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The Mike Toole Show - Christmas Special Forces


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Northlander



Joined: 10 Feb 2009
Posts: 900
PostPosted: Mon Dec 26, 2016 4:44 pm Reply with quote
Gina Szanboti wrote:
I've never understood this obsession with endless narratives about the need to "save Christmas." When has Christmas ever been in danger?

Because if even ONE kid doesn't get the present they've wished for and/or expected, or one family doesn't reconcile in time for Christmas, or if Santa Claus stubbed his toe and can't deliver presents and nobody can do his job for him for that important night, or if some weird Halloween Skeleton Guy kidnaps santa and tries to do his job for him (and poorly), Christmas is ruined forever. Can you not fathom the seriousness of the situation?

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Seriously, if the Alf Christmas special couldn't kill it, nothing can.

I'm almost afraid to ask, but... is it even worse than the Star Wars Christmas Special?
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
Posts: 4016
PostPosted: Mon Dec 26, 2016 6:15 pm Reply with quote
Gina Szanboti wrote:
Nah, in the end that was a saving Christmas story too. Most such hold that stopping Santa = Christmas destroyed, but the Grinch showed that nothing can harm Christmas and proved my point that it has never needed saving. Not even from Martians.


Actually--since Ted Geisel first started out as an advertising artist--the Grinch first appeared in a Seuss magazine story, as a cynical advertising sales-creature, who tries to sell a proto-Who on the idea that a $.69 piece of string is better than the sun! (Y'see, the sun doesn't work all day, year round or indoors, and it's not portable enough to fit in your pocket!)
That morphed into Seuss' idea that the Grinch would only see the commercial side of Christmas, like we sometimes do, and wouldn't consider the idea that the Whos take it spiritually.

That said, I don't think we're in any danger of not enough anime references to Rudolph.
From what we hear in anime episodes, the Japanese don't appear to have any OTHER concept of Santa and his sleigh, or yuletide mythology in general, except for what Videocraft and Gene Autry told them. (Qv. Osaka in Azumanga Daioh, and Kirito's short-lived Christmastime girlfriend in Sword Art Online.)
You know Dasher and Dancer, and Prancer and Vixen, but they don't.
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DerekL1963
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Joined: 14 Jan 2015
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Location: Puget Sound
PostPosted: Mon Dec 26, 2016 6:29 pm Reply with quote
Northlander wrote:
Quote:
Seriously, if the Alf Christmas special couldn't kill it, nothing can.

I'm almost afraid to ask, but... is it even worse than the Star Wars Christmas Special?


If you're under forty or so... you've probably never seen the real horror of the Christmas Special Season. The Christmas variety show. Now, there were some good ones, but most were downright awful.

And the awful ones all followed pretty the same format... an A-lister who was sliding down, a B-lister who hadn't fallen too far, or a once beloved C-lister to headline. A half dozen or so low B or high C listers to round out the cast. One or two standard "Christmasy" sets (a stage that was bare except for a few cheap trees and 'mounds' of snow, or a homey faux log cabin complete with fireplace and roaring fire, etc...). The same round of lame jokes, faux memories of Christmas Past, the same routine of pretending they were all great friends gathered for a jolly Christmas and a very limited standard repertoire of public domain Christmas songs.

I swear it sometimes seemed as if they just recycled the scripts from year to year.

I must have seen a dozen of them every Christmas, my mother loved them.
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11306
PostPosted: Mon Dec 26, 2016 7:29 pm Reply with quote
Northlander wrote:
Quote:
Seriously, if the Alf Christmas special couldn't kill it, nothing can.

I'm almost afraid to ask, but... is it even worse than the Star Wars Christmas Special?

Well, ymmv of course. It doesn't have Chewbacca's dad watching VR porn, but it does have death, abandonment, suicidal depression, and a child with a terminal illness (complete with In Memory Of title card at the end). Read up and decide for yourself. Very Happy
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Kadmos1



Joined: 08 May 2014
Posts: 13540
Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP
PostPosted: Tue Dec 27, 2016 2:01 am Reply with quote
Cutiebunny wrote:
I get tired of their noncommittal "We'll see" and then nothing is ever done and there's 0 communication that anything is in progress. I find their communication skills very lacking.

At least Funimation is 1 of those companies that acknowledges they have screwed up.
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Northlander



Joined: 10 Feb 2009
Posts: 900
PostPosted: Tue Dec 27, 2016 10:43 am Reply with quote
Gina Szanboti wrote:
Well, ymmv of course. It doesn't have Chewbacca's dad watching VR porn, but it does have death, abandonment, suicidal depression, and a child with a terminal illness (complete with In Memory Of title card at the end). Read up and decide for yourself. Very Happy




Normally, I'd say something like "OK, you win this one", but... you have convinced me that whenever the Alf Christmas Special is involved in any context or situation, nobody wins. Ever.


Last edited by Northlander on Fri Jan 19, 2018 6:50 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 27, 2016 5:50 pm Reply with quote
That is the saddest kitten I've ever seen. Not just sad, but totally "wtf, world?" written all over its face. Perfect.
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Errinundra
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Joined: 14 Jun 2008
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PostPosted: Tue Dec 27, 2016 8:27 pm Reply with quote
I recently read Anime: A History by Jonathon Clements and realised that The New Adentures of Pinocchio was the the first "anime" I ever saw, some time back in the 60s.
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writerpatrick



Joined: 29 Mar 2006
Posts: 670
Location: Canada
PostPosted: Thu Dec 29, 2016 9:00 am Reply with quote
When talking about Rankin Bass (or even early anime), everyone forgets about The Festival of Family Classics. Since it aired in 1972 it would be one of the earliest anime to air on Western TV and at 18 episodes constitutes the majority of RB's drawn animation. It is definitely one of the most overlooked Rankin Bass shows.

Unfortunately, only part of the series was released on DVD. The episodes can be found on VHS, but not as a proper series. Instead it came out as random episodes from various companies, usually as bargain children's tapes. To collect it properly takes a lot of hunting. If you know where to look, most of the series can be found online in English except for the first episode, Hiawatha.

The series also includes a Christmas episode, A Christmas Tree, as well as a Halloween episode, Jack O'Lantern. The latter often showed up on it's own as a TV special.
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StudioToledo



Joined: 16 Aug 2006
Posts: 847
Location: Toledo, U.S.A.
PostPosted: Mon Jan 02, 2017 11:10 pm Reply with quote
Aside from "Kid Power", another TopCraft involvement released around the same year was a series of hour long TV specials sold as "Movies" as part of an ABC block called "The Saturday Superstar Movie". One noted one I can think of was called "The Red Baron". Watching this one in particular shows how very young and inexperienced those TopCraft animators were, being an early effort, we can at least let that slide anyway, though one internet reviewer gave us his opinions anyway...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB3UVXu_uzc

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All of these were underwritten by Rankin and Bass, and written in the US (usually by a fellow named Romeo Muller), but otherwise created almost entirely in Japan.

Surprised ANN has an entry for Muller at all. Outside of Rankin/Bass, he also wrote other TV specials like Puff, The Magic Dragon and Strawberry Shortcake. He wrote three rather forgotten Xmas specials in the early 90's including one released after his death called "The Twelve Days of Christmas", itself, also animated in Japan, though it's nothing to write home about, though Phil Hartman got to do a voice in it.

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Of course, the Japanese aspect of these stop-motion specials wasn't specifically obscured—you could still find Mochinaga's name in the credits—but it was brushed aside in favor of highlighting the studio name and celebrity voice stars that populated the productions. Rankin and Bass would talk unctuously about how hard everyone worked on their specials, not noting that, in terms of production design and animation, “everyone” was mainly Mochinaga and his assistants, Ichiro Komuro and Akikazu Kono, who'd eventually take over directing the stop-motion fare for Rankin-Bass.

Of course, not mentioning everyone on a foreign staff became the norm as more Saturday morning cartoons mills out of Hollywood began farming out their shows to all sorts of places like Mexico City, Sydney, Tapei, Manilia, Seoul as well as Tokyo.

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Not every Rankin-Bass cartoon show would involve Hara—the well-liked 1969 Frosty the Snowman special was the product of Mushi Production, with animation direction supplied by none other than Osamu Dezaki. I like living in a world where Dezaki collaborated, in a strictly secondhand fashion, with Jimmy Durante.

Better than Mighty Orbots and its Gary Owens!

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Getting back to the business of Christmas specials, Topcraft got busy with stuff like 1974's Twas the Night Before Christmas, in which the credits mention “cinematography” by Tsuguyuki Kubo, who actually served as director and character designer for the show!

They really could've just credited him as an "Animation Supervisor" but, eh....

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The important thing is, this means that technically there is an anime feature starring Geroge Gobel, star of The George Gobel Show.

And a nerdy mouse who nearly ruined Christmas for an entire town by being an nerdy naysayer!

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Unlike a lot of these specials, this one aired fairly concurrently in Japan, on TV Asahi—the country had to wait years for earlier stuff, like Rudolph. But they edited Stingiest Man in Town down a bit for the Japanese telecast, by about five minutes. Man, don't you hate it when a local company decides to trim a foreign-made production?!

Now I wonder what sponsor did they had that night it aired to merit the cut-down job?

Quote:
The studio kept going for a while after Nausicaä's success, with their final production being The Adventures of the Little Koala—a show produced by Tohokushinsha, made specifically for Japan.

The show was a product of a Koala craze that hit Japan at the time in '84 I've read, another koala-featured cartoon produced around that time by another studio that also showed up here in the states was called "The Noozles".

Quote:
but their final stab at an animated Christmas special was 2001's Santa Baby, an Eartha Kitt vehicle that featured work by a young screenwriter named Suzanne Collins. But hey, it was still produced with Japanese talent! Rankin-Bass kept using talented anime creators, right to the end.

Even 1987's The Wind in The Willows had a few anime guys on it despite that special having been farmed out to James wang's Cuckoo's Nest Studios in Taiwan.

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At the very least, I figure we might someday see an anime special that's good enough to cause a huge swath of the population to be seriously upset when the TV networks try to stop airing it, like what the people of Sweden did when SVT1 tried to take away their Christmas Donald Duck cartoons. I want an anime special to have that kind of staying power!

Lord knows if such staying power was at play, they would be playing 'From All of us, To All of You!" every year here in the states, especially if Disney wanted to pimp the latest film in the cinemas.

DerekL1963 wrote:
I doubt you'll ever see them, the same way you'll likely never see a Cultural Festival episode of an American show set at school. Both are deeply rooted in and a product of their particular cultures.

It is, though I suppose the closest we have of anything school related at night might be the open house. If only high school classrooms got to be dolled up like the Nazi coffee house in Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer, I'd get behind that if offered in my World World II class! My high school once had a summer carnival funded every year by the athletics club. That stopped while I was a pre-teen and never came back. Sad

Top Gun wrote:
It really blew my mind when I started getting into this fandom and learned that the specials that form the heart of the modern American Christmas mythos were almost universally created in Japan. Growing up, we had a ridiculously well-worn VHS that my parents used to tape the TV airings of just about every special you could think of (anyone remember CBS's awesome "Special Presentation" intro?),

Remember, that was an INSTITUTION for any 6 year old and a calling card to stay up an hour late (as long as it was animated)!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0ZwQJnYGfc

Quote:
and along with the Grinch and Charlie Brown, it was pretty much all Rankin-Bass. So I guess thanks to Japan for making this time of year fantastic. Very Happy

And the Big Three Network that gave those specials the time of day at all (and the sponsors who chipped in, gotta buy those Norelco shavers!).
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