Oh, some like it hot, but I like it really hot

Did anyone else catch NBC’s live-action remake of the Rankin-Bass stop-motion animation classic, The Year Without a Santa Claus, last Monday night? Wow, was it lousy. It took me back to the days when Fred Silverman, desperate to placate Gary Coleman and keep him on Diff’rent Strokes, greenlit several mind-numbingly trite TV movies featuring the sassy, cherubic child star, abetting the network’s cash-hemorrhaging nosedive during that era. Can Supertrain 2K7 be far behind?

Based on the talent involved, and the utterly batshit promo that popped up on YouTube, I was holding out hope that if the remake wasn’t going to be good, at least it would be delightfully terrible in a campy sort of way.

It couldn’t even manage that level of inspired incompetence, and ended up being merely boring and stupid. Carol Kane and Harvey Fierstein, two actors who can usually be counted upon to deliver the goods, were utterly wasted in their roles as Mother Nature and Heat Miser. I’m not sure what was going on with Fierstein, who spent his time onscreen trapped in a limbo between total scenery-chewing madness and simply phoning in his lines. The guy has won several Tony awards and seemed like a great choice for the part (although I would have went with Tom Bosley), making me suspect a degree of directorial or network interference at work. Or maybe he realized how ludicrous the project was and went into thespian cruise control.

The final product turned out to be a sappy, yet generic Hallmark Channel “family” movie with non-matching tissue grafts taken from the original, stunt casting (as the 90’s Batman movies have shown, never a good sign), and a sickening amount of product placements. Seriously, a bound volume of the special’s product placement agreements would be thicker than a complete five borough set of the New York City white pages.

The scheduling of the special also baffled me. 9:00 PM on a Monday night? Not 7:00 PM on the Sunday before Christmas, which would have made more sense for a remake of a children’s holiday special? The strange time slot makes me wonder if NBC’s target demographic for The Year Without a Santa Claus wasn’t children, but instead grownups around my age who have fond memories of the original. If so, it was a move boldly poached from superhero comic book publishing’s realm of diminishing returns, which limps by through pandering to a graying fanbase. I’m not going to start bitching about NBC “raping” my childhood, like many obsessive comic fans accuse DC and Marvel of doing. It’s not a matter of “how dare you!” More like, “why’d you even bother?”

Now that I’ve gotten my token rant out of the way, here are today’s musical selections: The original Heat Miser and Snow Miser themes from 1974 and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy’s medley version from 2004. Nothing says “Merry Christmas” quite like high camp lyrics and music lifted from a Gypsy Rose Lee performance.

George S. Irving – Heat Miser (from Nick at Nite: A Classic Cartoon Christmas, Too, 1977)

Dick Shawn – Snow Miser (from Nick at Nite: A Classic Cartoon Christmas, Too, 1977)

Big Bad Voodoo Daddy – Mr. Heatmiser (from Everything You Want For Christmas, 2004)