As if we needed more reminders of the holiday, TV stations felt the need to create more and more Christmas stories for us to consume, whether they be adaptations of old stories like the told-too-often A Christmas Carol, current franchises ripping off those old stories, or creating bizarre Christmas-themed episodes from scratch. Some of these manage to be good, heart-warming tales that imbue the audience with the joy of the holidays, but more often than not they end up being unholy abominations. For the past three weeks, I've been digesting both the best and worst of the Christmas specials. To save you some time, the best specials are The Muppets Family Christmas, Peewee's Christmas Special, and The Venture Bros Christmas. Go watch those, but avoid these at all costs unless you want to become as curmudgeonly as Scrooge. These are the worst of the worst, the coal so dirty even Santa wouldn't give to the naughty kids, it's the Top Ten WORST Christmas Specials and Movies!
10) Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad: "Do Not Reboot Until Christmas"
One of the laziest plots in Christmas-based TV episodes is the "villain wants to destroy Christmas" plot. Now the original Grinch short managed to pull this plot off rather well, but whenever a cartoon with a supervillain does a Christmas episode, they'll often shoehorn a hatred of Christmas into the character to create conflict. Dishonorable mentions that use this plot include the Super Mario Super Show, Inspector Gadget, and The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. The reason why SSSS makes the list and not them is because the creators of the show felt the need to pad it out to two episodes. Yes, this is a two-episode Christmas special, and the entire thing is padded out to accomplish this. Bad acting and effects are par for the course for this show, but when you add in a stupid plot about a virus infecting presents because the whiny kid villain hates Christmas and barely show any fighting, you get an annoying mess of nothing.
9) The Flintstones Christmas Carol
There are two Christmas stories that are always re-used for TV shows: It's a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol. There were a couple Wonderful Life episodes I considered putting on the list, such as Tiny Toons Christmas and It's a Very Merry Muppets Christmas Movie, but the Christmas Carol stuff was just so much worse. I debated putting Disney's A Christmas Carol here, mostly for its creepily bad motion-capture of Jim Carrey, but I could at least see why some people might like that movie. This has no reason to exist at all. This is actually the SECOND Flintstones Christmas special to made, the first one being about Fred Flinstone having to replace Santa Claus when the old Saint falls off Fred's roof and injures himself. Yep, it was The Santa Clause before Tim Allen was even a thing. It's also bad, but the Flintstones Christmas Carol manages to be worst by playing A Christmas Carol straight, with the only variations being that it's a play performed by the main characters and they're all mad at Fred for being an asshole. Oh, and rock puns like Jacob MARBLEy. Here's the thing about Flintstones: they're not funny. They know only one joke and that's replacing modern day technology with caveman technology, and in some cases they don't bother at all and throw in a CB radio and the Kremlin. Even ignoring the obvious fact that Christmas wouldn't be a thing in the Stone Age, these specials are just a mess. The Christmas Carol manages to be worse for being yet another lazy Christmas Carol story padded out for an hour.
8) How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
I'm still weirded out by the amount of people who like this movie, let alone think it's good. Nothing about this movie works. The set designs are ugly, the costuming is terrifyingly bad, and it completely misses the point of the original story. The point of the Hoos is that they love Christmas despite the presents. They celebrate it for the merriment and the getting together of family and community. But for some reason the creators of this movie didn't know that, because the Hoos of this world place material wealth and gain over everything else. Now, you could make a story about people being obsessed with presents and forgetting the family aspect of the holiday, but this is the wrong setting for it. The first half of the movie is invented completely from scratch to try and make the Grinch as sympathetic as possible and make the Hoos look like assholes, but then they actually get to the part where the Grinch steals Christmas, and the Hoos suddenly decide that Christmas isn't about boxes and bows. It's a hollow, mean, ugly, cynical movie, and not at all what Dr. Seuss would want. Stick to the classic Chuck Jones animated special.
7) Rudolph and the Island of Misfit Toys
Someone actually made a sequel to the Rankin-Bass Rudolph special, but they decided it needed to be done in shitty CGI. To some people the original stop-motion cartoon was creepy and poorly animated, but it's Redline by comparison. None of the animation looks finished; many of the characters lack textures or just stand around staring at you with their soulless eyes. The Bumble is now terrifying for all the wrong reasons. The bad animation alone would earn it a place on this list, but it also has a crappy story on top of that, as well as some of the worst songs to assault your ears. Even though Rudolph managed to become a loved celebrity in the previous story, he's fed up with being appreciated for his red nose and wants to get rid of it. So yes, this is a movie about Rudolph wanting to get a nose job. The Island of Misfit Toys comes back into play when someone called the Toy Taker, voiced by Rick Moranis in one of his last acting roles, starts stealing all of the misfit toys. Nothing about this is compelling enough to fill out an hour of story, and the animation and songs just make the whole experience painful.
6) The Family Circus Christmas
I was surprised to discover that there was a Family Circus cartoon to begin with. I can see why it was buried. This is an animated special from 1979, though the animation is so amateur you'd swear it was older. I've seen motion comics with more fluid animation. Many of the characters have missing frames of animation, to the point that it looks like the whole cartoon was put together using coloring book pages. But like Rudolph, it as a crappy story to go along with its crappy animation, but this is one messed-up story. Jeffy starts seeing Santa Claus, who appears to him as a ghostly outline. That alone is disturbing, but Jeffy starts believing that Santa can bring his dead grandfather back from Heaven for Christmas. Family Circus has always been a Christian-influenced story, what with Bil Keane being an open Roman Catholic, but Jeffy's incapability to understand death is not handled well. His sibling tease him about it, his mom half-heartedly tries to convince him Santa can't resurrect the dead, but lo and behold Jeffy's wish becomes true, and his grandfather's ghost comes back on Christmas day. Of course, no one else but Jeffy sees him. The cartoon's attempt to show this in a warmhearted light just doesn't work, because either Jeffy needs severe mental help or he's a master of necromancy. Oh, and if you want to know why Santa knows when you're sleeping, it's because he's a ghost in your room. Now isn't that the image you see when you think of holiday cheer?
5) Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas
At least the 2000 Grinch can't be accused of ruining the original story. As bad as it is, it's an adaptation with its own continuity. Disney, on the other hand, just loves to make unnecessary continuations of their beloved movies, and one of those sequels was a Christmas story. Well, sequel's a bit of a strong term. While the film is established to take place after the Beast is freed of the curse, most of the movie is told in a flashback that happens during Belle's captivity. Now, I should say this doesn't ruin the original Beauty and the Beast. That film stands perfectly fine on its own, and this film is so bad it shouldn't be considered actual canon. But this film really doesn't understand its characters, and considering that they're characters from a good movie, that's just aggravating. People have joked about Belle suffering from Stockholme Syndrome, but in this movie that actually is what happens. The only character trait that Belle seems to have in this is that she wants to make the Beast happy at all costs, and the Beast in this acts like an emo teenager who lashes out at everything for no good reason. Only a hack would think the characters actually work like and have no depth or complexity, and because these traits of flanderized, it removes the romantic aspect of their relationship and turns it into a creepy sadomasochistic one. There's a new villain invented for the film, a pipe organ by the name of Forte voiced by Tim Curry. Huh, two bad Christmas specials with Tim Curry on this list. I'm sensing a pattern here. The villain's lame; his motivation is to keep everyone in the castle cursed so he can sooth the beast with his song forever, which contradicts his desire to move because he's strapped down to the floor because of his new pipe organ form. The animation's sub-par, the songs suck, the characters are all wrong, and the villain is weak. Nothing about this works, and it's all the more awful for roping in a good movie into the mess.
Also, how did this get a blu-ray release? WTF Disney?
Also, how did this get a blu-ray release? WTF Disney?
4) We Wish You A Turtles Christmas
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH! Why are so many of these Christmas specials so terrifying? I've screamed at more of these specials than I have at Halloween specials, and those are supposed to be scary. Once again, it's the terrible design that really damns this thing. The turtle costumes in this are just cheap, but what makes them terrifying is their constantly exposed teeth and soulless blinking eyes. How did we go from the awesome Jim Henson costumes from the 1990 movie to this? Thankfully this is only 20 minutes, but it's 20 minutes of creepy turtle costumes singing terrible renditions of classic Christmas carols with inserted pizza jokes. There's really nothing else to talk about here, because that's all there is to this special and it's all bad. It can't get creepier than this, can it?
3) Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: "Alpha's Magical Christmas"
Whyyyyy? Like the Turtles Christmas, it's just characters from the show singing Christmas songs, but it has the extra bonus of Alpha and Zordon kidnapping children from across the world to help them decorate for the holidays and kill your ears with their off-key singing. What's wrong with Alpha and Zordon? They're supposed to be protectors of the earth, and yet they kidnap children and force them to labor against their will. The Power Rangers make a brief appearance with Santa Claus, but other than that it's just Alpha and the kids singing while you contemplate gifting yourself a shotgun to the face.
2) Star Wars Holiday Special
Do I really need to elaborate on this one? Hasn't everyone already talked about how this is the worst Christmas special ever? Well, I've found one worse, but before I talk about it, I'd like to ask how many people have actually seen this thing. The best way to sum this up is that it's 90 minutes of wookies watching bad TV. That's it, and it's completely dull to watch. There are some creepy highlights, such as the old wookie jacking off to a porno of a human woman, and there's an animated segment featuring the debut of Boba Fett, but everyone knows that at this point. I doubt many people have actually sat through the whole thing, because you'd have to be crazy to do so. Wait...
Point is, the Star Wars Holiday Special is bad and we don't need to talk about it anymore. The sooner we bury it, the better.
1) The Nutcracker: The Untold Story
Ho-ly shit. This movie is not merely bad, it is offensively bad. It's rare that I'm offended by a movie. Merely being dull, annoying, and incompetent is not enough to offend me, just anger me or even make me laugh if it hits the right amount of bad. But then this movie came along. First aired at the European Film Market in 2009 and later released this year in Hungary and the UK, this was a huge financial and critical bomb, earning the rare 0 percent rotten rating from Rotten Tomatoes and making back only 16 million of its 90 million dollar budget. I don't think I can really sum up this film well enough to describe just how awful it is, and how awful I felt watching it. I watched this with a group of friends, as I did with the rest of the specials on this list, and we all claimed it was the worst movie we'd ever watched, and we've sat through some truly bad stuff. I could list the simple stuff; the acting's bad, the special effects are bad, basically nothing works. That's the case for all of these specials. What puts this movie at the top is bizarre need to insert Holocaust imagery into its story. Yes, the Rat King is basically Hitler and the rats are all Nazis in this adaptation of the Nutcracker. What possessed the director to turn this innocent ballet into a hateful fever dream? As an added insult, the original Nutcracker songs that appear in the film have added lyrics, and Albert Einstein makes an appearance just to further hammer in the hateful WWII allegories. I do not recommend watching this movie, not even as a curiosity. Everyone in our Christmas group felt awful for days, and the mere mention of the movie would cause us to cringe. It may deserve the title of worst movie period, but it certainly deserves the title of worst Christmas movie ever made.
I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season, preferably by avoiding these specials. Special thanks to the people who sat through this bile with me! You guys made this list possible.
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