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Geek Punditry #152: Blake’s Five Favorite Unorthodox Christmas Specials

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With Thanksgiving behind us (save for a refrigerator stuffed with leftovers) I for one am ready to dive headfirst into the Christmas season. I’m ready for decorations, lights, radio stations that play holiday classics 24/7 and, of course, Christmas movies and TV shows. But today, I want to focus on wonderful little subset of entertainment we know as the Christmas special. It’s not a regular episode of a TV show, it’s not long enough to count as a movie, but somehow it’s just not Christmas without them. We all know the Rankin and Bass all-stars, of course, and we’re well-versed in the antics of the Peanuts gang and the wiles of the Grinch. Those of us who are particularly sophisticated even indulge annually in Garfield’s Christmas shenanigans. But in the decades that Christmas specials have existed, there are many that have come and gone without leaving the mark that these other, better-known specials have… and some of them are outright BIZARRE. This week, to help you kick off the season, I’m going to give a spotlight to five lesser-known, sometimes baffling Christmas specials that you may have forgotten – heck, that you may never have heard of at all.

Twelve Hundred Ghosts

We’ve all seen A Christmas Carol, of course. In fact, we have no doubt seen it dozens of times, maybe even HUNDREDS of times, and we can do that without ever watching the same version twice. The story is a perennial that we’re all familiar with: On the night before Christmas Ebenezer Scrooge, professional miser, is visited by three spirits who show him visions of the past, present, and future in an attempt to get him to change his ways. Charles Dickens’ book was originally published in 1843 and became not only a classic, but in many ways helped reinvigorate the popularity of Christmas itself in a world where it had been waning. It is well-known and well-loved and this, combined with the fact that it’s in the public domain, means that it has been adapted perhaps more than any other story in history. Just think about how many different movies there have been based on the story, how many TV shows have borrowed its plot for Christmas episodes, how many times it’s been produced on stage, spoofed in commercials, adapted into comic books, and basically translated into every storytelling medium imaginable.

Heath Waterman imagined perhaps a bit TOO much, and in 2017 his imagination gave birth to Twelve Hundred Ghosts: A Christmas Carol in Supercut. Waterman spent a year and a half assembling clips from virtually every iteration of the story he could find – TV shows, movies, parodies, and plenty of others. Using only these clips, he assembled a retelling of the story that is surprisingly cohesive. Despite the fact that we can roll from a clip with Patrick Stewart to Mr. Magoo to Basil Rathbone in the blink of an eye, it’s amazing how well the narrative holds together. Even someone who has only a passing familiarity with the story could easily follow along with the tale as assembled by Waterman, and by the time its 53 minute running time is over, you’ve got a more complete telling of the story than many of the different versions tell you on their own.

Being a supercut made of copyrighted works, Waterman can’t market or sell his creation, and you won’t find it on Netflix or on DVD. But the whole thing is available on YouTube, and it’s worth the time to watch if you’re even remotely curious about how it works. 

The Great Santa Claus Switch

Before The Muppet Show, Jim Henson’s Muppets appeared in a variety of different forms – in commercials, as performers in sketch comedy programs, and of course, on that new kids’ show Sesame Street. In 1970, Henson and his team produced The Great Santa Claus Switch as a special episode of The Ed Sullivan Show. In this hour-long special, an evil villain named Cosmo Sam (played by the great Art Carney) has decided he wants to take over Christmas for himself. To carry out his nefarious scheme, he’s going to kidnap Santa’s elves one at a time and replace them with his own minions, furry creatures called Frackles. 

As you can tell from the description, Henson was never one to shy away from reusing certain resources. “Frackle,” for example, sounds an awful lot like the name of another pretty popular Henson production. He recycled actors as well – Art Carney wasn’t just Cosmo Sam, but also Santa Claus himself. (Carney, of course, would go on to star in another of the greatest Christmas movies of all time – The Star Wars Holiday Special.) And then there are the Frackle PUPPETS. Several of them were reused and repurposed into background characters a few years later when The Muppet Show premiered. You’d see them dancing in the background during sketches or hanging around in crowd shots…well, all except for one. One particular Frackle, a blue and purple weirdo with a hooked nose named “Snarl,” was given a new set of clothes and a new personality for The Muppet Show, not to mention a new name. You may have heard of him – these days he goes by Gonzo the Great.

This is a rare Muppet production that, as best I can tell, has never had an official media release. However, like 1200 Ghosts, the curious among you can watch it all right now on YouTube. It’s a decent enough special, and it’s really interesting as a piece of Muppet history that you may not have known about. 

Beebo Saves Christmas

The “Arrowverse” era of DC Comics television was a fun one. Beginning with Arrow, the line went on to encompass shows like The Flash, Black Lightning, Batwoman, Supergirl, and most pertinently, Legends of Tomorrow. That last one featured a team of superheroes on a time-travelling ship, with a cast that rotated with surprising frequency over the years. After a couple of seasons the show got stranger and stranger and eventually, they just embraced it. At one point, for reasons that are far too complicated to explain, the heroes wound up summoning a giant version of a blue, furry doll called Beebo to help fight demons. I swear, it makes sense in context. The show was utterly bonkers and once it accepted that fact, it transcended to the level of genius.

In 2021, they took it one step further and made an actual Christmas special, Beebo Saves Christmas. This was ostensibly an animated special that existed in the world of the show, a tie-in to the Beebo toys, kind of like how Pixar told us that Lightyear was the movie that Andy’s favorite Toy Story character was based on, except that the Beebo special was actually entertaining. In the special, an elf named Sprinkles (Chris Kattan) becomes obsessed with efficiency and convinces himself that he can handle the demands of the Christmas season better than Santa Claus (Ernie Hudson). So it’s up to our fluffy pal Beebo (Ben Diskin) to gather his friends and…well, you read the title. 

The astonishing thing about this special is how genuine and earnest it feels. It has all the hallmarks of a TV special that’s meant to shill toys but, at the same time, has a sort of warmth and heart to it. The people who made this weren’t just phoning it in to sell merch, because there WAS no merch. They were making a show to PRETEND they were selling merch, and they clearly had fun with it.

“So Blake,” you may be asking, “Where can we watch this holiday masterpiece?” Well, that’s the bad news. The main Legends of Tomorrow series is currently streaming on Netflix. (Why not on HBO Max? Because – and I cannot stress this enough – Warner Bros doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing.) But the Beebo special, which was not technically an episode of the series and was never presented as such, does not appear to be streaming anywhere. And I think we can all agree that this is a true disgrace. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: We Wish You a Turtle Christmas

Remember in the 90s, at the height of Turtlemania, when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles somehow transcended the pages of comic books, fought free of the television screen, broke out of the movies, and became a real-life rock band? How they actually toured and you could see them live? And somehow, in 1994, they got a live-action half-hour musical Christmas special? How could you possibly FORGET, right? 

There’s not even an attempt at a plot for this one. It’s a series of short music videos, some of them original songs, some of them turtle-ized twists on Christmas classics, and all of them absolutely terrible. These are some of the worst Christmas songs you’ll ever hear in your life. The music is lousy, the voices are awful, and the attempts at humor fall flat and cause ear-splitting, heart-rending agony in anybody unfortunate enough to have to hear them. It is perhaps the single worst Christmas special ever made.

Here’s a link to see it on YouTube. Watch it twice. 

Christmas Comes to Pac-Land

Speaking of trendy pop-culture characters that got overexposed, isn’t it wild that Pac-Man had a hit cartoon show? The game is just a circle running through a maze eating dots and occasionally ghosts. Somehow, Hanna-Barbera turned that into a Saturday morning TV series that built out the world and the mythology of “Pac-Land” and Pac-Man’s family crafting an entire world where everything is round and bulbous and susceptible to the kind of puns that I am absolutely DYING to make except that I try to keep these columns as PG as possible. And in 1982, that popularity spilled over into a half-hour special.

In Christmas Comes to Pac-Land, on Christmas Eve Pac-Man and his family munch the ghosts, as they do, and the ghosts’s eyes float away, as they do. But on this Christmas Eve, the eyes happen to spook Santa’s reindeer, causing a crash in Pac-Land. But the Pacs, as it turns out, have never heard of Christmas before, and Santa has to explain it to them, then enlist their help to find the toys that got spilled across the countryside before Christmas is ruined.

I’m never sure what to make of this special. Are we to understand that Pac-Land is a place in our own world, a place that Santa Claus glides over in his sleigh every year, but has never visited before? That we’ve never spotted? And if that is the case, what does the existence of ghosts imply? The theological implications of this special cannot be understated, and conflicting Biblical scholars have been debating the results of its teachings for over four decades now. Frankly, it was highly irresponsible of Hanna-Barbera to release this at all, and they now bear the responsibility for causing the greatest religious schism since the Protestant reformation. Merry Christmas!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He may have gotten a little carried away on the Disney Universe thing, but he has no regrets. 

Geek Punditry #81: Whatever the Era

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During the school year, I spend most of my time around teenagers. I teach high school English, and as such I am constantly exposed to the youth of today, with their thoughts and their ideas and their imaginations and occasionally their aromas, because some of these kids pay as much attention to the personal hygiene lessons in health class as they do when I’m trying to get them to understand 1984. But it’s July and school is not currently in session, and the only teenager in my usual orbit is my 13-year-old niece, Maggie, so the only teen ideas I am exposed to are mostly about something called Five Nights at Freddy’s.

♫“Thank you for bein’ a frieeeeeend…”♫

When I AM surrounded by the kids, though, one of the battles I fight a lot is attempting to convince them that just because something is old doesn’t mean it has no value. Shakespeare is the most frequently-cited example of this: yes, the language is old-fashioned and frequently archaic, but once you get past that the stories are pretty darn timeless. Romeo and Juliet is about a couple of kids YOUR AGE (or often younger, as I teach 11th and 12th graders) who want to date but their parents hate each other. Othello is the story of a man driven to homicidal envy because the girl he likes married someone of a different ethnicity. Hamlet is about a college kid whose father is murdered and then his mom marries his uncle, which everybody can agree is pretty messed up and will make Thanksgiving very awkward. When you boil it down, the greatest works of the past are just as relevant today, except that they’re too deep to discuss in-depth in a 15-second TikTok video.

Helping kids to see this, to understand the value in works of the past, is part of my job. In fact, in many ways, it’s my favorite part of my job. Don’t get me wrong, reading a well-written essay from a kid who struggled to put a sentence together at the beginning of the year is a badge of honor, but if that essay is explaining what they think the whole Green Light thing from The Great Gatsby is about in a way that makes sense…well, that’s like winning an Olympic medal. And most kids, I find, are pretty open to this, once you can find the right path in. It may take some trial and error, but I sincerely believe that any young scholar can find the value in the classics if you try hard enough.

I wish the opposite was true of their grandparents.

Tag someone you know in this picture.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the creation of a new over-the-air broadcast network, MeTV Toons, dedicated to showcasing classic animation 24 hours a day. It’s a great idea and one that I truly hope to be able to watch if the New Orleans affiliate – which finally launched just TODAY – would boost their damn signal a little bit so I could pick it up from my house. But that’s not the point. In that previous column, I also talked about a few online communities that have sprung up around this new network. The communities are thriving now. The largest of them, which was at 17,000 members when I wrote the previous column a month ago, has ballooned up to almost 65,000 people. And as is expected, there’s a lot of talk about the cartoons and what people’s favorites are and how much they’re enjoying the network, which I love. There are also a minimum of 750 posts a day from somebody who doesn’t understand how to watch the network, because apparently many of these people, who I would estimate are largely in their 50s and 60s, have completely forgotten how antenna television works. But the worst part of this community are the entirely-too-frequent posts that exist not to talk about the classic cartoons, but to complain about modern ones.

“I hope they don’t start making NEW shows. That’s what ruined Cartoon Network.”

“They shouldn’t show anything from later than the 70s. All of that stuff sucks.”

“You know who’s a fan of Powerpuff Girls? Hitler.”

And so forth.

I find it incredibly frustrating to read through this stuff, for a few reasons. First of all, and most importantly, is the sheer negativity of it. The world has enough negativity in it, and I hate the fact that Social Media – an invention that SHOULD have been used to bring all the people in the world together – has instead merely given us different ways to tribalize ourselves and spit venom at anybody who’s not part of Our Group. And second, it’s just not true. I can’t fathom the mindset of somebody who can turn on an episode of Help!… It’s the Hair Bear Bunch! and then claim with a straight face that this is the apex of animated entertainment.

Where the culture of Western Civilization apparently reached its climax.

The thing is, guys, both my Bard-averse teens and their Cartoon Network-hating parents and grandparents are suffering from the same problem, and it’s a problem that most of us have to overcome in some form or another. We are exposed to certain media when we grow up, and that media fundamentally contributes to the structure of our preferences in our brains. In other words, the stuff that we like when we’re young is the blueprint for the kind of stuff we like throughout our entire lives. If one of my 11th grade students tells me how much their mom hates the music she listens to, I suggest she ask her mom what HER parents thought of New Kids on the Block, and what THEIR parents thought of the Beatles, and so forth. Every generation firmly, steadfastly, believes that music reached its absolute pinnacle during their own formative years, even though it’s obvious that the best decade for music was the 1980s.

The same is true for everything: movies, TV shows, books, fashions, food, sports, and of course, cartoons. The big difference between my kids and their parents is that by and large, I find the kids FAR more likely to expand their horizons and look at work from another time. My students were in diapers when The Office was popular or not even born when Friends was a hit, but they’ll binge those shows and come to school talking about them. But trying to get one of these Toon-haters to give a chance to a modern cartoon like Bob’s Burgers, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Gravity Falls, or the finest cartoon of them all, Bluey, is a challenge that would make Sisyphus ask if he can just go back to pushing that rock up the hill.

Sorry, guys. I’m being told by the Facebook group that none of you are as good as… *checks notes* ‘Yakky Doodle.’

I know I’m generalizing here, and that’s not really fair. There are most certainly older people willing to give more recent works a chance. I know, I’m one of ‘em. And there are a lot of people like that. My uncle Wally, who happens to be an animator, would frequently talk to me about Animaniacs in the heyday of that particular cartoon – which was after his time, obviously, but one of the favorites of my time. He obviously PREFERRED the classics of his youth like the Looney Tunes and the Hanna-Barbera all-stars, but he was (and still is) always willing to give the new stuff a CHANCE.

The problem with the MeTV Toons group – like any other group – is that the most obnoxious people also tend to be the loudest. They’re the ones that complain, the ones that whine, the ones that come in with a sense of entitlement because the network has the TEMERITY to show Captain Planet instead of a 23rd rerun of The Flintstones for half an hour. 

Is it true that there are a lot of bad cartoons these days? Sure. But that’s true of ANY field of creative endeavor in ANY era. As sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon once observed, “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” For every Scooby-Doo that was turned out, there are a dozen Hanna-Barbera cartoons that died after one season. Looney Tunes gave us the work of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the Road Runner and Coyote…but it also gave us Merlin Mouse and Cool Cat.

I swear, these were actual, official Looney Tunes. Google it.

Hell, even my beloved Willie Shakes is considered the greatest writer in the history of the world…but name five other writers from the late 16th century. Unless you’ve got an English degree, chances are you can’t. There’s just as much good stuff being produced now as there ever was. The reason the past seems “better” is because it’s only the good stuff that gets REMEMBERED. If you lock yourself in to the work of your own formative years, you will miss out on a wealth of great storytelling, great music, great ART. And if you’re okay with that, I can’t change your mind, but at the very least you need to RECOGNIZE that bias and not make blanket statements about everything that’s from outside of your time period, because that’s not fair to anybody. 

I have a challenge for you, my friends. Right now, I want you to identify your formative decade. Are you an 80s kid? 90s? What was the time period in which you did the majority of your growing, say from first grade through twelfth? For most of us, that is the period where these preferences and feelings are most firmly established.

Okay, have you got your decade identified? GREAT. Here’s the challenge then: this week, I want you to go out and find something from OUTSIDE that decade that you think is worth watching, reading, or listening to. I don’t care if it’s from before your time or after, but I want you to find something from a different time period that you think is worthwhile, something that you can get excited about, something you want to tell people to check out. And then I want you to come back here – or hit me on Facebook, Twitter, or Threads – and tell me WHAT you read or watched and WHY you like it. 

There’s plenty of great stuff out there, guys – from any era. The trick is just to figure out where to look.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He considers himself an 80s kid, but he has just as much love for The Honeymooners and The Good Place as he does for Mama’s Family. Wow, that’s a weird list.