You know, when it comes to movies and pop music, I have never had a problem with mixing my holidays together. One of my favorite Christmas songs has always been Monsters' Holiday, Bobby "Boris" Pickett's follow-up to his worldwide smash, Monster Mash. With its silly but cute story of Frankie, Drac, and the rest of Pickett's monsters plotting "to steal Santa's sleigh," the song is the natural ancestor to Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, a film that I have championed since its original release. Even though I have tired in recent years of Jack Skellington's omnipresence in the Disney park stores, I still delight in seeing the Haunted Mansion transformed each year for a few months. And the film itself, which needs to stand as the true measure of the original story's strength, has never stopped delighting me. And I never cared that Halloween dripped into Christmas, or if Christmas overlapped the other way, as long as the results were charming and fun.
Despite this, it's odd how hard I fight to keep Christmas tamped down elsewhere in my life while Halloween festivities are ongoing. All through late September and straight past the 31 days of October, I am proactive in quashing or at least decrying every effort that the retail stores and broadcast television channels make to push the Christmas season forward so that it interferes with other holidays. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I don't want Hallmark to start their Christmas TV movie season on October 27th, right while I am in the middle of feasting on monster movie after monster movie. Though I adore so much of the music, I don't want to hear any Christmas carol stations until we are at least a couple of weeks deep into November, if not December 1st. After that, I will be singing along like anybody else. And I definitely don't want to walk into any store in late August and already see racks of Christmas decorations starting to pop up, even in a low-key way. For me, the month of October (especially) is for one thing only: Halloween.
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| Scheduled for posting tomorrow, Dec. 1st. |
After that, the lines blur fast, even for me. Just when is it appropriate to begin celebrating Christmas? Well, for Christmas' part, it's really not hard to run over Thanksgiving. We all cherish it and the vast majority of Americans celebrate it, but really, it's a pretty weak sister (at least in a merchandising sense) to the other two major holidays that sandwich it. Yeah, some of us (not me) still pay lip service to "giving thanks" but really, the holiday is actually about cramming a big turkey dinner down our throats, watching boring football, and getting a four-day vacation from your job. And I also think many of us pretty much consider Thanksgiving to be the natural start of the Christmas season. I know my wife and I were pretty regular in setting up our Christmas tree and decorations on Thanksgiving weekend, once we got past Turkey Day itself. (Not this year, though; we won't start putting stuff up until this weekend.)
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| Scheduled for posting on Dec. 4th. |
Here on Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, Christmas starts properly and promptly on December 1st. Two years ago, I attempted to start a tradition on this website by posting articles about ten Christmas or winter-related classic cartoons for the holiday season. This is much in the same way that I have been posting scary cartoons for Countdown to Halloween each October, the difference really being that my Christmas posts don't coincide with an additional reach for expanded readership by connecting through an outside website. For Christmas, I am on my own to grab viewers for the toons and readers for my words. One year ago, I had hoped to continue this new Xmas tradition, but then I got a serious hip injury that kept me off the computer for most of a few months. I had the films lined up and the templates of the posts built, but I just couldn't sit for more than twenty minutes at a time most days, and so the project went by the wayside.
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| Scheduled for posting this month. |
This year, everything – including me – seems to have gone back to normal. I got through October without an injury this time, and even warmed up for the holidays by publishing a Thanksgiving cartoon post last week. So now, it is time to announce that, starting tomorrow on December 1st, I will spend the month of December presenting yet another set of classic animated shorts either set in wintertime or dealing directly with the Christmas season.
Unlike at Halloween, when I have posts over most of my blogs and websites, I currently concentrate on cartoons only for Christmas (though that doesn't mean I won't expand to film and music in the future on the Cinema 4 Pylon). I have ten cartoons picked out for concentration this year, spread across many studios so that we have a more rounded picture of how animators of the past approached a similar subject. Pluto, Tom and Jerry, Grampy, Chip and Dale, Woody Woodpecker, and Mighty Mouse will all make appearances this year, and there will even be a classic Tex Avery MGM short in the mix.
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| Scheduled for posting this month. |
Due to a currently developing employment situation, I am not going to fully commit to naming the titles here, just in case I end up with not quite as much time as I would hope to get these reviews finished. But I will tell you that tomorrow (Dec. 1), I will publish my piece on the 1933 Grampy short from Max Fleischer called Christmas Comes but Once a Year. A couple days after that will come a review of the 1949 Mighty Mouse melodrama, A Cold Romance, which may not have Christmas anywhere in it, but is a fun Mounted Police operetta that takes place during the Canadian winter. Third will come a film about which I have put off writing for many years now: The Great Toy Robbery (1963), a short from the National Film Board of Canada that actually serves as one of the most influential cartoons in my life. And if I don't get to anything else after those three, I will at least hopefully write about MGM's Peace on Earth, the Hugh Harman-directed, Oscar-nominated classic from 1939 which is both impossibly beautiful but also completely harrowing in its dark vision of mankind's future due to its insistence on constant war.
After that, it is all up to timing on my part to see what I can get done by the time Christmas actually rolls around. I may get to all ten films – I am going to do my best to get to all ten – but regardless, there will be numerous cartoon classic presented leading up to the big day. I hope you wil return regularly throughout December for more fun in my It's A Very Special Cel Bloc Xmas series. In the meantime, if you want to get your own Christmas cartoon season going a day early, you can check out my published pieces on Christmas shorts from years past below. Have fun!
And Merry Christmas (one day earlier than I normally allow myself to say it)...
RTJ
It's a Very Special Cel Bloc Xmas 2015 + Thanksgiving Special
Each photo and title are linked to the article for that cartoon. You can also watch each short within the page for that article:
Still in the mood? Here's an older post that I updated (fairly) recently:
And finally, here is a Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse cartoon without a Christmas or winter theme, but which has a pretty good Santa Claus gag right smack dab in the middle of it:
You know, when it comes to movies and pop music, I have never had a problem with mixing my holidays together. One of my favorite Christmas songs has always been Monsters' Holiday, Bobby "Boris" Pickett's follow-up to his worldwide smash, Monster Mash. With its silly but cute story of Frankie, Drac, and the rest of Pickett's monsters plotting "to steal Santa's sleigh," the song is the natural ancestor to Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, a film that I have championed since its original release. Even though I have tired in recent years of Jack Skellington's omnipresence in the Disney park stores, I still delight in seeing the Haunted Mansion transformed each year for a few months. And the film itself, which needs to stand as the true measure of the original story's strength, has never stopped delighting me. And I never cared that Halloween dripped into Christmas, or if Christmas overlapped the other way, as long as the results were charming and fun.
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