Santa and the Three Bears (1970)

The director/writer/producer for this too-long special was Tony Benedict, and although any animation project is a collaborative effort I feel pretty safe in laying all of the problems I have with this one directly at his feet.  This was his first directorial effort after having been a long-time writer for Hannah-Barbera.  He would go on to be a writer and storyboard artist through the 80’s and 90’s for numerous shows including ‘Pandemonium,’ a random Saturday morning cartoon show that aired 13 episodes in 1982 and sank into the culture without a trace but which has been lodged in the back of my brain ever since.

This amount of artistic effort is indicative.

The one, singular, overwhelming problem with this special is its length.  At a whopping 44 minutes without the live action wraparounds (which we will address later) this special is easily twice the length of time that it needs to be as it has functionally less story than most seven-minute shorts.  This is the first time I’ve seen animation that has the same problems as most aggressively amateur live-action films: shots that last too long, lethargic editing, redundant and pointless scenes, and so, so much padding.  They also establish things multiple times that barely needed establishing the first time.

Let’s take the first five minutes of the actual animation.  We open on a very strange tracking shot, a window frame held dead center with the camera placed as if it’s outside facing in, except the scene through the window, seemingly the inside of some kind of toyshop, is moving from left to right.  This is exactly as confusing as it sounds. After a very abrupt transition we are following a man who turns out to be a park ranger as he rides a little scooter through the woods, coming across various animals who in no way factor into the rest of the special.  He eventually greets a mama bear and her two cubs as they prepare for the coming winter, and here’s where I would complain about the lack of a consistent world where it’s unclear which animals can talk to humans and which can’t and what kind of societies exist for the various species except these four characters are literally the only ones in the entire special so there’s no actual world for any of this to come into conflict with.  After some not especially clever banter we transition to the ranger in his winter cabin deciding to go out and cut down a Christmas tree.  After a full 22 second sequence of wordless pans of various shots of a snowy forest (something that will be repeated at basically every scene transition going forward) he again runs into the mama bear and her cubs and the previous conversation is essentially repeated.

Which is to say that the entire opening five minutes is completely pointless.  The introduction of the ranger and the cubs is instantly repeated, none of the animals shown ever appear again, and the information conveyed establishing their relationships is duplicated at the six-minute mark and will be continually underlined over the course of the special.

The premise of the special is that upon learning of the existence of Christmas the bear cubs want to stay awake and experience the holiday, much to the annoyance of their mother.  In an of itself this is a decent premise.  What it is not is enough of a backbone to carry 44 minutes of narrative.  But in order to stretch it out we become captive witnesses to endless commutes.  The ranger cabin is quite a ways from the bear cave but we watch as characters wander back and forth no less than five individual times.  The bears cubs wander over and are told the story of Santa Claus.  They wander back to the cave whilst engaging in shenanigans.  The Mama bear goes to the cabin to complain to the ranger.  Then she goes back home.  Having agreed to the mama bear’s request to pretend to be Santa to finally get her cubs to go the hell to sleep the ranger heads towards the bears’ cave on Christmas Eve and we get our longest commute yet as the ranger struggles through a windstorm, and struggles, and struggles, and the whole thing takes an entire four and a half minutes before he finally takes shelter for the night.  I need to stress that instead of a simple scene transition for all of these we are not trusted to understand that time and space exist and thus we watch them trudge, walk, gambol, and otherwise make their way from one place to another in what seems like real time.

The entire thing ends with the ranger trapped in a remote cabin due to a snowstorm and the real Santa magically showing up for the cubs.  The ranger gets there directly afterwards to be amazed and the bears finally go to sleep happily.  It’s a nice enough sentiment but, again, I will remind you that this special runs an hour with commercials.

The only point of slight interest is a stylistic quirk of the special which I haven’t frequently seen.  It’s fairly infrequent and in a non-animation context I would chalk up as an effort to extend length through editing but as these are hand-drawn sequences they almost have to have been actual storyboarded decisions.  During various montages frames will appear at the top and bottom of the screen imposing aspect ratio changes on the shots, or individual sections of the screen will become isolated in squares or rectangles, with the rest of the screen being blotted out, then other images will appear in similar squares arranged in patterns, sometimes stationary and sometimes moving, all to no discernable effect or meaning.  They serve no narrative function and, again, in a live-action piece I would consider them an effort to extend the running time through editing.  Mix in some standard trippy 60’s-style nonsense imagery and I really start to wonder what people thought interested children in those days.

I struggle to fully express how draining the endless parade of low-quality animation is.  Many of the individual cells are fine, and even at their worst they meet the standard of a decent Hannah-Barbera short, but after the seventh set of slows pans across the same static backdrop you start to worry about the animators themselves.  This took them weeks.  They got up in the morning, went to work, sat at an easel for hours at a time, then went home and presumably had to justify what they did all day to themselves.  Did they curse Tony Benedict for his hubris?  Had they been lured to the production with promises of future, more ambitious projects?  This thing did get an inexplicable theatrical release of some sort since it was correctly rejected by the television networks.  I imagine Tony Benedict following along behind Herschell Gordon Lewis and trying to book this into the same theaters as ‘Miss Nymphet's Zap-In.’  This special is so boring I had to make my own fun.

Then there’s the live action bookends.  They are quite short, totaling around three minutes between the two halves, and the second bookend takes place after the animated credits have run in their entirety.  I’ll sum them up with the very polite description of ‘awkward.’  The opening segment consists of several random shots of Christmas decorations as well as a cat coiled amidst them, eventually focusing on two small children clearly related to someone on the production team.  A quite unhealthy-looking middle-aged man (played by Hal Smith, Otis the town drunk on “The Andy Griffith Show” and the original voice of Owl in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh, so well done for that I guess) wrapped in a thick robe and shoved into a stuffed chair offers to tell them a story, which comprises the special we subsequently watch.  After the credits have fully finished we come back to a clock showing the time as just after midnight, an unconscious cat, and sleeping children who get woken up by Otis to open presents since technically it’s Christmas day now and they are not going to wait any longer.

This one was a slog.  Aside from some interesting imagery at times it contained nothing of note.  It was long and drawn out and generally pointless.  I can’t say that if it had just been half an hour it would have been any good but it would certainly have been less painful.  If Tony Benedict did any kind of reflecting on his intentions with this special, what messages or themes he was trying to convey, they were either of the most mercenary kind or consisting of a kind of solipsistic madness that I hesitate to consider further.  This one was lost to the depths of time for a reason.

The Night Before Christmas (1968)

              The first thing I’d like to point out about this special is the above-average animation.  This was produced by Playhouse Pictures, a smaller animation studio based in Hollywood that employed names like Bobe Cannon and Bill Littlejohn, names that meant nothing to me but whose credits span basically the entire second half of 20^th century animation and definitely worked on something you’ve seen.  Playhouse Pictures did mainly commercial work, advertising or opening credits, and seem to have some connection to the 1984 Jim Carrey series ‘The Duck Factory.’  The overall style seems to be somewhere between Disney and Hannah-Barbera and is very 1960’s in a way I find hard to articulate.

The main problem with the special, which is generally fine in a way that’s hard to write much about at length, is that the premise doesn’t become clear until about fifteen minutes into the runtime.  It’s just fine when you do understand it but at no point in the entire first half does it indicate what the story is actually about.  It works much better on second viewing but that doesn’t help much when you’re a confused nine-year-old already annoyed that you’re not watching ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas.’  In essence it’s a fictionalized telling of the composition by Clement Clarke Moore of the poem ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas,’ better known as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.’  It’s not shy about this, the opening title states “based on the life and verse of Clement Clark Moore,” but even in 1968 kids were not particularly well-versed on nineteenth century poets. 

Moore is a pretty interesting figure in and of himself, born into wealth as the son of a Bishop of the Episcopal Church and most known in his time as an eminent scholar and professor.  He inherited a large estate in New York called Chelsea, which after the expansion of New York City became the neighborhood named as such, and by selling that land Moore became incredibly wealthy.  He openly questioned the religious views of Thomas Jefferson, opposed the abolition of slavery, was a board member of the New York Institution of the Blind, and composed arguably the most well-known poem ever written by an American.  He’s shown in the opening few minutes giving a lecture and it’s more than a little likely that said lecture would have been against freeing the slaves.  The special doesn’t feel the need to really get into that.

The actual story behind the poem is rather mundane, having been written some time in 1822 or 1823 by Moore during either a series of shopping trips or during a visit to a relative, the stories vary.  First published in December 1823 anonymously, it was widely attributed to Moore before he finally claimed authorship in 1837.  His stated reason for not wanting to immediately acknowledge ownership was that he felt that writing such a poem was unbecoming for a man of his societal position.

The problem with starting the special without any of this backstory is that for most of the runtime it’s a well animated, nicely paced story about a random family doing various nineteenth century things with no sense of where any of it is going.  We open with the family performing some household chores and clearly getting ready for the upcoming Christmas before the father is suddenly off to give a series of lectures and a young girl is seen ostentatiously coughing.  She asks her father to buy her a book about St. Nicholas while he’s gone but although this is central to the story it’s barely given more emphasis than the other children asking for their own presents.  The father leaves, the girl takes ill, and none of it comes together until the father, having been unable to find a suitable book about St. Nicholas, returns home to find the girl delirious with pneumonia and muttering about Santa.  He swears to write a poem to make her feel better, proceeds to do so, and it finally all snaps together that this is what the story is about when the rest of the special is Moore reading the poem to his daughter while the special illustrates it for us.  The girl’s fever then breaks, no doubt because of the sick rhymes, and the family enjoys a happy Christmas morning.

There are really only two sequences of note, but they are very good sequences.  One is after the children have been put to bed and we get one of those random trippy montages that the 1960’s seemed to produce out of absolutely nowhere.  It’s decently integrated into the reality of the rest of the special by the camera dissolving into the patterns of the comforters on the children’s beds but we’ve still got swaying flowers with faces, bunny shenanigans, and random cherubs.  I’ve seen more disturbing imagery in children’s animations but it still comes rather out of nowhere.

The second is during the reading of the poem itself, which is done by a choir that changes the words of the poem in places to presumably scan better as lyrics.  Here we get the actions of the poem portrayed for the audience.  The entire sequence is given a much more cartoony feel than the rest of the special, with slapstick physics and big-eyed animals with clothes.  It’s a story being told to an explicitly delirious little girl which makes the fanciful imagery tonally a little odd, but I think it works.  At one point a mouse tucks her children into bed and then is flipped up into a stocking by the tail of a sleeping cat, that sort of thing.  The narrator as he appears in the story also has traditional exaggerated cartoon features not seen in the rest of the special, and of course since this is in-universe a story being told the Santa magic is presented as completely factual.  At the end of the sequence the girl is of course almost fully recovered and proclaims she had such a dream, although I do like that the next morning she’s still slightly ill and is carried around by her parents.  The cartoon is full of unnecessarily thought-out little touches like that.

That’s really about all there is to it.  Aside from an unclear premise there’s very little wrong with this special and there are a number of things it does right.  The fact that the story is almost entirely untrue, from the circumstances of the poem’s composition to the size of the family (three total children instead of the six he had at the time), is completely immaterial.  If we’re going down the road of ‘what were they trying to say with this special’ I think here we hit a fairly uninteresting cul-de-sac, I’m pretty sure they just thought this was an interesting story they could sell into perpetual syndication and were wrong.  Or maybe they just wanted to make children watch as worried adults huddled helplessly around the bed of a babbling, delirious little girl, it takes all kinds.  Any padding involves a cute dog or a cute kid so you don’t mind, the songs are decent enough for the time (although there’s a very ‘time filler between scenes of a Lawrence Welk special’ feel to them), and while there are anthropomorphized animals they are explicitly part of a child’s fever dream and therefore completely excusable.  If nothing else the Santa shown on screen isn’t the disturbingly mustache-free version from the Rankin Bass special ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.’  Never getting that imagery out of my head.

Davey and Goliath Christmas Lost and Found (1965)

“Davey and Goliath” was a show that premiered in 1961 following the success of “Gumby” by fellow creator Art Clokey.  Starring a Claymation boy named Davey and his talking (but only to him) pet dog Goliath, it was produced by the United Lutheran Church in America in an effort to provide moral guidance to the nation’s children.  It told short, simple morality tales over the course of 39 fifteen-minute episodes between 1961 and 1964.  Although religious in nature it was never explicitly Lutheran in its message, aside from some musical and visual cues.  In December 1965 the first half-hour episode aired, a Christmas special more overtly religious than previous episodes but still relatively non-denominational.

The premise of the entire special is that Davey isn’t feeling the Christmas spirit and keeps trying to find it in various unsuccessful ways.  Decorating, buying presents, putting together a nativity play, none of these efforts get him to feel the way he thinks he’s supposed to be feeling.  There’s a key moment where he hopes that opening his Christmas presents will have him feeling the “right Christmas feelings.”  We’ll circle back around to that.  His sister has no such trouble and is constantly berating him to keep trying while Goliath is more sympathetic but also insists he should keep at it.  Through continued effort and an eventual spontaneous good deed for a newly made friend he comes to understand the true meaning of Christmas.

There’s a very easy way to twist the narrative of this special into something sinister.  With basically no effort at all this can all be reframed as someone raised in a fundamentalist or even cult-like environment starting to question beliefs he’s been fed since essentially birth and being pressured by the community around him to abandon those doubts and fall in line, eventually convincing himself into succumbing.  At no point is it an option to simply abandon the effort to acquire this nebulous ‘Christmas spirit,’ instead this struggle is always presented as something that everyone around him finds not only perplexing as a concept but agrees is a personal failing of Davey himself.  His eventual personal revelation is exactly in line with what everyone has been pressuring him to believe and he is explicitly welcomed back into the fold through his public affirmation of the collective’s beliefs.

The behaviors he engages in to acquire this Christmas spirit are those deemed ‘correct’ by his community: buying presents, decorating his living space, collaborating with his peers to reenact an historical event deemed central to their agreed narrative, all activities that emphasis fitting in and conforming to the expectations of those around him.  None of these things seem to bring him any real pleasure or spring from a spontaneous desire from within but are those deemed necessary by the group.  He reflects after each one and finds no solace, only an inner hollowness that continues to gnaw away at him, driving him further into despair until at his lowest point he is curled weeping upon his bed.

There’s also the behavior of his little sister Sally, which is intended to be reassuring to the audience but often comes across as vaguely menacing.  Her devotion to the creche in the family living room starts as charming but increasingly comes across as slavish and slightly unhinged as the special progresses.  It begins innocently enough, with her first actions in the special announcing she’s going to set it up, with Davey voicing his skepticism of its necessity before leaving the room.  Upon his return she’s almost finished it and after learning he’s still not ‘feeling’ Christmas she insists he look ever closer and closer at the creche, claiming that merely looking upon it will solve his internal struggle.  In a later scene she sings by herself to the creche and when Davey starts talking to her she pointedly ignores him until she’s done, not even acknowledging he’s in the room.  At the end of the special, after Davey’s learned his eventual lesson and he runs to that same creche to say he now understands and loves Christmas, suddenly his sister and all the other characters are on the other side of the living room window, watching him, and make him say it again, louder, to reaffirm he’s one of them again.

Like I said, super easy, including having Goliath, which only Davey can hear talk, being the externalization of this conformist mindset so Davey can have someone to argue with safely without fearing repercussions from humans, all of that.  But honestly to frame it as this over is dismissive when I think something more complicated is going on.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen such a sincere effort at delivering a non-garbage morality tale to children.  Although he is chided about not feeling The Christmas Spirit and encouraged to keep trying he’s never in trouble for it or socially ostracized, it is seen as a problem but one he’s encouraged to keep finding an answer for himself.  And although I don’t entirely follow the moral logic of the ending it’s not that bad of a message.  At the beginning of the special we are introduced to a new kid in town manning the Christmas tree lot, put there by a never-seen father.  He and Davey grow increasingly friendly over the course of the special and although he would like to join in with the kid’s nativity play his obligations at the lot keep him from doing so.  On his way to finally perform the play Davey decides to let the new kid take his place and mans the lot in his stead.  I have a lot to say about an absent father forcing his child to run a tree lot by himself and the likelihood of anyone buying a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve (which someone does, two in fact, since Davey hard sells the guy), but that’s a different set of complaints.  Essentially the message boils down to being nice to others like God was nice to us with Jesus, which in a Christian context is fair enough.

It wasn’t until the second watch that a creeping sense of unease began to grow.  The special opens with Davey basically looking directly into the camera and saying, “I hate Christmas.”  In most Christmas specials this is the starting point of the villain, here it’s the main character, the one us kids are supposed to identify with.  And keep in mind this is explicitly a television show made by adults to teach moral lessons to children, so we need to ask what the intentions of the makers were by doing this.  The ostensible lesson taught by the end is fine enough, the true meaning of Christmas is kindness to others, but did they have to lean in so very hard on the existential dread gnawing at Davey’s heart?  I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic here; he’s continually show to be miserable, at one point he literally runs from decorating a Christmas tree to collapse on his bed in tears.

If we’re meant to identify with Davey, then the function of the special must be to teach a lesson to children who are old enough to start needing more from their religion than just ‘because we say so.’  Presents works for a while to justify all the pageantry, then you can use the story of the Baby Jeebs for a few more years, but eventually kids start to grow up and need some actual substantial reason why they get dragged to church once a week.  As shown in the special Davey is the only person with any kind of internal life, all the other children are shown as unquestioning and rather robotic.  Especially Sally, she does genuinely come off as slightly sinister.  The only one questioning anything is Davey, and honestly that can be pretty relatable.  A lot of kids feel like they’re the only ones who think they don’t feel like they’re supposed to feel and that everyone around them is just fine, regardless of the reality.

My unease grows from the fact that the people in charge of this special think they have the answers to those kinds of questions.  The ones they provide in this special, be kind to others and it’s the thought that counts, are about as good as one can come up with in a 29 minute Claymation special, but I’m struck by the confidence behind their ability to slowly manipulate lumps of clay over and over again while taking thousands upon thousands of incremental pictures with the explicit intention of using this process to tell children how to live the rest of their lives.  Advice is one thing, certainty based upon an eschatological understanding of the workings of the universe is another.  I have the sinking feeling that now that I’ve identified this unease I’m going to keep feeling it over and over again this season.

If nothing else this special is over five decades old so as a cultural artifact it’s fascinating.  A lot of the societal aspects are obviously dated, though not in a way that’s at all hateful.  Congrats to United Lutheran Church in America for prominently having some black kids in there.  I completely forgot about the existence of five-and-dime stores and the existence of loudspeaker-festooned trucks just wandering the streets announcing things.  If you’re against the Western monotheistic worldview in any fundamental way you’re going to be against this pretty much entirely but taken for what it is it’s a pretty well done Christmas special.  I’m not surprised it hasn’t become a timeless classic but I would consider it to be something that holds up fairly well after such a long time.  Just wish I could shake this creeping worry.