Let's Watch This: "Cranberry Christmas" (2008)

It's that time of the year again - Christmas! As I've said before, I LOVE CHRISTMAS. There's just so much to love about it: the eating, the gift-giving, the gift-getting, the lights, the decorations, the music, and of course the Christmas specials, movies, and TV show episodes that never fail to put a smile on our faces. I myself am prone to watching Elf, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Shrek the Halls each year.

However, for every Christmas special that DOES become an iconic holiday classic played every year (How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the aforementioned A Charlie Brown Christmas), there are quite a few that fall straight into the Pit of Animation Obscurity. Y'know, specials like The Moo Family Holiday Hoedown, the Robbie the Reindeer specials, Christopher the Christmas Tree, and Cricket on the Hearth. Some of these specials fall into the Pit of Animation Obscurity because they're awful (examples of this include Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer and that Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa thing). However, some really do not deserve to be so obscure, as they're actually quite good. Case in point, Cranberry Christmas.

This 2008 special is based on a 1976 novel by Harry and Wende Devlin. It premiered as part of ABC Family's annual 25 Days of Christmas event, presented with - GASP! - no commercials by Ocean-Spray. Fitting, seeing as it's got the word "cranberry" right there in the title. The special was directed by Edward Lynn and Simpsons director Michael Polcino. They even got Barry Manilow to narrate and write a couple songs for it. Is it any good? Well, I already said a paragraph ago that it was actually quite good, so... yeah, let's start the review...

The special begins in New England - in Autumn, to be precise. The narrator tells us that there's something special about Autumn in New England. "When the beautiful fall leaves cover  the countryside, everyone knows that the time has come for the annual cranberry harvest." You see, New England is home to lots and lots of cranberry bogs, and when Autumn shows up it's time for all the cranberries that have set up shop in those bogs to be harvested for the upcoming Thanksgiving celebrations all over the world.

And now I have a craving for cranberry sauce. And I don't have any cranberry sauce. But
I do have a glass of cranberry JUICE next to me as I write this, so that'll have to do.

And after Thanksgiving, when Autumn heads out the door and Winter rears its ugly head, it's time for another big feast - the Christmas feast! Those harvesters will have to hurry, for Winter also brings with it c-c-c-cold weather. And when the cold weather barges in unannounced and makes itself at home for months upon months, the water in the bog freezes over to protect its precious vines. And in the little town of Cranberryport, everyone knows that when the bog freezes, it can only mean one thing - Christmas is just around the corner.

This leads to a song, "Christmas is Just Around the Corner". I don't have much to say about it, but it's a nice song.

"Christmastiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime is heeeeeeeeeeere..."

After the song, we see a girl named Maggie (voiced by Liza Del Mundo) and her grandmother (Miriam Flynn) baking Christmas cookies. However, they suddenly hear somebody yelling - it's Old Man Grape (Jeff Bennett), the special's antagonist. He's basically Ebenezer Scrooge pre-Character Development, your typical crotchety old man who hates it when kids are on his lawn... or in this case, skating on his pond. In fact, he even LOOKS like Ebenezer Scrooge.

"Bah, humbug!"

Then another old dude with a beard and tells Old Man Grape that the pond he claims to own is actually HIS - and it's not a pond, it's a BOG. This is Mr. Whiskers (Rob Paulsen).

Shouldn't he be off adventuring with Tintin?

"My father grew cranberries from this bog before me, and HIS father before HIM! So, I will thank you to leave MY property at once!" Mr. Whiskers demands. "I will do no such thing!" Old Man Grape replies. "You know very well that this POND belongs to ME! Now remove yourself, sir, or I shall have no choice but to bring the sheriff to do the job!" The "sheriff"? Who still calls a police officer a "sheriff"? This DOES take place in modern times*, right?

Maggie and her grandmother arrive, and the grandmother demands that Mr. Whiskers and Old Man Grape stop arguing. "It's almost Christmas Eve and THIS is the way you behave!" she snaps. And apparently her telling them to stop bickering is all that it takes to get them to stop bickering. I guess we know who wears the pants in Cranberryport.

Dang it, now I'm craving a cranberry cookie...

She offers them both a cranberry cookie, but Old Man Grape announces that he hates cookies, just in case you didn't get by now that he's a horrible person. Then he and Mr. Whiskers start going at it again until the grandmother tells them to go back to their homes and search for the deed to whoever's property that this pond/bog is.

So Mr. Whiskers heads back to his house and starts looking for the deed. As does Old Man Grape, but he's not having much luck. "What am I to do? If the pond is not mentioned in MY deed, is it possible that Whiskers might find mention of it in his OWN papers?" he asks. If that's the case, then he'll have to put up with children laughing and playing and skating and singing and stuff like that day after day after day, and he'll never have a moment's peace!

Then he gets an idea. An awful idea. Old Man Grape gets a nasty, awful idea. If Mr. Whiskers can't locate the deed, he won't be able to claim the pond/bog for his own. Thus, he shall see to it that Mr. Whiskers will never find the deed and he'll... I dunno, be able to claim that the property is his without anyone saying otherwise. In the words of another green cartoon villain, no one will ever know!

Mr. Whiskers kind of looks like a black-haired Santa Claus, doesn't he?

Do you think that was intentional, what with him being the good guy in a Christmas special
and all?

Back at Mr. Whiskers' house, he still can't find the deed. He checks the closet, only to fall victim to the "closet is full of crap that falls on top of whoever opens it when it's opened" cliché. Little does he know that he's being watched by Old Man Grape, who himself notices Maggie approaching the front door. After Old Man Grape gets into WACKY SHENANIGANS, Maggie heads inside and Mr. Whiskers fills her in on what's been happening - he can't find the deed, and if he can't prove that the bog belongs to him... well, it's just too awful to even consider. Then Maggie notices an envelope by Mr. Whiskers' feet and suggests that, hey, maybe THAT'S the deed. But alas, it's only a letter. A letter from his sister who lives in the city, who says that she's coming to visit him for the holidays and that she'll be arriving on Christmas Eve. "Christmas Eve? But that's TONIGHT!" Maggie points out. Wait, didn't her grandmother say earlier that it was ALMOST Christmas Eve? Isn't Christmas Eve generally considered the whole day, not just the night?

"Dang it, this is just my cable bill!"

Oh, and the letter ALSO says that Mr. Whiskers' home is untidy, and that if he can't take better care of his home then perhaps he should move in with her she can better look after him. And she lives in... dun-dun-dun... THE CITY! And who'd want to live in the city? The noise, the traffic, the smog... no giant tree in Rockefeller Center could possibly make up for any of that!

Old Man Grape dubs this a "stroke of luck". With Mr. Whiskers off living in the city, that pond/bog would be his, all his. He vows to make Mr. Whiskers' home incredibly untidy to ensure that the pond/bog... you know what? I'm just gonna call it a bog... will belong to him forever. Meanwhile, Mr. Whiskers is at Maggie and her grandmother's house (I don't know where Maggie's parents are, for those wondering) to tell the grandmother that Mr. Whiskers is in a jam, so she suggests that he, you know, just clean his house. Something that he apparently doesn't do all that often (he sweeps it once a year, though). But Old Man Grape is STILL spying on him, and he plots to not just make the house untidy but also take a page from Wreck-It Ralph's book and wreck it.

After falling on hard times, Grandpa Phil from Hey Arnold decided to become
a carpenter.

Old Man Grape gets to work destroying the place as we get another song. It's basically "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch", telling us all about how evil Old Man Grape is. The scene is even very reminiscent of the scene in How the Grinch Stole Christmas where the Grinch is stealing all of the Whos' stuff. They were clearly inspired by the Grinch when they were writing for this guy. It's basically a rule - you want people to like your Christmas special, be sure to throw in references to OTHER Christmas specials. By the way, it sure is fortunate for Old Man Grape that Mr. Whiskers is taking his sweet time getting back to the house so he can clean it up, giving him plenty of time to destroy it.

So afterwards, Mr. Whiskers arrives back at his house with Maggie and her grandma to start cleaning up the place... only to discover that the house looks like a tornado hit it.

"Get that camera outta my face!"

Mr. Whiskers immediately deduces that Old Man Grape is behind this, and then we see Old Man Grape peeking out from behind a tree and bragging about how now Mr. Whiskers is gonna have to go live in the cesspool of awfulness known as the city. Then the camera hits him in the face. I love a good fourth wall-breaking joke.

Mr. Whiskers bemoans that when his sister sees this, she'll drag him back to her home in the city and the children will have no place to skate. Maggie and her grandmother encourage him not to give up, and all three of them are unaware that Old Man Grape is still spying on them. Doesn't this guy have anything better to do with his time? But Old Man Grape's sabotaging Mr. Whiskers' home turns out to be his downfall - when the bed falls through the ceiling thanks to his handiwork, the deed to Mr. Whiskers' bog falls through the floorboards and he finds it. But there's still the whole "Mr. Whiskers' sister wants to drag him back to her place in the city" and how could they possibly get the place fixed up before she arrives? "It's going to take a miracle. A Christmas miracle!" he says. Well, then it's a good thing you're in a Christmas special, because they tend to include Christmas miracles.

So we then cut to Mr. Whiskers driving his sister (also Miriam Flynn) back to his house later that night... and when they arrive, it is indeed all fixed up! The mandatory Christmas miracle has done its thing!

So... what specifically WAS the miracle? Did Santa Claus show up while Mr. Whiskers was out and fix everything? Was it friendly woodland animals a la the ones you see in Disney films? Are Maggie and her grandmother just really, really good at fixing houses?

I think it's supposed to be the third one.

The sister is so impressed by the house that she says instead of having HIM move in with HER, SHE'LL move in with HIM. As for Old Man Grape, he wakes up the next morning to discover that kids are still skating on what he believes is his pond. As he's demanding that they scram, Mr. Whiskers shows up with the town sheriff (also Rob Paulsen).

Digging the mustache you've got there, Sheriff.

Mr. Whiskers gets out the deed confirming that he is indeed the owner of the cranberry bog that Old Man Grape believes is a pond that he is the owner of. Thus, it is Old Man Grape who is the trespasser. Oh, the irony!

Hello, new potential meme...

Old Man Grape glumly agrees to go quietly, but then Mr. Whiskers and Maggie invite him to join them in skating. And what happens then? Well, in Cranberryport they say that Old Man Grape's small heart grew three sizes that day. He admits that even when he was younger, none of the other kids ever wanted to skate with him, and that's why he would never allow the children to skate on what he thought was his pond. Yep, he was bummed that nobody ever invited him to skate with them, and instead of seeking therapy or something like that he decided to take it out on the kids and Mr. Whiskers. "Merry Christmas, Mr. Grape!" Mr. Whiskers says, and everybody has a great time. The end.

WHAT'S THE VERDICT?

So, that was Cranberry Christmas. And it was pretty good. The storyline is good (and not as dependent on cranberries as I was expecting it to be). I liked Mr. Whiskers, and Old Man Grape made for a fun Scrooge/Grinch stand-in. The animation is...  typical Flash animation, but the style and character designs are nice. It looks like a children's book. Plus, it's got Rob Paulsen and Jeff Bennett voicing the main characters, you can't go wrong with THAT.

Why doesn't it get more love? Well, it's possible that people looked at it and thought it would just be a thirty-minute commercial for Ocean Spray. But personally, I think the lack of popularity might stem from the fact that for whatever reason the special hasn't been released on DVD or Blu-Ray, and ABC Family... or rather Freeform, as it's called now... hasn't aired it in years. Apparently it's much more important for them to air The Santa Clause three times. Fortunately, somebody uploaded it to YouTube back in 2018. Give it a watch, you might like it.

* Well, technically since the special was released in 2008 and I'm writing this review in 2020, I don't think it's accurate to say that it takes place in "modern times". Or maybe it is, I don't know.