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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Jul 2, 2018 13:49:41 GMT -5
Are you doing Rudolph’s & Frosty’s Christmas in July, MarkInTexas? I don’t remember a thing about it, but according to my parents it pissed me off on a conceptual level as a tiny kid. |
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Post by MarkInTexas on Jul 2, 2018 15:57:17 GMT -5
I tend to avoid movies and specials that are more than an hour long (though I have made exceptions), and Christmas in July runs over an hour and a half. Still, I might take a look at it for next year's July write-ups.
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Post by Jean-Luc Lemur on Jul 3, 2018 16:30:24 GMT -5
Yikes! I’d have guessed forty minutes at the most.
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Post by MarkInTexas on Jul 8, 2018 19:38:04 GMT -5
How Murray Saved Christmas (2014)
It's extremely hard to make any entertainment that balances the line between being a parody of a genre and a sincere example of it. Go too far one way, and the parody is lost. Go too far the other way, and the sincerity is lost. That's why most attempts to lampoon a genre tend to go hard on making fun of the cliches and avoid investing too much emotion in the characters.
One show that did manage the balance was The Simpsons, particularly during the show's first decade. One of the principal forces behind the show's success was Mike Reiss, who was in the writer's room during the first two seasons before being promoted to showrunner for seasons 3 and 4, which many (including myself) consider the show's two best seasons. Reiss, along with partner Al Jean, left The Simpsons to create The Critic, which was also able to maintain the balance, if not as successfully as The Simpsons (then again, the number of pieces of entertainment that managed anything as well as Seasons 3 and 4 of The Simpsons is exceedingly short). Since then, Reiss has been involved in numerous projects. One of them was writing a Christmas picture book for kids, How Murray Saved Christmas, in 2000. The original book did a decent job of both being a send-up of the "Substitute Santa" genre and a sincere example of it.
In 2014, Reiss adapted the book into a 45-minute special for NBC. If they had stuck to a half-hour special, I suspect a lot of the charm of the book would have come through. The extended version, however, falls too far over the line into parody (and not particularly funny parody, either) to really work.
As all specials with Santa Substitutes must do, Santa is put out of commission thanks to an errant toy invented by tinkerer elf Edison (voiced by Sean Hayes). As Santa lives in the town where all the personifications of all holidays live, a town called Stinky Cigars (a name the specail finds hilarious), it doesn't take much prodding to convince the town to come together to help Santa out. However, only one person in town actually has the ability to deliver all the toys, and that's bad-tempered deli owner Murray Weiner (voiced by Jerry Stiller). Because this wants to be both a cliched Christmas special and a send-up of a cliched Christmas special, we get the predictable beats of Murray not wanting to do the job, then agreeing to do the job, then discovering the job is too hard, then threatening to quit, then getting his spirit restored just in time.
45 minutes is a lot of time to fill, so there's a lot of musical numbers (the soundtrack, by Reiss and Walter Murphy, isn't really all that bad), a rather needless (though fitfully amusing) look at Murray's past and how he became such a grump, and an even more needless subplot involving Santa thinking he'd been robbed and the town cop (apparently the only person unaware of what was going on) attempting to arrest Murray for the crime. Oh, and there's a late-in-show number where Murray repeatedly proclaims how very, very gay he is (but not that kind of gay).
The voice cast is good, with Stiller's TV son Jason Alexander as the town doctor, who is more interested in putting on production numbers than curing patients, Kevin Michael Richardson as Santa and the Easter Bunny, John Ratzenburger as the cop, Dennis Haysburt as the narrator, and veteran voice actors like Maurice LaMarche, Tress MacNeille, and Billy West as various townspeople. And there are a few amusing gags, like the discovery that Santa makes Mr. Burns look like the world's greatest boss. But still, this feels like a lot of work for not much payoff. Many of the send-ups are obvious and not funny, and the special doesn't really earn the emotional response we're supposed to get from the ending. Oh, did I mention the whole thing is in rhyming couplets?
How Murray Saves Christmas is certainly not awful, but it's not very good either. Aside from a few good gags, this feels overlong and not particularly dramatic. Reiss is exceedingly talented, but this is a swing and a miss.
Next Sunday: An old-fashioned holiday variety special, back when variety ruled the airwaves.
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Post by MarkInTexas on Jul 15, 2018 17:35:56 GMT -5
The Carpenters at Christmas (1977)
The brother-sister pop group The Carpenters, featuring Karen Carpenter's vocals and Richard Carpenter's arrangements and instrumentals, ruled the easy listening chart throughout the 70s. However, the soaring melodies and harmonious chords belied a tense reality. Karen was suffering from anorexia, which would eventually kill her in 1983. Richard became addicted to Quaaludes. Karen chafed under Richard's control of the group, and the one solo record she eventually made ended up being shelved until long after her death. She had a rocky relationship with her parents.
Needless to say, none of that is on display in The Carpenters at Christmas. Indeed, the special seems to go out of its way to be as relentlessly cheery as possible. It almost seems to serve as a grab bag for every variety special cliche possible. You want Harvey Korman singing and dancing his way through a bowling alley? You got it! You want non-Muppet puppets being treated like real people? You got it! You want everyone at a party that's supposed to be taking place on Christmas Eve suddenly start ringing in the new year? You got it!
The Carpenters at Christmas opens with a full orchestral rendition of "Sleigh Ride", complete with several costume changes and photographic effects. After that, the "plot" of the special kicks in, with Karen preparing her annual Christmas Eve party and Richard, not feeling the Christmas spirit, decides to go randomly wandering around Los Angeles. That's how he encounters Korman, who is supposedly running the bowling alley coffee shop, but is happy to shut everything down in order to demonstrate to Richard his old show-biz moves. This leads to one of the weirder moments in the special (which is filled with weird moments) when Richard seems to be playing the piano as the only accompaniment to Korman's number--and yet the soundtrack has an entire orchestra.
To me, it seems that what audiences of 1977 would really want would be plenty of Karen Carpenter, but instead, she's almost reduced to making cameo appearances in her own special, as we continue to follow Richard, now joined by Korman. They encounter Kristy McNichol, who talks about wanting to do a number with Karen, so of course we immediately get to see her (and her so-so singing voice) do a number with Karen. Then, there's an extended bit where Korman and Richard encounter puppets Kukla and Ollie, largely forgotten today, but major stars in the 1950s, where their show was somewhat of a forerunner to The Muppets. They're mildly amusing, but still seem out of place. There's also a lengthy bit where Korman does all the parts of A Christmas Carol himself, at first using cuts and edits to cover the fact he's playing all the characters, but eventually, we see him run around the outside of the set, changing clothes all the while. It's a silly gag, but it's the funniest part of the special, and maybe the one time the ever-present laugh track is earned.
The special finally concludes at Karen's party, which Richard attends, of course, with a couple of sing-alongs, which each guest star getting to do a verse (Korman's verse not-so-subtly references his frequent appearances in drag on The Carol Burnett Show). And then the balloons drop and we wonder if everyone involved forgot they were making a Christmas special, not a New Year's special.
I haven't come close to seeing all the 70s Christmas variety specials, but of the ones I have seen, this is easily the strangest. There was not really a good reason to have an overriding narrative given that most people watching just wanted to see Karen sing Christmas carols and maybe some of her hits. The Carpenters made another special for 1978, which I have yet to see. It will be interesting to see if they jettisoned some of the parts that didn't work so well in The Carpenters at Christmas for their next special.
Next Sunday: An new-fashioned holiday variety special, back when variety had been dead for decades.
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Post by MarkInTexas on Jul 22, 2018 17:56:25 GMT -5
Gwen Stefani: You Make It Feel Like Christmas (2017)
As a weekly series format on English-language American television, variety died at the end of the 1970s, with every attempt to revive it since (most recently only two years ago, with Maya Rudolph and Martin Short) crashing and burning. The variety special, however, is still going. There aren't too many during most of the year, but there are always a few new ones that pop up each holiday season, usually starring a (female) musician, who has a new Christmas album to promote. The special will feature the singer singing a variety of Christmas music, a mixture of classics and the new songs of of her album. Many will be solos, but some will be duets with one of the many famous guest stars she has on her show, and she may also participate in comedy bits as well. There will probably be a "behind-the-scenes" look backstage, played up for comic effect.
If you wanted to watch a Christmas special fitting that exact criteria, you couldn't go wrong with Gwen Stefani: You Make It Feel Like Christmas. Named for her new album, it features Stefani performing ten of the songs from the album, each number featuring a brand new outfit and seemingly new backup dancers (I know the kid dancers from the first number didn't make a reappearance). Seven of them were solos, but she also dueted with Seth MacFarlane, Ne-Yo, and boyfriend Blake Shelton. If you enjoy Stefani's singing, the numbers are pretty entertaining, even if the originals are all pretty forgettable. The costumes are impressive, the dancing isn't bad, and Stefani has a fine voice. If they could have cut out the filler, they could have just performed the entire 12-track album.
But you can't have a variety show with just musical numbers. So, that's why we have Ken Jeong on hand in a dumb skit playing one of Santa's assistants who disapproves of her fashion designs, and Chelsea Handler as a drunken Elf on the Shelf, a sketch that might have seemed edgy in 2003. There's also Shelton (the only guest performer who gets to appear outside the introduction and their song/comedy skit) trying to get backstage around a child security guard. And thanks to what appears to be a magic advent calendar, we get no less than three visits by Stefani to her childhood bedroom, where she hangs out with her 8-year-old self (who seems weirdly calm about a strange woman claiming to be her from the future appearing next to her bed), who makes lots of jokes about her hatred of country music. Oh yes, and there's an entire segment dedicated to Stefani's kids.
If last week's entry, The Carpenters at Christmas was what a generic Christmas special looked like in 1977, 40 years later, Gwen Stefani: You Make It Feel Like Christmas is what a generic Christmas special looks like today. There's a few cute numbers, some good singing, some cringeworthy comedy, and nothing really memorable. I haven't heard the album, so I can't attest to the quality of it. But the TV special its designed to promote is the antithesis of timeless. Frankly, I'll be surprised if I remember this one in a week.
Next Sunday: Do you recall the most meta special of all?
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Post by MarkInTexas on Jul 29, 2018 19:26:43 GMT -5
A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All! (2008)
Variety shows and specials are nearly as old as television itself, and throughout the years, most of them seem to follow the same formula. The fabulously famous host welcomes fabulously famous guests, at least one of whom is a musician, and the hosts and guests proceed to perform comedy skits (no matter how unsuited the fabulous host is to comedy), and sing a few songs (no matter how unsuited the fabulous host is to music). Innovations come and go, but the variety formula is forever.
Surprisingly, there have been precious few parodies of the variety formula over the years. Sketch comedy shows like Saturday Night Live have sent them up in the past, and Norman Lear produced a nightly talk show spoof for two years in the late 70s, but straight-up, full-length spoofs are few and far between. Of the very few that are out there, arguably the most prominent is A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!
Produced three years into Stephen Colbert's run as the host of The Colbert Report, the special managed to make fun of the tropes that surround variety specials even as they were indulging them. Colbert and his guests frequently referred to the artificial nature of the isolated cabin Colbert was trapped in, and when Colbert dramatically announced each guest's name, clearly artificial applause would break out for a few seconds before abruptly stopping. The roaring fire in the fireplace was clearly a TV set.
However, Colbert's famous celebrity guests were actually famous. Toby Keith, Willie Nelson, and John Legend, among others, showed up to sing a song and banter with Colbert for a bit. That's an impressive lineup for any special, which takes the spoof sheen a bit off. The songs, all of which but a late-in-the-show rendition of "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding?" were original, were pretty clever. Keith sings a song about how patriotic Christmas is, Nelson sings about how the Wise Men should have brought Baby Jesus weed, and Legend sings an old-fashioned, double-entendre laced song about nutmeg. Oh, and Elvis Costello got eaten by a bear.
A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All! was amusing the first time I saw it, but it doesn't really hold up well on repeated viewings (despite the comic discussion at the end about how the audience should buy the DVD of the special). I'm a big fan of Stephen Colbert, and this special is pretty amusing, but it's far from him best work. The perfect spoof of the variety special has yet to be filmed.
Next Sunday: Christmas in July is over, so no more entries until after Thanksgiving, when I'll return with all-new entries for A MarkInTexas Made-For-TV Christmas 2018.
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