When you’re done watching the usual stuff, consider one of these very bizarre attempts at holiday cheer.
When AMC released their holiday programming lineup this year, it seemed like an attempt at a joke: in addition to a handful of aging comedies that have nothing to do with Christmas (or any other holiday for that matter), like Uncle Buck and Caddyshack, the now-ubiquitous Elf was scheduled to air no less than sixteen times in thirty days, and that wasn’t counting the December 2nd “anniversary celebration” marathon. Second to Elf was National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, scheduled to air twelve times. Filling out the remaining time not occupied by Elf or National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation was woeful C-tier fare nobody enjoyed the first time around, like Christmas With the Kranks and Fred Claus.
In the era of streaming, finding Christmas entertainment now requires keeping track of who has the rights to show what special or movie at any given time. Gone are the days of CBS airing A Charlie Brown Christmas every year for decades: now it’s under the sole domain of Apple TV+. Its former companion How the Grinch Stole Christmas is available only on Peacock, and all manner of Muppet-related programming is exclusive to Disney+. If the pickings aren’t slim, then they’re disbursed like so much reindeer feed across multiple platforms.
Never underestimate the value of YouTube during these troubling times. An excellent source not just for old Saturday Night Live Christmas sketches (like the classic “Dysfunctional Family Christmas”), underloved specials like Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, and kitschy holiday variety specials of the 70s and 80s, it’s also where you can find some true seasonal oddities. Instead of having to hear Uncle Eddie announce, yet again, that the shitter was full, why not consider some of these as an alternative?
The Leprechauns’ Christmas Gold (1981)
With Charlie Brown and The Grinch their only competitors initially, Rankin and Bass dominated Christmas entertainment for years. Even today their charming stop motion animation and old-fashioned earnestness makes such shorts as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and The Year Without a Santa Claus favorites with audiences of all ages, resulting in collectible toys and TikTok trends.
By the late 70s, however, Rankin and Bass were running on fumes, and, having exhausted all the most familiar Christmas icons, started trying their own original stories. This resulted in The Leprechauns’ Christmas Gold, a baffling folktale only tangentially related to Christmas. A sailor digs up a magic pine tree and accidentally releases a banshee whose sole purpose is to steal the titular leprechauns’ gold, and the only way he can stop her is to help the leprechauns trick the banshee into turning herself into tears. Leprechauns and banshees aren’t usually associated with Christmas? Never you mind, they are now.
More than half of the special is dedicated to unnecessarily complicated backstory and lore, and it seems like describing the magical tree as a Christmas tree was an afterthought so that the special could earn twice as many residuals every year. Alas, it was to be Rankin and Bass’s second-to-last holiday special, overlooked along with their other attempts at capitalizing beyond Christmas, including The Mouse on the Mayflower and The First Easter Rabbit.
B.C.: A Special Christmas (1981)
During the marginal amount of research I did for this article, I discovered just today that the comic strip B.C. is still in publication. I know, I need a minute to process it too. It’s true, though: even though creator Johnny Hart literally died in the middle of drawing a panel in 2007, it was taken over by another artist, and its whimsical while not being very funny “caveman meets Jesus” humor remains in print today, along with The Family Circus, Blondie, and a whole lot of other comic strips you didn’t realize were still around.
Following a Thanksgiving special that not many saw in 1974, there was B.C.: A Special Christmas, which aired on HBO in 1981 to an even smaller audience. If you’re wondering how a comic called B.C. could have a Christmas special, well, much like wondering why there’s a banshee in a Christmas special, you shouldn’t waste psychic energy over such things. Two cavemen buddies come up with a scheme to get other cavemen to buy stuff off of them, and basically invent Christmas, or at least the greedy, mass consumption part of it.
Though it boasts voiceover work from 50s comedy legends Bob and Ray, everything you need to know about the level of humor B.C.: A Christmas Special is operating on is that the two female characters in it are named “Fat Broad” (loud, aggressive) and “Cute Chick” (dumb, giggly). For a special that ends with the characters discovering that they’re about to witness the very first actual Christmas, a tired “women, am I right?” gag goes down like dry fruitcake.
Deck the Halls With Wacky Walls (1983)
As the saying goes, if you’re old enough to remember Wacky Wall Walkers, it’s time to schedule your colonoscopy. Much of 80s and 90s children’s television was aggressively selling something, but perhaps nothing quite as utterly useless as a Wacky Wall Walker. Transformers could actually do cool stuff. Barbie dolls came with all kinds of neat accessories and pretty clothes. But all you could do with a Wacky Wall Walker, a small rubber octopus coated in a sticky film, was throw it at a wall, where it would stick for a moment, then indifferently fall to the ground, where it would immediately become covered in crud and rendered unusable.
Nevertheless, NBC managed to painfully grind out a 25-minute holiday special dedicated to them, even offering some backstory. They’re aliens from planet Kling Kling, sent to Earth to discover the meaning of Christmas, and are turned into slave labor by a rich brat. Eventually, however, everyone learns the reason for the season, and the Wacky Wall Walkers are set free to experience exciting lives of being flung at something and immediately forgotten by bored fourth graders.
Christmas in Tattertown (1988)
Ralph Bakshi, the creator of the X-rated Fritz the Cat and the infamously abridged animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, might not be the first person you’d think of when you hear the phrase “Christmas special.” Nevertheless, after the success of his take on Mighty Mouse, Bakshi was given an opportunity to create an original series for Nickelodeon. What he came up with was Christmas in Tattertown, a deeply weird fairytale about a little girl who finds herself in an alternate universe where inanimate objects come to life.
Though Christmas in Tattertown, drawn in the style of Depression-era Max Fleischer cartoons, looked good, its rather dark tone, incoherent plot, and adult jokes made it a baffling choice to add to Nickelodeon’s kid-friendly lineup. Like The Leprechauns’ Christmas Gold, its connection to Christmas is tenuous at best, and its decaying urban setting where everything from old shoes to coathooks talk and have sentient thoughts didn’t exactly scream “heartwarming holiday classic.” Bakshi’s deal with Nickelodeon was for 39 episodes of whatever the hell it was Tattertown was supposed to turn out to be, but just one got made: you’re reading about it right now.
Noel (1992)
If your primary complaint about Christmas specials is that they don’t teach children about the inevitability of death, might I direct you to 1992’s Noel? Narrated by Charlton Heston, it tells the story of a plucky little Christmas ornament who’s delighted to be brought home to hang on a family’s tree, only to eventually witness the relentlessly cruel passage of time, as his other ornament friends are either lost or fall to their doom, as Noel himself does at the end.
With Heston reciting this tragic tale in a funereal voice, Noel is the perfect show for people who thought It’s a Wonderful Life would have been better if had ended with George Bailey doing a nosedive off the bridge, A vague allegory for Jesus Christ, it makes Joni Mitchell singing “The River” sound as festive as “Feliz Navidad.”
Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa (2002)
You’ve almost certainly at least heard of Rapsittie Street Kids by this point. It’s gained a sort of cult status, because once you see it, you’ll want to watch it again, just to make sure you saw everything right the first time. After that, it’ll become your own personal Zapruder film, to be examined frame by frame to see how certain scenes happened, let alone how they were left as is to be aired on national television.
A noble poor boy gives his most prized possession as a Christmas gift to the nasty rich girl he has a crush on, and she throws it in the trash. This is pretty much the only thing that happens, yet it was considered enough to stretch the special out to a punishing 45 minutes long, with two interminable musical numbers. Come for the “plot,” stay for the mind-boggling CGI, in which the characters’ legs don’t bend, and objects aren’t held so much as fused to their hands.
The truly astonishing thing about Rapsittie Street Kids is that, despite the Microsoft Paint-level effects, the animation program used was considered an innovation at the time, enough that the show’s producers were able to get genuine voice actor talent on board, including Jodi Benson, Grey DeLisle, and Mark Hamill (!!), who sounds like he phoned in his dialogue while sitting in line at a bank drive-through. With a deluded confidence that’s almost enviable, the show ends with the promise of an Easter special, which, in one of the gravest injustices of our time, has yet to come to pass.