ALF also had a Wonderful Life episode. 'Course, this is ALF so that means the Tanners were better off without him!
I nominate this one as well… except instead of a wiki entry, I give you the entire movie via YouTube!
This is on right now.
My favorite forgotten Christmas movie is “The Cheaters” (1945).
The pilot for “The Waltons” TV show was the 1971 TV movie “The Homecoming, A Christmas Story”.
I still cry like a little girl now that I finally found it on DVD.
Wow…I totally missed this thread and started another…
Anyway…for those of you who don’t want to click the link, at least twice in my childhood (once on TV, once in school…this was in the early '80s, but I suspect the cartoon was made in the '60s), I saw a very short animated cartoon…very CHEAPLY made…in which a boy is in his bedroom and sitting on his floor, telling his dog the story of the nativity. All I remember was that at some point, the boy and the dog actually LEVITATED to the bed (again, this was cheaply made!), and that it ended with what I swear was “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” from A Charlie Brown Christmas. I didn’t see it listed in the Wikipedia list of Christmas specials…I’m guessing this might have been on some religious TV channel…(plus, I went to a Catholic school, which would explain why they showed it to us in school)…
Looking through the ABC Family offerings, came across a Rankin-Bass special I’ve never seen before:
Rudolph and Frosty’s Chrstmas in July
Kids and I watched it tonight; truly awesome and horrible simultaneously. Frosty has kids? And the Snowman family is now rendered Rudolph-style? Rudolph’s Red Nose was not a genetic mutation but rather a gift from Lady Boreal, Queen of the Northern Lights? And the bad guy has dragon guardians! In his icy fortress? Did we think this through?
What rock have I been living under to have missed this glorious acid flashback every Christmas?
Back in the mid-1960s there was some movie with the Devil trying to hurt Santa Claus but I have no memory of the title.
It sounds like Santa Claus, a Mexivcan film dubbed into English. I actually paid to see it at a Saturday matinee at our local theater. They riffed on it on MST3K, but I haven’t seen that episode.
Just saw on my schedule that The Christmas Toy will be airing twice this week on kids’ channel The Hub (channel 179 on Dish Network): 9 AM EST on 12/23, and 11 AM EST on 12/25.
It’s on Netflix as well (or was as of last Christmas). I still like it, but not as much as I did as a kid… I still think Pixar owes A TON of credit to Henson. They could basically take place in the same universe, save for “toy death” not being a part of the Toy Story world.
-BTW I didn’t realize they actually made a series based on this movie that followed the characters afterward.
I don’t but out of curiosity, I googled the names of some of the characters and one of the hits was for an IMDB entry for The Gift of Winter.
I don’t know how “forgotten” these are, but there are a couple of others I can think of:
The Night The Animals Talked - it may have been a musical, although I may be confusing it with another animated musical Christmas special (where the animals choose a single “leader” to follow the Christmas star)
A Very Merry Cricket - a sequel to A (The?) Cricket in Times Square (about a cricket that makes violin music when it rubs its wings together; there was a third one made for the Bicentennial in 1976)
Has anyone happened to have seen Karroll’s Christmas? It originally aired on A&E about 8 or 9 years ago, but gets repeated on various channels in years since. It starred Tom Everett Scott, Wallace Shawn, and the ever wonderful Verne Troyer.
It’s not a particularly great Christmas film or anything, but I wrote it, so I get residuals every time it airs, so it’s my personal favorite forgotten Christmas film.
I just got my DVD copy of “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol”. I haven’t seen it since I was a little boy in the 1960’s!
“And razzle-berry dwessing”
This is my all-time favorite interpretation of *A Christmas Carol *(although I’ve never figured out why the ghosts of present and past are switched in order). I was so happy when it showed up on Netflix!
We watched A Carol for Another Christmas on Sunday, and it was really an interesting period piece – Rod Serling at his preachy-est with great performances by Peter Sellers et. al.
Precisely. They are the Morlocks to the Jetsons’ Eloi.
Just watched Magoo’s.
Still brings a tear to my eye.
Oh my God! That looks like it might be it! Thank you, Cal. And the entire thing is on YouTube!
Another one from the dim recesses of memory…I seem to remember that the [popular 1960’s family group (“The Cowsills”) did several Christmas shows-do DVDs of these exist?