The Tiny Tree (1975)

              I’ve run into an informational black hole I’ve encountered before.  First aired on NBC on December 14, 1975, this special was produced by DePatie-Freleng (makers of the dread ‘The Bear Who Slept Through Christmas’) as part of the Bell System Family Theater, sponsored by Bell Telephone.  The last time I tried to dig into the history of Ma Bell’s reign over all media was when I looked into 1971’s ‘Bing Crosby and the Sounds of Christmas.’  I didn’t get anywhere then either.  It’s very hard to overstate the effect the telecommunications monopoly that the Bell Telephone Company held for much of the 20^th century and its eventual fracturing in the mid-80’s had on the fabric of American life.  Just about every important technological and cultural moment in the past forty years can be tied fairly directly to this corporate breakup.  This certainly isn’t to say there’s any kind of conspiracy to suppress such knowledge, the breakup of Ma Bell has been extensively covered, but the focus of study has almost exclusively been on the anti-trust machinations and its international fallout and very little time seems to have been spent picking at the edges of their once-mighty PR outreach machine.  This is understandable if annoying for my purposes.  This is the tiniest spoke in the tiniest wheel of its formerly all-conquering engine and every time I even brush against it I shudder a little.

              I first need to give all due credit to the folks at cartoonresearch.com who have more information on this special than could be reasonably expected.  Any factual assertions I make in regards to the special itself were almost certainly gleaned from their write-up.  Anything that can’t be found on IMDB came from there.

              This special was primarily the effort of Chuck Couch, a long-time veteran of the industry as both a writer and animator.  His credits stretch back to at least 1931 and I’m sure he was involved with many more projects than we’re currently aware of as studios were quite a bit looser with properly crediting staff back then than they would be later on.  By 1975 he was one of the gears in the machine that was Hannah-Barbera productions.  He pitched the idea for the show to Bell Family Theater, which in turned hired DePatie-Freleng to make it.  Couch would direct the special and co-write it with Bob Ogle and Lewis Marshall, who were both also Hannah-Barbera people, churning out such classics as ‘Partridge Family 2200 AD’ and ‘Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch.’  I don’t have time to go into the madness of mid-70’s Saturday morning cartoons, that is a deep, dark well with seemingly no bottom.

              The voice cast was full of ringers.  The character of Squire Badger, who tells the story of the special in yet another wrap-around section, was voiced by Buddy Ebsen, probably best known today from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ but then ever-present in the tv landscape of 1970’s tv.  The mole was Paul Winchell, famous as Tigger, the little girl at the center of the story was Janet Waldo, voice of Judy Jetson, and the legendary Frank Welker voices somebody, IMDB lists him as ‘Father,’ but the father character doesn’t speak.  I suspect he’s the groundhog, the de-facto main character, but I can’t be absolutely sure of that.  The special is littered with song fragments, two of which are sung by Roberta Flack, who in 1975 was officially too good for this.

              The special itself is a well-intentioned ball of fluffy nothing.  The stakes are low to nonexistent and the inciting incident at the twenty-minute mark is almost instantly undone.  The most annoying thing about the special is that we have yet another instance of an unnecessary framing device.  The story is presented as told by a friendly badger to a couple of rabbit kids, who interrupt every once in a while to ask unnecessary questions which are instantly answered in the following scene.  For some reason it was deemed necessary  at this time in children’s entertainment to justify the presence of a narrator.  This is the fourth time I’ve watched a special that felt the need for this, and the only one I’ll give a pass to is ‘Yes, Virginia,’ as that had some fun with the concept and ended up having the narrator be Jim Bacchus Santa Claus.  Jim Bacchus can officially get away with just about anything, as far as I’m concerned.

              An interesting thing about the special is that it starts in spring and follows its characters through the year, culminating in Christmas.  It does make sense from a narrative perspective, it establishes the characters and their dynamics and plants seeds of story that sprout at the end, but this means that for most of this Christmas special we’re watching characters run around during non-Christmas times.  After briefly introducing us to our titular tiny tree, a small, isolated whispering pine in the middle of a meadow with an off-putting cartoon set of eyes and a thankfully closed mouth, we have an extended scene of our animal characters gathered outside the burrow of their friend the groundhog.  Apparently the custom of Groundhog Day has spread amongst the animal community as well.  After explaining the concept to each other, presumably for the benefit of both the small bunny and actual kid audiences, the groundhog sleepily emerges into the slate-grey sky and everyone inspects the ground under his feet to verify that there sure isn’t any shadow and thus celebrate that spring will soon arrive.  It’s frustratingly never made clear if this is just a superstition or if in this reality it holds the actual gift of prophecy.  It’s also weird to see the characters, fully capable of checking their own shadows, waiting for the groundhog to step outside to check his own, which implies that on other occasions he’s stepped outside and somehow spontaneously generated a shadow in stubborn defiance of any actual absence of direct sunlight.  The special, unfortutely, has other things on its mind.

              There are exactly three animal characters of importance: the groundhog, who spends the special running around giving exposition speak, the mole, who will end up causing the third act crisis by being threatened by the resident vegetarian hawk, and the resident vegetarian hawk named Horace, who I believe is the only other named character besides the narrator.  There are some other secondary characters, some even with speaking or singing roles, but they are strictly there to kill time or to frolic in the background.  The special does take the time to show that Horace is indeed a vegetarian and thus always hungry, and also that the mole is happy about this but always a little nervous around him.  This will all come up again.

              What plot there is kicks into gear when the groundhog informs everyone that the vacant farmhouse whose land they’re occupying has new residents, including a little girl.  Instead of filling everyone with dread, as they’ve been gorging themselves on the farmland that’s been left to go wild and presumably they’re going to be systematically hunted and/or driven from the land by the new owners, they all rush over to introduce themselves to the little girl intent on becoming her best friends.  When they arrive at the farmhouse they find to their consternation that she’s in a wheelchair due to an unspecified accident.

              I don’t think anyone will be surprised that this is a very 1975 portrayal of disability.  It’s not an accurate depiction of what it’s like to rely on a wheelchair and I would argue that it’s not trying to be.  The girl is tiny, smaller than the groundhog, and when she’s perched on her wheelchair her feet barely reach the edge of the seat.  She’s never depicted as in any pain or really suffering in any way, the fact that she’s in a wheelchair doesn’t really even become relevant until the third act false crisis.  I also don’t think I’ll shock anyone when I spoil the ending by saying she magically becomes able to walk again through the power of love, although the exact nature of that love is a bit out there, even by 70’s standards.  None of this is great but I would argue that it’s not worth getting upset about this far after the fact and after the special has sunk this far into obscurity.

              After getting over their surprise the animals make their introductions, so yet again we have clothes-wearing animals fully able to converse with humans, a reality which redefines the entire arc of human history in a way that these simple children cartoons categorically refuse to grapple with.  They bring her over to the tiny tree, which is apparently their bestest friend despite being a tree who just sits there and can only communicate by “whispering” through its needles, and he and the girl instantly fall deeply in love.  Yes, they specifically gender the tree.  This is not me exaggerating for comic effort, explicitly in the story the little girl, who’s maybe six or so, and the tree with the cartoon face fall instantly in romantic love to the delight of their animal compatriots.  They beam at each other, the girl puts flowers in his branches, she snuggles up to him, the narrator literally says it was “love at first sight,” and Robert Flack sings a song called “To Love and Be Loved” over the top of it all.  It’s this love (and Christmas magic) which will grant this girl the ability to walk at the end of the special.  Did not foresee this one.

A love story for the ages.

              The special kills some time with a musical number and various shenanigans until it hits the winter.  The animals are now portrayed as worrying about finding food, especially the hawk.  After the mole finds some berries under the snow the hawk swoops down and gobbles them up.  Then he starts imagining the mole is a berry in a slightly interesting variation on the typical cartoon “hungry character sees another character as a sandwich” trope.  The other animals, alarmed, decide the best thing to do is to go get the little girl in a wheelchair to help them.  They get her attention and she rushes out wearing a thin dress with no coat, brandishing a broom, to save the mole.  She ends up not even using the broom, as she’s rushing towards them she yells to the hawk that it’s not a berry and he instantly snaps out of his hunger-induced hallucination and drops the mole.  Which means that any of his friends could have done the same and her presence in the wintery wasteland is completely unnecessary.  For reasons beyond comprehension she decides she needs to help the mole up from the ground, whereupon her wheelchair spontaneously tips her into the snow.  This is presented as super-dramatic but the animals simply lift her back into her chair, wheel her home, and she’s fine.  That’s it, there are no consequences from these actions.

              I went through the special noting the time stamps and up until this point the tiny tree and the hawk had had roughly the same amount of screentime, 288 seconds for the tree to 276 seconds for the hawk, and remember only the hawk has an actual name and actual lines of dialogue.  The tree also doesn’t move and hasn’t done anything except be a receptacle for the little girl’s romantic affections, so up until this point I was questioning the special’s focus on the tree.  It’s only in the last five minutes of the special where anything of actual note happens and the tree justifies its presence in the title.

              Due to a snowstorm the family is stuck on the farm and unable to go into town.  This is presented as chiefly a problem for the dad because he can’t get the Christmas tree and presents he ordered from town.  The animals are sad on the little girl’s behalf, especially when the father’s attempt to make it through the snow on Christmas Eve fails and it looks like there won’t be anything for the little girl to wake up to on Christmas morning.  Then the tiny tree gets an idea and whispers to the animals that it will be the little girl’s Christmas tree.  They object saying that the tree is too far from the little girl’s window for her to see any decorations they put on it, and for a moment I felt a sadistic thrill as I wondered if the special was going to go all The Giving Tree on us.  I wanted it to try to put a positive spin on the girl waking up to the gussied-up corpse of her one true love, propped up for her Christmas enjoyment, but no, they just carefully dig it up by the roots and replant it closer to the girl’s window before adding some suitably natural decoration and the sky tosses down a magical beam of light to act as the star on top of the tree, as the cartoon cosmos is always so ready to do.  The light causes the girl to wake up and magically regain the use of her legs.  She walks to the window, sees her tree fiancé sparkling back at her, wipes some happy tears from her eyes, and the special ends.

              It’s almost refreshing to watch a special with so little going on behind its eyes.  This is as shallow a production that was allowed to go through to completion as I can recall.  The central idea is that there’s this tiny tree, a girl loves it, and the local animals decorate it for her for Christmas.  That is genuinely it.  They got it to the half-hour mark by writing in a vegetarian hawk for some fake jeopardy, threw in some song fragments, and wrapped the entire thing in the soothing vocals of Buddy Ebsen.  This has never been made commercially available, in fact it’s something of a mystery how it’s been preserved at all.  Bell Systems Family Theater seems to have been pretty liberal with its distribution of 16mm prints to schools and libraries and the version online does seem to come from a film print, so somewhere along the line a fan or preservationist must have gotten ahold on one and digitized it.  It’s up on the usual video hosting platforms and if you’re a big fan of Roberta Flack or a Frank Welker completionist you could certainly sit through worse.