What does Christmas look like when it's brought to you by the monopolistic Bell Telephone Company of the 1960s? Very crappy puppetry. Or, at least, that's what it looked like in The Spirit of Christmas (scroll down), this old special produced by "Ma Bell" in the Sixties.
The Spirit of Christmas is really just a thinly-veiled piece of progaganda. "Look! The phone company cares! We give braille storybooks to blind kids and free toys to poor kids!" In between the "We care! Honestly!" segments, however, are two marionette vignettes depicting, respectively, "The Night Before Christmas" and the Nativity. And let me tell you, this was the worst puppetry ever! You could see the strings, the movement was hilariously unnatural, and the puppets were positively Satanic-looking. Freaky!
Yet, apparently, it was a big Christmas tradition here in the Delaware Valley back in days of yore. WHYY (the Philly public television station) rifled through the vaults to find it, so someone must have enjoyed it. All I want to know is how much eggnog they consumed to arrive at that state of enjoyment.
3 comments:
I make it a point to check for this show every year, because it is just so damn creepy. Something about those mariennettes...I dunno. Anyway, it's on this year, on Christmas Eve at 10:30pm on WHYY (Channel 12).
The Bell Telephone production of Twas the Night Before Christmas and The Nativity are classics and have been a part of my Christmas traditions since they were first aired when I was a little girl. These along with Magoo's Christmas Carol mean Christmas to me more than all the other programming I remember. Happily, The Cartoon Network aired Magoo's Christmas Carol today and WHYY aired Twas and the Nativity tonight. Now that I have no family with whom to celebrate Christmas, it's wonderful to see these magical shows that would bring our family together at this season.
I could only find it listed for one of the HBO channels in Philly at 830 Christmas Eve, 2007. Not on WHYY.
The show, it is Christmas, by todays standards it's pretty crappy, but if you grew up with it, well, when that show came on, Santa was close.
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