Why the Bears Dance on Christmas Eve (1977)

              The internet is full of rabbit holes, some more malign than others, and one that I find myself worried I’ll fall completely into one day and never emerge from is the sub-sub-section of the web devoted to lost media.  The fascination itself is as old as recorded history, a history which was then lost and sought after by later historians.  As far back as writing goes you’ll find references to older texts and then complaints that the author can’t find copies of them anymore.  The first time I remember running into the concept was catching an airing of the tv-edit of ‘The Name of the Rose,’ likely on TNT, sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s.  For those wondering, yes, the book is better, but I’ll stick up for the movie version.  It doesn’t keep quite the same amount of focus on Jesuit politics as the original or incorporate Eco’s theories on semiotics (“books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told”), but it got Ron Perlman some walking around money and it did keep the central conceit: that the entire plot is swung into motion by the existence of a copy of Aristotle’s second book of Poetics, thought lost to time.  The fact that all of the death and misery came from people’s desire to variously preserve and destroy a fabled lost book stuck with me.

Fair enough, they do tell us.

              There exist entire online communities dedicated to cataloguing and trying to restore various lost and forgotten texts, be they actual books or stories or songs or movies.  The Lost Media Wiki is as dangerous to me as TV Tropes.  Examples of such lost works range from ones almost everyone knows about, such as ‘The Day the Clown Cried,’ to the relatively obscure, like ‘Out to Lunch,’ a ‘Sesame Street’ / ‘Electric Company’ collaboration that aired on ABC prime time on December 10, 1974, guest starring Elliott Gould, Barbara Eden, and Carol Burnett, to my personal white whale: a copy of The KLF’s “The Black Room” sessions, and then finally to ‘Why the Bears Dance on Christmas Eve.’  The first three examples have never seen the light of day.  The first because although footage does definitely exist in some form there doesn’t appear to be a final, edited film and everyone involved is very reluctant to have it released.  Supposedly the copy in the Library of Congress is set for release in 2025, fingers crossed.  It’s unknown if a copy of the second exists, if it does it’s in the hands of people involved in the production who have decided not to share the footage thus far.  The third exists in the possession of Bill Drummond, and who the hell knows what he’s ever going to do.  The fourth has been recovered, remarkably enough, due to the efforts of Julio Villareall, who contacted a member of production, received a copy, and uploaded it to YouTube on June 18, 2012.

              The reason he had to go to such steps is a bit of a story in and of itself.  The special was produced by a non-union animation company out of New York named Tele-Tactics.  Every source makes sure to mention that they were non-union.  They operated from 1975 until 1978, when the chief executive Barry Drucker, one of the co-writers of this special, died of a massive heart attack.  The company folded and its portfolio fell into obscurity as no other animation studio was interested in purchasing the rights.  Most of their output had been cartoon commercials, including one for Tootsie-Rolls that I certainly remember from my childhood (https://youtu.be/uaXk6PVXqJE).  The special itself aired exactly once, on December 12, 1977, on ABC.  It was never repeated and never issued on any home video format due to the aforementioned lack of interest.  Despite the best efforts of Julio Villareall and the lost media community I cannot say that this special was worth any amount of their efforts.

              The director of this special was Jon William Lopez, who never directed anything else but remained in the industry for many years.  He has animation credits on a number of big-budget animated features, including a number by Disney.  Clearly, however, his talents did not lie in the domain of directing.  Many of the listed animators have also gone on to have successful careers, such as Yvette Kaplan, who did the character designs, and Linda Daurio and Kimball Miskoe, credited as “assistant animation.”  Everyone has to start somewhere.  People who did not find success afterwards, however, were the co-writers Diane Gess and Robert C. Miles, who both worked on exactly one other thing, the 1980 cartoon ‘Sunshine Porcupine.’  That is its own subject for another time.

              Initial impressions of the special certainly back up descriptions of Tele-Tactics as a “third-rate” animation studio.  The fact that this aired on network television does not speak well of how low the standards were at the time, or possibly how desperate they were to have wall-to-wall Christmas content.  Nobody was a huge fan of the assembly-line nature of Hannah-Barbera’s production methods but at least it kept all of the characters vaguely on model.  The movements here are stiff, the pacing is bad, and the soundtrack not only lacks any quality tunes it’s mixed so badly the lyrics are almost completely undecipherable.

              The opening moments do catch your attention, though, since for a while it seems like the techs at ABC accidentally slipped in a Halloween tape.  Over a creepy-little tuba-based tune a series of shadowy figures emerge from a cave in the wilderness to vaguely wave themselves back and forth in what the spectral singing insists is a dance.  The camera slowly zooms in and resolves to an interior shot of a trio of bears, an older male one and two younger ones, a boy and girl, doing what the animators are doing their best to convince us is a dance.  I’ve seen creepier things in Christmas specials, but it was always from the villain and always on purpose.

              This turns out to be another wraparound section of a grandpa telling a couple of kids a story, this time to explain why it is that bears dance on Christmas Eve.  I’d like to point out the absurdity of being several years into a dancing tradition before learning why they’re doing it but that’s probably the most realistic part of the entire special, it takes way longer than it’s comfortable to admit to question dumb traditions.  Grandpa says he’ll tell them a story and we flash back to years ago, focusing on a young bear that’s clearly the grandfather himself but the special insists is named Bashful. He tells them about how back in his day all of the woodland creatures would gather to decorate the forest and watch the sky to see Santa travel to give gifts to the human children.

And it is specifically the human children, not to any of the animal children, he makes that distinction very clear.  This establishes that not only do animals realize what Christmas is and who Santa is they also understand that all of this is not for them.  It’s for the humans, and they seem fine with this.  Happy, even.  They gather in groups to hang decorations to celebrate the giving of gifts to specifically not them.  It’s later made clear that it is desperately important to them that this happens, to the point that they are willing to commit violence to make sure it does.  No, it is never made clear why they feel this way.

Bashful, being true to his name, declines an invitation to a post-decorating party with the other animals and decides the best way to go home is to trudge up the side of a dangerous mountain by himself.  Pretty soon he’s alone on this mountain when an earthquake happens and he’s plunged down a fissure into the depths of the earth.  He picks himself up and witnesses the horrifying sight of a group of Snurfs, who the grandfather helpfully informs us are “evil, nasty characters who do bad things to the world we live in.”  Specifically he means the human world, because all of their plans revolve around fucking with Santa and as has been establish Santa doesn’t give a shit about the animals.

The Snurfs are about as distinctly designed as that name implies, they’re vague shapes with legs and are mostly just colored outlines that mill around in the background of shots swapping around a few frames of animation.  Four of the Snurfs are themed evils and sing little songs about what they are and thus what they want to do.  Here the bad sound mixing partially defeats me because I’m only mostly sure the following names: Fire, which is pretty self-explanatory, Trashy, a walking garbage dump that looks mostly like a melting blob of frosting, Slippery, which is specifically oil pollution, apparently, or possibly water pollution in general, and then the last one whose name is something like Evore but which clearly isn’t that, I genuinely can’t make it out and there are no voice actor credits at the end to help me.  His theme is energy inefficiency and the wasteful usage of natural resources.  An incredibly specific kind of evil that doesn’t help with the name at all.  I really feel like Fire is doing a lot of the actual work here in terms of getting evil done, although I guess if you want to really argue about long-term negative impacts on society the other three have some pretty cogent arguments.

They sing in front of a cowering Bashful (but not to him, they haven’t seen him yet, they just like to sing) about how they plan to use their vaguely defined powers to prevent Santa from bringing toys to all of the human children.  Bashful tries sneaking away but gets spotted.  As he’s cowering before them the energy inefficiency one (that is such a specific concern, did the writer get an unexpectedly high heating bill right before production kicked off?) asks if the others have ever seen a bear dance.  Before this gets too weird Trashy pipes in saying that the last time he saw one he laughed so hard he couldn’t stop for a week.  The rest agree that this would be hilarious, so they order Bashful to dance, which he does, including a saucy little butt-shake towards the camera.  The evil Snurfs fall down laughing and Bashful takes the opportunity to escape.

And that’s why the bears dance on Christmas Eve.  Because it makes the Snurfs fall down laughing and so later all the bears dance in front of them and then murder them while they’re helpless, Santa briefly flies by overhead and thanks them for their service to their human betters, the end.

              In many ways this entire month is just one long stroll through recovered lost media for me.  None of these specials are particularly remembered and since most of them aren’t commercially available the only reason I can talk about them at all is due to either flukes of someone hitting record on a VCR at the right time or sometimes the thankless efforts of people like Julio Villareal.  There is no market for any of this, these efforts simply exist on the same continuum as librarians and archeologists attempting to document and maintain our history for future generations.  It just lacks a lot of the inherent nobility of, y’know, libraries and museums.  Sometimes works of art are saved from obscurity and find the acclaim and relevance it never had in life, like the works of Van Gogh.  Sometimes you end up with ‘Why the Bears Dance on Christmas Eve.’  Like I said, it’s a continuum.  Even if I didn’t enjoy watching it I am glad that this still exists.