The Santa Clause 2

Michael Lembeck, 2002
Rotten Tomatoes score: 55%

After two reviews in a row of belated sequels, why break the streak?

Eight years after the original The Santa Clause, which begat a slew of imitators and inaugurated a whole new generation of family Christmas movies, they finally got around to making a sequel. But this time around it is a strictly G-rated affair, and the change of tone is pretty striking—the reindeer are now goofy cartoon characters, Tim Allen's trademark wit has lost its edge, and David Krumholtz as boss elf Bernard acts like he's had a lobotomy. Corniest of all, Scott and the elves are joined in this sequel by a host of other "legendary figures", including Mother Nature, Father Time (curiously played by Peter Boyle, who was Scott Calvin's boss in the first film), and the Tooth Fairy, whose macho pride Scott flatters by renaming him "the Molinator."

It's Bernard, assisted by his henchman Curtis (Spencer Breslin), who breaks the bad news to Scott Calvin. It turns out the Santa Clause that took effect when he first put on the red suit has an additional rider: If Scott isn't married by Christmas Day, he will lose his infinite power. Does this mean that every past Santa Claus has been married? Did Scott's clumsy predecessor leave behind a mourning widow when he fell off that roof? If so, where is she?

Well, let's immediately dismiss all those concerns from our consciousness, because Scott has a second problem on his plate. His son Charlie (played by the same kid from the first movie, but looking totally different) has become a juvenile delinquent. Now Scott must travel to his unidentified home town (Chicago maybe?) to put Charlie back on the straight and narrow and, if possible, arrange a shotgun wedding for himself while he's at it.

Conveniently, the target of Charlie's misbehavior happens to be the beautiful, unattached female principal of his high school (Elizabeth Mitchell). Principal Carol Newman is so stodgy and no-nonsense that she has outlawed all holiday decorations in the school—not out of any commitment to secularism, but just to be a Grinch. Clearly there is room here for her to undergo a total change of character and fall for Scott, but that will have to wait until he has gone through a series of disastrous blind dates (including Molly Shannon working very hard to be obnoxious and succeeding tremendously).

Meanwhile, Scott spends his downtime trying to reconnect with his son. Apparently, Charlie is frustrated by the burden of keeping Scott's true identity a secret; the rest of the world believes that Scott lives and works in Canada. Wait a minute, why is this necessary? I don't understand why Santa Claus has to have a secret identity. He's not Batman. What would be the problem if Charlie's friends knew his father was Santa? And besides, at the end of the first movie the whole town (or at least the whole police force) found out about it.

And what has been happening at the North Pole all this time? Bernard and Curtis have been hard at work filling the movie's run-time by inventing a robotic Santa Claus to stand in for Scott during his absence. I don't know if they're afraid the other elves are fomenting revolution or something, but apparently they are all stupid enough to believe this plastic being is the real Scott. Anyway, do you remember the episode of Futurama where there's a robotic Santa Claus who becomes a tyrant and terrorizes people at Christmas? Well, the same thing happens here, only there are no explosions, and John Goodman is not involved.

Back in the real world, Scott discovers that his magical powers are gradually fading as he spends time among mere mortals, so he has started to look more and more like Tim Allen. Principal Carol notices the difference, but she seems rather unfazed by the fact that Scott has lost fifty pounds overnight. Fortunately, Scott has just enough magic left to liven up a faculty Christmas party by miraculously materializing nostalgic vintage children's toys for the attendees. Slowly, it dawns on Carol that there is something special about Scott, but she can't put her finger on it. (Maybe it was the way he caused it to snow directly above her head, which so few people can do.)

But when Scott tells Carol the truth—that he is Santa Claus and needs to marry her immediately—she has some difficulty accepting it. Unfortunately, that conflict will have to take a back seat, because Curtis has just arrived to tell Scott about the increasingly repressive regime of robot Santa. With no magic left to fly him home, Scott is forced to yank out one of his own teeth (a surprisingly bloodless operation) to summon the Molinator, who obligingly transports him to the North Pole at supersonic speed. Shortly thereafter, Charlie and Carol show up as well, having each sacrificed a tooth to make the trip.

Once the robot Santa is brought to heel, Carol reveals that Charlie has melted her icy heart by uttering some inspirational dialogue. She has now decided to throw caution to the wind, and Mother Nature marries them, Vegas-style, without filling out the proper paperwork. Imagine Carol's surprise when Scott instantaneously transforms back into a 250-pound elderly bearded man before her eyes. (Actually, the credits sequence suggests that Carol herself eventually becomes old thanks to the magic of Christmas, but that will be forgotten by the time part 3 rolls around.)

Not to be left out, Charlie has had a change of heart as well, and he now views his role as Santa's secret-keeper as a blessing rather than a burden. I still object to the whole situation.

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This is a toss-up; I really have no strong feelings. I guess I'll say

Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House

Rod Daniel, 2002
Rotten Tomatoes audience rating: 24%

Well, here's a low-hanging fruit that deserves more than the one-paragraph treatment I gave it in my Home Alone review in 2012. I called it "despicable," urged readers never to watch it "under any circumstances," and even made sarcastic comments about actors French Stewart and Daniel Stern. That wasn't really fair. Daniel Stern is a reliable character actor, and French Stewart does all he possibly can with the material he has to work with here.

However, I should add that, according to Wikipedia, Daniel Stern refused to appear in this picture, calling it "an insult, total garbage." This quote is unsourced and unverifiable, but what would you have said if they'd asked you to play Marv?

As I mentioned before, this movie was released 10 years after Home Alone 2, but all the characters are played by different, much younger actors. Kevin's enormous family has been reduced to two siblings, Buzz and Megan, who are still bullies. His parents are separated, and his father plans to marry a rich woman named Natalie. Natalie is a decent person who tries her best to be a good stepmother to Kevin, but for some reason we're supposed to view her as a villain.

Fed up with his family as usual, Kevin decides to spend Christmas with dad and Natalie in their capacious mansion. Actually it's more than a mansion; it's a high-tech palace that rivals Smart House. Left with the run of the place during the workday, Kevin enjoys playing with the voice-controlled gadget that controls doors, fireplaces, and showerheads, but the grouchy butler Prescott wishes the little brat would go home. Fortunately, grandmotherly housekeeper Molly is there to look out for him. (In case you're keeping score, no, Kevin is neither at home nor alone.)

But since this is a Home Alone movie, inevitably the Wet Bandits have to make their appearance sooner or later. For some reason, Harry has hung up his crowbar, so instead we get Marv and his loving wife Vera, who scheme to kidnap a crown prince who will be spending Christmas with Natalie. Marv looks and behaves very differently than he did in the old days, and curiously he wears Harry's black stocking cap in every scene. Did the wardrobe department get them mixed up?

You might have thought that the high-tech gadgetry would provide a lot of new opportunities for wacky slapstick sequences involving Marv and Vera, but I guess the writers figured that was too obvious. Instead Kevin thwarts their crimes by bonking them over the head with pots and pans.

Awkwardly, the encounters between Kevin and the Wet Bandits are staggered across a string of clumsy sequences, with the bad guys repeatedly finding new excuses to break into the house and then leave again. First they show up to "get the lay of the land", and Kevin defeats them by turning on all the water in the master bathroom and filling the entire ground floor of the house with six inches of standing water. Unequivocally the best scene in the movie is the one where the bathroom door bursts open and Marv and Vera are carried downstairs on a giant tidal wave that floods the entire house. The first time I saw this, it made me laugh uncontrollably. It's not quite enough to make the movie worth watching, but this is gratuitous property damage straight out of Steve Urkel's playbook, and it is worthy of an encore.

Anyway, when Natalie comes home to eight inches of standing water covering the first floor of her house, she blames Kevin. Kevin insists that the burglars are to blame, but none of the adults believe his story. (And even if they did, I'm not sure this was a reasonable response to a housebreaking.) Meanwhile, Kevin concludes that Prescott must be working for the crooks, since he failed to respond to Kevin's call for help.

The bad guys return during a dinner party, disguised as caterers, hoping to abduct the prince. Unfortunately for them, the prince's flight was delayed, so after another pointless run-in with Kevin, they resolve to break in yet again on Christmas day. When they do, they imprison Kevin and Prescott—who was innocent all along—in the wine cellar. It turns out their inside man was actually Molly, who is Marv's mother. Trapped in the cellar, Kevin uses Prescott's last few minutes of cell phone battery life to call first Buzz and then his mother. When the phone call cuts out, the mother panics and burns rubber to get to Natalie's house. If only there were some simple way to contact professional law enforcement officers during an emergency! Eventually, Kevin and Prescott escape, and a few uninspired pranks later all three Wet Bandits are apprehended.

Once everyone is safe, Kevin's dad reveals that he has decided, purely out of narrative necessity, to leave Natalie and move back in with his family. Even the crown prince, who has finally arrived on the scene, wants to stay with Kevin's family instead of Natalie. Natalie is devastated, but that serves her right for having done absolutely nothing whatsoever to incur anyone's animosity! That'll teach her to be a disfavored love interest!

Kevin brings the entire production to a close by using the voice-control system to cause it to start snowing. If you listen very carefully, you can hear the entire production company laughing at your expense.

Jingle All the Way 2

Alex Zamm, 2014
Rotten Tomatoes score: 30%

I was mildly surprised to discover last year that 1996's Jingle All the Way had suddenly spawned a sequel after eighteen years of well-earned obscurity, and that it starred blue-collar funnyman Daniel Lawrence Whitney (who was born and raised in Nebraska and has never worked for a cable company). I was more surprised, upon finally watching this movie a year after I bought it, to learn that it was produced by WWE Studios, the motion picture division of World Wrestling Entertainment.

Also surprising is the fact that this direct-to-video low-budget sequel actually scored higher on Rotten Tomatoes than the original.

Larry the Cable Guy plays Larry Phillips, a hayseed who may or may not be a cable guy, and who presumably excels at gitting-r-done. Larry lives in a trailer in the woods of North America and enjoys ice fishing with his five-year-old daughter Noel. (The movie was produced in the Vancouver area, known for its damp but mild winters, and seems to take place in equally temperate North Carolina. Apparently Larry and Noel don't mind making the thousand-mile drive to Ontario in a single morning to go ice fishing.)

Noel loves Larry as truly only a naïve child could, but her mother is now married to Victor Baxter, a multi-billionaire box manufacturing mogul. One wonders what Noel's evidently intelligent and attractive mother ever saw in Larry, but if we pause to wonder about that, we may as well also ask why Larry speaks with a cartoon southern drawl while everyone else in his hometown is Canadian. So let's just move on.

Larry resents Victor for his ability to supply Noel with things material, so when he chances upon the tyke's letter to Santa, he sneaks a look to find out if there is anything Noel wants that Victor has not yet provided. It turns out there is: Noel's misspelled letter is hard to decipher, but it appears to say, "I want my family to get Harrison." Larry interprets this cryptic statement as a reference to Harrison the Talking Bear, the most popular children's toy on the market.

Now, in Jingle 1, the sought-after toy was clearly a parody of Power Rangers and other action figures that were the rage in the mid-90s. I'm not sure what they're going for with this talking bear—the closest thing I can remember from real life is Real Talkin' Bubba, but that came out 20 years ago. (If you're old enough to remember Real Talkin' Bubba, I'm sorry for reminding you of it, and if you're not, I dare you to look it up.)

Christmas apparently is still several days away, so Larry is not under the same time pressure as Arnold in the first movie, but every time he comes close to laying his hands on a Harrison Bear, events conspire to thwart him. Eventually, we the audience discover that there really is a conspiracy to stop Larry from buying the doll, and of course Victor is behind it—he has bought every Harrison Bear in town to make sure Larry can't find one. Larry finally puts the pieces together (actually he learns about Victor's scheme from the local news, which seems like a lazy plot device), and sneaks into Victor's warehouse to confront his nemesis.

Faced with scandal now that the town knows he's been hoarding toys, Victor bears his soul to Larry. It turns out that Victor has always envied Larry, the easy-going fun-loving dad, and bought up all the Harrison Bears in a desperate attempt to steal Larry's thunder. This of course comes out of nowhere, but I can't say it's out of character, since Victor was never really given any character traits to begin with. Anyway, Larry and Victor learn to appreciate each other and put aside their differences in record time, after which they placate the townspeople by distributing the stockpiled Harrison Bears to the masses.

On Christmas morning, Larry finally gives Noel her present, and to everyone's astonishment, she is indifferent towards it. It turns out her letter to Santa Claus actually said, "I want my family together as one."

Well, that's just ridiculous.

Lucky Christmas

Gary Yates, 2012
Rotten Tomatoes audience rating: 14%

We're scraping the bottom of the stocking this time. Notice that that 14% score is an audience rating. As we all know, the audience reviews are usually unrealistically positive, so this is a truly abysmal showing.

This is, of course, a Hallmark original movie. Over the last few years, the Hallmark Channel has become to adults what the Disney Channel once was for children, namely a clearinghouse of inoffensive, inexpensive, incompetent movies produced on the business model of an all-you-can eat buffet: Quantity over quality, drinks are extra, and stay the hell away from the seafood.

Starting around Halloween and continuing until the New Year, Hallmark throws its assembly line into overdrive and produces at least 600 new movies a day, all of them cheesy, family-friendly romantic comedies taking place around Christmas and featuring actors whose names are vaguely familiar. This time out we get Jesse Spano from Saved by the Bell and Lt. Randy Disher from Monk as Holly and Mike.

As always, the female lead is a pretty, likable single mom whose tremendous intelligence and potential are being squelched by her life circumstances. And as always, the male lead is a handsome, likable single man whose foolhardy but non-malicious actions get him into trouble. (I say handsome, but Mike does his best to hide his handsomeness in this film by wearing a hideous House M.D. beard.)

Holly is a chef by trade, but she just can't get together the money she needs to open up a restaurant. Meanwhile, Mike is a highly-educated architect who is stuck doing menial labor in the family business because his uptight brother won't listen to his big ideas. While Holly is lamenting her difficulties with her best friend (a character who never once speaks to anyone else but Holly—is she a ghost?), she fails to realize that Mike is in the same bar with his best friend, the world's biggest chowderhead.

Mike has taken one too many of his sister's snake-oil cold pills, so he passes out at the bar, and his idiot friend has to drive him home. Since the friend's car has been booted by the police for unpaid parking tickets, he decides to "borrow" another car, which just so happens to be Holly's. Now, the idiot friend has no intention of keeping the car, but once he discovers a lottery ticket in the glove compartment, he ropes Mike into a harebrained extortion scheme. Needless to say, the scheme requires Mike to pretend to fall in love with Holly, and now you can see the shape this mess is taking.

You can probably fill in the rest of the blanks for yourself. It involves Holly's horrified revelation that their relationship is a sham, Mike's belated realization that he has fallen in love for real, a lot of ineffectual attempts by Mike to make things right, and a huge number of very prominent references to the Pinewood Derby. (You probably wouldn't have guessed that last one, but man, they sure plug that Pinewood Derby for all its worth.)

Mike attempts to return the lottery ticket, but due to a contrived series of oversights, Holly doesn't find it until the last ten minutes of the movie. The lottery ticket has to be turned in at midnight on Christmas Eve, and Holly finds it two hours before the deadline. But just to manufacture some suspense for the big finale, she then spends an hour and 45 minutes driving around the city searching for Mike to reconcile with him before they cash in the ticket. She finds Mike with just minutes to spare, and then stands and talks to him for an eternity while the clock ticks down. For crying out loud, there's suspense, and then there's just bad writing.

The final shot of the movie is Holly and Max walking into City Hall to redeem the ticket just as the clock strikes twelve. There's a school of thought that holds that leaving a story's outcome to the audience's imagination makes it more satisfying. I have some sympathy for that perspective, but with a movie this bad I don't think it's worth the bother. If they really want to take that strategy, why not just end the movie right after the opening credits?

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Yeah, this is a really bad movie. But 14% from the viewers? That's just appalling.

Unbelievably, but this thing managed to be

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TMoC:

1. The lottery is your secret to a happy life.
Actually, as the state lottery commission informs us, "lottery games are based on chance, and should [not] be played[.]"

2. The Pinewood Derby is an alternate secret to a happy life.
When George Costanza was a Cub Scout, he got stuck on Webelos for three years because he kept losing the Pinewood Derby. Happy Festivus!

The Grinch

Ron Howard, 2000
Rotten Tomatoes score: 53%

I saw this movie in theaters the winter of 2000, and the theatrical poster was the one you see to the left of this paragraph. The title was The Grinch. Then, when the movie came out on video, the title had been expanded to Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. (And that exclamation point is part of the title; I did not type that sentence with any enthusiasm.)

Apart from being an unwieldy mouthful, this train wreck of a title disingenuously implies that the film is a close adaptation of the Dr. Seuss children's book of 1957. I will continue to refer to the Jim Carrey movie as The Grinch, so as to forestall any confusion with the 1966 cartoon, which has exactly the same title.

Another point on the title before moving on: No version of this story is called "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas." So stop calling it that.

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This is a difficult movie to review. The book and the cartoon are so nearly perfect that it was risky to even attempt a live-action adaptation.

After all, the story derives its charm from its simplicity: The Grinch is a misanthropic creature who, for no reason at all, hates Christmas and begrudges the people of Whoville their happiness. So senselessly curmudgeonly is the Grinch that he goes to absurd lengths to deprive the Whos of their Christmas presents, thinking he can make them as miserable as he is, but he is redeemed in the end by the revelation that simple companionship is what makes the Whos happy.

Even filling a 26-minute cartoon required a lot of extra material, but fortunately it all took the form of songs and cartoon set-pieces; not a word was added to the story. But you just can't go from 26 minutes to 104 minutes without massively changing the plot. So rather than the inoffensive non-speaking plot devices we're familiar with, the Whos are now an irritating bunch of busybodies and bad neighbors who make the Grinch look like the hero. (I guess he's supposed to be the hero, but why does that mean the Whos have to be so obnoxious?)

As for the Grinch, he's given an unnecessary backstory to explain why he's such a grouch. (His heart is two sizes too small—isn't that enough of an explanation?) Cindy Lou Who has been aged, soap-opera style, from "not more than two" to about six, and her part has expanded as well. Since she's the only really sympathetic character in the movie, this is a welcome change, but her role is limited to having the Wide-Eyed Innocence of a Child and trying to persuade the townspeople that the Grinch is not all bad. (But he is all bad! That's the whole point!)

But I think I'm being unfair. Nothing could have lived up to the original Grinch, so it's only right to evaluate the movie for what it is.

And for what it is, it's all right. Jim Carrey of course steals every scene, and he's exactly what a live-action Grinch should be. He spends about half the movie talking to himself, and these scenes are my favorite because the Whos aren't there. The voice he does sounds similar to Boris Karloff in the cartoon, and just look at him—he looks exactly like the Grinch. (They actually won an Oscar for this make-up, but why do the Whos have tiny rat-noses? Aren't they bugs?)

They did a reasonably good job of making the movie look like a Dr. Seuss book, though not quite as well as in the Nickelodeon show The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss. It certainly has a stylized look, but I could have done without all the intense red and purple lighting; all the nighttime scenes look like they take place in front of a bar in a bad part of town. The music is good, including some new songs, but the best number remains "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," this time sung by the Grinch himself, which is clever and very in-character.

Well, I've been pretty critical of The Grinch, and I was going to say it was overrated, but then at the last minute my icy cold heart grew three sizes. So I guess it's

...but not by much.

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The True Meaning of Christmas is:

1. The joy of Christmas is the company of your fellow rat-nosed bug people.
It will come without packages, boxes, or bags, but according to this movie it will be like pulling teeth towards the end.

2. Just watch the cartoon.
I have to admit, it still gets to me when the Grinch hears a sound rising over the snow...

I'm sorry, I just... talk amongst yourselves.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

Henry Selick, 1993
Rotten Tomatoes score: 94%

I've occasionally encountered controversy about whether this is a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie. It's true that it came out around Halloween, but that's only one week earlier than most Christmas movies. And yes, it's a scary, but don't forget that Tim Burton also made two other scary Christmas movies around the same time.

Anyway, this is a pointless argument. It's clearly both Halloween- and Christmas-themed, so it makes the list. After all, it does have the word "Christmas" in the title.

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As the movie begins, the narrator explains that all our favorite holidays are somehow created by the denizens of fantasy towns, accessible by a bunch of warp zones hidden in the woods. Who knew?

The people of Halloween Town (not the unforgivably long Disney Channel movie series, but a different Halloween Town) spend 364 days out of every year planning a scary festival for October 31. In charge of the excitement is Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, adored by the townsfolk but secretly dissatisfied with his life. The only person who understands him is Sally, a Frankenstein created by some guy who looks like a duck.

While wandering aimlessly through the woods, Jack stumbles across the entrance to Christmas Town. In a musical number that will be familiar from the Coming Attractions you fast-forwarded through on every VHS tape you ever owned in the 90s, Jack wonders at the jolly world he has entered. He returns home with a few souvenirs in the hopes of persuading his fellow Halloween Town citizens that there is more to life than ghosts and goblins.

Jack becomes determined to bring Christmas home, so he enlists the help of some obnoxious children to kidnap Santa Claus (who Jack believes to be a giant lobster), and persuades Sally against her better judgment to make him a Santa outfit. On Christmas Eve, the kids return from their caper with Santa Claus in tow, and he is by far the scariest-looking thing in the movie. I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something in his gigantic, inhumanly-proportioned body, his stiff wiry white beard, and his sandpaper voice that my eight-year-old self found really disturbing. Seeing it again today, I can confirm that he is as hideous as ever.

Just look at him:

And he's not wearing any pants, either.

On their own initiative, and apparently believing that they're doing Santa a favor, the kids deliver him into the lair of a homicidal gambler called Oogie Boogie, who is really just a bunch of bugs in a burlap sack.

Meanwhile, Jack has disguised himself as Santa and set off to deliver scary, often deadly presents to the children of the world—that is, the real world, although it too is populated by creepy-looking stop-motion characters. The real world doesn't take kindly to Jack's antics, so they shoot him down with anti-aircraft artillery, apparently killing him.

Back in scary world, Sally has entered the bogeyman's lair to free Santa, only to find herself captured alongside him. Finally, Jack returns, having survived his encounter with the Real World Military. (Actually, Jack said at the beginning of the movie that he was already dead, so why did anyone think he had been killed?) Jack disables Oogie Boogie by pulling a loose thread on his burlap skin, releasing the vermin inside. (As Oogie Boogie disintegrates into a swarm of insects, his voice cries out "My bugs!" What's going on here? The burlap skin has been removed, so the bugs are all that's left. Who is crying out? Isn't he made of bugs? That would be like if a person died and cried out, "My cells!" Okay, forget it.)

Jack and Sally realize that they love each other, and the movie's over.

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I was surprised to discover that this movie was not directed by Tim Burton. His name is placed so prominently on every piece of promotional artwork, I had always assumed he was an auteur. But no: Burton wrote the three-page poem on which this was based. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume it was a super-weird poem.

Really, the man of the hour is Danny Elfman, who wrote the music and lyrics, and who provided Jack Skellington's singing voice. (It's common in cartoon musicals for the speaking and singing voices to be done by different people, and usually the speaking voice is treated as the "real" voice, with the singer just jumping in for the songs. But here, Jack spends most of the movie singing, so Elfman really is the star of the show.)

Since the plot makes no sense, you really are watching just to enjoy the way everything looks and sounds. But that's not a bad thing—it looks and sounds great.

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Here's the True Meaning of Christmas and/or Halloween:

1. Life is better when you celebrate multiple holidays.
I'd hate to live in Washington's Birthday (traditional) Town. That must get old.

2. Santa Claus can be horrifying.
Remember that episode of Full House where Nicky and Alex were afraid of Santa Claus? (Or were they just afraid of Joey Gladstone dressed as Santa Claus? Because that I could understand.)

Frosty the Snowman

Rankin/Bass, 1969
Rotten Tomatoes score: 60%

How strange that Rotten Tomatoes has critics' reviews for this thing. Previous "TV specials" on my list have always had to do without official scores, but this phoned-in 30-minute cartoon gets the full treatment.

Well, maybe "full treatment" is an overstatement—there are a total of five reviews, and only two are from sources I've heard of. Anyway, it's a number, so I'll just go with it.

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The song "Frosty the Snow Man" was written for and recorded by Gene Autry in 1950, in a conscious attempt to follow up on Autry's previous hit "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Many years later, after Rankin/Bass had struck gold with their Rudolph movie, they decided to give Frosty a try too.

It seems that their goal with Frosty the Snowman was to recapture the spirit of Rudolph, but to put absolutely no thought, effort, or money into it whatsoever. Rudolph's stop-motion animation looks charmingly old-fashioned; Frosty looks a notch or two above Clutch Cargo. Rather than stop-motion, they went in for traditional hand-drawn animation, but it's the corner-cutting, Xerox-heavy animation style that was all the rage in cheaply-produced Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

(Have you ever wondered why Fred Flintstone and George Jetson have five o'clock shadows all the time, or why Yogi Bear wears a tie? It's because the animators needed clear boundary lines between their body parts, so that they would only have to animate the bare minimum, then paste it into a still image of the rest of the body. Try talking without moving any part of your face except your mouth; it's not as easy as Fred makes it look.)

As with all Rankin/Bass movies, this one is hosted by a celebrity narrator, depicted on-screen as an animated representation of himself. Frosty has Jimmy "Schnozzola" Durante, who also sings the title song. (Isn't it weird when you hear some actor sing for the first time, and you think, "Wow, I never knew he had such a good voice"? This is not one of those times.) The rest of the cast consists of a lot of famous people I'm not familiar with.

As you would expect, the movie starts with the premise of the song: A bunch of kids build a snowman out of "Christmas snow," and when they place an old silk hat on his head, he comes to life. But did you ever wonder where the "old silk hat" came from? Well hold onto your seats—it came from a self-described "evil magician" named Professor Hinkle, who threw the hat away after a failed performance in the children's elementary school classroom. I bet you didn't expect that. Now, once Hinkle discovers that his hat is really magic, he decides to steal it back, even though he knows this will snuff out the life of an animate being.

Meanwhile, Frosty and the kids have another situation on their hands. The temperature is starting to rise, and Frosty is afraid he will melt unless he takes a train to the North Pole immediately. (Frosty doesn't know how to count to ten or what a traffic light is, but he has an instinctive understanding of thermometers and the location of the North Pole.) He decides to stow away on a refrigerated boxcar, and he invites one of the human children to come along for the ride. Karen is apparently the stupidest 10-year-old alive, as she believes she can make it to the North Pole and back before bedtime. What's more, Professor Hinkle is also aboard, scheming to take back his hat at the first opportunity.

As the freezer car rambles on northward, the inherent tragedy of his life dawns on Frosty. He realizes that the cold that sustains his life is slowly inflicting hypothermia on Karen, so he takes her out of the freezing boxcar and into the freezing wilderness. Frosty's rabbit pal Hocus Pocus hops off to fetch Santa Claus for help, while Frosty carries Karen to a conveniently-located heated greenhouse. But wouldn't you know it, Professor Hinkle has been waiting in the wings for such an opportunity, so he locks Frosty in the greenhouse to melt. This is quite a crisis, but luckily we're down to the last few minutes of the movie, so Santa immediately shows up, brings Frosty back to life, reprimands Professor Hinkle, and takes Karen home.

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Remarkably, there have been a number of Frosty sequels. The first one, in 1976, had Andy Griffith as the narrator, and in 1979, Frosty teamed up with Rudolph in a two-hour stop-motion extravaganza. John Goodman took over the role of Frosty for a 1992 pseudo-sequel, and yet another one was released direct-to-DVD in 2005, with Burt Reynolds (!) narrating.

I've never seen any of these sequels, but I read on Wikipedia that the 1992 version removed all references to Frosty's corncob pipe. Honestly, are they really concerned that Frosty might turn children on to pipe-smoking?

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Once again, the True Meaning of Christmas:

1. It's wrong for small children to board freight trains bound for the North Pole, accompanied only by snowmen.
Just kidding. This is never addressed.

2. Once you've thrown away a piece of headgear in frustration, you forfeit every conceivable right in it.
Jimmy Durante tells us this in no uncertain terms in the first five minutes of the show.

3. Christmas snow can never disappear completely.
This is how Santa explains his resurrection of Frosty in the finale. So is the snow magic, or is it the hat? And why exactly is "Frosty the Snowman" considered a Christmas song? It's really just a cold-weather song.