Christmas Animation

In honor of St. Nicholas Day:

The Wind in the Willows: Mole's Christmas

The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends: The Tailor of Gloucester

The Forgotten Toys 

The Twelve Days of Christmas

Good King Wenceslas 

The First Snow of Winter

Happy Rankin Bass Easter!

I believe these are all available on DVD now! Buy these restored versions for yourself!

And my favorite of all:

"There's a Place for Each Small One..."

I was guest blogger today on Christmas TV History's "Animation Celebration" for Christmas in July:

The Small One

Happy Christmas in July!

I still can't believe it was time for the Hallmark ornament premiere already...the days go by so slowly, but the weeks go by so quickly.

We arrived at the store just after they opened; a man and woman were just exiting the store with a big bag, and the guy said to James, "You're late!" No, we were very, very early, as this is probably the first Hallmark ornament premiere ever that James was more eager to get to than me! The airplane this year was a GeeBee, of the color markings that Cliff "The Rocketeer" Secord flies at the beginning of the movie, and they also had an ornament of Santa Claus testing out a rocket launching kit. He also bought the Kelvin from the Star Trek reboot and the little airplane "Dusty" from Disney's upcoming sequel to Cars (called Planes, of course). And Marvin the Martian...just because. But the store was completely out of the cute little "Captain Nello's ray gun," a darling item with fins that made all sorts of retro ray gun sounds. Since we were the second people in the store, we figure the guy and the gal coming out of the store as we came in had copped every one of them.

I only bought four ornaments, but two of them were big: I got the "Steamboat Springs" "ornament" (in quotes because, really, it's too big for the tree) that plays a country version of "Good King Wenceslas" as a little train circles a mountain on one side and a steamboat paddles about in a lake on the other, and the Mickey Mouse "Band Concert." I'm not a Mickey collector, but it was a zoetrope, and I'm crazy about old motion picture machine toys. I also bought the "French hen" ornament and the Rudolph ornament. They also had a big rack of previous years' ornaments marked way down; I got a set of six miniature "International children" (although if I add any more ornaments to the miniature tree, it's probably going to collapse), the Where the Wild Things Are ornament for the library tree, and, since it was buy two half price and get the third off, another ornament as a gift.

(Maybe it was because it was early, but this was really a rather lackluster ornament premiere on the store's part. Usually they have several goodies and big pitchers of drinks or punch. Today was a cookie "cake" and two small containers of tea and lemonade.)

This wasn't getting James a ray gun, though, so after we finished at Trader Joe's, we took the most direct route to the Hallmark store at Town Center. There were lots of ray guns there, and James also decided to get a "KITT" from Knight Rider, especially as it does have William Daniels' voice. I didn't buy any more ornaments, but did get hooks and adapters, so perhaps this year our space ornaments will make sounds again (they don't work with our present string of lights), and found Hanukkah cards on discount.

Matched with an overcast sky and a breeze, it was probably the nicest July ornament premiere in years.

Christmas Carol Redux

A couple of weeks ago I went to Barnes & Noble at Town Center, and, as I usually do, slipped into CD Warehouse to see what they had in used DVDs...not that we need anymore. I came upon the Blu-Ray version of Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol. Now, I already have a copy of this on DVD, plus I bought the collected version of Christmas specials which also contains this story. But I've been in love with MMCC since its first broadcast (I don't actually remember the first broadcast; what I remember is the repeat the next year—I can clearly remember sitting on the burgundy plush sofa we had then, watching the clock, swinging my legs back and forth, and chanting "It's almost time for Mr. Magoo!" I was eight at the time.) and by the time of that second broadcast I practically had the songs memorized. (BTW, Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, not Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or A Charlie Brown Christmas, as people think, was the very first made-for-television animated special.)

Besides, it was only $10 and came with all the extras: a little commemorative booklet and an "autographed" still.

It's been sitting at the back of the sofa rather taunting me since then, and, although I really should be doing other things today, I couldn't resist putting it on. Last night I volunteered to write something for Joanna Wilson's Christmas in July 2013, and although I offered to do Mr. Magoo, it was already taken (I'm doing The Small One instead), and the combination of the two were irresistible.

The restoration is...wow. There are still a few bits of dirt on the print, but it's 99 percent pristine and the color is brilliant; in fact I had to turn the television from standard picture brightness to cinema because the colors are just so pure and bright. One of the things I've always loved about it is that, except for the framing sequence and the songs, the dialog is pretty much 98 percent directly from Dickens, and I always find myself chanting along with the best lines, including Scrooge's damning "If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population," and Marley's “Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed!" I watched it with the commentary and they talked to several of the animators and the voice artists, including Marie Matthews (who sings Young Scrooge's lovely "Alone in the World"), Jane Kean (Belle's singing voice), and Laura Olsher (Mrs. Cratchit).

(Aside: as a kid I considered "Alone in the World" "my" song. I was an only child and raised by older parents—Mom and Dad were 38 and 41 when I was born—and I never did like things my classmates did: I was more into Perry Como and Bing Crosby and Big Band than I was to contemporary music from the Beatles and Herman's Hermits; 60s fashions were anathema to me since what I really wanted was a skirt that swirled just like Loretta Young's. Miniskirts. Yuck! I felt myself not in synch with my generation a lot and "All Alone in the World" pretty much defined that loneliness.)

Sadly, there are very few extras besides the cool commentary: a couple of storyboard sequences against the final print, and Jule Styne and Bob Merrill singing the demo of "Ringle, Ringle" in accompaniment to the animation sequence, but the last is a peach, "From Pencil to Paint," showing the conception drawings and then the final cell, because it's accompanied by the lost overture music, which is absolutely fabulous. Styne and Merrill were seasoned Broadway composers (they later did Funny Girl) and each song is a gem: the opening night excitement of "Back on Broadway," the aching sadness of "Alone in the World," the menacing humor of "We're Despicable," the bright hope of "The Lord's Bright Blessing," the strong rhythm and rhyme of "Ringle, Ringle," and the plaintive song of lost love, "Winter was Warm." Even the incidentally music, often minor-key versions of the songs, is memorable. The creepy music accompaniment to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is as chilling in 2013 as it was in 1963.

Serendipity is defined as "the art of happy accident" and this Blu-Ray version has been the best kind of serendipitous find.

A Little Christmas Spirit for the Upcoming Sneezy Ordeal of Spring

Everlasting Christmas Movie Montage - Happy Holidays!

Rudolph Day, February 2012

"Rudolph Day" is a way of keeping the Christmas spirit alive all year long. You can read a Christmas book, work on a Christmas craft project, listen to Christmas music or watch a Christmas movie.

Here are three humorous Christmas videos to set the mood:

Cartoon “White Christmas”

Santa’s Stuck Up the Chimney

Funny "Jingle Bells"


Pagan Christmas, Christian Rätsch and Claudia Müller-Ebeling
If you are looking for a "unique" Christmas book, you wouldn't have to look much further than this volume. Described as "an ethnobotany of Christmas," it traces the background and the use of all the plants we think of as traditional to the holiday—mistletoe, holly, fir trees, poinsettias, etc. However, it chronicles all the plants over the years having been traditionally associated with the holiday, including the white-spotted mushrooms (the fly agaric) so commonly duplicated as ornaments on European trees, yews, and all the fragrant herbs and spices, i.e. rosemary, bay, ginger, anise, etc., most of which trace back to pagan antecedents and some to drug use to obtain "visions." For that reason, I strongly suggest this book is definitely not for children, as there are reference to sexual practices as well. However, as a book for adults I did find it quite entertaining, reading about customs from the past, some which even dated back to near-prehistoric times. And, indeed, many of the images we think of as "Christmassy," the Scandinavian "julebok" and the Julenissen, St. Nicholas' white horse, the smokers of Germany, the colors red and white, hark back to far older solstice and Yule celebrations. As a plus the book is illustrated with not only photos of the plants, but liberally illustrated with Christmas imagery that goes back to early Victorian chromolithographs, of delightfully pagan-based postcards, advertisements, and greeting cards that were sold freely in Christian countries. Just a very neat book, but not for everyone.

"Simple Gifts"

This was a unique Christmas special presented on PBS in 1977 and repeated for a few years afterward, then it disappeared. I found a videotape copy on e-Bay a couple of years ago. Together are stitched six animated segments and an introduction, all in different styles: limited animation, stills combined with animation, etc. Colleen Dewhurst introduces the program.

The Introduction

From Moss Hart's book Act One

"Lost and Found" (done in the style of the old "Toonerville Trolley" animated silent cartoons)

"The Great Frost" from Virginia Woolf's Orlando (This is probably the most remembered sequence of this program; many people think it was a separated animated piece)

An excerpt from the diary of young Theodore Roosevelt

A narrative of the 1914 Christmas Truce

And lastly the "No Room at the Inn," by R. O. Blechman

You Can't Have Christmas...

In the 1960s and 1970s the Lutheran Church made several animated or "Claymation" type stories for children to illustrate Christian concepts. The most famous of these were the Davey and Goliath series (and its well-remembered Christmas episode, Christmas Lost and Found), but in the late 1960s-early 1970s kids were also treated to a brief cartoon series about Benji, an elementary-school age boy, and his lolloping sheepdog Waldo. There was an Easter special called Easter Is and an Independence Day special, Freedom Is, but the two most well known are the following.

In Christmas Is, Benji protests having to play a shepherd once again in the school play, and learns how important the shepherds were to the Christmas story:

Christmas Is, Part 1

Christmas Is, Part 2

Christmas Is, Part 3

In The City That Forgot About Christmas, Benji and his buddy flee Christmas preparations to the quiet of his Grandpa's workshop, where his grandfather tells him a story of the influence a strange traveler had on a small town:

The City That Forgot About Christmas, Part 1

The City That Forgot About Christmas, Part 2

The City That Forgot About Christmas, Part 3

Oh, if you like these stories, you might consider buying them on DVD! They're sold on one DVD, along with the live-action The Stableboy's Christmas, called "Three Christmas Classics."

First Sunday of Advent

Some classic religious Christmas cartoons:

"The Candlemaker" (1957)

"The Christmas Visitor"

"The Little Lamb"

A Hallowe'en Treat

Raggedy Ann & Andy: The Pumpkin Who Couldn't Smile, Part 1

Raggedy Ann & Andy: The Pumpkin Who Couldn't Smile, Part 2

Raggedy Ann & Andy: The Pumpkin Who Couldn't Smile, Part 3

80 Days Until Christmas

Here are the classic Raymond Briggs stories as animated for television, but you may not have seen them this way before. Father Christmas has the original British voices (the version that is sold to American audiences was retracked with a different actor) and this version of The Snowman has the original introduction by Raymond Briggs.

Father Christmas, part 1

Father Christmas, part 2

Father Christmas, part 3

The Snowman, part 1

The Snowman, part 2

The Snowman, part 3

Blast from the Past: Christmas 1974

This was produced by Bill Melendez, which is why the animation looks vaguely like the "Peanuts" stories. Jimmy Osmond rather yowls the title tune, but otherwise this is pretty sweet.

Yes, Virginia, There is Santa Claus, Part 1

Yes, Virginia, There is Santa Claus, Part 2

Yes, Virginia, There is Santa Claus, Part 3

Remember "The Raccoons"?

Here's their Christmas outing, with Rita Coolidge as the voice of Melissa and Rupert Holmes as Dan the forest ranger.

The Christmas Raccoons, Part 1

The Christmas Raccoons, Part 2

The Christmas Raccoons, Part 3

Short and "Tweet"

R.O. Blechman CBS Christmas Message from 1966

Rudolph Day, November 2009

The purpose of Rudolph Day is to keep the Christmas spirit all year long. One can prepare Christmas gifts or crafts, watch a Christmas movie, play Christmas music, or read a Christmas book.

If you're in the United States, you've probably had a busy day, since Thanksgiving is tomorrow. But Christmas is just in hugging range...Advent begins on Sunday. Now's the time to watch some Christmas cartoons. Try

Donald Duck and Chip'n'Dale in "Toy Tinkers"

Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Chip'n'Dale in "Pluto's Christmas Tree"

Here are some of the new Christmas books I have on line to read this year:

♥ The True Gift by Patricia MacLachlan, author of Sarah, Plain and Tall

♥ 25 Days, 26 Ways to Make This Your Best Christmas Ever by Ace Collins

♥ A Christmas Promise by Anne Perry (I usually don't buy Perry's Christmas novelettes, but get them at the library, but since this one is about Gracie Phipps I made an exception.)

♥ Wishin' and Hopin' by Wally Lamb, a 1960s story that takes place in a parochial school

♥ Christmas Traditions, inspirational stories edited by Helen Szymanski

♥ Christmas Memories by Susan Waggoner, illustrated nostalgia book

♥ Christmas on the Home Front by Mike Brown (British home front during World War II!)

What's on your Christmas reading list this year?

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!