Let's watch some Christmas Specials. All of these are recorded from the 80s or 90s complete with less than great video quality but meh.
A Muppet Family Christmas: This is one of my favorite Christmas specials of all time. The main premise is that Fozzie and company are going to Fozzie's mom's for Christmas. Fozzie's mom was renting her house to Doc and Sprocket from Fraggle Rock while she went to Florida then they show up. What follows is the strategic deployment of unhappiness for three characters until they convert to Christmas Cheer. But that's not the only reason to love the heck out of this thing. No, no, no, because all the Muppets from Sesame Street pop up also followed by the characters from Fraggle Rock. This has never happened before and never happens again.
It's worth noting that this is all long before Elmo became famous. He;s there but Grover gets center stage like he always should. I mean, seriously, Grover rocks on so many levels its not even funny. What makes everything all the much better about this is that you can so tell where the same voice actor is
Another running gag of the special is the Swedish Chef trading barbs with a turkey he is trying to roast. It also involves The Turkey trying to set him on other characters, the main one being Big Bird. In the end, there is no Christmas Bird which is a shame since the Turkey is kinda a mean character with little redeemable value. I mean, the guy tried to offer up Big Bird as a sacrificial bird. You deserve to get eaten.
An important note is a fair amount of scenes in the special are not on the home video release, mainly since rights were only cleared for a few of the songs only on television. Since I'm watching a recording from the original broadcast, it means thankfully that I get to see all of them. It also means we get to see the Muppet Babies in puppet form.
Winnie the Pooh and Christmas Too: The special got introed by Michael Eisner. Knowing what I do about Eisner now, it really doesn't come off the greatest but hey, not like they have Walt Disney's frozen head stored someplace, now do they? In many ways, this comes off as more of a Christmas episode of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh than a specific Christmas Special. It makes sense since the animated series was still in production when the special came out. It would be easy to maneuver a few funds around for another episode.
The main idea is that Pooh needs to deliver the letter to Santa for him and his friends. When he ends up failing, he tries to deliver the gifts himself. When everyone gets angry with Pooh over sub-par gifts, Pooh then tries to deliver the letter in person. This fails horribly but then Christopher Robin shows up with the gifts anyway and it all works out.
Santabear's Highflying Adventure: I have never heard of this before. I just know if has John Malkovich in it. It seems like one of those very generic Christmas Specials that aired once and then never ended up airing again. The Santa Bear character was mostly an ad character made for Macy's I believe. I guess the bear is supposed to be Santa's helper or something. I dunno, I was like two when this aired originally. Santa Bear gets tasked with taking gifts to the South Pole because why not? I wonder if this is going to turn into a crossover with John Carpenter's The Thing?
Instead, Santabear meets a female bear who is pretty much meant to be his counterpart I'm guessing. There's also an evil Santabear named Bully Bear for some reason. The usual mistaken identity thing happens but it gets solved and there's a merry Christmas and all that jazz. Wish I could say there's a legitimate surprise there but I can see why this thing didn't enter the holiday repertoire. It's pretty unremarkable to be completely honest.
Non-Viewing Thoughts: I am really starting to think that Christmas Crunch is a thing of the past. I've tried finding it this entire Christmas Season and, once again, couldn't find a single box. Completely sucks.
Late
Christmas Ideas: A new pillow would be awesome also. The one I have right now I swear I;ve had for like ten years.
Notable Commercials: It's kinda depressing to think that all the kids in the Osh-Kosh commercials that keep on playing during the Muppet's special are now in their 30s.
I always missed the old Halls Medicine commercials with the hallways
made of Hall's Medicine. Just something about it that I always found
really awesome.
Tally:Mountain Dews left: 23
Amps left: 3
Pumpkin Pie Left: 5/6ths left.
Sanity Rating: (1 being a Turkey Dinner, 10 being deep-fried Turduckfishenin Hambruger Gravy ): 5
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