Recently in Holiday Triumphs 2009 Category

No Holiday Horrors today. Why? Because it's Christmas Eve! And I don't wanna miss out on presents from Santa cause I was naughty and mocking Neil Diamond again.

One of my favorite holiday traditions is to watch the "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 as many times as possible. If you want an entry point to this wonderful, wonderful show, watch this episode around the holidays and thou shalt be hooked. It starts off on a high note, with the robots telling Joel what they want for Christmas (Tom Servo wants "a Ted Williams signature inflatable bathtub pillow" and Crow wants "to decide who lives and who dies"), and just keeps going up from there.

This episode has many highlights, but if I had to pick one, it would be Crow's stirring new Christmas carol, "Let's Have a Patrick Swayze Christmas", inspired by his love of the movie Roadhouse. It is probably the only Christmas carol to include an action sequence, unless you count that one deleted verse of "White Christmas". (Irving Berlin thought it'd be fun to have a few lyrics where the singer karate chopped guys in the junk, but Bing Crosby wasn't into it.)

Sadly, the real Dalton passed away earlier this year, which makes this song so much more poignant. But where he's gone, pain don't hurt. And really, he hasn't gone anywhere! Dalton is still ripping dude's throats out--in our hearts.

Just to prove to everyone that I don't hate every Christmas song in existence. Links for handy download, too (where I had 'em), in case you wanna make yourself a hot holiday mix. And if you wanna DL the whole batch in one fell swoop, click here.

The Ramones, "Merry Christmas (I Don't Wanna Fight Tonight)"



Slade, "Merry Xmas Everybody"



The Pogues, "Fairytale of New York"



Bonus! Ted Leo performing "Fairytale of New York", live on WFMU, 2007 (with the dirty bits chopped out).



Bonus bonus! For you socialists out there, Billy Bragg performing "Fairytale of New York" live on the BBC.

As previously stated, I love Cartoon Network's The Misadventures of Flapjack. It is one of the craziest, visually innovative, and funniest kids cartoons in existence today. But my love recently transformed into MEGA LOVE, because The Baby and I watched the Flapjack Christmas special, "Low Tidings". It may be the greatest Christmas special of the last 10 years. For real.

In the Flapjack universe (which I explain a bit in that link above), every winter they celebrate the miracle of Low Tide Day, when the waters beneath The Docks recede and children hang their boots over the side in the hopes of getting presents from Poseidon if they've been good. But the bad kids get "sacked": thrown in a sack by a gang of angry, muscly mermen and tossed around violently (kinda like a maritime version of Krampus).

Bubbie the Whale (who does double duty as Flapjack's mother figure and house) always leaves The Docks during Low Tide season because she needs water to live. Captain K'Nuckles (Flapjack's adventuring mentor and negative role model) always leaves because he's rotten and doesn't want to get sacked. He still harbors childhood trauma from his own youthful sackings. But Flapjack wants to see what Low Tide Day is like (and sings many badly rhyming songs to this effect), so Bubbie leaves him and K'Nuckles behind.

Flapjack marvels in the wonder of the season, while K'Nuckles desperately tries to find a hidey-hole so he can avoid a merman beatdown. Unfortunately, much of The Docks' hiding places are already occupied by other miscreants. In his effort to avoid a sacking, K'Nuckles engages in more bad behavior that makes a sacking even more likely than before.

I don't want reveal too much about how the plot resolves itself. Suffice to say, Poseidon rethinks the whole "pummeling people with sacks" thing and decides to change many features of Low Tide Day, thus resulting in a more Christmas-y holiday .

"So it doesn't matter if you're good or bad anymore?" cries one desperate Dock resident.

"Nope, pretty much everyone gets a present now," Poseidon nonchalantly explains, and spirits himself away.

I've never seen a special that so captured the wonder and mystery of the holidays while equally depicting the sadness and weirdness of them. Maybe A Charlie Brown Christmas, although in a very different way, of course. Flapjack even managed a subtle poke at religion, via Poseidon's benign but totally arbitrary rules for his followers.

As much as the show seems to aim jokes and references at parents, kids love it. At least my three-year-old does. I realize she may not be the best barometer of what all kids will like, since she has a fondness for The Simpsons, Predator, and destruction. But I say, if your kid doesn't like Flapjack, just write him/her off. You know they're never gonna be cool.

This special is nothing short of genius. I demand the entire world watch it and prepare a 500-word essay on why it's the greatest thing ever.

This is the last batch of vaguely-holiday-related ads for the season, I promise. They all come from yet another tape in the Vast and Dusty Scratchbomb VHS Archives. This one was dominated by a CBS airing of The Wizard of Oz around Christmastime of 1985.

Again, very few of them have actual holiday content. But since they all come from Christmastime broadcasts, they remind me of spending a wintry evening indoors, watching network TV because, hell, what else was I gonna do on a December night?

1985 marked some of the heaviest fighting of the cola wars. Coke and Pepsi faced off in a no-holds-barred battle which left no one unscathed. Brother fought against brother. Millions were left homeless (but refreshed). You can find out more in Ken Burns' 19-part documentary.

Coke's commercials tended to be dismissive, rarely mentioning Pepsi by name and emphasizing the ubiquity of their product. Pepsi was more directly confrontation, as you can see in this ad. Some time in the distant future, an archeology professor and his students tour the ruins of a 20th century home. He seems well versed in the mores and folkways of this era, except for one object which stumps him.



Quite a big eff-you to the folks at Coke, as was their snagging of Michael Jackson, biggest pop star in the universe, to promo their beverage. Unfortunately, he suffered serious burns while filming an ad for them, due to faulty pyrotechnics. So Pepsi had to turn to another big artist. He didn't have quite the explosive stage presence as Jackson, but he could dance on the ceiling.



Pepsi also put on some thrilling action sequences, as in this ad for Pepsi Free. Notice the weird banging cans at the end of the ad? I seriously tried to do this eight billion times when I was a kid. I did not succeed in recreating it, but I did succeed in spilling tons of soda.

It's Friday! Procrastinate and count down to happy hour with these lovely bits!

In case you haven't heard, Pee-Wee Herman is back! He's doing live shows and appearing on TV shows and all other sorts of wonderful things.

Is Paul Reubens a bit too old to be doing Pee-Wee Herman? One could make the case. But considering how he was railroaded off TV in the early 90s (and for what, exactly?), I think the man is just making up for unjustly lost time. He could keep doing Pee-Wee until he's 90 years old, and I would say 'bravo'!

* Note to Paul Reubens: Please don't do Pee-Wee when you're 90. Don't go out like Groucho.

One part of Pee-Wee's renaissance is a new, spiffed-up web site, which has many neat things. But perhaps one of the neatest items is The Pee-Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special, which you can watch there in its entirety. It is one of the most deliriously weird Christmas specials ever made--in the best possible sense, of course.

For a lo-res sample, check out the opening below. A chorus of Marines (I think) sings a Pee-Wee-related carol, then Pee-Wee goes nuts introducing all the Playhouse denizens and special guests. Such luminaries as Frankie Avalon, Little Richard, Whoopi Goldberg, Magic Johnson...the list goes on and on!



Also, did you know that Pee-Wee appeared in the video for the holiday classic "Reggae Christmas"? And did you know that there was a holiday classic called "Reggae Christmas"? And did you know that this holiday classic was sung not by a real reggae artist, but Canadian rocker Bryan Adams?

I'm sure you feel much better now, knowing this exists. Yes, Bryan Adams sucks (he sucks so much that he won't allow embedding of his videos, hence it's absence in this post). But Pee-Wee improves anything he's involved in a full 35 percent. It's been proven by science.

If you want to watch the OFFICIAL version of the video, it's here. If you're wondering why Pee-Wee looks so glum, it's because his friends made him the MTV VJ for the evening on Christmas and abandoned him shortly thereafter. You can peep the full version here. I would have included it below, but (a) it's much lower res, and (b) it won't allow me to turn off autoplay.

Sorry, but I can't have my webbed site playing "Reggae Christmas" each time it loads. Can't do it, not even for the love of Pee-Wee.

I considered adding "Do They Know It's Christmas?" to my list of Holiday Horrors. It does meet most of my criteria for a terrible holiday song. It's not a very good song, for one thing. It's extremely dated, musically and spiritually. And in its effort to be sympathetic, it sounds insensitive. ("Tonight thank god it's them instead of you!")

However, I decided that "Do They Know It's Christmas", for all its clueless brand of charity, actually did help people. Then again, such reasoning didn't stop me from blasting Bob Dylan's terrible Christmas album, which was also done completely for charity. I guess even more important (for comedic purposes, anyway) is that the song has become such a punchline over the years, treated to so many parodies and skewered in so many forums, that attacking it seems as cliche as attacking airline food.

Especially when it's been redone by much more capable minds than mine. So I'm gonna turn my frown upside down and highlight a hilarious remake of the song put together by Comedy Death Ray. The cast is a veritable cornucopia of comedy (and comedy-friendly) gods: Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn, Paul F. Tompkins, Aimee Mann, Rob Huebel, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Weird Al, Doug Benson...it would be easier to list which alt-comedy giants aren't in this thing!

Actually, it would not be easier to do that. I just got tired of writing all those names. 


My favorite moments: Patton Oswalt leaving mid-verse to field a cell phone call. Thomas Lennon calling into the song as David Bowie, while getting a blow job from Mick Jagger (played by Ed Helms). And the rap interlude by Cracked Out, authors of such deathless hip-hop anthems as "Are You Ready to Get Fucked (By Us?)" and "Fuckin Ya Moms in the Ass".

Continuing my pointless quest to digitize every 80s ad I possess, I present this latest collection of commercials from The Vast and Dusty Scratchbomb VHS Archives. The latest batch comes from a tape with material recorded right around Halloween, 1985. Why am I presenting Halloween materials when we're so close to Christmas? Because many of these ads have holiday relevance. And because I lump Halloween into that Drive To XMas Season. And because SHUT UP IT'S MY STUPID SITE OKAY?!

This first ad definitely has Christmas significance. In it, Alex Karras (aka Webster's dad) informs parents that they better rush down to their local toy store NOW if they want to get some decent Transformers for the kiddies come December 25. This ad aired very close to Halloween, meaning there were at least seven weeks left until The Big Day. Just in case you thought retailers jumping the gun was a recent phenomenon.

It also features Webster's dad lip syncing to "robots in disguise", thus putting it in my top 10 favoritest ads ever.

Thanks to the tweeting of The Onion's Joe Randazzo, I was able to enjoy the Framley Examiner Advent Calendar. Or as they call it, The Advert Calendar, since each date contains an ad for a mundane or horrifying product. It comes from a fake British department store, as a supplement to a fake local British newspaper. But trust me, the laughs are real and plentiful.

I won't ruin any of the gags ahead of time. Just click here and you shan't be disappointed.

Jean Shepherd has been a prominent obsession of mine for a long time. Both my parents grew up listening to him on WOR radio in New York, where he did a 45-minute show every weeknight for over 20 years.

What did he do for 45 minutes? Tell stories about his youth in a northern Indiana steel town, or his years in the Army during World War II, and ruminate on the human condition, virtually uninterrupted. He would weave tales, veer off on tangents, and catch you up in his verbal wave. And then, just as the end credit music swelled and you thought he could not sew everything up in time, he did.

The fact that he did this five days a week (plus several years of a simulcast, two-hour live weekend gig at a Greenwich Village club called The Limelight), completely off the top of the dome, is nothing short of mind blowing. If he'd done his work in virtually any other medium, he would have won 10 Pulitzers. Unfortunately, he worked on the radio, a medium that's as disrespected as it is ephemeral.

His show was resolutely anti-commercial. He was certainly not averse to making a buck, but he had little interest in changing anything about himself or making nice in order to do it. He would often mock the ads that ran during his show, or talk over them, or if he was reading the copy himself, punctuate it with his own observations that weren't germane (or flattering) to the product being discussed.

He also constantly tweaked WOR, a button-down conservative station where he stuck out like a sore thumb. During station IDs, he would often tie in a topic or prhase he just mentioned. ("Speaking of the trivial, this is WOR AM and FM, New York...")

It was, in other words, the kind of show you simply can't do on radio anymore. The closest thing to it, vaguely, is The Best Show on WFMU, because WFMU doesn't have to deal with commercials, so the show can proceed at its own pace. But a major part of The Best Show is its guests and callers--particularly the long calls between Tom Scharpling and characters played by Jon Wurster. Shep, on the other hand, never spoke with anyone but himself. He delivered his monologues as if having a conversation with you, the listener, but really he just needed a microphone to write novels out of the air.

This time of year makes me think of Shep because nowadays, if he's remembered at all, it's as the writer of A Christmas Story, the holiday favorite that's inescapable every December. Shepherd also narrated the movie; that's his devilish, mellifluous voice you hear throughout the film, punctuating it with priceless lines like "the soft glow of electric sex".

I like A Christmas Story a lot, but as great as it is, it does not have the same tone or feel as his radio shows. It's much more sweet and nostalgic. In fact, Shepherd initially dismissed the movie once it bombed at the box office. (To give you an idea of the angle he wanted, his screenplay was initially titled Santa's Revenge.) He only embraced A Christmas Story later when it made him a millionaire.

In his tales of kid-dom, the themes he always came back to were pain, disappointment, and disillusionment. This has always resonated with me, because I feel that most adults idealize childhood to a ridiculous degree, when in fact childhood is often terrifying. Early in his radio heyday, Shep told an interviewer, "Childhood seems good in retrospect because we were not yet aware of the basic truth: that we're all losers, that we're destined to die and death is a defeat."

The kids in his stories don't have happy endings. They don't get what they want, and if they do, it becomes a Pyrrhic victory. He begs and begs for a BB gun, only to be thwarted at every turn (even by Santa himself), and when he finally gets the object of his desire, he nearly shoots his eye out. He scrimps and saves to get a Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring, then discovers to his horror that it's just a marketing tool. (A crummy commercial?)

I discovered Shep for myself thanks to the interwebs in the late 1990s, when old fans of his who taped his shows back in the day began to digitize them for the rest of the world to hear. To be sure, not everything holds up, and Shep occasionally busts out an embarrassing ethnic accent (think Krusty the Clown's "me so sorry!" act). But far, far more of his shows are relevant than not. It's truly remarkable.

For years, I would corner any acquaintance of mine and insist they had to listen to his old shows. Because I'm an evangelist by nature, and also insane. Few heeded my pleas, and I don't blame them, because when you think of Old Radio, you think of creaky stuff like Fibber McGee and Molly and other shows that have not aged well. Plus, there is a lot of Shep out there. It's hard to know where to begin.

In my own opinion, you can't go wrong with any Shep show from the 1960s. Earlier in the decade, his shows were much more somber and dark. Over time, he gradually crafted himself into a master storyteller; 1963-1969 or so is his high watermark. By the time the 1970s rolled around, his show was saddled with more commercials, and he saddled himself with more extracurricular activities (a PBS series, short stories for Playboy). The shows suffered for it, and by 1977, his lack of commercial appeal caught up with him. He either resigned or was fired from WOR, depending on who you ask, and sadly spent the rest of his life completely dismissing his brilliant radio work, bitter over what happened to the medium.

Here I present a few of Shepherd's holiday/winter tales for your perusal, so you can judge for yourself. The first is the saga of his friend Flick sticking his tongue to a flagpole on a cold winter morning--later immortalized in A Christmas Story, heard here in a show from 1968.

As back story, the "Dayak curse" Shep refers to at the beginning of this show was a prank/experiment he did several times on his show (one of his few "recurring gags," if you will). He would play a recording of some spooky-sounding, Eastern music and say that it was a special flute crafted in the wild jungles of Borneo as an instrument of war, designed to kill anyone under a certain age. Since his audience skewed pretty young, it was a frightening prospect to the vast majority of them.


Download file here.

In this second show from 1963, Shep talks about buying a gift for his mother that he thinks is really gonna knock her socks off: a perfume atomizer. Plus, a glimpse into the bygone days of ordering Christmas gifts by radio.


Download file here.

Finally, this last program from 1964 isn't a Christmas-related show, but it is seasonal, and a perfect example of Shep's story-telling powers. In it, he recounts The Great Indiana Blizzard that tore through his town one winter.


Download file here.

If you dig any of this, I suggest checking out FlickLives.com, which has tons of info on Shep and lots of shows for download. There's also a podcast, The Brass Figlagee, which has literally hundreds of Shep shows for download.

He's one of the greatest artists of the 20th century you've probably never heard of, and we'll never see another like him again. I hope you enjoy the selections above.

Let the record show I don't hate everything about the holidays. When I was a kid, I had a VHS tape of holiday specials and other stuff recorded around Christmastime, 1985. I rediscovered it years later and loved to watch it over and over for the old ads, plus a truly awesome special about the 50th Anniversary of Loony Tunes.

This special featured various celebrities speaking about the beloved cartoon characters as if they were real people with whom they'd worked. It's a bizarre panoply of famous folks, from Chevy Chase to Danny Thomas to David Bowie, who pretends to not know Bugs Bunny, then admits "we might be doing an album together".

But the best clips come from Bill Murray, who, as always, was pure genius. I've actually made mp3s of some of his improv dialogue and put it on my iPod; whenever it pops up on shuffle, I am always delighted. You can view this special, in chunks, on the Loony Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2, but I just had to share a few of Mr. Murray's best bits, even if it's not the best quality video. In this first bit, Murray reveals a few behind the scene glimpses of the working relationship between Friz Freleng and Yosemite Sam.



In this second clip, Murray talks about the Loony Tunes characters he does and does not respect.



Billy Dee Williams also knows how to bring the funny. Here, he reveals the music he puts on when he wants to get a lady in just the right mood: Carl Stalling. His little gestures, as if saying, "ah yes, that's lovely" as cacophanous cartoon music plays, are priceless.