Lee sorta-liveblogs old crap from 20-plus-year-old tapes
Hi, I'm Lee, and while this is technically not the first time I've done anything liveblog-ish (some of you have seen me rambling about old tapes in the main thread before), this is the first time I've gone ahead and made a thread for my ramblings.
Tonight's feature is a tape recorded during Christmastime of 1992. Back in 1992, I had two younger brothers that would have been right in the target audience for Christmas cartoons, and I still liked cartoons a lot myself, even though I was 15 and in high school at the time. We ended up recording everything we could, even if we had other copies, since there might be rarities aired (I'll get to that in a second), or simply because the tapes that had other copies of, say, Rudolph or Grinch were misplaced. (We've never had a particularly good filing system for VHS tapes, and one day, when I finally convert all this crap to digital, I'll make one. :P)
Anyway, here goes. This is going to be pretty brief, since I did some skipping around.
This tape has some of the oddest Christmas specials I've ever seen on it:
There's It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown...you've never heard of it, since I don't think it ever gets rerun. It seems pretty solid, though the music is off—David Benoit's arrangements sound less like Vince Guaraldi and more like Steely Dan circa 1980. :P (Or, for that matter, most of Kamakiriad.)
Then we get Inspector Gadget Saves Christmas. It's a DiC production from after they switched to KK C&D for most of their animation, and it shows; I originally thought it was one of the Perennial Pictures syndicated specials, the animation was so weird-looking. I can't comment on the plot since I didn't watch most of it.
Right now, I'm looking at Noel. I'm relatively sure that, just like Turn-On, Co-Ed Fever and the lost pilot episode of Limozeen...but they're in space?, this only ever ran once. This thing is so rare that, when I tried to add it to IMDb several years ago, it not only wasn't there already, but the submission review staff actually doubted its existence. This one really needs some discussion, since I remember really liking it back when I was 15, but it seems kind of, well, forced now. (Then again, you could say that about a lot of Christmas-themed stuff, since schmaltz seems to be encouraged.) It was written by Romeo Muller, the head writer for all those old Rankin/Bass Christmas specials, but oddly enough, Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass had nothing to do with this. Maybe they wanted to work on other projects, maybe they weren't happy with the script, but for whatever reason, Muller approached R/B's production partner on ThunderCats and The Comic Strip, Pacific Animation, and had them produce it themselves.
The story is pretty straightforward. It's centered around Noel, an anthropomorphic Christmas ornament who gets a "happiness" from the tears of a glassblower who had just heard his first grandchild was on the way. (Yeah, it's that kind of show). Noel, like most ornaments, thrives on being shown to people and coming out of the attic for Christmas and New Years, and it goes on this way for several years, but after a family tragedy, he and his boxmates are left abandoned in the house's attic. Years later, a modern-day black family (the mom and dad of which look like dime-store knockoffs of Cliff and Claire Huxtable) move in and find the ornaments while cleaning up the house. Yeah.
And then he falls off the tree and smashes to bits. Oops. But! There's a Nativity scene at the bottom of the tree, and it causes a miracle and turns Noel into a spirit/energy being that goes and brings the Joy of Christmas to everyone, no matter what cultural background they are. There's some unfortunate implications there, mainly related to Christianity's not-so-nice past regarding proselyting, but I'll let it slide for now since it's not quite as preachy as I remembered.
After this, it's yet another copy of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. But! It has the commercials in! This is actually kind of cool! I'll liveblog the commercials later on.
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Comments
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis
I said "I probably won't post in this thread often" and that came up instead. Too funny to delete.
Anyway.
Yeah, I probably won't post here often, but rest assured I will read it often.
There's also promos for Shelby Woo (hands up if you remember that) and Harriet the Spy (yay, Michelle Trachtenberg!) in here. This was obviously recorded in the summer of 1996!
don't think I remember that episode
They used to be the paragon of "we don't air it unless we own it"! A veritable IP generator! The Nick of 15 years ago wouldn't dare pick up The Penguins of Madagascar!
yeppers
I thought it was all right
I'm thinking...digital cameras were what lowered the barrier of entry into photography as a hobby for me, because my parents didn't have money to give me to keep buying film for the cheap 35mm camera I had. I wonder if anyone else experienced something similar.
i get so angry sometimes i just punch plankton --Klinotaxis