Category Archives: Holiday Horrors 2010

Holiday Horrors: Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny

Continuing the fabled tradition begun all the way back in 2009, Scratchbomb presents Holiday Horrors and Holiday Triumphs: an advent calendar of some of the more hideous aspects of this most stressful time of year–with a few bits of awesomeness sprinkled in.

santa&icbunny.jpgA few years ago, three gentlemen associated with Mystery Science Theater 3000 (Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett) started an online business closely related to their former endeavor called Rifftrax. They record audio tracks that you can download and play along with the hideous movie of your choice. This skirts one of MST3K’s biggest stumbling blocks: usage rights. Getting the rights to a movie like Avatar so it can be mocked in an MST3K-esque format is impossible, but nobody can prevent you from creating a commentary track for it.

Until very recently, I had not enjoyed any of Rifftrax’s products beyond a few YouTube clips. I knew they existed, I just hadn’t sought them out. I’d gone to see Cinematic Titanic–another group of bad movie riffers made up of MST3K alumni–live, but that’s because that group includes Joel Hodgson, and I would do his jail time if he asked me. Apart from that, I’ve stayed away from most of their post-MST3K endeavors, figuring they would pale in comparison with the originals.

However, within the last week or so, all of the Rifftrax guys tweeted about how they’d just released a full-length work, video and all, on an obscure holiday movie called Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny. Each of them described it in nigh-apocalyptic terms and shuddered with the memory of how punishing it was to watch this film.

Now, this is nothing new. I recall reading in some retrospective MST3K article that the cast, immersed in hideous cinema, would often protest that each week’s offering was the worst they’d ever seen. But then, I saw many tweets from several folks who watched this film and were stunned by its badness. So I gave myself an early Christmas present, purchased the Rifftrax disc, downloaded, and began to watch.

Look: We all know that Manos: The Hands of Fate is the worst movie ever made. It’s like the Bad Movie Speed of Light–a constant that can never be approached, let alone equaled. Only hypothetically can something achieve even a significant fraction of Manos‘ hideousness.

Well, it’s hypothetical no longer, because Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny is very, very close to Manos levels of WTFitude. I’d say it travels at about 95 percent the crazy-speed of Manos, a hitherto unheard of percentage.
Continue reading Holiday Horrors: Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny

Holiday Horrors: Traffic Reactions

Continuing the fabled tradition begun all the way back in 2009, Scratchbomb presents Holiday Horrors and Holiday Triumphs: an advent calendar of some of the more hideous aspects of this most stressful time of year–with a few bits of awesomeness sprinkled in.

gwb.jpgBad habits never emerge full blown. You pick them along your life’s journey, and they grow slowly, like mold, until one day you notice you’re covered in them.

I don’t really traditional vices (not to the point where they negatively impact my life, anyway), but I do have a problem with flying off the handle about dumb stuff. I like to say that I’m a good person to have around in a crisis and a terrible one to have around for petty annoyances.

If I had to guess why I do this (other than “I’m a dick”), I’m guessing it’s because said annoyances are often reflections of other people’s incompetence or stupidity. I find nothing more infuriating than being thwarted or inconvenienced because somebody else isn’t paying attention or doing their job the right way. It speaks of my overall fear of a loss of power and control. Hey, I have issues. We all do.

As a subset of this personality trait, I picked up a very bad habit years ago. I’m not exactly sure how; I think it stemmed from the years when I was either in a band or traveling often with friends’ bands to gigs. Getting stuck in traffic was a common feature of these trips. When that happened, the common refrain was, “I better see some bodies at the end of this.” The longer the traffic lasted, the more graphic the descriptions of these bodies would get. It helped pass the time in a frustrating situation and made me feel better, in a horrible, horrible way.

I had a girlfriend back then who would get really upset whenever I said something like this, and she would lecture me about how terrible it was to say stuff like this. “Won’t you feel awful if you get to the end and there’s a horrible accident causing it all?” I snorted these objections away, because in my experience to that point, 99 out of 100 traffic jams were caused by road work or people rubbernecking to see a fender bender, or something equally idiotic.

Flash forward several years. I’m driving up to my grandparents’ house on Christmas morning, trying to make my way to the George Washington Bridge by way of the FDR Drive. On most Christmas mornings, I’d have the road virtually to myself, but on this Yule, the traffic came to a screeching halt just past 125th Street.

I reacted to this with my usual grace and patience, which is to say I engaged my “there better be bodies on the road” setting. As the traffic crawled forward as a snail’s pace, my desire to see death got progressively more gruesome. I demanded severed limbs. Decapitations. Entrails hanging from tree limbs like tire swings.

And then I got to the source of the problem. A big, boaty American car of 1970s vintage had plowed into the divider between the GWB on-ramp and the north-bound FDR. Either the safety barrels’ effectiveness were grossly overstated, or the car had been going at an insane speed. Whatever the cause, the car’s entire front end–engine block, axle, and hood–was folded in on itself, and the windshield completely shattered.

The accident only involved one vehicle, so there was only one NYPD squad car and one fire truck on scene. The fireman stayed in their truck–there was no fire to extinguish–and one cop lazily waved traffic passed one blocked off lane. In that lane, another cop was just draping a sheet over a dead body.

It was just one body, with nothing close to the carnage I had been asking to see moments earlier. I didn’t see a single drop of blood. And yet I felt as sickened and guilty as if I were responsible for the accident, as if I had willed it to happen because of my childish, ghoulish impatience.

So I don’t do my “I better see dead bodies” routine any more. Sure, I’m still miserable to be around in a traffic jam, but not so miserable I wish hypothetical death on anyone. I just wish I could have broken myself of this bad habit without seeing AN ACTUAL DEATH. Or without making this ex-girlfriend piously and retroactively correct.

Holiday Horrors: Deep Cuts from Rankin/Bass

Continuing the fabled tradition begun all the way back in 2009, Scratchbomb presents Holiday Horrors and Holiday Triumphs: an advent calendar of some of the more hideous aspects of this most stressful time of year–with a few bits of awesomeness sprinkled in.

There are many artists known for one thing and one thing only. And that’s fine–how many people are known for nothing at all? If you can make one transcendent work that touches millions, that’s one more than most of us manage. If I had a choice, I’d pick one burst of brilliance over sustained mediocrity. (Last time I checked, I don’t get a choice.)

In the case of Rankin/Bass, the one thing they are known for is Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the triumph of stop-motion animation still beloved almost 50 years after its debut. They did many other holiday specials, but Rudolph is their crowning achievement.

Unfortunately, Rudolph was one of Rankin/Bass’s first productions. When you have such critical and financial success so early, the desire to innovate and expand is often drained. Over the years, Rankin/Bass made more stop-motion holiday specials, each of which looked like a copy of the previous production, until they were as strange and indecipherable as a seventh generation Xerox.

Truth be told, there’s some odd things in Rudolph, like Hermey the Elf’s desire to be a dentist, and Yukon Cornelius, and The Island of Misfit Toys. For the most part, this weirdness is offset by enough charm and goofiness and quality tunes to make the weirdness simply part of a larger quilt.

But in each subsequent special, the weirdness was pushed to the forefront, until the weirdness was the canvas on which the characters were painted, not the other way around. It’s fitting that many of these specials were animated in Japan, because there is a bizarre, foreign feel to the plots and humor of many of the latter-day specials not unlike the kind you see in many Japanese TV shows. Whoever wrote these shows attempted to marry the complicated plots of screwball comedy to the psychedelic-tinged nightmares of Sid and Marty Krofft, with predictable results.

I remember hearing about these other shows as a kid, but by that point they’d mostly been taken out of the annual Christmas special rotation. It’s probably best I didn’t see most of these when I was young, because I have a distinct memory of the one time I did. I was staying at my aunt’s house in Queens while my parents had to go see lawyers about my recently deceased grandparents’ estate (such as it was). There wasn’t much kid-stuff in the house, so I just watched TV, and this afternoon they showed Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, a weird tale about Kris Kringle’s origins that crosses into some bizarre territory. For instance, there’s a scene Santa and Mrs. Claus marry each other in the woods without benefit of a justice of the peace like a bunch of damn hippies. The weirdness of the show, combined with being away from my mom and in a house I didn’t know well with no fun Kid Stuff in it on a cold, gray, wintery day, gave me a kind of lonesomeness that only children know.

Last year, I wrote a bit about the fever dream that is Rudolph’s Shiny New Year. The campy/bizarre A Year Without Santa Claus has reentered the Christmas canon in the last few years, to the point where I’ve heard swing cover versions of the Heat Miser/Snow Miser song (seriously). As strange as these specials are, I saw a few obscure Rankin-Bass specials this weekend that make their kookadookery pale in comparison.

The first one was Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July, a feature-length special from 1979. Admittedly, I only saw the last 15 minutes or so, but I can’t imagine it would have made much more sense if I’d seen the whole thing. It apparently involved some sort of traveling carnival headed by Ethel Mirman, so right away…yeah.

treewizard.jpgWhen I tuned in, Rudolph was in the process of rescuing Frosty’s magic hat so he could thwart the machinations of an evil winter wizard. Said wizard tries to exact revenge on Rudolph, but Ethel Mirman smashes his crystal ball, which makes him transform into a tree, in a scene that’s a little too disturbing for a kids’ show.

Not as disturbing, however, as what would follow. Because the wizard had been vanquished, all the spells he cast were undone, including one that allowed Frosty and his family to be outside in the summer and not melt.
So the very next thing you see are Frosty, his wife, and TWO SNOW-KIDS TURNED INTO PUDDLES. Merry Christmas! Sure, they are soon rescued by Jack Frost (more on him shortly), but good lord. That was upsetting to me as an adult; I can’t imagine how Kid Me would have handled it.

Now, onto Jack Frost, also from 1979. I watched this entire thing, and I still have no idea what I saw. I didn’t view it so much as allow it to pass over me like a marauding army, hoping I could just wait out the carnage.

Jack Frost employs a weird framing device that revolves around a famous groundhog (Pardon-Me-Pete) voiced by Buddy Hackett, who narrates the special because he’s best buds with Jack. This puts the special behind the 8-ball immediately, because Hackett is not an ideal choice to narrate anything. He sounds like a more butch Truman Capote after getting stung in the mouth by a swarm of wasps.

jackfrost.jpgIn Jack Frost, the titular character is a mystical sprite who makes winter happen for a poor, benighted town of presumed Eastern European location (as implied by the proliferation of Boris and Natasha accents). They are ruled with an iron fist by a tyrannical Cossack (because Cossacks are hilarious) named King Kubla Kraus and his army of ironclad assistants. Jack falls in love with one of town’s comely young lasses and is allowed turn into a human in an attempt to woo her. He can remain human as long as he maintains certain arbitrary benchmarks of wealth and wooing success by the time spring rolls around.

This is all fairly standard by Christmas special standards, but I’m sanding down a lot of really sharp edges. Because these details are sprinkled amongst a sea of exposition, stiff song stylings, and Buddy Hackett’s insufferable narration. There’s a lot of details about Jack Frost’s celestial home, which contains other sprites who make snowflakes and “snow gypsies” who distribute them. There’s Jack’s curious decision, once he becomes a human, to pretend to be a tailor, which has almost no relevance to anything. And then there’s Kubla Kraus’s clanking minions, who stumble around at great length but to little effect.

And this is only what I can remember. Following Jack Frost was like trying to keep up with a conversation as your cell phone service drops in and out, and you can only catch every third word. Every time some other detail of the plot was “explained,” I’d turn to my my wife and saying something to the effect of “…the hell?” And then I’d miss the next detail, leaving me even further behind than before. I don’t think Jack Frost made me any dumber, but it certainly made me feel like I was.

But Jack Frost gets the girl and lives happily ever after, right? Actually, while he’s away saving this vaguely Slavic village from something or other, his special lady friend falls in love with a knight and they get married. So Jack Frost becomes a sprite again and returns to his snowy home in the clouds. Hooray?

The producers try to tie a nice little bow on it by bringing back Pardon-Me-Pete for a jokey ending. But unless you have a Memento-like inability to make new memories, or can find Buddy Hackett comprehensible in any way, you’re left with the feeling that what little bit of the show you could understand was intensely depressing.

The crazy thing is, Rankin/Bass went on to make more stop-motion holiday specials well into the 1980s, the last one 1985’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. If what Wikipedia has to say about this show is any indication, it was far darker than anything Jack Frost could conjure up.

In this story, the Great Ak summons a council of the Immortals to bestow upon a dying Claus the Mantle of Immortality. To make his case, the Great Ak tells Claus’s life story, from his discovery as a foundling in the magical forest and his raising by Immortals, through his education by the Great Ak in the harsh realities of the human world and his acceptance of his destiny to struggle to bring joy to children.

Hey kids, let’s watch this show where Santa’s gets really old and dies! I hear it’s narrated by Art Linkletter!