Holiday Specials

Since my favorite holiday of all time is a month away, that's right Halloween, I thought it was time to talk about all the holiday specials we used to watch as kids. What prompted this was a Blog entry on The Poop blog on SFGate.com regarding the "Star Wars Holiday Special". What Holiday Special you may ask yourself. Yep, if you weren't a Star Wars freak back in 1977 when it came out like I was you probably never saw this horrendous piece of poop. It aired in November of 1978. Heres a link to imdb.com http://imdb.com/title/tt0193524/ so you can check out the details for yourself. It had all the cast members (yes Harrison Ford actually was in it) and it had all the hack character actors of that time: Art Carne, Bea Arthur and even Harvey Korman. It was so bad that Lucas has done everything he could to make sure it never officially saw the light of day ever again after the inital broadcast. You can buy bootleg copies at Comic Conventions on VHS, but they are probably copies of copies from someone's parents who had a VCR back then (those huge ones with the corded remote and the door that popped up so you could put in the tape....remember those beasts???). I used to love to watch "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown" every year. Check out the Robot Chicken version of this...it's brillant. Then during that "other" big Holiday...you know the obnoxious one that happens in December where people put lighted trees in their houses and you have to bankrupt yourself getting gifts for people you don't honestly care about but don't want to be a social ass if you don't. Anyway, during X-Mas (I love calling it that...it pisses certain people off when you do that...) we used to watch all those great Rankin-Bass stop action puppet shows. Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the Little Drummer Boy and the Year Without a Santa....what you don't remember that one??? You don't remember the song: "I'm Mr. Heat Miser, I'm Mr. Sun. I'm Mr. Green Christmas I'm Mr. 101...." C'mon.....it wasn't on for that many years but it was great. There used to be some great Variety shows that had X-mas specials too. At least the Simpsons is still making "Treehouse of Terror" specials every Halloween.