The Mirthworms in: A Merry Mirthworm Christmas (1984)

               I’d be interested to read any accounts of what it’s like to start up an animation company.  I can read some articles on Wikipedia, infer some things from IMDB production lists, and there are even the occasional writeups in newspapers captured by the Google machine, but I’d really like to know how many of the conclusions I’m starting to come to are in any way accurate.  For example, it makes sense to me to start with smaller, commercial shorts with local business and the occasional national chain in order to establish a stable cash flow and accumulate enough of a buffer to take a stab at the kind of larger artistic ambitions that presumably got the founders into the industry in the first place.  Maybe the eventual goal is to have a tv show or feature film, and it seems to me that a very good steppingstone to achieving those is to make a one-off holiday special, maybe even one that introduces a set of characters that’s franchisable.  This seems to have worked for Nelvana Limited and ‘A Cosmic Christmas’ and for Bill Hutton and Tony Love with ‘The Christmas Tree Train.’  ‘The Mirthworms in: A Merry Mirthworm Christmas’ seems to be an attempt to do the same by Perennial Pictures.

I will admit the designs are super cute.

              Showtime rose up in the late 70’s as a direct competitor to HBO using the same business model.  They became nationally available in 1978, three years after HBO, and in many ways it’s been stuck in second place ever since.  This is a strictly anecdotal hierarchy but in terms of prestige I’ve always assigned the top spot to HBO, Showtime a rather distant second, and then Cinemax far behind in third.  The explosion of premium cable channels in the last couple of decades has muddied the waters considerably, but at the time of this special’s release there were still only a few players in the market competing for the same subscription revenue, and if HBO was going to have Christmas specials than by God so was Showtime.  Thus this special.

              It’s hard to judge the success of Perennial Pictures Film Corporation and their three Mirthworms specials, the first being this one.  It was founded in 1979 by G. Brian Reynolds and Russ Harris, who would also produce, write, direct, animate, and star in ‘A Merry Mirthworm Christmas.’  According to the company website it “made its initial entry into the marketplace producing local and regional animated television commercials.”  They chugged along for decades, producing animated specials and direct-to-video cartoons as recently as 2018 with their educational Crawford the Cat series.  A shockingly large percentage of their titles on IMDB, nine out of twenty-one, are Christmas related.  The website still exists, although it seems to be a zombie site that hasn’t been updated in years.  Someone (or something) is still paying those hosting fees.

              It’s important to point out that the special features some quality animation.  The character designs are ridiculously cute, doing about as good a job as one possibly could in making earthworms loveable.  They keep everything rounded and simple, with big eyes and at most a couple of items of clothing or accessories to keep the distinctions clear.  The backgrounds are nice and detailed enough to give a sense of place and the snow effects are perfectly acceptable.  This seems like faint praise until you peruse the credits and realize that only three people are credited as animators, one of whom, Jerry Reynolds, also directed and voice acted.  That is insane and must have taken forever to make.  The team doesn’t seem to have expanded much for the following specials so these really must have been labors of love.

              Which unfortunately doesn’t do much for the actual story and script here, which is troublesome at best and malevolent at worst.  The dialogue is generally fine, especially as performed by non-actors, and I can at least follow the plot and understand character motivations, which are not always givens, but the message explicitly stated to be the point of the story by the characters themselves rather clashes with the message you take away from what actually happens on the screen.

              The term ‘coding’ has unfortunately become rather loaded as a descriptive term in ways that were probably inevitable but certainly unintended.  It just means that certain signifiers, visual, auditory, or other, are meant to convey meaning via associated shorthand to an intended audience.  Of course, while these signifiers can be neutral, like introducing a character holding a basketball to indicate they play sports or showing a bedroom decorated with posters of boy bands to indicate a character is a teenage girl, it reveals quite a lot about the people setting up those signifiers as well.  If the only kid with a basketball in a group of teenagers is black, that might imply some things.  Posters of boy bands equaling girl also plays into some gender stereotypes.  These are some pretty anodyne examples, there are obviously some stronger examples I could give.  This is just to say that the antagonist of this special, Wormaline Wiggler, is introduced wearing a fancy hat and jewelry, basically using visual association with the 80’s conception of Zsa Zsa Gabor.  This is to show that she’s the stuck-up, high class one and therefore the enemy of our main character, Bert Worm, an aw-shucks lovable green worm who sports a shirt-collar around his neck, meaning he’s a regular middle-class guy just trying to get by.  The problem is that this dynamic doesn’t match up with what we’re actually shown of the characters and their behaviors and drove me goddamn nuts while watching this thing.

I feel the special might be trying to convey some sort of moral ....

              A frustrating thing about this special is that almost nothing actually happens during its runtime but a whole lot of stuff seems to have happened before it starts.  It opens with two characters meeting in the street, Crystal Crawler and Wilber Diggs, and they then discuss a third character, Bert Worm.  Crystal explains that he’s her new neighbor, he’s very nice, and they’re going to attend the Christmas party that evening.  We never get a flashback or discussion on any of this, it’s just asserted and then we move on.  We then cut to the interior of the town hall where they’re preparing for the party under the watchful eye of Wormaline.  I need to stress that Wormaline is not a nice person, she’s perfectly acceptable as an 80’s villain.  She’s vain, high-handed, concerned about her place, and rather short tempered.  All that needs to happen for her to slot right into her proper place as the special’s antagonist is for her to persecute Bert for no good reason and we’re instantly on his side.

              The problem is that Bert is demonstrably the worst.  It is demonstrated to us by the special.  The entire first five minutes of the special is the cartoon showing how Bert actively makes life difficult for everyone around him.  In the span of three minutes he drops an absurdly large stack of plates on the floor, climbs to the top of a Christmas tree and causes it to fall over and lose all of its decorations, and literally pulls the ladder out from under someone hanging decorations on the ceiling who then falls and gets a concussion.  When Wormaline loses her temper and tells him to just leave the way she does so is perhaps overly curt but we, the audience, just watched him put several lives in danger over the course of a few minutes.  This is how we’re introduced to the character and since it’s stated that he just got into town this is also how all of the other characters are introduced to him as well.  Remember this for the back half of the cartoon, this is all of the interaction this town has had with this character.

              In a normal cartoon the natural progression from this introduction is that Bert is going to overcome his flaws and work hard, thereby earning the respect of his new neighbors and showing that stuck-up Wormaline Wiggler that he can too help out.  Nope.  He goes home, sings an incredibly self-pitying song called “(No One Can Say) I Didn’t Try” containing the lyrics “I’ll find a place where I don’t do anything wrong / sometime, somehow, someway I’ll find where I belong.”  He then writes a goodbye letter reading “Dear anyone who reads this, after what happened today I realize I’m out of place in Wormingham.  Since I don’t want to be a bother I guess I’ll just move on to someplace else.”  He then posts this on his front door and heads out with a sad little sack of belongings.  At night.  During a blizzard.

              Before he leaves Crystal comes around to go with him to the party, but he declines, saying he doesn’t feel welcome.  Crystal huffs off to the party and reads the assembled for filth.  They all feel bad and troop off to Bert’s house and find the note.  They hastily assemble a search party to find him but are driven back by the storm to the town hall.  Crystal is sad that her friend is gone, but then all the commotion wakes up Bert from where he’d been sleeping underneath the Christmas tree.  They’re all happy that he’s safe but he offers to leave again.  Crystal remembers overhearing his song of self-pity and gets him to sing some Christmas tunes showing everything that he can be useful and everyone is happy again.  The mayor puts Wormaline on notice for her cruelty and the special ends on what’s supposed to be a message of acceptance and togetherness.

This calculating motherfucker.

              That’s about as neutral a plot summary as I can give.  A fuckup is yelled at once, puts on a big show of running away from home, doesn’t do it, and everyone welcomes him back.  That’s genuinely all that happens.  The special goes so far as to have a closeup of a Christmas tree ornament emblazoned with the words, “A friend is the best thing you can have, and the best thing you can be!!”  While being weepy in the town hall Crystal repeats these words, so the special makes very sure that the audience is getting the point.  Apparently being a friend means never criticizing people for their objectively harmful actions and shunning anyone who does have the temerity to be less than 100% supportive of everyone all the time.

              My favorite type of running gag on MST3K was overlaying an alternative narrative on top of films, such as characters continuously being drunk or villains just being continually frustrated service industry employees.  A close cousin to that kind of joke is purposefully misinterpreting narratives and characterizations, like Kevin McAllister being a budding psychopath or The Joker being right, actually, in ‘The Dark Knight.’  This can be fun as long as you don’t take it too seriously as the correct interpretation of the material or start pretending that this was somehow intended by the filmmakers.  That being said, this special is just daring me to detail how instead of a loveable schlub Bert Worm is a narcissistic manipulator who recognized Wormaline Wrigger as a threat and orchestrated everything that happened in the special to supplant her in the social hierarchy of the town.

              The actual line that supposedly causes Bert to instantly abandon the town he’d just moved into, his house and belongings included, wasn’t even spoken by Wormaline but her assistant Teddy.  While removing a bucket of paint that had been dumped on his head directly as a cause of Bert’s negligence he says, in a moment of understandable anger, “If you can’t contribute anything don’t bother to come back!”  Wormaline only told him to leave the party preparations, she never said anything about not attending the party itself and nobody at all said anything about leaving town.  Bert instantly escalates things in his own head, deciding that he’ll show all of them.  He goes home, sings his little song of self-pity, then writes his note.  There’s a small moment I fixated on when Crystal knocks on his door so they can go attend the party.  Bert has written his note at this point and prepared his little go-bag, but when he hears the knock he stows the bag away from sight.  The entire time he’s talking to Crystal about why he doesn’t want to go to the party, really, you go Crystal, I’m just not wanted, I don’t want to be a bother, he never mentions his plans to go.  About the only interpretation I can put on him hiding the bag and not mentioning the letter he just wrote is that he doesn’t want to give her an opportunity to object or try to talk him out of it.  Remember, no one has told him to leave town, nobody is forcing him to set out in the middle of the night in a snowstorm.  He actively hides his intentions from her, makes sure she leaves, dramatically posts the note on his front door to make sure that everyone will see it, and briefly makes his way into the night just long enough for the town hall to empty out before sneaking in there and hiding, waiting for everyone to return and show remorse before his dramatic reveal.

              The worms really go all out on searching, too.  The entire town seems to empty into the surrounding woods, the old and the young and even a mother holding her infant in her arms.  The mayor eventually calls it off as too dangerous, stating that if they stay out too much longer some of them might not make it back.  I cannot stress enough that this entire thing stems from a single person yelling at Bert while extricating his head from a paint can, and now the entire town has put their life in danger.  A town which, almost to a person, has not actually spoken with him or interacted with him beyond seeing him break a bunch of stuff and be asked to leave. 

Willing to give everything for their beloved Bert.

Bert Worm is the personification of passive-aggressive.  Every time someone tries to reassure him, pay him a compliment, or even just tell him he doesn’t have to fuck off right that very second, he turns all self-deprecating, insisting he’s not wanted and should just leave, forcing everyone else to tell him he’s great, he’s wanted, they totally want him around.  His actions cause the mayor to turn on Wormaline, whose worst sin over the course of the episode was not being concerned enough about the feeling of drama queen Bert, and she’s left collapsed in an anxious heap by the end of the episode.  Bert solidifies his hold over the town by singing ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ but altering the lyrics to include “You gave me a present I’ve wanted so long / you gave me your friendship and a place to belong” and switches the “we” in the rest of the song to “I.”  He then cajoles everyone to join in singing “Deck the Halls,” pressuring everyone into becoming complicit.

              I briefly went on a tangent about the cult-like nature of Davey’s world in ‘Christmas Lost and Found’ mostly because the pieces were there and it was fun.  I don’t claim that the picture I’ve painted of Bert Worm is any more accurate than that, but there are a lot more pieces and it involves a lot less effort to paint his efforts as nefarious.  Even if you take the message straight, that everyone should accept everyone always, it raises immediate objections as an overly-broad statement even without the three introductory minutes of Bert being an active menace to those around him.  The clash between the ostensible message and what’s presented up on screen are so stark that I begin to question the actual intentions of the animators.

We’re entering into specials that were created and sold with perpetual syndication in mind so it's not entirely surprising that these Mirthworm cartoons are currently available for viewing, specifically on Tubi, the people’s streaming service.  It is a genuinely well-done production and perhaps the script problems that drove me borderline insane in this special were fixed for the subsequent ones.  I’ll never know because I refuse to give any more of my time to the emotional black hole that is Bert Worm.