THE WORST WE CAN FIND - Christmas Advent Calendar: Day 10 - Christmas Shorts-Stravaganza

 

Heading back to the Christmas Spirit, in a way, with a return to RiffTrax, but this time to their second-ever live event. From 2009, it’s Mike, Bill, Kevin, and special Guest Weird Al Yankovic in Christmas Shorts-Stravaganza!

Christmas Shorts-Stravaganza

Program: RiffTrax

Air-Date: December 16, 2009 (later released on DVD in March 2010)

Plot: Various shorts are introduced by Mike, Bill, and Kevin in San Diego, California. (Most other live presentations have been done at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville.)

RiffTrax Cover art for the special live performance of Christmas shorts.

Christmas Toy Shop (1945) – Live action with clumsy, idiot dad (I can say that, because I am one) trying not to wake up the kids on Christmas Eve, leading to the kids dreaming Santa is telling them a story. The story is excerpts from a Terrytoon cartoon (originally entitled “Ye Olde Toy Shop” from 1935) about a bad spider kidnapping a Miss Muffet doll and the other toys retaliating with force and DDT. The children wake up from their nightmare for Christmas and find Dad in a Santa outfit. They are not amused. Neither are we. As mentioned in some reviews for this short, the cartoon has nothing to do with Christmas, making Santa telling the story even more bizarre.

A Visit to Santa (1963) – Live Action once again, this time with two mumble-mouthed children going to sleep and dreaming they get to visit Santa.  Santa appears to live in a split-level ranch house and his workshop appears to be a downtown department store, with storefront puppets much like the ones seen in the Whizzo special. An online article by Jason Togyer (http://www.tubecityonline.com/almanac/entry_1150.php) places this as being shot around downtown McKeesport, a suburb of Pittsburgh, where Clem Williams Films was located. Clem Williams’ specialty was highlight films of various sport teams, although they ventured into other types of shorts as this proves.

Christmas Rhapsody – (1948) – Produced by Encyclopedia Britannica. The Forrester’s kids find a small tree in the forest who constantly whines as being insignificant. They chop it down and taunt it by glamming it up with tinsel and bulbs. Damn kids.

Three Magic Words (1939) – A Wilding Production starring The Jesters, a singing trio who popped in in a handful of westerns of the period. It’s a musical short with the Jesters showing a young housewife how to buy, cook, and eat pork by following the mantra of “quality, freshness, and flavor.” It was done for the Arlington Brand Meats company from out of Boston. "Weird Al" Yankovic, who is vegan, is a good sport in participating in the short’s riffing.

 Gaylord the Dog toy commercial – shown as a gift for Kevin.

 'Twas the Night Before Christmas (1946) – Live action retelling of the classic poem. Santa is sometimes a cartoon, sometimes not. By sheer coincidence, some moments in this short appear in Weird Al’s music video for his song, “Christmas at Ground Zero.”

Jimmy Jet toy commercial – shown as a gift for Bill. Or would have if they had realized to go to the FOOD store.

Christmas Dream (1945) – A film from Czechoslovakia with added footage of Santa for American audiences. Stop-motion animation has a little girl gives up her old doll for new ones and in her dreams the doll comes to life and makes a mess of the room, which makes her love it even more. This film won the Grand Prix International at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival for “best short fiction film.”

Sports:  Parade of Aquatic Champions (1945) – Color footage of various swimmers competing and showing off skills at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool. Including are famous swimming stars from the screen: Esther Williams, Buster Crabbe, and Johnny Weissmuller.

Ding-a-Lings toy commercial – shown as a gift for Mike.

I wasn't kidding about the Rudolph toys there, guys.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1948)– Animated short from Max Fleischer based on the famous poem. The short was originally down for Montgomery Ward, and advertised the department store, but was later edited to remove the advertising and add in a version of the 1949 song that Gene Autry would make famous.  By the way, as Santa starts his journey, there are Rudolph toys in Santa’s sleigh. Why would he be commercializing off of Rudolph before even asking for his help?

 The special ends with the guys at the office exchanging gifts and vomit.

Favorite Riff: (as the spider picks up a gun and starts shooting at the soldiers in Christmas Toy Shop) “I don’t feel like it’s Christmas unless there’s a good killing spree.”

The Riffing: Live shows were no strangers to MST3K or those who left the program to go their own way with riffing movies. MST3K, of course, have done a few since the days of the original program and even toured a few times as the rebooted version of the program was on its way. Emily Marsh, who would becoming a regular in the 13^th season as Emily Connors, was first introduced to us fans back during the Great Cheesy Movie Circus tour, where she appeared on stage as Emily Crenshaw and did mic-work out in the audience for a short Q&A with Joel done before the main feature.

Live shows were also an important part of the Cinematic Titanic dynamic, and The Mads are Back toured before COVID around the country with their own riffing show. But it was RiffTrax that would take that ball and go the distance by doing many live shows since 2007. After riffing live of such films as Daredevil and public domain film in one-off shows in the California area, RiffTrax worked with NCM Fathom Events to begin transmitting one-off live riffing of movies; most of them from the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, Tennessee; to be shown around the country, and often time more than one movie in a year’s time. This would eventually led to a series of Kickstarter campaigns over the years to help Rifftrax purchase the licensing for more successful movies to be used for the live shows, of course many (although not all, as Doctor Who fans sadly have to deal with thanks to a lack of their “Five Doctors” riff from a few years ago) have later been released by RiffTrax on their streaming app and on DVD and Blu-Ray.

The Christmas Shorts-Stravaganza was the second Fathom event, which explains the lack of a stage set to frame the movie screen as would be the norm for many of their later offerings. It also was certified to be a good one as RiffTrax up to that point had done some of their best work on various educational shorts and cartoons and would become very versatile in finding humor in Christmas-oriented movies and shorts over the years. The Rudolph cartoon is a classic from the group and as noted in the live event, caused so much laughter at one point that the trio ended up having to discard three riffs due to the laughter not dying out in time. If you watch, it is clearly the early days for the concept and not as smooth as later productions for Fathom have been, but the riffing in on-target, making it one of the better collections of shorts done by the RiffTrax team over the years.

Oddly enough, the DVD version of the show excludes the final sketch shown during the end credits where Bill, Kevin, and Mike exchange terrible gifts, and Kevin provokes illness with his entrance into Mike’s office.  So, if you want to catch up on all that, make sure to check out the streaming version on the RiffTrax app.