Well, there is a sequel to A Christmas Story, but it has nothing to do with Christmas, so it doesn’t really belong here. It’s called It Runs In The Family, and it’s set in the summertime. This time, you get to meet the Bumpuses.
I was watching the MST3K version of it & Santa when revving up his sleigh (with robotic reindeer?!?!) says something like “May Jesus the Son of God be with us” - and Joel & Bots talk about the weird theology of the movie
I caught it on TV and never saw the title- I heard the same distinct narrarator’s voice and heard them talk about the Bumpuses so I thought it must be the sequel. I changed it after seeing several minutes of Charles Grodin as the dad. It was awful.
Courtesy IMDb:
Just make sure not to confuse “It runs in the family” with Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss, which at my house, at least, is a treasured classic.
I don’t know about you but with a title like The Leprachaun’s Christmas Gold how can you go wrong? It’s likely one of those things were they felt the need to burn the print after seeing it.
So it’s time to hunt and see what that thing is about.
He’s a description for a site selling the video (no I don’t think I’ll pay $9.99 plus shipping and handling to find out how brain killing it is): “A young boy stranded on a magic island helps a band of the ‘wee folk’ save their Christmas gold from a banshee in this animated tale that features the voices of Art Carney and Peggy Cass.”
Oh my god! It’s going to actually be aired on television in ten minutes according to one site. I’ll view it and report back if my sanity holds.
It was worse than anything I had ever seen. Horrifying, terrible. I may never recover.
The moderator may feel a need to move this to Great Debates because it’s clear now that Christianity is wrong. God wouldn’t have sent Jesus if it meant that some day The Leprachaun’s Christmas Gold would be unleashed upon the world.
I wonder if it’s the animated version of Darby O’Gill and the Little People - a movie we are forced to watch every year at Christmas, even tough it isn’t a Christmas movie and we aren’t Irish. We all sit there in stony silence, pacifying our Mother’s freakish obsession with this movie.
Well if no one minds me indulging in a little recap, it definitely is not Darby O’Gill.
It starts with a our hero as a cabin boy in a ship and his captain tells him that he always has a tree on board for Christmas but not this year. At least until he spots a pine tree on the beach of an uncharted island they’re passing. So he sends this kid out to dig it up. He does and releases a banshee who whips up a storm. As the storm passes he sees a rainbow which points to a mound of shamrocks. “Rainbows appear in summer but it’s Christmas Eve!” I’m glad he said that since I was confused about whether he was supposed to be in the southern hemisphere since everything was green and there wasn’t a hint of snow.
Anyway, the mound opens and he spots a pile of gold which is guarded by a leprechaun. So he’s invited in for tea where he gets this leprechaun’s life story. Meanwhile the banshee flew up to the rather conspicuous chimney on his barrow and poured something down it which landed in the spigot of his tea kettle. The leprechaun explains that banshees are creatures that if they are not freely given any gold by Christmas they turn into tears and wash away. So this evil leprechaun is hoarding all the gold because he wants her to die. The leprechaun goes on to explain how the banshee took the form of a friendly angel who told his wife that her husband’s greed was corrupting him and she should convince him to get rid of the gold. The wife convinced all the leprechauns to stop hoarding gold except her husband who moved out. Because he couldn’t wait two days for the banshee to die the leprechaun gets particularly evil and has his friend trick the banshee into turning into tears for a short time and planting a pine cone in her. Apparently even though two hundred years have passed since they did that, and two hundred Christmases have passed where the banshee didn’t get any gold, she’s up and about and wanting Christmas gold.
So at that point the leprechaun finally drinks his tea and the banshee storms in telling him that he just drunk a potion of generousity and will give her something anyway. Apparently being drugged into doing it counts as being “freely given”. The leprechaun is so spiteful, though, that instead of just giving the banshee a gold cup or something so she’ll go away and can live another year he hands off all of his gold to the cabin boy. The leprechaun tells him to not give away the gold to the banshee and though the banshee can change form it’s always crying so you can tell.
Three minutes later cabin boy is out on the beach wishing he could find his ship and finds a crying a girl. Gee, I wonder who that could be. The crying girl convinces him to give the gold away to everyone which apparently inspires the cabin boy to say “The gold is yours!” Naturally it was the banshee and she puts the sleep of a hundred christmases on him (is that a hundred years, or a hundred short afternoon naps after the kids wear you out in the morning?). The banshee flies off to get some gold and the leprechauns come out of hiding. The husband and wife make up over the cabin boy and he’s woken up by the power of their love (no, I didn’t just make that part up). A rainbow appears to let the banshee into the mound with the gold but the sun rises and she dies a horrible death. The other end of the rainbow leads back to the ship which happened to find a convenient dock and the uncharted island and all the gold and leprechauns go with the cabin boy back to Ireland.
In short, it was about as bad such things get. It clearly wasn’t a Christmas special; there was one short musical number sequence that was likely rapidly reworked after they couldn’t sell the St. Patrick’s Day special (but they could somehow sell this?). The message it gives is disturbing (Hoard things even at the expense of other people’s lives! You’re right and being nice to people is wrong!) and story even less interesting than I made it out to be. The animation is particularly lifeless, but that’s a Rankin-Bass production for you.
JSG, I’d like to point out that you just wrote 753 words about “The Leprachaun’s Christmas Gold”. So sad.
While it’s nowhere near as bad as TLCG, I’d like to mention “Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas”. However, it does have some pretty money songs, and features a rival band called the Riverbottom Nightmare Band. You really can’t pass that up.
Yeah but you took the time to count it. Even just cutting and pasting it takes some time.
Oh my God! I think I’ve seen the movie!
and for the record, I would say Rankin-Bass productions are about 50/50. I enjoy as many as I despise. I loved their HOBBIT, hated their ROTK, but I hate Bashki’s LOTR even more.
Yeah. Although, like Kat, I have to admit that I’ve seen it before. It really smacks of holiday opportunism. They get to air it for both Christmas and St. Patrick’s Day (much to the horror of the unsuspecting viewer).
I start with the basic assumption that every holiday-related movie or TV special is pure, unadulterated CRAP!
It makes life so much easier when flipping through the TV guide: Oh look, 6 Christmas movies on tonight. Let’s go bowling dear.
The only movie worth seeing is A Christmas Story with Peter Billingsley. The only TV show worth seeing is the original, 22 minute animated version of The Grinch (and I’ve got the CD, so I haven’t even seen it in years).
Ok I admit Rankin and Bass are a special kind of crap but I can never turn it off, or refuse to Purchase them. Damn though you have to think about how much things have changed in Kiddie entertainment.
How many new Christmans specials would use lines like:
“And how the children cried they thought that Santa had died and every eye shed a blue Christmas Tear.” A Year without a Santa Claus
“A Kiss for a Toy is the price you’ll pay, When you sit on my left knee don’t be stingy” Santa Claus is coming to town
Every Dope will love the sentiment of this one:
“Give up a little on the wonder why and give your heart a try,” T’was the Night before Christmas
“You don’t know as much as you think because you only think with your head” T’was the Night before Christmas
“Soon the Burgermiesters kinda died off and after everyone had a good laugh they were forgotten” Santa Clause is coming to town.
My favorite thing about 70’s Christams specials is their love of all things of the Victorian Era. There was no reeal reason but every one of the stories are period pieces set at the turn of the centurey.
For badness, however, nothing Beats however
The Stingiest Man in town. If you disliek a Christmas Carol then try the cartoon musical with Tom (Mr. C.) Bosely as the Humbug and Walter Matthau as Scrooge. The songs are forgettable the animation suspiciously foriegn and hearing Walter belt out tunes… Frightening.
Yeah they are crap but that is why I love these things and will continually watch them every year.
Have none of you ever seen Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny? I got to see it in the early 70’s when I was 2 or 3. I had a vague recollection of this cinematic turd lodged somewhere in the back of my mind for years, not sure if it was a real memory or a deluded fabrication due to a childhood trauma. I remembered images of Santa and his sled (sans reindeer) stuck in the sand in Florida. A bunch of kids came by and gawked at him while he bitched about the hot weather. The kids eventually decided that only the Ice Cream Bunny could help him so in came Man in Giant Bunny Suit who drove Santa off in a truck to who knows where.
I finally found this pile of crap at the IMDB. It actually exists. What a relief I was not suffering from some form of psychosis. Of course, that someone not only made but thought kids would be entertained by this garbage is even more disturbing.
Hopefully, all copies of this film are deteriorated beyond recognition by this time.
But you have to enjoy the life-size Pia Zadora! And the Martians from the “Ed Wood School of Dramatic Acting”!
I’m going to chime in with an R-B Christmas special probably fewer people have have seen than The Leprachaun’s Christmas Gold:Jack Frost. It’s been years since I’ve seen it so my exact memory of it is somewhat hazy but a few things lept out about it:
(1) It’s not really a Christmas special. If Christmas was mentioned during the program, it was only passing. The show is narrated by a groundhog voiced by Buddy Hackett so it’s really a GROUNDHOG DAY special (in fact, aside from the later Bill Murray movie, it may be the only one). When I first stumbled upon this show, I couldn’t figure out why they weren’t airing this around February 2nd instead of at Christmas.
(2) The show’s villain was bizarrely funny. In Jack Frost, the titular character is a magical weather-controlling elf who becomes human and ends up battling a tyrannical Slavic overlord (whose name I can’t recall) on behalf of an oppressed village. This overlord, however, is not your typical holiday-special baddie. He had an army of clunky robots and always carried around an iron ventriloquist’s dummy who acted as his chief “advisor.” Think of Richard Libertini’s Latin American dictator in The In-Laws (which, I think, came out after this show first aired), make him a stop-motion animated figure, and give him a Russian accent and you’ll have the bad guy here.
(3) It does not have a happy ending. To stay human, Jack Frost must find true love by February 2nd. As a requirement for these types of shows, there is a potential love interest for Jack. Jack, of course, tries to do everything possible to win her over (including defeating the villain and setting the town free) but–in the end–she just thinks of him as a friend and goes back to her old boyfriend who spent most of the program recovering from being beaten-up by the villain. So, February 2nd comes, and Jack, with a melancholy look on this face, disappears from human view and reverts back to being an elf.
Now, unlike the Leprachaun Christmas special (which I haven’t seen) I wouldn’t call this the worst Christmas movie or special–in fact, I’ll admit I rather guiltily enjoyed the program when I saw it. Of course, the details of it are fuzzy. If somebody here has seen it more recently (or has a better memory of it than I do), add your view and correct me if I’m wrong.
I’ve seen that one, too. I’ve been told that I used to sing the “It’s Just What I Always Wanted” song.
It’s definitely nowhere near as bad as the Leprechaun special, or, say, Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July, which is a short view into the torments of Hell.
You’re pretty much right, from what I can recall. I remember there was a big point of Jack hearing the Love Interest say that she loved Jack Frost, and then she didn’t love him as Jack Snip, the human tailor, because she only loved the Knight in Golden Armor (why “Golden”? It should be “Shining”!) and Jack Frost.