It’s that time of year once more, denizens, in which I journey back to those nostalgic memories of Christmases past and bring a little holiday joy into the lair while doing so. For me, holiday television viewing is almost predominantly owned by Rankin\/Bass Productions.<\/a> I’ve referenced these purveyors of stop-motion and traditional animation before, but this time I’d like to reference one of their stop-motion cartoons that wasn’t quite as popular as their more famous fare, like Frosty and Rudolph: The Year Without a Santa Claus.<\/a><\/em> Featuring Mickey Rooney as the voice of Santa and Shirley Booth as the voice of Mrs. Claus, this show didn’t air in regular rotation for very long in comparison with other Rankin\/Bass offerings (I believe it stopped appearing on regular television in the early 80s, which means it was only out there for five or six years; ABC Family now plays it every year, which I guess is one tick in favor of cable television). <\/p>\n

I actually don’t remember a whole lot from the show itself. My favorite parts, however, were the Miser Brothers: Heat and Snow. Together, they sing two parts of a song that I still love. It’s silly and bouncy and actually converted quite well to a cover by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. Don’t believe me? First, here’s the original: <\/p>\n

\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/hGRkNaMFp6w<\/a><\/p>\n

And here’s the cover: <\/p>\n

\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/sPJjBNa7WYY<\/a><\/p>\n

See? Not bad. If you want “bad,” all you need do is listen to this cover, performed by Harvey Fierstein as Heat Miser and Michael McKean as Snow Miser for the 2006 live-action version of this special. Oh, denizens, I really, truly wish I was kidding on this one. I apologize now, but I’m going to have to post a link to this since I have mentioned it. It’s terrible. You have been warned: <\/p>\n

\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/IGhT_ylXN8s<\/a><\/p>\n

Eek. And did they really try to sexy up this special with scantily clad girlie dancers? Seriously, who thought this would ever be a good idea? Tick another one off in the support of my disdain for remakes…<\/p>\n

Oh, and by the way? Team Heat Miser, all the way. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s that time of year once more, denizens, in which I journey back to those nostalgic memories of Christmases past and bring a little holiday joy into the lair while doing so. For me, holiday television viewing is almost predominantly owned by Rankin\/Bass Productions. I’ve referenced these purveyors of stop-motion and traditional animation before, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[893,297,894,896,209,898,900,901],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13290"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lobablanca.com\/blog09\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}