Cynical Cinema

Last year, at about this time, Alliance Films released a box set called the Original Christmas Classics. It contained Christmas shows and movies with which we are all, I’m sure, familiar. The claymation stuff - Rudolph, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, the Frosty movies. It was a really nice nostalgic set. This year, Alliance is releasing The New Christmas Classics on a similar box set on November 4th. This time, the content of the box is decidedly less familiar. George of the Jungle, Casper The Friendly Ghost, Gumby, and Fat Albert are not generally thought of as Christmas Classics. At least, not that I’m aware.

The first series in the box is Gumby. This is the first time I have ever seen Gumby, a show from the 1960s about a weird little dude made out of clay with a pointy head who travels into books with his weird little clay horse friend. In this manner, the two manage to travel through history, observing the events as they take place and in some cases affecting the outcome. The books they enter are sometimes classics, like A Christmas Carol, and other times they are books that have never existed. Like The Big Snow Hill. The first episode appears to have nothing to do with Christmas at all, it is about Thanksgiving and the Mayflower. The second episode sees the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock. This episode features some 1960s-style questionable history and attitudes toward Indians, and the theft of a bunch of corn.

Then there are episodes with no dialogue, that just see Gumby running around and falling into toasters and cement mixers and then putting himself back together. He and Pokey the horse visit fairy tales involving poor kings and princes and the goose that lays the golden eggs. There is an episode called In a Fix that involves a bunch of strange bird-like clay creatures that hop around. It is a genuinely bizarre collection of Gumby episodes, and of the 12 that are featured on this set, only three are even tangentially related to Christmas. The main theme of the Christmas episodes is Ebeneezer Scrooge, who keeps escaping from A Christmas Carol to wreak havoc on Christmas. Apparently the Grinch wasn’t yet the anti-Christmas villain yet in 1967, so Scrooge became the bad guy. He keeps trying to kidnap Santa, or at the very least discredit him. In one particularly memorable episode, Scrooge uses the word “humbug” as a verb, a noun, a preposition, an adverb, an adjective, and an epithet. Sometimes within the same sentence. Another great one involves a couple of little clay building blocks who drive a tank that shoots lasers. And then there are nine other bizarre episodes of Gumby that may appeal to stoners in some way.

The next series in the set is Fat Albert. And because every single cartoon, ever, does a Christmas episode that rips off A Christmas Carol, this one is no exception. The boys are trying to put together a Christmas pageant at their clubhouse, a shack in the junkyard. The mean old Scroogey owner of the junkyard wants to bulldoze the shack, and hates the kids, and is miserly with money, and is generally a nuisance. A young couple with no job and no money end up in the shack to have their new baby, because there is nowhere else for them to go. There is a Tiny Tim character named Marshall, the son of the downtrodden couple, and there are some standard Fat Albert style cheesy lines. “You remind me of school at vacation time - no class!” Of course, in the end, the old Scrooge sees the error of his ways, and all is mended. There are two other Fat Albert episodes on the DVD, neither of which has anything to do with Christmas. One is about a girl who is embarrassed about her poverty and her rundown house, and the other is about Fat Albert’s friends helping him with his chores so he can go to the zoo and feed an elephant.

Then there is George of the Jungle. This show is reasonably funny, for a kids’ cartoon, and the six episodes here are pretty good. But again, only two of them have anything to do with Christmas. Again, we get the Christmas Carol cartoon cop-out, as George is visited by three goats. Get it? Goats? The Goat of Christmas Presents? You see, he has tried to make Christmas happen for some irritating city girl who lives in the jungle. Not being familiar with Christmas, he gets overwhelmed by the Christmas spirit, and makes every day a Christmas celebration, much to the chagrin of his friends. He is visited by three ghosts. Three ghost goats. Who show him the error of his ways, blah blah blah, and everything turns out fine.

The other George of the Jungle episodes involve a crazy rash George can’t scratch, and a weird baboon who hogs George’s heroism for himself. Although he calls himself a marmoset, he’s clearly a mandril. He has the coloured nose and all. There’s one about a magical bathroom that gets stolen, and all the apes begin disappearing from the jungle. And then there is the George’s Birthday Present episode where George has his first birthday ever. A premise which is virtually identical to the one in the episode where he tries to provide Ursula, the annoying city girl, with her Christmas.

And that brings us to the final series in the box set, Casper. Not the TV series, but a made-for-TV movie called Casper’s Haunted Christmas. This is an 80-minute movie with the computer-generated Casper and his computer-generated uncles taking up residence in Kriss, Massachusetts. Get it? Kriss, Mass? Anyway, after a Randy Travis theme song and the appearance of a ghost who is clearly Slimer from Ghostbusters, we get into the movie. Apparently, some giant green ghost god will revoke the ghost licenses of the uncles if Casper doesn’t scare someone by Christmas. You see, ghosts have to scare people, and blah blah blah. At the very least, in this movie they make the point - Casper does, indeed, scare people all the time when they discover he’s a ghost. But in this case, it is scaring people on purpose that matters. He has until Christmas to do so, or the four of them will be banished to some dark-space purgatory for eternity.

This set-up takes about seven minutes. Which means that the next 73 minutes need to be filled with something. And that something is cheesy, awful jokes. Like the kind I used to see on Hallowe’en cards when we were forced to exchange them with our classmates in the second grade. See if these phrases make you laugh - smellular phone! Shocking days until Christmas! No? Yeah, me either. There is an incredibly painful few minutes of dialogue about “scare mail”, the “ghost office”, and the dead letter department. Basically, it is the same show that Casper used to be when it was a cartoon, years ago, only much worse. And with slightly better animation.

Overall, with a total of 22 episodes of various series in this box set, only 7 of them actually have anything to do with Christmas. Of the seven Christmas episodes, five of them are takes on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. If you count the Casper movie, six of the seven involve three ghosts. And very few are worthwhile. But the box set could, conceivably, keep your kids entertained from December 1st all the way until Christmas.

Season One of Transformers: Animated hits DVD today, August 19th, from Paramount Home Entertainment. It picks up right where Transformers Animated: Transform and Roll Out left off a few months ago. Transform and Roll Out was really the first three episodes of this series, episodes that you actually don’t get with this DVD. Five Autobots - Ratchet, Prowl, Bulkhead, Bumblebee and of course Optimus Prime - have found the AllSpark, which is some kind of big deal for Transformers, and they have stashed it safely on Earth. And they now live in Detroit. While in Detroit, they must do battle against numerous foes. Not only do evil Decepticon robots occasionally show up to attack them and snatch the AllSpark, but since their arrival on Earth, they have been enlisted several times to do battle against human comic book Supervillains as well.

Which means that although there is a story line to Season One of Transformers Animated, it is really told in just four episodes. And the other fourteen episodes are filler. Stand-alone episodes where the Transformers fight guys made entirely out of acid, and learn to play Twister. Finally, we get to the end of the season, when Megatron (the leader of the evil Decepticons) manages to trick a friendly Earth scientist into helping him rebuild his own body…ah, I won’t ruin it for anyone. But truly, there are only four episodes you need to watch. Episode 4, episode 6, episode 15 and episode 16. If you want to watch the episode about the guy who dresses up as Robin Hood and robs banks, or the one where Bumblebee stars in a WWE-style event against a human on tons of steroids, then go ahead and watch them all. Otherwise, I have just saved you seven hours.

Seven hours that you would spend, as I did, wondering how the character Prowl managed to, while growing up on the planet Cybertron, acquire ninja skills. Or how come the Decepticons are necessarily evil? The only way this appears to be determined is simply because they keep referring to themselves as evil. All we really know about them is that they hate Autobots and want to fight them. And they seem to be meaner when they fight. That’s about it. There are dozens of supporting characters who show up for one episode at a time, only to be killed off at the end of that episode, who then show up later having only been “presumed” dead. There are dozens of characters who don’t make sense. Like the “bounty hunter” transformer who shows up on Earth to collect the bounty on the head of Optimus Prime. But…how is he the only transformer in the world who knows that the Autobots are on Earth? If the Decepticons sent him to collect the bounty, why wouldn’t they just invade themselves in order to get to the AllSpark? Ah, so many questions with this show. Most of them best left unasked.

This series IS better than Transformers Cybertron, in that it makes a little more sense. A little. And it doesn’t have an opening theme song that drives through my brain like a white-hot railway spike. But this may be considered “faint praise” at best.