"What the hell was THAT?" - Krusty

This could also be filed under, "When the Universe Speaks (through the TV)" after my post yesterday.

Last night I got home from the meetings very late, so I ended up eating dinner after 9pm. My wife and I are sitting on the couch as I'm trying to wait until after I digest before going to bed, and I start flipping channels. That's when we hit the Family Channel (I forget who owns this now, if it's still ABC or not) which has been playing Xmas specials and there's one I haven't seen currently playing. And I've seen every holiday special, including "It's the Sounding of the Shofar, Charlie Brown."

The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. It's a Rankin-Bass stop motion puppet feature, but there's some awfully weird things going on. My first thought is "WTF is Cernunnos doing in an Xmas special (he's called the Great Ak here)? And that's just the first of those moments. Puck (who is speaking Esperanto and a mix mesh of other languages), Bee Queen, Japanese Ogres, John Barlycorn, the Seeley Court, those 3 Fairy Mothers from Sleeping Beauty, those things from Dark Crystal... whose head trip is this? Well, I guess it's a Frank "We're off to see the Wizard" Baum's headtrip.

This was one of those mind exploding moments. The writing for the TV Special most truly and horribly sucks out the wazzoo. But the visuals and the "WTF is that doing in with the Santa Claus story" moments more than made up for it. Plus there were songs that weren't "tear out your hair" bad. I'll have to see if I have this thing on one of the DVDs I own (it might be there on some disk, unplayed, along with "Hestor the Long Eared Donkey" and "Rudolph Saves the New Year"). It was that strange.