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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.

A 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.

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.

Bad 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.

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.

When 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.

In 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!

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.

Much like the Teenage Metal Eggnog entry in this series, I actually think the subject of today's feature is awesome, but I'm putting it amongst the horror because that is where I'm sure it would like to be.

It is The Chrisfits, a Yule-themed Misfits cover band. Although "cover band" doesn't quite fit the bill. They actually write new lyrics and, in many cases, apply seasonal instrumentation to them. Witness this repurposing of "Astro Zombies," entitled "Astro Tidings" and performed with a more gentle arrangement than the original.



But they also do more Misfit-y renditions, like in this tune called "Yuletide Business."



There's not whole lot of info out there about The Chrisfits, beyond what's on their MySpace page. They are apparently from Alberta and list among their influences Burl Ives and figgy pudding. But you know what? I don't need to know anything else about these guys. Just the fact that there's a Christmas-themed Misfits cover band out there is enough make me believe in the Christmas spirit again.

And while we're on the subject, here's audio of the real Misfits performing a rendition of "Blue Christmas" into "We are 138".

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.

While perusing through some digitzed VHS tapes, I ran across an ad for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze on home video. I contemplated using it as a Holiday Horror entry, mostly for shamful nostalgia reasons.

See, I used to love TMNT, even though I was a little too old to be into it during its heyday. It was probably the last gasp of my "I will watch anything on TV aimed at kids" phase. In retrospect, two things baffle me: 1) Why the cartoon was so insanely different from the original comic book, and 2) Why I kept watching this show well after I got into said comic books. In its original form, TMNT was weird, dark, and vaguely reminiscent of Japanese martial arts movies. The cartoon was goofy and centered around pizza and surfer lingo--and of course was a monster hit among kids during the First Bush administration years.

Unfortunately, the tape that had this commercial was not in the best shape. It looked pretty bad on my computer and even worse when exported to a YouTube-able form. So on a whim, I searched around the interwebs for some TMNT-Christmas stuff. Surely something that was once so huge had tried to cash in on the holidays.

As it turns out, they did. In 1994--well after the height of their popularity--TMNT was responsible a straight-to-video special called We Wish You a Turtle Christmas. That is not a promising title, but the special somehow manages to crawl under even this low bar, with plenty of room to spare. I agree with the sentiments expressed at X-Entertainment*: "You could put my dick in one of those vices they screw on to the tables in middle school woodshop...I still won't watch it again."

* I used to read X-Entertainment religiously, yet somehow had never read their takedown of this monstrosity until now. Don't ask me how that happened.

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.

Admittedly, I am stretching the definition of "horrors" pretty wide for today's entry. This is more like a petty annoyance. A very petty one, in fact. But I wouldn't want to live in a world where I wasn't allowed to be petty now and then.

The subjects of my ire are the Hyundai ads with a twee musical couple called Pomplamoose (seriously?) doing precious renditions of holiday songs. They're a poor man's version of She and Him. If you think Belle and Sebastian is a bit too macho, this is the group for you.


Is there holiday stuff out there worse than this? Of course, much, much worse. But the cutesy quality of this is song is so grating, it's like being bludgeoned with marshmallow Peeps. It's so fey and convinced of its own cleverness, it's like a New York Times subscription ad turned into music. I find it uncomfortable and annoying, but in a really gentle way, like being softly tickled by someone I don't like while stuffed in a Whole Foods tote bag.

And it's forcing me to stretch my Simile Powers to their breaking points. So boo, Hyundai. Be gone, and never darken my towels again.

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.

We live in the golden age of the Local Kook. Once upon a time, if there was some wacky eccentric in your town, he or she would toil away in tin-foil-hatted obscurity. But nowadays, even the most obscure nuts can make it big on the interwebs.

One such example: Jan Terri, a Windy City resident who fancies herself a songwriter and performer. She also makes videos for these songs. Really bad videos, apparently shot on a camcorder. Said videos became something of an internet sensation a few years back, and she has many online devotees, some of them unironic ones.

She has more range than her fellow Chicagoan, Wesley Willis, but a similarly myopic view of the world. All of her videos are padded out with odd, seemingly endless shots of random buildings. She films herself on location for no discernible reason. And the videos are edited about as well as camcorder footage can be edited, which is to say, hatchet-like.

Among her many oeuvres is a Christmas tune called "Rock n Roll Santa." Truth be told, this is not a bad song, musically. You will hear much, much worse tunes at the mall during the holidays. Unfotunately, Ms. Terri is not a gifted lyricist, or a singer. In penning verses, she's closer to the aforementioned Mr. Willis than Ira Gershwin. In voice, too, sadly. I don't know if Ira could carry tune, but he'd have to be better than Terri, since virtually everyone is.

I struggled over whether I should include this in the Holiday Horrors category. When it comes to found video stuff like this, I always wonder if mocking it says more about the mocker than the mockee. Clearly, Terri and her cohorts are having a blast making this video. Who am I to make fun of this, like I'm such a big shot? (Last sentence written by my mom.)

Ultimately, I decided that this could not go into the Holiday Triumphs because, at the end of the day, it's too weird not to be some form of Horror. So in that spirit, here's some horror!

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.

What's worse than viral video fame? Trying to explain or capitalize on viral video fame. It's some horrible ghetto of actual fame, where there's nothing but tenements and liquor stores, and all the Chinese takeout joints have bulletproof glass and caroussels.

About three years ago, someone posted a video on YouTube that billed itself "the worst version ever" of "O Holy Night." Listen to it and it's hard to disagree.



This rendition of the classic hymn quickly achieved Grape Stomp Lady-levels of internet infamy, with people posting their own videos of themselves lip syncing it and even playing it on the radio as a joke.

Well, it turns out the person who performed this song was unhappy. Not that he was being made fun of, but that he wasn't getting credit for his work. So he posted his own YouTube video to prove it was him. The man's name is Steve Mauldin, and he had arranged "O Holy Night" for a church group.

In this video, he goes to very long, very earnest lengths to prove his bona fides, and to also insinuate that he'd done the original song in jest. I believe this about as much I believe Tommy Wiseau when he says he meant The Room to be a comedy.

Watching Mr. Mauldin's video, I'm struck by what Fame can do to people. Being known for this song is fame the way McRibs are food, and Mr. Mauldin does not seem at all like the kind of person who'd even aspire to notoriety. And yet, when confronted with the choice between remaining anonymous or known for singing the worst Christmas song ever, he chose "fame." And if this earnest, humble man can be so easily corrupted, whither goest us?

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.

The internet is great because literally anyone can have their voice heard. The internet is also terrible because literally anyone can have their voice heard. People with terrible voices that should probably caged and studied, not exposed to the general public.

Speaking of which, do you know Fred Figglehorn? He's a YouTube sensation. How do you become a YouTube sensation? Speed up your voice to a pitch that only eight-year-olds can tolerate. Then watch the cash roll in!

Yes, technically you don't make any money off of YouTube videos. But you do earn a lot of attention when a million-plus people subscribe to your YouTube channel. And when you create a movie for Nickelodeon that pulls in near-High School Musical ratings, despite having no discernible plot or a main character who is bearable for more than five seconds at a time.

Why did Fred become so popular? Did I mention the sped-up voice? Good, because that's pretty much it. Imagine a 15-year-old Demetri Martin sucking helium and pretending he was six. Then take whatever you're imagining and shake it until it's dizzy, and then microwave it. Now you're getting close.

If you watch the Fred videos, you will see small kernels of ideas and creativity in them. Unfortunately, these ideas placed within a context that's so grating, it's not worth digging for them. It's like trying to pull a mustard seed out of a tub full of lukewarm jello.

Perhaps it's a generational thing, and there's something about Fred that appeals to the zeitgeist of the emerging pre-teen generation. I'm guessing it's either this or the fact that kids like garbage.

As annoying as he is, I actually feel sorry for Fred (real name: Lukas Cruikshank), because he is trapped by this fame, such as it is. I saw him on an episode of Tosh 2.0, ostensibly to promote his TV movie, and he professed to be thinking about retiring the Fred character, but said so with an almost haunted look on his face, as if he knew this would never be possible. His options are either fade into obscurity or continue to enjoy celebrity for being That Speedy-Voiced Freak. Sophie's choice was harder, but not by much.

All this mishegoss and foofara is just preamble to tell you that Fred made a Christmas music video because, duh. It's called "Christmas Is Creepy," and points out that certain elements of the Yuletide might be considered disturbing if one thinks about them in a certain away. That's the gist of it, anyway. I'm not 100 percent sure, because my ears filled with blood 30 seconds into the song.

So if you like ear-blood, Hannah Montana beats, and Macauley Culkin-esque mugging, this is the Christmas video for you. I will watch it again as soon as I get the lobotomy required to enjoy it. And in case you were worried about the future of our country, just know that as of this writing, "Christmas Is Creepy" has been viewed over 16 million times. U-S-A! U-S-A!

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's lots of things I like about The New York Times, and there's lots of things I don't like about it. Most of the latter are perfectly encapsulated by their subscription commercials, which portray reading the Times as some sort of exclusive club that they will deign to let you poor slobs join for the low, low price of whatever.

In particular, their Trend Pieces drive me nuts, because they are so disconnected from life as it is truly lived. Nine times out of 10, these articles are based on something done/noticed/overheard by three friends of the 23-year-old fact checker, then reported on as if it is some fantastic new wave sweeping the city. And in their definition, the city exists between Canal and 96th Street, extends into certain parts of Brooklyn, and that's it.

Not to mention that these pieces usually feature some of the worst, most clueless humans alive. Like the trust fund fucktard who told the Times you shouldn't bother to have a party if you're too poor to hire a bartender. (You get three guesses where this asswipe lives and your first clue is "Williamsburg".)

The piece I'm going to discuss now is only tangentially related to such nonsense, but it is holiday related and it does involve a Totally Fake Trend perceived as real by roughly 12 people on the Upper East Side. Plus, it took a swipe at something near and dear to my holiday heart: egg nog.

First off, know this: I love egg nog. I loved it as a kid, and I still love it. I know it's horrible for you and I could not give less of a shit about that. If egg nog was illegal, I'd make it in my bathtub. I will consume anything that even pretends to be egg nog-flavored: ice cream, milk shakes, lattes, laxatives. And I not only enjoy the mass-produced, completely fake, store-bought egg nog, I prefer it.

Do I understand why someone would not like egg nog? Of course. I'm an egg nog enthusiast, not an evangelist. To each his or her own. But I would prefer to not be judged for my noggy proclivities, as was done implicitly and explicitly in the Times last week.

The piece in question appeared in last Thursday's edition, penned by Frank Bruni, and entitled "The Eggnog Resisters' League." Solidarity, comrade! Bruni has stormed the ramparts to combat the imperialistic advances of egg nog, a drink that he and only he has the guts to take on! Why does he hate it so?

It's a dessert in drink drag, a single-cup, multi-egg sleigh ride to feeling overstuffed and overwhelmed right at the start of a party, when an unimaginative host foists it upon you -- "we have eggnog!" -- in place of a proper cocktail or respectable glass of wine or something, anything, that won't spoil your appetite and erase three miles on the treadmill in three insanely rich sips.

It's a calorie extravaganza, a cholesterol jubilee, ruling out any possibility of pacing by hogging all the nutritional naughtiness that should rightly be spread across the breadth of a cold December evening.

What kind of parties is Bruni going to where the host "foists" anything on you? Is he telling me that there are people who, if you ask for a martini or a beer, will hold you down and pour egg nog down your throat through funnel? This sounds like those totally BS stories about drug pushers. "First one's free, kid!" You know what you do when you don't like the drink someone offers you? You ask for something else. If they're a good host, they'll give it to you, judgment free. Crazy, I know!

I also love how Bruni equates serving egg nog with a lack of imagination, as if it is only served because of obligation or panic. Later in the article, he blames egg nog's waning popularity (an assertion for which the evidence is circumstantial at best) with, among other things, "greater culinary sophistication." So don't serve egg nog this year, folks, unless you want your guests to mistake you for some shoeless hillbilly.

But because he wants a beverage that still evokes the holidays, Bruni consults some bartending friends who construct for him drinks that evoke egg nog-ery without being egg nog. Which is fine--by all means, experiment, innovate, and all that. Except even from these bartenders, there is an unspoken implication--and in some cases spoken--that these drinks are spiritually and culturally superior to actual egg nog, the holiday swill of philistine idiots.

To give you an idea of the lengths to which these bartenders go to make egg-not, one of the concoctions involves a pine-flavored liqueur. If everyone involved wasn't so god damn sophisticated, I'd suspect they were all depraved alcoholics reduced to drinking household cleaners. Even Bruni admits that these egg nog alternatives don't really capture what he's looking for. But at least he's not drinking egg nog, the moronic gruel sloughed down the grunting throats of troglodytes.

Is Bruni allowed to dislike egg nog? Of course he is. Just don't act like you're more highly evolved than the rest of us schmucks for a matter of pure taste, or that you're the member of an oppressed minority. And don't bend over backwards and ask bartenders to make drinks based on coconut milk, mulled cider, and Pine-Sol just because you don't feel like drinking it. Just have a chardonnay and shut the fuck up.

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.

Wanna feel old? Kids now in college grew up with Pokemon. It's been around long enough to cycle back into the area of nostalgia, just like G.I. Joe and Transformers have for folks of my generation. In Japan, I think Pikachu was elected to the Senate.

Though I'm too old to be in the Pokemon wheelhouse, I totally understand why it was so popular with younger young'uns. It has all the elements necessary to hit kids right where they live.

For starters, the hero of the show was a kid, which is the quickest shortcut to kids' show success. It had an enormous universe full of characters and a vocabulary all its own, which capitalizes on kids' obsessive tendencies. And the show itself was really just one arm of a multi-tiered assault of Pokemon related things to buy and do, like its Magic the Gathering-esque card game and roughly a bazillion licensed items from backpacks to differently sized backpacks.

But as I've said repeatedly on this site, you should never confuse nostalgia for quality. If you loved Pokemon as a kid, that's fine, but seen with adult eyes, it's a terrible show. Not any worse than the stuff I watched when I was seven, mind you, but still terrible.

Naturally, Pokemon produced a gaggle of Christmas-related fare, because the franchise churned out more junk per square inch than any toy line since Masters of the Universe. Just in time for Christmas 2001, they released Pokemon Christmas Bash! Because in a world still reeling from the attacks of September 11, we all needed something to help us heal and strengthen our resolve. And what better to unite us than an album of Pokemon-themed Christmas songs, with instrumentation from the finest keyboard technology 1987 had to offer?

Or, more accurately, Christmas-themed Pokemon songs, since the holiday was was dwarfed in most of the tunes by the importance of naming as many of the characters as possible. But it's one thing to compose brand new songs about Pokemon that barely mention the holiday (like the immortal ballad "I'm Getting Santa Claus a Pikachu for Christmas"). It's quite another to shove the names of your dumb characters into beloved carols, which is what they did with this Pokemon Christmas medley.

If you know nothing about Pokemon, this will sound like another language to you. Every third word is the name of a character or a move or something else Pokemon-universe-related. If you did grow up watching it, I'm guessing this will inspire in you some serious cringing. If you can listen to this more than 30 seconds at a time, you are a stronger person than I.

And if you find this grating, be aware that somewhere out there is a German-language version of this album (Pokemon Weihnachtparty!). I could not find any audio of that online, and it's probably best I didn't, as I'm pretty sure if I heard it I wouldn't be able to sleep for a month afterward.

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.

"Marshmallow World" is one of those marginal Christmas-y tunes that inexplicably remains at the fringes of the Yuletide canon. It is not among the top ten most popular holiday tunes, or even the top 100. But you are guaranteed to hear it at least once a year over a PA system if you dare go shopping in an actual brick-and-mortar store. It survives for the same reason that shows like According to Jim remain on the air for so long: nobody loves it, but nobody hates it, either.

They say you shouldn't go food shopping when you're hungry. You probably shouldn't write lyrics when you're hungry, either. That's the only explanation I have for verses like this:

It's a marshmallow world in the winter,
When the snow comes to cover the ground.
It's the time for play, it's a whipped cream day,
I wait for it the whole year round!

Those are marshmallow clouds being friendly,
In the arms of the evergreen trees;
And the sun is red like a pumpkin head,
It's shining so your nose won't freeze!

It should be a songwriter rule that if you start to write lyrics like this, just get up from the piano, take a stroll, and go get a sandwich. If you don't, you might start composing love songs about pot roast.

These words weren't written by a hack, either. They're the work of Carl Sigman, a lyricist who worked with composers like Duke Ellington and wrote tons of songs. He wrote the lyrics to "Ebb Tide," which are simple yet gorgeous. (It's most famous as done by the Righteous Brothers, but I'm partial to Frank Sinatra's version.) But even a skilled craftsman can have an off day. Or a gotta-bang-this-out-before-I-get-lunch day.

But if nothing else, "Marshmallow World" is partially responsible for this hilarious clip from a Dean Martin special from the 1960s. Dino and his buddy Frank stomp down a flight of plastic stairs, almost run each other over in the process, then sing the song with all the care it deserves. Which is to say, they yell-sing it and flit around in mock-balletic moves, clearly annoyed that they have to perform this dumb song about marshmallows.

Oh, and did I mention they're very obviously smashed? Enjoy!

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.

Earlier this week, I did a post on the awful He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special. I gave the show a proverbial smackdown, but it was all in good fun and we all had a jolly good laugh. Of course, there always has to be Grinch at every holiday gathering, and the turd in my punchbowl is Classic Media.

A few days ago, I received an ominous email from YouTube that one of the clips I posted from the special "may have content or media that is owned or licensed by Classic Media." I'm very sensitive to stuff like this, because I once had a YouTube account that contained a treasure trove of old commercials and other weird clips, but lost it all thanks to several baseball-related clips. MLBAM fiercely guards its copyrights, and even though the footage I posted will never, ever, ever, and also EVER be released by them in any form from now until the seas dry up and the cities turn to loam, they came down on me like a ton of bricks.

Not wanting to endanger my YouTube account, I decided to just take down the clips. They died so that the rest of my video library could live. A moment of silence, please.

Truth be told, this was my fault for posting the clips in the first place. Had I done two seconds of googling, I would've realized the special was recently released on DVD, and therefore generally available, and therefore the clips were liable to be noticed by the makers of said DVD. And while the clips illustrated my points, I think you could understand the special's horror without them.

But you know what? Fuck Classic Media in the pants is what. Do they think the clips I posted on my site, digitzed from a 25-year-old VHS tape, are going to dissuade people from buying their DVD? Are my lo-fi efforts really cutting into their bottom line?

Trust me, the only reason you buy this hunk of crap is nostalgia. It has absolutely no intrinsic value otherwise. You'll want to watch it because you saw it as a kid. And the people who feel this way will go ahead and buy the stupid DVD no matter what I post on my site. I could have thrown up the entire special with an extra soundtrack of me farting throughout it, and not one less person would have bought this thing.

So thanks, Classic Media, for reminding me that even at Christmastime, there are people with nothing better to do than sic lawyers on poor schmucks who have no recourse. Happy holidays!

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.

Last year, I wrote of the horrors of Krampus, the demonic goat-man of Germanic legend who trails Santa Claus on his Christmas journey. According to these folktales, if you're good, Santa brings you gifts. If you're bad, Krampus brings you a beating. Usually with a switch, though sometimes with a chain. And if you're really bad, you might get a ride to hell in a basket strapped to his back.

In Germanic Yuletide lore (from which most of our Christmas traditions originate), Krampus and Santa Claus were once inseparable. You could not have one without the other. But Krampus was written out of Christmastime over the years, at least in America. The chastising of naughty children was taken over by Santa, who distributed coal instead of whippings. Eventually, even coal disappeared from the equations, and Christmas became a holiday that was all yin and no yang.

But in Europe--particularly Germany, Austria, and Switzerland--Krampus remains alive. December 5 is known as Krampustage (Krampus Day) in parts of these countries, an occasion for revelers to dress in scary costume, cause mischief, and get tanked. It's basically the Mitteleurope version of Halloween (a Celtic holiday that never caught on in Europe much beyond the British Isles).

In the late 1800s/early 1900s, folks in these countries liked to send each other Christmas cards featuring his fearsome visage, with the greeting/warning GRUSS VOM KRAMPUS (Greetings from Krampus). In the Teutonic holiday spirit, I'd like to share some of these cards with you, just in case you were running low on Nightmare Fuel.

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.

I got caught up in Christmas each year as a little kid, as most little kids do. Putting up the tree, decorating the house, pulling out my collection of Christmas LPs. My favorite was the Sesame Street Christmas Album, and ironically, my favorite tune on that record was Oscar the Grouch singing "I Hate Christmas". I also recall a Disney Christmas album, though I can't remember much of its content, except a version of "The 12 Days of Christmas" where Goofy kept singing "five...onion rings! hyuk!" (Learning disabilities are funny!)

But obviously, the presents were the biggest reason I loved Christmas. I didn't just get stuff as a matter of course as a kid, mostly because my immediate family didn't have enough dough to get stuff with. So Christmas brought the promise of a decent haul of toys, and at least one Big Thing for me and my brothers to share.

The biggest one of all came when, after lusting after it for years, I finally got an Atari. I can still remember two of my uncles hooking it up to our TV, and then testing it out, and then playing with it for far too long, or what felt like far too long to me, because I thought my head might explode if I had to wait any longer to use it.

When you don't get many toys for a good chunk of the year, the stakes for Christmas are raised to a ridiculous height. You want EVERYTHING right then, because you know if you don't get it, you're SOL for the rest of the year. So even though I wasn't a greedy or ungrateful kid (at least I like to think I wasn't), I could get carried away at Christmastime. Which I definitely did one fateful December 25.

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.

Local ads have all but disappeared from the landscape, particularly in the New York area. I don't know if this is because of skyrocketing ad rates, the rise of cable, or the death of small local businesses in general, but other than the occasional car dealership spot, almost all commercials you see on TV days are nationally produced for national chains.

That's a shame, because I miss local ads. They were usually the product of one man's vision, and that vision was almost always askew. Because in most cases, the ads were created by the owner. He pulled himself up by his bootstraps, he did, and built the largest chain of wig supply stores in all of Queens! And he'll be damned if some college boy is gonna make his ad for him!

In New York in the 1980s, the king of local ads was undeniably Crazy Eddie, a chain of electronics stores. Why? Because his prices were INSANNNNNNNE! And so were his ADSSSSSSSSSS!

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.

Yesterday, in my post about the puke-tacular He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special, I wrote about how you shouldn't let nostalgia cloud your judgment about the true quality of beloved items from your childhood. There is no such danger with today's Holiday Horror, because even in my less discriminating youth, I knew it was garbage.

Like many folks of my generation, I loved Nintendo. Scratch that, I didn't just love Nintendo, I believed in Nintendo. If I added up all the hours I spent playing it as a kid--assuming there are machines powerful enough to make such calculations--I would probably have to kill myself once I learned how much time I wasted.

One of the main tenets of Nintendoism holds that Mario is awesome, no matter what he does. Therefore, when a cartoon show debuted called The Super Mario Brothers Super Show, naturally I had to watch it. I eagerly anticipated its arrival, but once I actually watched the thing, I felt that horrible Kid Feeling of being gypped by adults. This show was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.

My first tip-off should have been the fact that it was called The Super Mario Brothers Super Show. In retrospect, that is a painfully stupid name, and indicates the amount of care and thought that went into the whole enterprise.

Do you remember another Nintendo-themed cartoon called Captain N? That was pretty awful (except for the choice to make Mother Brain sound like Little Richard, which was insane). But compared to The Super Mario Brothers Super Show, Captain N was The Wire. 

It would've been bad enough just as a cartoon. The animation was terrible, and the plots about as threadbare as you might expect from a show based on a video game. Its only redeeming feature--if it can be called that--was that the music and many of the sound effects were taken from the real Mario games. Such a minor detail being its best feature--one that might be noticeable to only the fanniest of fanboys--should indicate how bad the rest of it is.

But the show wasn't just a cartoon. For some reason, there were also live action sequences with the Mario Brothers engaging in sub-Bowery Boys-level comedy, on sets that make Steampipe Alley look like Barry Lyndon. And in case you thought anyone involved would escape with any dignity, the producers added a laugh track that ironically punctuates just how unfunny the whole thing is.

Mario himself was played by legendary wrestling figure Capt. Lou Albano, who was a ubiquitous figure in the 1980s thanks to his contributions to rubber-band-based fashion. He was not, however, a very good actor. Then again, Laurence Olivier couldn't have done anything with this material. (Although I wish he would've tried; it would've resulted in a hilariously scenery-chewing Jazz Singer-esque performance.)

Like every other cartoon ever made, The Super Mario Brothers Super Show had a special Christmas episode, "Koopa Claus". Truth be told, this installment is not any worse than any other. But all those other episodes didn't try to drag down the Yuletide with it, so this one gets an extra large lump of coal in its stocking.

After a title sequence "rap" so cringe-worthy it will make your teeth hurt, the Mario Brothers' enjoyment of boxing is interrupted by a kid with a suitcase (who I'm pretty sure is the youngest kid from Family Ties who aged five years in one off-season). He wants to run away from home because his parents don't love him anymore. Being responsible Italian stereotypes, the Mario Brothers try to talk this wayward child off the fence while their cartoon unfolds.

What happens in the cartoon? Does it matter? Even if you've never seen it, you could probably relate what happens just as well as I. The Mario Brothers, The Princess, and Toad wind up near the North Pole just as King Koopa kidnaps Santa and tries to ruin Christmas. Like every other villain ever, he hates Christmas, presents, and goodness of all kinds, and he keeps saying "Bah, Koop-bug" as if this makes any goddamn sense whatsoever.

Enemies from the games try to defeat the Mario Brothers, to no avail, and King Koopa's evil plans are thwarted by the power of Christmas spirit. When you subtract the live action segments, the cartoon probably clocks in at 12 minutes, and yet it feels like nine years have passed. While waiting for this garbage to end, I swear I grew a beard.

With that unpleasantness over, we return to the hilarious live action antics of the Mario Brothers, which include a flashback to Mario and Luigi's feckless youth, when they wore propeller beanies and didn't want to help their mother peel garlic. Only color film and an audible soundtrack tell you that this wasn't produced in 1917. You would not be the least surprised to see a Keystone Kop hit a huge fat lady with a cream pie.

Stick around for the end credits to learn how to do The Mario. If you can't wait that long, here's how: Swing your arms from side to side, then step once, and then again. That's it. Words can not express how truly uncomfortable this song made me as a kid. It made me feel bad for whoever was involved in writing it, performing it, and, in a small way, for the entire human race.

If you love Mario, download the old games for your Wii. Do not watch this Christmas special, or any other episode of The Super Mario Brothers Super Show. It does not even qualify for so-bad-it's-good status, and the live action segments are so old timey and weirdly racist against Italians, I think they were written by vaudevillian Klansmen.

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.

UPDATE 12.10: I received a copyright claim from Classic Media regarding the He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special video clips. Rather than endanger the rest of my YouTube bounty, I made the executive decision to take them down. I apologize that they're no longer available but these terrible videos died so that the rest may live. A moment of silence, if you please.

There's an important milestone in every adult's life when you realize most of the things you liked as a kid aren't very good. Most kids' tastes aren't too refined, and they're also easily swayed by peer pressure. If everyone else at your school likes something, there's a good chance you'll "like" it, too. There's no such thing as a hip 8-year-old who eschews Pokemon to dig on Wes Anderson movies and Captain Beefheart.

I don't think you should turn your back on everything you loved as a kid. (The enormous amount of posts about things from my childhood should indicate that.) But there's a big difference between appreciating the touchstones of your childhood in a nostalgic way and insisting these things actually have quality, which most of them don't.

Trust me, I have a little girl who's into lots of things that are terrible. They look like complete garbage to me, but I'm sure that one day she'll look back on them with the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia. Twenty years from now, we can look forward to glowing essays on the metacritical themes of iCarly.

Here's a prime example: He-Man. I watched this cartoon every day, without fail. I had many of the toys--not as many as I wanted, of course, since there was a new Masters of the Universe figure every three days or so. My poor mom still tells the story of traveling all the way Poughkeepsie and fight with other desperate parents, just so she could bring home a Castle Grayskull playset for Christmas one year.

And yet, I remember virtually nothing about the show. I remember some of the characters' names, the theme song, and that's basically it. I don't think this is because I was so young, because I can remember other things from around the same time, and vividly. I have clear memories of both Transformers and Thundercats, which both had a distinct, sometimes dark style to them. (Ever read the Transformers comic book Marvel put out in the 1980s? It was dark as hell. So was the G.I. Joe title. They knew their main audience was kids and killed people left and right anyway.)

The reason He-Man was lost in the mists of my brain is because it wasn't very memorable. The few times I've seen it as an adult have confirmed this. The animation is decent during action sequences, but the animators seemed to struggle with dialogue; any word that matched a character's lips was purely coincidental. The voice acting was stilted, and the dialogue just as wooden. And there's rarely any real sense of drama. Someone gets in trouble, Adam turns into He-Man, and he beats the crap out of everyone. The end, ho hum.

Not to mention that the show was a shameless vehicle for selling toys. Mattel would put out a new figure as often as humanly possible, and lo and behold, he'd show up in next week's cartoon! When they ran out of ideas for new characters, they'd just fit the old ones with squirting backpacks or chests that got dented for some reason Even among its peers, who basically did the same thing (see: the aforementioned cartoons), He-Man stuck out as being quite obviously only one arm of a larger marketing strategy. It was like the KISS of superhero cartoons.

However, one He-Man episode has remained in my mind, because of its craven attempt to both capitalize on Yuletide joy and introduce a whole new line of toys. This was the He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special. Yes, He-Man and She-Ra (who are apparently twin brother and sister) teamed up for this event, which was about as successful a crossover as The Jetsons Meet The Flintstones.

As the action opens, He-Man and She-Ra are together for the first time to celebrate their birthdays together (no explanation of why She-Ra has returned, or why they haven't had a birthday together every, of course). We're treated to a scene of all the He-Man characters and all the She-Ra characters decorating and tidying up the royal palace for the party. Yes, that's why we got all these heroes together in one place, so they could clean up! If you tuned in late and missed this scene, don't worry, you'll see it at least three more times.

The action (such as it is) begins when Orko accidentally sets off a rocketship and, after a run-in with Skeletor, winds up crash landing on Earth. There he meets a couple of kids, Miguel and Alecia, and does something useful for once by saving them from an avalanche. The kids take shelter in Orko's stolen spaceship.

When the kids mention Christmas, Orko has no idea what that is, so they fill him on the whole "away in a manger" story. The cartoon cuts away before the kids can tell the whole Biblical tale, but I still find it weird that, in a special that is otherwise completely middle of the road, they would touch anything religious with a 10-foot pole.

To get Orko back from Earth, She-Ra has to rescue some sort of gem from a lake, which is guarded by robots who look suspiciously like Transformers. They capture She-Ra in a bubble, then inexplicably leave to "prepare for battle." Given this reprieve, She-Ra returns the crystal, and the spaceship is transported back to Eternia.

Unfortunately, it brings the kids with it, and now they're going to miss Christmas! Don't worry, kids. A couple of magical fairies and some beefy dude with a heart on his chest will cheer you up. Until a boner-shaped ship comes to take you away, that is.



Why are the kids wanted? Because Horde Prime fears their presence has brought "a great spirit of goodness to Eternia!" So he charges Skeletor and Hordak (She-Ra's mortal enemy) with reining these kids in. Would you like an explanation about who Horde Prime is and what power he holds over these super villains? Too bad!

Much wackiness and one-upmanship ensues. Hordak loses the kids when they're claimed by the aforementioned Transformer-rip-off-bots, who want the children for reasons neither they nor anyone else bothers to articulate. They languish in prison until rescued by this special's Ewok equivalents, cutesy little robots called Manchines. Then He-Man and Sh-Ra beat up the Fake Transformers and everything's cool, right?



Nope! Skeletor swoops in to take the kids, but his Air Rascal is shot down by a jealous Hordak. They land on a snowy mountain, where the evil villain suddenly feels himself overcome by an odd sense of charity that makes him feel ill. He gives he freezing kids jackets and even takes care of the sickeningly cute Manchine puppy that stowed away with them. And when Horde Prime attempts to kidnap the kids, Skeletor even blasts his ship and saves the day.

Naturally, this Grinch-like turnaround ends with a fade-out on everyone laughing. This was actually the law back then; every pivotal cartoon scene had to end with all the characters chuckling at something, even if it wasn't remotely funny.

The special ends with He-Man playing Santa and giving the kids flying belts. That seems a tad irresponsible; I can only imagine what kind of trouble a kid could get into while levitating. Why, just watch the mischief they play on their parents! (Who seem weirdly unphased that their kids were missing FOR DAYS.)



Why is this a Holiday Horror? If you did not grow up in the 1980s, there is absolutely no reason for you to watch this thing. I can't imagine what would compel you to do so, and even if you did, you'd surely turn it off five minutes in.

Even if you did grow up in the 1980s, I'm sure your opinion of this special will range somewhere between excruciating and unwatchable. All the dialogue sounds like it was slowed down or delivered by voice actors on Xanax. The non-action animation is robotic. Even the simplest plot points go unexplained. And the Manchines are annoying as hell, apart from being another blatant attempt to create a new set of figures for kids to scream at their parents to get (which, near as I can tell, did not succeed).

I often get annoyed when The Baby makes me watch something like Caillou or The Fresh Beat Band. And then I remember I watched garbage like He-Man all the time as a kid, and consider this my karmic payback.

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.

This monstrosity to your right was installed in the Claridge Hotel in London last week. It's supposed to be a take on the traditional Christmas tree designed by French fashion-person John Galliano. Isn't your mind BLOWN, bro?!

I don't know much about art, but I know what I hate. And this, I hate. I don't hate this because it's so "weird", but because it's so lazy. I don't see anything that suggests "Christmas" at all. If you're doing your "crazy" take on a Christmas tree, shouldn't something about your work evoke Yuletide in some way? An ornament? A star? Anything? You could place this in the lobby of any building in Miami Beach in the middle of summer, and the effect would be largely the same.

Also, Mr. Galliano is the same designer who based an entire fashion show around homeless Parisians he spotted while jogging along the Seine. If there's a better illustration of the clueless, out-of-touch artiste, please inform me.

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.

Today brings us another find from UbuWeb's 365 Project. In December of 2007, they presented all the tracks from an album called Merry Christmas 1968 with The Going Thing, without comment. Here's the opening cut. Go on, just listen.



Musically, this is exactly what you might expect from an album with a cover like the one you see below. Inoffensive, pillowy pop renderings of Christmas songs. (Santa almost looks like an afterthought, or like he photobombed the shoot, Michael Cera style.) What's most notable, and what sends it into Horror territory, is the spoken word intro that precedes it.

When I first listened to this, I had no idea who was speaking or for what reason. He speaks in broad strokes about all we should be grateful for during the holidays. Then he starts talking about how, though our nation has problems, it's nothing we can't pull through if we all band together and put our noses to the grindstone.

That's where this speech took a weird turn for me. I began to feel uneasy, because considering the year this was produced and the well-scrubbed youths on the cover, it seemed more than likely that this track was going to devolve into a John Birch Society screed about Martin Luther King being a communist or fluoride in the water.

This speech stays away from right-wing haranguing, thank goodness. But it goes someplace almost as weird. Out of nowhere, right in the midst of his "shoulder to the wheel" appeal, this man starts talking about selling cars.

Why? Because The Going Thing was actually a pre-fab band put together by Ford. "Ford is a going thing" was their slogan at time, and for several years afterward. The Going Thing appeared at Ford-sponsored events and in commercials like this swingin' tune.



The man speechifying is Bob Naughton, a top Ford exec at the time. I assume therefore that this album was made exclusively for Ford dealers, so that they could spend the holidays being both soothed and motivated by company brass.

Adding to the weirdness: According to the blog Ernie (Not Bert), this was actually a one-sided album. That sounds like the kind of gimmick a boutique noise-rock label would pull. "We're putting out a split 7" between Merzbow and no one. GET IT?!"  I think it might actually be more expensive to put out a one-sided album than a regular two-sided one. You'd probably have to process the records manually so you didn't press both sides. Seems like an enormous hassle for a dealership giveaway--and one that didn't even go to customers, but to the dealers themselves.

Why does this qualify as horror? Because it is a relic of the days when The Big Three could flush money down the toilet on stuff like this that nobody asked for or wanted. It's made even more horrific when you consider the gas crisis that would come in just a few short years, followed by all the layoffs and union-busting of the late 70s/early 80s. A vanity project like this is a preemptive "let them eat cake" moment.

But mainly it's a horror because some Ford bigwig had to put in his long-winded two cents. After all, nothing says "Christmas" more than some blowhard expounding on the state of the world, thus turning an inoffensive holiday collection into a Trump-sized ego stroke. "Oh no, you're not releasing that soft-rock album until I get to record my thoughts about America and car selling! The franchisees will be inspired by my golden throat and powerful words!"

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.

Last year at this time, I included the ad in today's Holiday Horror as part of a larger Holiday Triumphs post on seasonal commercials. But the Triumph designation was meant merely as an umbrella term for the treasure trove of nostalgia contained in those spots. On further reflection, this ad is firmly in the Horror camp.



This ad is extremely unique for many reasons. It is a commercial for a children's toy aimed squarely at adults. Most toy commercials appeal to kids, hoping they'll run to their parents and scream GIMME GIMME GIMME! Occasionally, you'll see one where a parent-type says, "This toy will make a wonderful gift for your child!" But this ad cuts out the middleman and gets right down to brass tacks. Ingenious, and yet oddly creepy.

I mean, we all know that Christmas is all about the presents, but it's still weird and crass to be told so in point-blank fashion. I should also mention that this ad aired during a holiday special, when a large amount of kids were (presumably) watching. Isn't this tantamount to saying Santa Claus isn't real?

I'm sure there are other examples of this kind of appeal, though I can't think of any offhand. I definitely can't think of one where one adult told other adults, point blank, that they needed to get this toy NOW because supplies were limited.

"Get 'em now while stores have a good selection," he says. In the days before e-tail, this was virtually a threat. This ad aired only a year after the infamous Cabbage Patch Kids Wars, when parents literally fought each other to make sure they could bring home the season's hottest toy

I mentioned this ad aired during a holiday special. I neglected to mention that the holiday in question was Halloween. This commercial ran a good eight weeks before Christmas. Even by modern standards, that's a tad insane. It specifically advises parents--warns them, one might say--to stock up on Transformers before Thanksgiving weekend. I can't imagine anyone trying to get away with that now.

If the narrator looks familiar, it's because he's former NFL great-turned-actor Alex Karras, best known as Webster's dad (or if you prefer, Mungo in Blazing Saddles). I suppose he was chosen for his grandfatherly quality, though that's offset somewhat when he starts talking like Starscream. But I genuinely love that he intones the ROBOTS IN DISGUISE tagline, then keeps on talking as if nothing happened. "Yeah, sometimes I just talk like a robot, no big deal."

The one thing that puzzles me: The music used in the ad sounds decidedly different than that used in the cartoon. (Trust me, that tune is deeply ingrained in my memory.) I thought maybe this was because the cartoon hadn't debuted yet, but it looks like it made its US debut in 1984. Maybe they had rights issues, the cartoon being a separate entity from the toy? Any suggestions for an explanation are welcomed, because I am baffled.

Though I am designating this in the Horror side of the ledger, I will say that the moment Alex Karras casually lip syncs ROBOTS IN DISGUISE might be one of the best things ever filmed.

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.

I'm trying to not be mean with these posts. Really, I'm not! To qualify as a Holiday Horror, I think something can't merely be bad. It has to have an element of exploitation to it.

Christmas is a time when many people find themselves feeling vulnerable and sentimental, and when many other people try to capitalize on those feelings by rushing out something vaguely Christmas-y to tug at their heartstrings. It's the holiday equivalent of living near a tourist trap and charging people $20 to park on your lawn.

Christmas is one of the easiest and laziest shortcuts to emotional reaction that a writer can take, right up there with endangering a small child. Want a guaranteed blockbuster? Make a movie where a little girl gets kidnapped right around the holidays.

Today's Holiday Horror demonstrates this principle in spades. It combines a little girl, the holidays, vague religiosity, and a recently departed celebrity to create a thick, sugary gruel. It's called "Merry Christmas, Elvis," a Yuletide ode to the King of Rock and Roll recorded only one year after his passing. It is so craven and crass with its heartstring pulling, I'm surprised the producers didn't shoehorn a puppy or a grandmother into the mix.

Before even hearing it, you can probably guess that this is a country tune. Country music is an uncomplicated medium, where emotions are raw and simply articulated. Sometimes that leads to sheer awesomeness like Johnny Cash. Sometimes it leads to sentimental drivel like you hear in most modern pop-country. And which you will hear in abundance in this tune.

I ran across this years ago thanks to UbuWeb's 365 Project. Back in 2003, they posted a bizarre song every day of the year. The tunes were usually outsider stuff, like home recordings or self produced singles. "Merry Christmas, Elvis", credited to a young lady named Michele Cody, has a bit more polish to it. It was clearly a professional job from the Nashville song factory, with session musicians and everything. (Even if the guitarist chooses to use a completely inappropriate Mu-tron effect.)

The person who posted this to UbuWeb (Dancin' Dave) described it as "perhaps the awfullest 45 I own". Even though I know nothing of this man's record collection, that is almost certainly true.

Why am I so sure of this? Because "Merry Christmas, Elvis" is sung by a young lady who looks forward singing Christmas songs with Elvis in heaven. That essentially means she can't wait to die. Let that sink in while you sip your egg nog. It's a sentiment you hear often in Christian-y stuff, but it's one thing to wish to be reunited with a dead loved one. It's another thing entirely to ask for death's icy grip to take you so you can jam with Elvis. Plus, I imagine a heavenly Elvis might have different priorities than singing with little girls. Like boning angels who look like Ann-Margaret, for one thing.

This girl's vision of eternity and the afterlife is akin to that of John C. Reilly in Talladega Nights ("I like to think of Jesus like, with giant eagle's wings and singing lead vocals for Lynyrd Skynyrd...") She imagines Elvis (or, in her pronunication, "Evvis") "singing with the angels on a bright shining star". Though she also "can't understand why you had to go." A crisis of faith! What a spiritual crossroads for such a young girl!

But she recovers from this dilemma long enough to tell Elvis to "wish Jesus a happy birthday". The first time I heard this, I wanted to punch my computer because of how nakedly pandering it is. Someone must have targeted a certain demographic (ie, rednecks), figured out the three things they love most, and constructed a song around that, sung by an adorable, criticism-proof little girl.



If this doesn't make your skin crawl, you should probably go to a doctor to make sure you still have fully functioning skin.

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.

We're starting Holiday Horrors off with a bang this year, folks, because I believe I may have found the worst Christmas special ever.

I don't take such an accusation lightly, believe me. I've seen more than my share of Christmas specials, and as I scour my brain for comparisons, I can't think of one that plumbs the depths of the human spirit any more than the special I share with you today. In fact, I debated sharing this with the world at all, because I thought it might be the Hadron Supercollider of Christmas specials--a show so extraordinary, it could unleash forces that would destroy the earth itself.

I haven't seen many slasher movies or horror films or Human Centipede, but I can't imagine any of those things could make me feel worse than I did after I watched Candy Claus.

Here's how it all started: In one of my many fits of VHS digitizing, I ran across an ad circa 1988 for a 900 number where kids could call up Candy Claus. Back in the late 80s/early 90s, there were literally hundreds of such numbers that tried to get gullible children to call them up and amass enormous phone bills for their parents.

I remember many of these ads--particularly the one for the DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince number, since I had a friend who snuck out of CCD one afternoon to call said number on the church office phone (needless to say, he got into an assload of trouble). However, I have no memory of the Candy Claus commercial. According to Santa's narration, she's the Christmas Seals Child. I don't recall her being elected to that position. Perhaps it's appointed by Congress?



So unmemorable was this ad that not only did I not remember seeing it as a kid, but I completely forgot about the commercial after first posting it to YouTube. Initially, I assumed it was just an attempt to introduce a charity's mascot, one that presumably did not take off.

But after looking through my YouTube inventory recently, I watched the Candy Claus ad again and began to wonder about it. It's doubtful a charity would've bothered to animate all of this material just for a 30 second spot. I sensed a long-forgotten holiday special was involved somehow.

Turns out I was right. Oh lord, was I right. Although using the word "special" to describe Candy Claus seems bitterly ironic.