Santa lives in his enormous workshop on a cloud high above the North Pole, with dozens of international children (who make all the toys) and his wondrous array of surveillance gadgets, made for him by Merlin. Yes, that Merlin. It's nearly Christmas, so it's time for Santa to finish setting up his nativity scene and sing a song urging his child laborers to finish that year's toy manufacturing. Then, evil rears its ugly head...
Satan really doesn't want Santa to succeed, so he sends Pitch, one of his lesser demons, to defeat Santa. Pitch tries to get our adorable little heroine, Lupita, to steal her only Christmas desire, a beautiful dolly, as Santa watches and listens helplessly (he can spy on us all the time, but only visit in person on the night of the 24th),
Santa and the narrator urge Lupita to resist Pitch's wheedling, and she repeatedly tells Pitch that stealing is bad and she wants to be good. And then it's the night of the 24th, and Santa has to wind up his clockwork magic reindeer:
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| Good, old-fashioned, nightmare fuel. |
And we, the audience, are scarred for life. And that's only the first half of the film: After that, Santa and Pitch have several weird slapstick fights and Santa helps another good child, a poor little rich boy who only wants his parents to love him (Santa doses their drinks with a magical remembering potion). Pitch cuts a hole in Santa's bag of magical sleeping powders, and Santa loses his invisibility rose, and gets treed by a dog. Did I mention that Santa and Pitch have weird slapstick fights? Because they do. A lot. This is truly strange, and inexplicable. And, like Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, I can't imagine any Hollywood studio would make anything this damned weird.
The previous MST Christmas episode was a Joel-era one, and this is only about the tenth episode Mike hosted. The writing is, at this point, indistinguishable from the earlier part of this season, and Mike's in-theater riffing is already perfectly in-character and has a great flow. I watch both these Christmas episodes almost every December, and I think I've seen them more than any other MST3K, even Manos and Pod People and Mitchell. The two episodes, I noticed this week, do a few similar things in each:
1) Frank and Clay re-enact "Gift of the Magi."
2) In the riffs, Santa has Vietnam flashbacks.
3) A bot makes reference to "Carmen Miranda rights."
4) They make a reference to The Dick Van Dyke Show.
5) "Diarrhea is like a storm raging inside you."
If you care to read more about the riffs, there's an incomplete roundup here.
Coming up next, I have three Christmas-related episodes of Homicide: Life On The Street...
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