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Graeme Burk

WonderCafe Advent Calendar - December 7

Posted on: 12/07/2008 09:54

 

 
It came from the blandness called the 1970s…

 

 

A Cosmic Christmas
 
From the cultural standpoint, it just sucked to grow up in the 1970s. As kids we knew that because all our cartoons carefully edited out all the violence and superheroes had to become Super Friends. And the blight had spread to Christmas specials. It was clear that all the great Christmas specials had dried up by 1969. What we were left with were grotesque monstrosities, like David Bowie singing with Bing Crosby or the Star Wars Holiday Special, or unbelievably dull and mind-numbingly earnest secular tales.
 
Which brings us to A Cosmic Christmas.
 

 
There’s a lot to like about A Cosmic Christmas. It was the first production by Canadian animation house Nelvana and it contains their beautifully eclectic (and occasionally grotesque) house style in the character design. And any lead character who has a pet goose named Lucy can’t be all that bad.
 
But even when I saw this for the first time as an eight year old in the Christmas of 1978 I thought the idea was lame. The trippiest aliens seen this side of Heavy Metal come to explore the meaning of Christmas. Which begs the question: what kind of drugs were these people on back then? The aliens see the commercial and nostalgic sides of the holiday, many of them put to those sort of syrupy songs that create a cringe impulse in anyone not paid to produce it.
 
The climax is kind of cool--The true meaning of Christmas is found in everyone, including the non-interfering aliens, forming a human chain to help the lead character save the bully who had kidnapped the pet goose. I remembered that part for decades afterward. But I discovered that it was a mercy in a way that I had forgotten so much else about it.
 
Other decades came up with A Charlie Brown Christmas, Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Miracle on 34th Street. The best my generation could get was A Cosmic Christmas.
 
Is it no wonder that anyone between the ages of 30 and 45 are so cynical?
 

 

 

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