Underrated Christmas Specials, pt. 2: WILL VINTON'S CLAYMATION CHRISTMAS CELEBRATION

Premiering with A Garfield Christmas Special in 1987, Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas Celebration is another underrated gem of a television special. My home video (again, thanks Dad) must have been recorded the night both premiered as they are back-to-back on the tape, still including those fabulous ‘80s Christmas commercials.

Before stop motion made a quasi-comeback with Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, the ‘80s was replete with advertising and merchandise by Will Vinton’s clay animation (Claymation), most prominently with the success of his “group” The California Raisins, who famously sang Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it through the Grapevine.”

Vinton was an Academy and Emmy Award-winning animator who came to fame with when his Raisins began promoting Sun-Maid. Though largely forgotten now, Vinton created brilliant ad campaigns and, in some ways, his creations were perfect for a Christmas special, in some ways echoing the stop-motion folks classics from the Rankin-Bass group (Santa Claus is Coming to Town, etc.)

Claymation Christmas is a delight—full of music, comedy, and (of course) a special performance of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by those anthropomorphic shriveled grapes. The special is hosted by two dinosaurs—Rex, a serious emcee who is continually annoyed by his co-host Herb, who wants nothing more than to eat his way through the holidays. This begins a running gag in which Herb refuses to believe the lyrics to the famous carol is “Here We Come A-wassailing” as different karts of holiday food arrive in the town square with characters singing variations: “Here We Come a-” “Waffling” (dogs peddling waffles), “Waddling” (geese bringing in goody baskets), and “Wallowing” (pigs with fruit). Herb’s shenanigans aside, Rex tries to keep calm and collected as he introduces a bevy of musical numbers that are, each in their own right, classic.

My personal favorite is the rendition of “We Three Kings.” Each Magi (traditionally named Balthazar, Caspar, and Melchior) sings his verse (with the corresponding gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh) in reverent, staid fashion only to be interrupted by a doo-wop singing trio of their camels jazzing up the number on the chorus. While the jazz riff is funny, the animation of the verses is respectful and even brings an air of mystery to the nativity story.

Perhaps the funniest sketch involves a performance of “Carol of the Bells” played by a self-clapping orchestra of “bells” all under the baton of Quasimodo, for some reason, at the Notre Dame cathedral. One bell is just not paying attention, smacking himself at the wrong time trying to swat a fly, trying to steal another bell’s mallet when he discards his. Quasimodo gets progressively frustrated at the fledgling musician. As the rogue bell is the last note of the piece, the hunchback takes matters into his own hands and rings him with a slingshot before he takes his bow.

While specials today may be wall-to-wall comedy with little in the way of the spirit of the holiday, this special takes its time and presents some songs straight, rendering moving graphics at the same time. “O Christmas Tree” is a particular delight. We begin with two children marveling at their tree. As we zoom in on one of their ornaments, we begin an odyssey into various adornments that bring us into several living rooms— scenes of families preparing for and sharing at Christmastime.

I wonder if kids today have the attention span for some of these more reserved segments. I remember trying to show The Muppet Christmas Carol to a class of sixth graders in the mid-2010s to which they responded, “This is ancient!” Ah, well. Times change. What was fur and clay has become digital and doofy. What can you do?

Another reverent segment is a tribute to African American worship with a version of “Joy to the World.” This segment, while beautifully drawn, is not Claymation, but shifting panels of stained-glass images exquisitely celebrating family, children, and the central story of Christmas. I remember being awed by these segments as much as delighted by the funny ones.

As a child, my parents turned the living room and den into holiday wonderlands. Almost every surface was covered with decorations, both religious and secular. I would spend hours in the den, lit only by decorations, dazzled by the effect. There’s something of that feeling in the more tender moments which, of course, evens out the comical ones.

Two more funny segments remain: “Angels We Have Heard on High” is an instrumental in which a couple of walruses perform an ice ballet to the chagrin of a group of penguins who keep getting bruised up in the process. Finally, of course, the Raisins perform their own version of “Rudolph.” Legendary singer/drummer Buddy Miles, who played for Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana, was the lead singer of the Raisins, whose Motown-style are always a pleasure to listen to and watch. “Hey, Rudolph—come on and guide my sleigh” they riff as they create a makeshift Santa sleigh to rise to the skies and get home for the holidays.

The true meaning of “wassailing” is finally revealed to Herb, who has gained fifty pounds in the result of the 22-minute special gorging himself and the special ends with the Claymation critters in the square singing, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.”

While never as popular as Charlie Brown or Garfield, Vinton’s animation holds up and creates a special with many moods—all of which are pleasant, tuneful, and fun. As with Garfield, you can find the special on Youtube. Give it a shot—and get ready for two more recommendations as we continue in the holiday season!

Underrated Christmas Specials, pt. 1: A GARFIELD CHRISTMAS SPECIAL

Welcome to the holiday season. In my lifetime, Christmas has gone from something you might start celebrating the day after Thanksgiving to something you start just whenever you want to: in November or maybe even earlier. The reasoning I hear a lot is, “Thanksgiving is a day; Christmas is a season.” Technically, that’s true. But the Christmas season traditionally begins the day of Christmas. Right now, we find ourselves in the season of Advent, but in a mostly evangelical country, the old Christian calendar is not as well known.

That being said, I found myself kind of craving Christmas this year and even had some carols in my head back in the summer—“Christmas in July.” Perhaps I’ve looked forward to it more because of the stress and strain of this year. But, continuing in the spirit of the season of Christmas, I thought December would be a good time to look at some underrated and personal favorite Christmas specials from the boob tube. Some, I hope, may jog memories for you too, if you happen to be of or near my generation.

My father was fairly hip to VHS technology in the ‘80s. He loved recording us with those cameras you had to tarry on your shoulder or set on a tripod they were so heavy. He also recorded many Christmas classics from television for me, including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I’ve never bought official DVDs of them because I love getting out the old VHS tapes from the late ‘80s-early ‘90s and watching them as I have my whole life. Even with the increasingly poor quality, you get to see a snapshot of time: when were then shorter commercial breaks with more creative ads that themselves are booming with nostalgia, the images of which are ingrained in me just as much as the freckles on my forearms.

I first wanted to dig into the criminally underrated A Garfield Christmas Special from 1987. The deadpan, sarcastic feline first appeared in comic strips in the mid-seventies from creator Jim Davis. Arguably, on the same level as the work of Charles Shulz, his strip (first called Jon, then Garfield) translated perfectly into animated cartoons, reaching their apotheosis in the Saturday morning TV series Garfield and Friends. 

A Garfield Christmas Special, directed by Phil Roman and voiced by the legends Lorenzo Music and Pat Carroll (the original, ahem, only, Ursula from The Little Mermaid), was an autobiographical effort from Davis, who wrote the teleplay. The special also included songs sung by, among others, the late great Lou Rawls.

The special begins with a dream sequence where Jon presents Garfield with a machine that will give him any gift he dreams up. This rapture is quickly dissipated when Garfield wakes up to Jon announcing they’re heading back to his family farm to visit his parents and sibling for Christmas. The dialogue alone in the first scene is hysterical, even today.

“We’re gonna pack up our presents and go to the farm for Christmas. Won’t that be fun?” Jon asks, to which Garfield replies, “You’ve got a real sick sense of humor, Jon.” Jon counters, “The whole family’s going to be there. Dad, Mom, Grandma, and Doc Boy…” to which Garfield retorts, “…and Good Boy and Bad Boy and Oh Boy and Atta Boy and…”

When I see a lot of children’s television today, there may be some misplaced meanness (mostly at the expense of parental characters), but Garfield’s particular tone of ho-hummery, especially voiced by Music, is genuinely funny while still having a bite that children in the ‘80s apparently could handle but would apparently displease the so-called “parents” of today. While I never saw the “live action” Garfield movies, Bill Murray was, in a way, the perfect choice to voice our favorite orange cat. His early comic success depended on a harmless but cutting sarcasm that turned many off at first, but then became a trademark style that launched him into a successful second career as a serious dramatic actor, without ever really leaving behind his trademark persona—including a face with a sort of deep pessimism about the world but without cynicism. A great sarcastic cutting remark, if not cynical, can be joyous.

Garfield, Jon, and Odie do indeed pack up the roadster and this leads to our second musical number, probably the best in the special, “Can’t Wait ‘til Christmas,” which is one of many jaunty traveling numbers in animation, like the “On the Open Road” sequence in A Goofy Movie—tuneful and funny. Jon reminisces about how the family would celebrate. He sings, “Decorating the tree!” which Garfield describes as “Gardening.” Jon: “Wiring all of the lights!” Garfield: “Electrical contracting.” Garfield, of course, does not see the joy of the season, ending the song with, “Wake me when it’s through.”

Jon’s family, all voiced and animated perfectly, are charming. Doc Boy, the brother who apparently still lives at home, has a relatively small part, but shines in it. When he is asked to bless the food, he reluctantly complies, at first struggling to come up with anything, but when he gets going, his prayer becomes more florid and verbose, leaving him with a smack on the head as they begin to eat.

Typical Christmas shenanigans follow—reading a Christmas story, singing carols, opening presents. But the sweet stuff pretty much all involves the lovable Odie and Grandma. Odie spends the special making covert missions to the barn to collect random items for which purpose Garfield doesn’t yet know. Grandma, a feisty and sidesplitting woman who dares Jon to give her a punch in the stomach to show she’s as tough as ever, becomes Garfield’s idol. A particularly sweet scene, where she pets him while he sits in her lap, reveals how much she misses her deceased husband. 

When Garfield follows Odie to find out what he’s up to in the barn, he stumbles upon Grandma and Grandpa’s love letters, which he gives to her as a gift. It turns out Odie was assembling a homemade back scratcher for Garfield, which touches him. The overriding message of the special is summed up by Garfield: “Christmas: it’s not the giving, it’s not the getting—it’s the loving,” followed by a beautiful encapsulation of his character: “There, I said it. Now, get outta here.”

In a way, I find this overall theme more prescient today than even the one proffered by A Charlie Brown Christmas. While I personally honor the religious significance of the holiday, Linus telling the Christmas story without context and having nothing apropos to do with the special itself, is sweet but unfulfilling. Garfield’s message, on the other hand, is timeless and a payoff to a special that is geared toward that line. Christmas indeed should be about the loving, and in a hurting world, that is a message we need now more than ever.

It may seem like I’m overselling it but trust me that A Garfield Christmas Special has equal parts laughter and sentiment, both used to astonishing effect. That really can’t be said about A Charlie Brown Christmas, which expresses sentimentality over sentiment. This is not to denigrate Charlie Brown. It’s still a classic, but I would rather have the cutting jibe of Garfield than the morose whining of Charlie any day.

Stay tuned as, over the next three weeks, we’ll look at some more underrated specials that you might be able to find on streaming services to supplement the Rankin-Bass stuff.

You can watch the entire special on Youtube!

Native Children

In the early 2000s, I inherited a book collection from my former theatre teacher. It was a virtual treasure trove of hardcover and paperback classics of the theatre, covering everything from Greek tragedy to the best of the 20th century. One volume, with a copyright date of 1920, was particularly interesting because it was an anthology of “best American plays.” I knew there were really no great American plays before the work of Eugene O’Neill, so I wondered what on earth the volume contained. Indeed, the last work in the collection was O’Neill’s first Pulitzer winner Beyond the Horizon, but John Gassner’s anthology attempted to bring together all the important early American plays, which don’t hold up to today’s standards, but nevertheless contained an old American play on the subject of Pocahontas, one of my favorite myths, legends, historical stories of America.

Custis

The play in question was Pocahontas, or The Settlers of Virginia (1830) by George Washington Parke Custis. Custis was the adopted son of our first President and, after a successful voluntary career in the military, became a noted orator and playwright. His plays were typical of the time—bombastic, melodramatic dialogue, skimpy to ensure there was much time for special effects and, of course, all the tropes about Native Americans we wince at today. After all, we’re talking about a Pre-Civil War Southern playwright writing about race relations.

But there was more to it than that. The story of Jamestown really is our nation’s first great story of culture clash in a country that continues to clash over one thing or another. Also, Custis’ work was anthologized because his Pocahontas play improved over past ones which were more historically accurate, but anticlimactic because Pocahontas’ saving of Smith (probably not a true event) came as the climax of the play rather than in the first act.

There was a lot there that could be used for further adaptation. The story of Pocahontas has taken on legendary status and no dramatic rendition can be historically accurate because our information is so full of holes and come from sources that play it up into “legendary” status. Yet, I’ve found each version of Pocahontas does something interesting and even reveals aspects of the historical truth, though they’ve not all been synthesized in one single dramatic work.

THE NEW WORLD

Disney’s 1995 Pocahontas has all the dwellings of the Powhatan people facing east as they would have been (though it gets almost everything else geographically wrong). Terrence Malick’s masterpiece The New World (2005) attempted to rebuild the Algonquin language. And then there’s Custis’ work, which reveals the polygamous and religious side of the Powhatan confederacy. It also smartly solved the problem of the Natives and English not understanding each other.

He included a fictional character named Barclay, who is the last surviving remnant of a lost colony, like Roanoke (my other favorite early American historical story). He has been kept by Powhatan Wahunsenacawh to teach his people the ways of the English so they can be better prepared for future explorers. Of course, there is nothing historical about any of this, but it does keep one from solving the language barrier by magic leaves or something else tedious (ahem, Disney).

I had initially intended on my version of Custis’ work to be played by adults and perhaps, since the play is set in 1607, creating it in the style of an Elizabethan play where a small cast performs multiple roles on a Globe Theater-like setting. But only scant fragments, including the opening scene, were ever written down and it seemed like I was in no hurry to finish it.

Reading of CHILDREN

Cut to the early 2010s and I am teaching theatre at a high school in Jefferson County, Alabama. I need large-cast plays to show off the talents of my students, who I loved and were wonderful—so good in fact that, by my second year, I established a Classics Unit which would perform slightly more challenging plays. The impetus of this began when, in my first year, we held a concert reading of the first draft of my new play Cry of the Native Children, which retained exactly one line of Custis’ original (used ironically) and was changed from a three act play for adults to a long one act suited for high schools and community theaters.

Feedback from the reading, overall, was strong though I don’t know if the community fully understood what was happening as it is unusual for a high school to mount a new play. The reading gave me a sense of changes that could be made and, by year 2, I had a slightly expanded draft that brought in so many characters that everyone who auditioned ended up in the cast. One was even added as I saw fit to use a historical character who gets little credence, the Powhatan’s brother Opechancanough, who was an important political figure.

Climax

Native Children (which we called Native Chicken for fun in rehearsals) would be mounted in the Winter of 2011 at the high school and then tour to play the last slot of that year’s Thespians Festival at Troy University. As rehearsals barreled toward us, any notion of historical costuming or scenery went out the window. Since we were already teeter-tottering on eggshells by having Caucasian and African American students playing Native roles, it seemed more in line to have an experimental show. The “tribes” wore all white and all black, the Natives wearing white so as not to give the impression that either character group color stood for "good" or "bad." It had always been my contention that the story couldn’t just stomp on the actions of the English (though that would have been easy enough to do) but should be more overall anti-violence, pro-discussion, between two people who are at war.

Dance

We also went several steps further—we performed the play on a bare space with the stage walls in full view. The only scenic elements were three periaktoid towers which could be moved together or separately to denote certain playing areas. They were painted on all three sides and could transform into the inside of a Native dwelling to the forests, etc. An original rock score was composed by Justin McElroy, who also had to put together music for a Native dance that became everyone’s favorite part of the show. Fluorescent make-up, strobe and black lighting, and representative weapons finished out the show’s technical elements.

The play does establish the Powhatan as polygamous with various names, including secret ones. Pocahontas was the nickname of Amunote, secretly named Matoaka, and later, after her marriage and conversion, Rebecca. The religions of each tribe were given equal time and examination, and Barclay became my favorite character, wryly commenting on the actions bringing a social critique of the events. Native Children was a success at the high school and now it was time to take it on tour.

Thespians Festival Bows

We made it to South Alabama and, as we were slated for the last Sunday morning session, I wasn’t expecting a lot of folks to stay around. But a crowded house and the restoration of a more risqué closing line, made the experience sort of the crowning point of my time teaching high school theatre. I’m ashamed of it, but I’m often uncomfortable watching my own plays with an audience. Yet, I never missed a performance of Native Children. It was a perfect synthesis of an excited and talented cast, some really interesting new directions for the company technically, and a play we all genuinely liked.

Full NATIVE CHILDREN Cast

Eventually the script was published and is available for license from Eldridge Plays and Musicals, which also publishes my translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the first show of our 2nd season. Unfortunately, it was published with my old pseudonym Robert Cole. It has not seen productions since, I think, because of the enormous number of men required. By beginning my tenure at the high school directing Grease, I never wanted for men, and I think most schools struggle with this, though I would not mind it being performed gender blind as well as racially blind. In the published version, I encourage any company who can to cast Native actors and our production did include one Mexican-indigenous performer.

'Til this day, Native Children my favorite production of one my plays and I was smart enough to film it for preservation. For more info on how to purchase the script or perform the play, visit Eldridge’s website.