I was introduced to Holidaze: The Christmas That Almost Didn't Happen through Platypus Comix's "Island of Misfit Christmas Specials" page. It was directed by David H. Brooks of Saturday Night Live fame, features a ton of celebrity voices, and proudly boasts on the DVD cover that it has songs written by the folks who did the songs for High School Musical. This is another one of those specials that languishes in obscurity for one reason or another - I don't know if it ever reran since its debut on ABC in 2006, it was released on DVD but I imagine the DVD is out of print by now, but you can find it on YouTube if you'd like to watch it for yourself.
Is the special any good? Let's find out.
The special starts off the week after Christmas, as our narrator talks about how they very recently had a Christmas that almost didn't happen. The camera zooms in on a snowman... and then the narrator says "Hey, wh-what are you looking at?" and it pans over to a elf who sounds like a frat boy (voiced by Jonathan Price) chuckling. "Like snowmen can talk!" he quips, an obvious reference to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and its singing snowman narrator. Then we get a joke about reindeer peeing in the snow (surprisingly, they don't go for the obvious "don't eat yellow snow" joke - this one is a lot less subtle).
Yep, this is one of those "this ain't your granddaddy's Christmas special!" specials, desperately trying to be "
irreverent" and snarky. Hopefully it at least doesn't have any innuendos like Jingle Bell Rock did.
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| "Pff. Talking snowmen... next you'll probably be claiming that an elf can become a dentist." |
In case you're wondering, we never actually see Rudolph on-screen at any point in this special. They don't even say his name - this is because Rudolph isn't in the public domain, ergo, you can apparently get sued if you have him appear in your Christmas special. The most we get is a glowing red light coming from off-camera.
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| "Have I ever mentioned how much better Rudolph is than Rusty? Because..." "Hey, Dad, what are you talking about?" "GAH! Rusty, I didn't see you there! I was just, um, talking about that Unaccompanied Minors movie we saw the other day..." |
According to the narrator elf, everybody gets pretty stressed out at the North Pole during the holiday season... except for the big guy himself, Santa Claus (Fred Willard). Particularly troubled is poor Rusty - he can't fly (and there are no George Lopez-voiced toucans around to give him lessons), his nose only glows briefly, and his dad's constant gushing over his brother isn't doing much to boost his confidence either.
Nitpick time: I don't really like the designs of the reindeer. I'm okay with everyone having one eye slightly larger than the other, I just don't care for the cheekbones or the weird lips they gave 'em. Maybe these designs would've looked better in 2D, but in three dimensions they're just off-putting.
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| I think Rusty blew a fuse the last time he blew his nose. |
Maybe Rusty can help Mrs. Claus (Edie McClurg) out with her... cooking show? Yes, Mrs. Claus has a cooking show. You'd think this might lead to some good jokes, but it doesn't. Instead, Rusty somehow fails miserably at putting icing on cookies, and Mrs. Claus suggests that he go help the elves.
The elves are upgrading their "Naughty-and-Nice-a-Matic" - once a giant computer, now a simple laptop. Rusty's attempt to help sends one elf flying into a box... and then the flap on his pajamas falls down, showing off his butt. Because I really needed to see an elf's butt. Thanks for that.
Rusty walks around feeling sorry for himself as his inner monologue (which is not Fred Savage for some reason?) sings an incredibly uninteresting song. "I want to find some place where I can be a part of Christmas!" he tells an elf (John Ales). "I want to be someone else besides 'Mr. Red's little brother'! I want my dad to be proud of me!" The elf hands him a card that reads "HERBIE THE ELF, DDS - DENTIST" - not to be confused with that OTHER dentist elf whose name starts with an "H", wink wink, nudge nudge. On the back of the card, the elf claims, are some people who can give Rusty the answers he needs. They helped Herbie, so surely they can help Rusty too.
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| "Wait, I thought the elf who became a dentist's name was Herm-" "Ssssssssssh! You wanna get sued?!" |
So off Rusty heads to the big city, his inner monologue continuing to sing about his hopes and dreams. Along the way, he runs into the Coca-Cola Polar Bears. No, really. The Coca-Cola Polar Bears, holding up Coke bottles and everything. Whatever happened to those bears? I don't remember the last time I've seen them on TV. Ah well, it's a neat cameo...
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| Now I kind of want to see a stop-motion Coca-Cola commercial. |
Rusty arrives in the big city - presumably New York, since that's the big city everyone most associates with Christmas, but they don't specify - where he runs into a guy dressed like Santa Claus and mistakes him for the real deal. The narrator elf tells the audience that department store Santas like this guy are Santa's helpers, who take toy requests and fax, phone, or email them to the North Pole. You know what I find funny, though? This guy isn't at all weirded out by there being a talking reindeer in front of him.
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| "You smell like beef and cheese, you don't smell like Santa..." |
The Santa suit-wearing guy (John O'Hurley) dubs himself a thespian. "Ohhhhhhh... my aunt Roberta was one of those," Rusty claims, giving us a joke that I'm sure made the parents watching this with their kids back in 2006 raise an eyebrow.
Then he gets mistaken for a dog by a dog catcher (also Fred Willard)... because, y'know, there are a lot of dog breeds with antlers. But considering how the dog catcher also mistook a snake, a cow, a chicken, a little girl, and some other type of animal that I can't make out for dogs, I guess we can chalk this up to him being a few sodas short of a six-pack.
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| Can anyone make out what that thing in the cage next to the cow is? |
Rusty heads to a meeting for various holiday icons held in a church's basement. In attendance are the Easter Bunny (Gladys Knight), Cupid (Paul Rodriguez), a turkey named Albert (Harland Williams), and two valley girl ghosts (Emily Osment and Brenda Song) who are there to represent Halloween because they didn't have the rights to Jack Skellington (although I wonder why they didn't just go with a jack-o-lantern).
Y'know what this reminds me of? My sister once came up with an idea for a TV show called "The Holidaze" starring these characters that represented each month of the year. There was a reindeer for December, a firecracker for July, a sun for... June, I think, a heart for February, and I'm pretty sure a turkey for November. Strange how I'm just now remembering that...
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| Shouldn't there be a leprechaun to represent St. Patrick's Day, too? Maybe he got caught in traffic or something... |
The ghosts and Cupid initially mistake Rusty for Rudolph. We get some Family Guy-esque cutaway gags, then the Easter Bunny suggest that Rusty land a role in a holiday pageant rehearsing upstairs. So Rusty winds up dressed as a camel, talking to a grouchy kid (both Dylan and Cole Sprouse) who complains that he's only taking part in the play to get school credit.
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| He needs a "I Really Wish I Weren't Here Right Now" button. |
The Easter Bunny sings "White Christmas" presumably for no other reason than because they figured if they had Gladys Knight in their special they should have her sing, and Rusty talks to the unnamed kid, who reveals - horror of horrors - that he doesn't believe in Christmas. The kid doesn't believe Rusty when he tells them about the "Naughty-and-Nice-o-Matic" and that he won't get the catcher's mask he wants if he's on the Naughty List. "Oh, yeah? If you know so much about Christmas, why aren't you at the North Pole doing something?" he asks. "You're a REINDEER. Aren't you supposed to be GUIDING THE SLEIGH or playing REINDEER GAMES or anything besides bugging me?"
Then we cut back to Mrs. Claus' cooking show... because it was so funny the first time, right? She's making soup. And not just any soup, no, no... Campbell's chicken noodle soup! The narrator elf even says "Mmm, mmm, GOOD!" and everything. I always thought that what Christmas specials needed was more product placement. How much better would Frosty the Snowman have been if Frosty brought up General Electric or Twinkies at some point?
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| Incidentally, I had Campbell's soup for dinner the night I wrote this review. It is indeed "mmm, mmm, good." |
Rusty feels crummier than ever. One of the ghosts suggests that they get her boyfriend's band, the Pumpkin 3, to write him a theme song. The other ghost suggests another band comprised of zombies to write the song. They both perform their songs, neither of which are particularly good.
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| A screencap from The Nightmare Before Christmas 2: Halloween Town's Got Talent. |
This leads to... um, a parody of American Idol with Albert, the Easter Bunny, and Cupid in place of Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul, and Simon Cowell. I'm sure THIS won't date the special at all. Then again, who am I to complain? I just made an America's Got Talent reference...
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| Guess which one's the Simon Cowell equivalent. Go ahead, guess. |
After that, we cut to the kid back at his house. His parents don't listen to him when he says he wants a catcher's mask - they're too busy gushing over what an absolute saint his brother is. Apparently, what HE wants for Christmas is more chores around the house... WHAT? What kid would ask for MORE CHORES? I get what they're going for here - the kid feels overshadowed by his brother, just like Rusty, they're more similar than he thinks they are - but there's such a thing as overdoing it.
Rusty searches for the "Naughty-and-Nice-a-Matic" on Ask.com (I guess Google asked for too much money) and discovers that it does in fact exist. Meanwhile, back with Rusty and the holiday icons, Cupid suggests that Rusty go around the world, visit the houses of every kid on the Naughty List, and take toys away from them. Figuring out that these guys aren't going to be much help, Rusty makes a run for it. I like the gag here about the icons being too busy bickering to notice that Rusty left until the narrator elf has to shout it.
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| "And then, in the 1990s, I helped the Looney Tunes and Michael Jordan play basketball against aliens. It didn't make much sense, but it sold Nike shoes..." |
Rusty walks down the streets of the big city in a glum mood until he comes across the kid, who says that Rusty was right and that he believes in Christmas again. Little do Rusty and the kid know that the "Christmas Contract" has a clause... a SANTA Clause, if you will. Actually, I guess they knew that Disney beat them to that joke, so instead, a bunch of sand falls out of the contract and the elf says that it's a "sandy clause", complete with rimshot.
What's the "sandy clause"? Well, if a kid is on the Naughty List because they don't believe in Santa, if they decide that they DO believe in Santa, they must tell him or one of his deputized helpers by midnight on Christmas Eve - which, of course, is what day it is. The kid snatches the contract out of the narrator elf's hands so he can read it for himself.
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| "What's this part about drinking Pepsi automatically putting you on the Naughty List?" "The Coca-Cola lawyers made us put that in so we could use the polar bears..." |
So now Rusty and the kid have to find one of Santa's helpers so the kid can say he believes in Santa. Along the way, Rusty runs into Albert, who's terrified that someone might eat him since, y'know, he's a turkey. Isn't it kind of funny that the icon for Thanksgiving is the thing we EAT for Thanksgiving dinner? It'd be like if we celebrated Groundhog's Day by scarfing down a woodchuck...
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| "If only they'd listened to Benjamin Franklin and made me the national bird. Then I'd represent the Fourth of July instead!" (They actually bring up Benjamin Franklin's suggesting the turkey for the national bird in the special, which is what inspired me to make this joke) |
Then Rusty and Albert run into that thespian guy from before, but he's not particularly helpful. They follow him into a diner, where Albert is chased around by a crazy chef with an axe and the thespian gives them acting lessons. Uh, don't we have a kid that we need to get off the Naughty List before midnight? Time is of the essence, Rusty...
"Maybe instead of looking for my place in Christmas out here, I should be looking for Christmas... in here," Rusty says. "And the first thing my insides tell me to do is FIND THAT KID!" So he and Albert meet up with the kid at the city's Wal-Mart (cha-ching!), where Rusty finds a bunch of reindeer action figures that look like him. I sincerely doubt that any actual Rusty action figures were sold in stores after this special aired (if I'm wrong, please tell me).
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| "Hey, that's an unauthorized use of my image. I'm suing the toy manufacturers!" |
Alas, the Wal-Mart's department store Santa has gone home for the night. Gee, maybe if Rusty and Albert hadn't wasted so much time with those acting lessons... there's only one thing to do now. Rusty must get the kid to the North Pole so he can tell Santa in person that he believes.
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| But first, Albert is going to sing the National Anthem. No, he doesn't actually do that, it's just the funniest thing I could think of for this screencap. |
Or maybe the kid can just use the webcam on a convenient nearby laptop to tell Santa instead of going all the way to the North Pole. This is how they learn that the elves are having so much trouble with the "Naughty-and-Nice-a-Matic" that they might not be able to have a Christmas. They have to do something!
So they meet back up with the other holiday icons, but they're not helpful at all. Fortunately, a mail delivery guy gives the ghosts an idea - is there such a thing as "super-extreme-double-rush-delivery"? Apparently, there IS, so they use it to ship Rusty and the kid to the North Pole. Aw, the turkey's not going along too? He's the funniest character in the special.
The delivery guy says that one can't ship live animals in a box, so instead Rusty and the kid have to skydive to the North Pole. Upon seeing the kid, the elves freak out. "You can't bring a kid to the North Pole! Now we're gonna have to MOVE AGAIN!" one elf moans. Apparently, Santa's workshop was originally in the South Pole, but then a kid found them and they had to move. The narrator elf suggests that they move to Jamacia.
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| "Why, NO, Santa, we DON'T know what happened to those Christmas cookies you were saving for your pre-flight snack! We didn't eat them, if that's what you were thinking!" |
Santa shows up, and the elves fill him in as to what's going on. Santa takes the kid to the computer room, where the kid fixes the laptop (apparently they had the wrong operating system working) and thus Christmas is saved. "I think if he promises not to tell Santa where the North Pole is, we won't have to move," Santa declares. Rusty overhears his dad telling the narrator elf about how proud he is of Rusty, wrapping up that character arc in a neat little bow.
The kid tells Santa that, instead of a catcher's mask, he wants Rusty to be a part of his sleigh-pulling team. Problem with that is, Rusty's not much of a flyer. But Santa has an idea - Rusty can act as his air traffic controller!
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| "Uh, shouldn't I be getting home now, before my parents start worrying about me?" |
Thus endeth the story of the Christmas that almost didn't happen. Now go to your local Wal-Mart and buy a case of Coca-Cola and a can of Campbell's chicken noodle soup. And maybe the DVD of this very special while you're at it. Oh, wait, you can't, 'cause it's probably out of print. Maybe you can buy it on Amazon or something...
What's the Verdict?
Honestly, this wasn't half-bad. The animation is good, although I'm still not crazy about the reindeers' designs. Rusty is sympathetic, Fred Savage does a good job as his voice. What really makes up the bulk of the special is its jokes, and that's where things get a little complicated.
I've noticed a trend of sorts with these 1990s-2000s Christmas specials - most of them attempt to have some sort of "attitude" to it that you don't see in more iconic specials like A Charlie Brown Christmas or the Rankin-Bass stuff. I feel that can make these specials a product of their time, which is likely the reason they don't re-air often and fall into obscurity. Case in point, the jokes here are a mixed bag. For every joke that works, there's a weak pop culture reference that falls flat on its face. Hey, look, it's a reference to American Idol! Look, a reference to Alec Baldwin! You know who James Bond is, right?! There's also a weird amount of product placement that wasn't really needed. But there are far worse specials that try to do the "Christmas special with an ATTITUDE!" thing... for one thing, Jingle Bell Rock and its creepy "the elf wants to deck the halls with hot girls, if you know what I mean, heh-heh-heh" jokes.
For the most part, Holidaze: The Christmas That Almost Didn't Happen works. Perhaps with another rewrite, it could've become a new Christmas classic. Instead, it's another one I'm gonna put in the "okay" category.
Further reading:
- Platypus Comix's review of the special
- Another review by a blog that does nothing but Christmas reviews
Or you could watch Bobsheaux's review of the special (I didn't watch this until after I'd written my review, so any similarities are entirely coincidental)
Y'know what else is kind of funny? This is the second Christmas review I've done this year where the main conflict had to do with technology. Does that mean I can blame Ozzie the Elf for what happened in this special?
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