Exactly - the Great Ak? The trolls? All the other paganist spirits of the woods, it’s like a rejected chapter of The Hobbit.
I can see how you could find it to be weird, ala Jeep’s Phoenix statement, but as far as I can tell, the two clauses your last sentence don’t go together.
They go together in the sense that I find Tolkein’s writing to be weird, laborious, and convoluted. So that combined with the weird fantasy subjects I call it tolkeinesque.
YMMV
I’m not sure how much it’s based on or borrow from, but “The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus” is a book by L. Frank Baum (the Wizard of Oz books guy). It’s pretty consistent with some of Baum’s other fairy tales.
So did they cut it to “I’ll be back”?
Yes! And to top it all off, in the one I saw,
it ends with Santa on his freakin’ deathbed! Granted, he’s made immortal in the end and everything is fine, but geez!
It was indeed based on Baum’s book. I believe it premiered in 1985. I was in grad school, thrilled to see another Rankin Bass production & was appalled by it.
When I mentioned it to a friend the next day, he said “Let me guess. It attempted to explain just about everything to do with Christmas & did it… badly”
Yep! That was pretty much it!
Author Francesco Marculiano has done a detailed analysis of the different types of Rankin-Bass Santas.
I’ve never seen “Year Without a Santa Claus.” Is this something I need to correct?
There are two reasons why you need to see “The Year Without a Santa Clause”:
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[li]The Heat Miser Song[/li][li]The Cold Miser Song[/li][/ul]
And sniff “I Believe in Santa Claus”
I just stopped in to say that Mrs. Claus in SCICTT is bangin hot. Well…before she moved to the north pole and got big.
Nitpick: The “Snow” Miser.
But how can you run a dog pound and not be able to tell a sick reindeer from a puppy?
Hey, no fat-shaming! You have no idea how near-impossible it is for a woman to maintain a girlish figure for over 200 years.
Anyway, the woman who voiced Mrs. Santa Claus, Robie Lester, also narrated dozens of Disney storybook record albums of which I had many as a kid. In fact, when I first saw “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”, I remember being a little weirded-out hearing the character with her voice since I was so used to only hearing her on my story records.
I think the point is that, even if Santa is mad or whatever, having a bad year, etc, in the end he ALWAYS comes through.
Yeah, TTNBC Santa always seemed like he could be REALLY easily waylaid by a villain…or just a lunatic with a pen.
"Dear Santa,
We ALL hate you! Everyone in the world! Because you keep putting robots in our brains! Go DIE!
Signed,
All Humans Who Have Ever Lived
P.S.: I am not a nut."
That and the somewhat “confused” the special had towards the “faith vs rationality” angle. Albert (the letter-writing mouse) is the snotty intellectual nonbeliever who “thinks too much with his head, and not with his heart,” right?
Well, in his world, Santa is provably real. He makes no effort to hide himself on his delivery runs, he regularly sends and receives mail, and has a telephone switchboard—a trans-species accessible one, at that—with operators waiting to take calls and give out information.
In other words…virtually everyone in that special was a rationalist, working from evidence. Albert was a deluded fanatic acting on blind faith.
I’m pretty sure that would have bugged me as a kid, even if I hadn’t grown up in a non-religious household.
Because it was masterfully disguised with socks on its ears. Which in retrospect may have been what caused the illness.
Right. I believe it’s actually considered to be an Oz book, in the sense of taking place in the same fictional universe and having a few crossovers in some of the later Oz books.
So, essentially, the stop-motion Life and Adventures of Santa Claus is actually a parallel story to The Wizard of Oz and not really a traditional Christmas tale.
I remember that Santa Claus showed up at Ozma’s birthday party in The Road to Oz. He sent Dorothy back to Kansas for the last time before she decided to up stakes and move to Oz permanently.