Richards Favorite Videos

Part 2:

Twas the Night Before Christmas, the 1974 Rankin-Bass animated Christmas television special, has very little to do with the famous 1823 poem that opens with this line.

In this television special, set in the town of Junctionville in a world where humans and intelligent humanoid mice apparently openly interact at least on a professional basis, Santa Claus is offended by an anonymous letter printed in the town’s newspaper claiming that he doesn’t exist. In response, Santa returns the entire town’s letters (the letter was signed “all of us”) to him unopened. Upon reading the anonymous letter printed in the newspaper, Father Mouse (voiced by George Gobel) — a mouse assistant to the human clockmaker Joshua Trundle (voiced by Joel Grey, the credited narrator) — immediately suspects that his brainy son Albert is its author. Albert (voiced by Tammy Grimes) confirms his suspicions, repeating the letter verbatim to him.

Father Mouse and the Trundle Family devise a plan to appease Santa by building a singing clock tower for him, built with a special recording to play a song to coax him into visiting Junctionville on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, Albert enters the clock to explore it without permission, and inadvertently damages it seriously, thus rendering it inoperable and seriously damaging Trundle’s professional reputation. Furthermore, the mayor, publicly embarrassed at the clock tower’s failure, refuses to give the clockmaker access to it for repairs.

Confessing his mistake, Albert volunteers to repair it himself and Father Mouse tells Joshua of the situation before waiting at his bed with worry on Christmas Eve. Although Albert does not complete his task until about one minute after the Midnight deadline, the clock does play its song within earshot of Santa which convinces him to visit the town after all.

The special aired for decades on CBS before moving to its current home network, ABC Family.

This was always what I thought of when I heard the term Gorilla Mask for years until I found out that it was an abusive but hilarious sex degradation act.

Herb and Rex, the Jurassic odd couple, introduce segments featuring the Three Wise Men, singing camels, ice-skating penguins, and the hilarious Paris Bellharmonic Orchestra. There’s even a Motown rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” The entire cast joins a rousing chorus finale of “Here We Come A-Wassailing,” which is certain to put everyone in the Christmas mood. (1987, 24 minutes.

I always thought the Heat Misers song was kind of a cop out. The lyrics seem a little lazy. Snowie has a rhyme on the verse about what temperature he prefers it to be (”degrees” with “freeze”). Heat Misers version just repeats the word degrees. Wtf is up with that?

So I loved Rudolph’s Shiny New Year as a kid, and watching it now I realize… well, it’s actually terrible. But this one scene is still pretty cool. Unfortunately this is also the one scene that they cut out to make room for commercials when they show it on TV now. So uh… here it is, in case you remembered this when you watched the movie years ago and couldn’t find it since and thought you were crazy.

here we learn that its wassailing, not waffling, though they don’t explain further.
The practice has its roots in the middle ages as a reciprocal exchange between the feudal lords and their peasants as a form of recipient initiated charitable giving, to be distinguished from begging. This point is made in the song “Here We Come A-Wassailing”, when the wassailers inform the lord of the house that

“we are not daily beggars that beg from door to door but we are friendly neighbors whom you have seen before.”