also ran unedited movies late at night.
The special was created by Bill Hutton and Tony Love, who both started out in the bowels of the Hannah-Barbera system before teaming up and setting off on their own. They learned the trade animating such classics as ‘The Herculoids,’ ‘Roger Ramjet,’ and horribly enough ‘Santa and the Three Bears.’ They would go on be something like co-directors-for-hire, helming episodes of ‘RoboCop,’ ‘The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo,’ and the entirety of “James Bond, Jr.’ The credited writer for the special is John Bradford, also a Hannah-Barbera veteran, and someone on IMDB also included John Bates with a story credit that goes unacknowledged in the special itself. The animation isn’t great, exactly what you’d imagine you’d get when you take Hannah-Barbera animators and remove the budget, but this is overshadowed by fundamental flaws with the story told in this cartoon. This isn’t the usual complaints about unfunny jokes or unlikeable characters, although those problems are there too. This is more that the way this cartoon is structured at the basest of levels is broken. John Bradford’s writing credits include a lot of work for Hannah-Barbera, including a bunch of episodes of ‘Jabberjaw,’ but also some truly weird stuff like ‘The Gary Coleman Show’ and ‘I Am the Greatest!: The Adventures of Muhammad Ali.’ After this special he did a lot of work with Hutton and Love, including all 26 episodes of ‘Chucklewood Critters.’ He’d been writing professionally for almost a decade by the point of this special, which surprises me because it’s an absolutely awful script.
This special begins like so many others with a narrator character threatening to tell us a story. In this case it’s a man named Ranger Jones, up on a lookout tower in the middle of a nature preserve sizing up a passing train he refers to as “the Christmas tree train.” It’s literally a train hauling felled trees from the forest to be processed and sold as Christmas trees. At least the train in “The Trolls and The Christmas Express” was run by elves at Santa’s workshop, this is just a regular train service. The ranger claims to be surprised that we’ve never heard of the train before, which first off is presumptuous, and secondly is the kind of thing only a hard-core trainspotter would say. Maybe he gets really bored out on his own in the forest, he does spend the special talking with animals. He admits he's never ridden on the train, but a couple of his friends did the previous year. As he says this he focuses some binoculars on a cave from which a young bear and fox emerge, Buttons and Rusty. He then says, “On second thought let them tell you. It’s their story.” The outlines of the binoculars vanish as Buttons and Rusty speak and the special then continues on, presumably now a year in the past. There is no transition to indicate the rest of the cartoon is a flashback, no further narration from the ranger or indeed Buttons and Rusty. They do not tell us the story. There is also no corresponding ranger section at the end of the cartoon. The only function of that perfunctory setup was for the ranger to address the camera and explain that the Christmas tree train is the train that hauls Christmas trees. There was apparently no other way they could think of to introduce this concept.
Why the special focuses so much on the train is an absolute mystery. After that opening segment the special features the train for all of three minutes and sixteen seconds of its running time. About an equal amount of time is given to the parents talking amongst themselves and twice as much time is spent with Buttons and Rusty running around a department store. The function of the titular train within the special is that through comic misadventures the two little animals accidentally get loaded onto said train and end up in the city, worrying their families. That’s all the train does. The Christmas tree part is entirely superfluous, it could have been hauling anything. If a Christmas special is going to mention a train in the title I want it to be more than an incidental means of transportation.
The entire special is shapeless and badly paced. The inciting incident, the scare that makes the tiny animals flee from the ranger in terror to start the series of shenanigans that makes up the plot happens four minutes in. They end up on the train three minutes after that and are loose in the city five minutes after that. The special is half over before we’re done with what seems to have been the setup for the climactic scene: the tykes dancing in a department store Christmas display and getting the attention of the local tv news, which is what finally lets their worried parents know where they are. That climax doesn’t even start until the nineteen-minute mark, so there’s an interstitial seven minutes of nonsense as the bear and fox run around in a store and their parents ineffectually fret back at the forest.
The parents find out where their missing children are with about three minutes left in the runtime, including the end credits, and I was genuinely interested in how they were supposed to resolve all this, and credit to Mr. John Bradford, he pulled an ending out of his ass the likes of which I haven’t seen in a while. It turns out that the department store Santa we’d seen precisely once before is actually the real Santa and the ranger just happens to know the guy. So the ranger calls the store, gets Santa on the line, and then that right jolly old elf flies back the kids and drops them down the chimney, the end.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a story write itself into such an easily avoided corner, run out of time, and then just pull the holiday equivalent of ‘a wizard did it.’ You could have shaved a whole minute off of the special just by dropping the jokes about the bear father being sleepy and trying to hibernate. There was a completely unnecessary owl subplot on the train. There was an entire scene between shadowy workers in the alley department store that we didn’t need to see. It amazes me not that the script was written badly but that they went through an entire storyboarding process, planned out the shots, recorded the script, literally added up the number of individual cels they’d need to draw, and decided as a unit that this was the amount of time that needed to be allotted to all of these story beats. There’s a brief insert scene where the ranger is watching on tv as the Reagan White House lights up their Christmas tree. They chose to do that, they did that on purpose.
I could not tell you a single point of difference between the characters of Buttons and Rusty. Aside from the character design they are completely interchangeable. At one point the fox claims that his kind are smart, but neither one displays any more or less intelligence than the other. The bear crashes into a garbage can when running from a mountain lion, but he’s never shown as clumsy again. The reason that there are two of them seems to be so they can have dialogue between each other explaining what’s very obviously going on for the benefit of any children who are in the same room as the television and can hear it but can’t bring themselves to actually look at it.
I don’t begrudge the makers of this special their modest success, they certainly kept plugging away at this property and made something of it, they really did put the effort in. There were nine total one-off specials and two thirteen-episode television series, and that’s more than a lot of people get. There’s also something called ‘A Chucklewood Halloween,’ a Claymation … something on YouTube that claims to be directed by Bill Hutton and written by both him and John Bates, but I have my doubts. It’s forty-six minutes long, features the song “That Magical Moment” by Queen over the end credits, and was voiced by maybe two people. Its legality seems questionable. It’s the kind of internet oddity that is so strange I’m surprised it hasn’t had something of a viral moment yet, since it’s tied to such an obscure but actually documented syndicated cartoon series and is so impressively amateurish. This is another one that’s commercially unavailable but has been uploaded to the usual sites, although I would consider this one entirely skippable. It’s bad in an uninteresting way and really not worth your time.
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