It was “Let It Snow”, but even I had to think very hard for almost a minute to come up with that. I was actually winnowing through the “most common Christmas song” list and eliminating whatever I knew someone else had done in this ep.
Glee is at it’s worst when it tries to be all warm and fuzzy, or when it tries to shove a message down your throat. It always seems to be one or the other lately.
It’s been available to watch online at various places for years now.
I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either. I quite liked the cheesy absurdity of Artie’s Christmas special, but - and I say this as someone who likes her Christmas sentimental and sappy - the Band Aid song to the remarkably clean and attractive homeless people was a glurge too far.
I think my favourite thing was Blaine’s suit. Guy can rock a three-piece.
I think the joke was supposed to be that Artie hadn’t actually ever seen theStar Wars Christmas special, and thus mistakenly believed that it must be really great.
I learned today that there was supposed to be a Kurt/Blaine gift-giving subplot, but it was cut due to lack of time. Santana performing “Santa Baby” was also cut. (See story on TVLine.) I hadn’t known this, but apparently one of the promo photos for the episode showed Kurt opening a present from Blaine, so a lot of Klaine fans were apparently expecting this scene and disappointed that they didn’t get it. What seems really strange about this to me is that there were a number of places where “Extraordinary Merry Christmas” seemed to just be killing time in order to pad the episode out to the usual length. IMHO the episode would have been improved if they’d cut “Don’t They Know It’s Christmas”, everything that happened after the homeless shelter scene, and tightened up the B&W special section. I did generally enjoy the B&W special, but as others have mentioned “My Favorite Things” could easily have been shorter.
The cut Kurt/Blaine gift plot also apparently tied in to that weird moment in the B&W special where Kurt was trying to buy jewelry from the Elizabeth Taylor collection online. I think they could easily have cut THAT instead, as it didn’t make any sense and wasn’t really funny. I tried to tell myself that maybe it was supposed to be some sort of updated reference to something that happened in the Judy Garland Christmas special, but that may be giving Glee too much credit at this point.
It also seemed like they pulled “Let It Snow” out way too long, too, just repeating verses and crap. I was seriously unimpressed by about 90% of the B&W special, actually.
On the final episode of The Brady Bunch, Bobby (or was it Peter?) decided to earn extra money by selling hair tonic for a mail order company. Greg buys some, turns his hair orange, etc… It was a ludicrous plot for several reasons, not least of which being most kids in the mid 1970s probably didn’t know what hair tonic was beyond something they saw in a Bugs Bunny cartoon once, and Robert Reed got into such an argument about it that he refused to be in the episode.
Turns out (something I originally learned on Pop Up Brady Bunch and later confirmed), the writer of that episode was a hack comedy writer in his late 50s who’d been writing for movie shorts and radio since the 1930s, when hair tonic really was popular, and he’d dusted off one of his old scripts from the '30s and '40s and tweaked it for Brady Bunch and didn’t even change hair tonic to something like ‘conditioner’ or ‘special rinse’ or whatever.
The reason I mention this: this episode was written by Marti Noxon, who was born in 1964, a couple of years older than me. Like me, she probably saw the Star Wars Holiday Special when it first premiered. For those not old enough to remember or who didn’t watch it, it’s important to remember that STAR WARS was red hot at the time, yet there was hardly any merchandising released yet (it was months after the movie that the first action figures came out, then just a trickle of merchandise), so kids were starving for anything SW themed. It wasn’t certain whether there was going to be a sequel, there were just rumors.
And the reason I mention this is that when it came on… it was still bad. We were trashing it in school in Alabama a few days later it was so lame. The only significance to the canon other than camp is that it was the first appearance of Boba Fett, and that was just in a cartoon within the special.
Add to this that since it was the time when Andy Williams and Dean Martin still had those cheesy scripted Christmas specials, and SW used that as something of a template, it was filled with actors from the '70s: Harvey Korman (imitating Julia Child, as an alien), Bea Arthur, Art Carney, George Gobel, Diahann Carroll, a few several “that’s what’s his names”, with the infamous holograph of Jefferson Starship watched by Chewbacca’s old white haired wookie dad (while, it was theorized at the time, Art Carney was shagging Chewy’s wife- and when I rewatched it more than 25 years later, that actually seemed more possible than before [though I’m sure it wasn’t intentional]). Bea Arthur’s the only person Artie might know from the cast, save for the STAR WARS cameos, and that’s another thing:
Artie’s first STAR WARS experience would probably have been THE PHANTOM MENACE which came out when he was in early elementary school. It’s highly doubtful he’d have been an original trilogy afficianado.
So, there was nothing to like in production values, plot, or musically about the special. The only value of this special was nostalgia- I thoroughly enjoyed watching a VHS tape of it around 2002 or so for that reason, especially the commercials- but Artie wouldn’t be nostalgic for being a kid in 1977. Though writer Marti Noxon would.
And as for the Judy Garland special, I’m middle aged, and gay, and like Judy Garland (in limited doses), and I didn’t even know what they were parodying until it was pointed out upthread other than generic ‘bad old Christmas specials’. Again, Artie probably wouldn’t even know of the existence of these, if he didn’t he wouldn’t care much, and if he did care, he’d probably have mentioned by now that he loves Judy Garland and kitsch TV specials.
Therefore, if the TV TROPE doesn’t already exist, I propose the name NOXON:BRADY WOOKIE-HAIR TONIC trope to TV writers who are too egocentric, or just too much of a hack, to know or care that people born a quarter century or more after them don’t have the same nostalgia (though the good ones find out what they do have nostalgia for or else establish long before that this kid is very different and there’s a reason why he or she has nostalgia for a time he was never a part of). I don’t know or care what Moxon’s other writing credits- I don’t care if she’s won two Oscars and six Emmies for other works- this was such dreadful hack shite that had I somehow written it due to a combination of indigence and manic episode and lost bet I’d have done so only if they credited it to Al B. Goode or some other pseudonym. She should be slapped by her grandma on her grandma’s deathbed for this.
I totally agree. I thought that whole scene was just bizarre. I was all, “WTF were the writers thinking?!”
Rachael’s demanding of extravagant Christmas gifts - especially when she’s Jewish - made me sick.
It was a pretty weird Christmas episode.
First time I ever hated a Glee episope, utter dreck.
Why is it doubtful? I am, at best, apathetic towards Star Wars, but I know there are plenty of young people who love the original series. The movies are hardly obscure, and Artie is the perfect age to be a second generation fan. I have a coworker whose son (a freshman in HS, so a couple of years younger than Artie) has been a Star Wars fan for most of his life thanks to being brought up on the original series by his now 40-something dad. As Community pointed out last week Glee has always pandered to the pop culture tastes of Baby Boomers, but this is one case where it’s actually realistic. It’s certainly more plausible than Finn being a Hall & Oates fan.
That said, I agree with your broader point about this obviously being the work of someone who’s out of touch with what modern teenagers would know about or be interested in, but for different reasons. I’m 30, and I’ve never been a Star Wars fan, but by the time I was Artie’s age I had heard of the Star Wars holiday special and how epically awful it was. This was back in the '90s when only geeks like me used the Internet, before Wikipedia, YouTube, or even Google existed. In 2011 it is trivially easy to find out about the Star Wars holiday special online. I just checked and it looks like the whole thing’s on YouTube. The only way Artie would be unaware that the special has a very bad reputation or that he would consider it “lost” would be if he’s somehow unfamiliar with the Internet.
What would have made more sense would have been if Artie’s stated goal had been to finally give the world a good Star Wars holiday special. But that would have required more commitment to the Star Wars theme than this episode demonstrated. Maybe there were subtler jokes that I missed, but it seemed like they just threw in a few Star Wars costumes and that was it. IMHO it would have been better to either drop the Star Wars stuff altogether or else really go crazy with it.
Artie did actually say to the PBS guy that the show would be a tribute to the Judy Garland Christmas special.
But I agree that:
It would have made a lot more sense if this had been Rachel’s idea, as she was raised by middle aged gay men and has always been depicted as being interested in popular culture from long before she was born. (One of the things that can be so frustrating about Glee is that it’s so easy to think of these “fixes” for most of the shows missteps.) But since the writers couldn’t even remember that Rachel is Jewish I’m not surprised they couldn’t remember her other established traits.
So for me the best thing about this episode is that I found out I’m way older than Sampiro, yet I always get his references. Makes me feel I’m still in touch.
Of course! Didn’t you see Shallow Hal? Inner beauty is measured in terms of volunteer work.
wow
I’m now imagining Santana performing “Teach Me How To Understand Christmas” and I don’t know whether to :eek:, 
, or 
I’m imagining her singing it in a Princess Leia costume, and I don’t mean the long white dress. 
I could almost believe the “Santa Baby” number was cut at the last minute after they saw how thoroughly Community had pulled the rug out from under them, but sadly I don’t think enough people watch Community for it to matter.