In an email I read from My Beloved today...

... titled "What the HELL?", I was informed that the broadcast network NBC will be showing their new movie, "The Year Without A Santa Claus".


That's right. Their new movie. (From last year.)

Wonder if they've got any other hot ideas for the season?

Turns out, they do have a new angle, after all: it's live action, not stop motion. So far as we're told, anyway; that's really up to the actors and directors. Here's the official NBC link. Good looking cast. What worries me? Executive Producer Ron Wolper's other links are only Salem's Lot and Helter Skelter. Arguably good movies, but hardly holiday fare; totally different textures, family visit horror notwithstanding. Ron Underwood, the director of this 2 hour (TWO HOURS??? Rankin and Bass only needed 30 minutes with commercials to get their story told!!) movie has City Slickers and Mighty Joe Young (not the good one) under his belt. We didn't see this last year, when it premiered. I looked into it. I pre-supposed we could expect either absolutely ZERO overdone schmaltzy touchy-feely, or an over-abundance, simply because these two don't ever to deal in that coin, so they were likely to deal lightly or go way overboard with it.

They went way overboard with it.

I'm a bit worried! I saw no mention of the songs in any of the reviews for this movie! Those songs are classic! My husband was Heat Miser once for Halloween because of those songs. I mean, the characters played a part in that choice, too, but those songs are so great, he has a CD cover of the Heat Miser song that gets played all year long. (His now ex-wife was Freeze Miser, which was a bit of type-casting for her, but that's a whole lot of story for a whole nother time!) (Still: entirely true, and Tracy's mother made the costumes, the red one still hangs not 10 feet from me as I type.) Will the lesson be the same? None of the reviews made that clear, either. It worries me when Corporations take over classics. Details suffer and Big Pictures fade.

Plus, the word 'Corporations' always makes me think of geology. 'Corporations' sounds like 'Conglomerations' which IS geology, and hurts when you get hit with it. I'm rarely comfortable when a 'Corporation' is involved. Particularly when they are involved with something I care about, or if it's something that originally had a geniuneness about it. Something like the entire Rankin and Bass library.

Watch, perhaps, but watch with caution. And hold onto your DVDs of the original Rankin and Bass classics. We'll see what happens, what doesn't, and whether those writers have any business coming back from that rotten inconvenient strike. (Give me back my Life, and my Bones, and my Heroes, and my Daisies. These are simple and basic needs, really.)

By the way, ABC will show the original Rankin and Bass stop-motion animation movie this Saturday afternoon at 2:30 pm Eastern, and college football is over til the bowl games start, just so you're remembering--don't panic (Go Buckeyes!). The new, live-action, all human (shh! don't tell the kids! *wink*) version on NBC will air at 8pm Eastern on 23 December. Just in time for Santa and Vixen to get over that nasty flu or cold or whatever.