Showing posts with label Santa Claus videos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Santa Claus videos. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Here comes Santa Claus: vintage Christmas gifs





Don't ask me to identify these. They are from an evil source. Late at night, or sometimes NOT late at night, I drag the lake bottom for videos like this. These are all black and white, and there is something just so depressing about Santa Claus videos in black and white. Spoils the effect. This guy is just creepy, as so many Santas are creepy. I don't know what he's saying to that little boy, but I'm glad it's not my kid.




This guy obviously studied at the Adolf Hitler School of Santology. Note the impassioned gestures! The menacing shaking of the beard! Mein Fatherland!!




I don't know what the hell this is, but I wish I could find the rest of it. I stole it from a site called Giphy, which I only use if I am desperate. I make almost all my own gifs now, because the ones I see on the net are pure shit: short, choppy, with no theme, no emotion, no remembrance of things past. This looks like a funeral pyre, or a whole heap of kindling waiting to be set ablaze.




This has to be seen to be believed. Must be some old European thing. Here, a Christmas frog tries to get something away from a Christmas bug, with a tiny sprig of a Christmas tree in the background.




Here, the frog appears to be in a homoerotic relationship with a tiny Santa Claus, Either that, or the frog is gigantic. Santa looks like some Russian Czar from the 1500s. This was long before that Coca -Cola ad that told us all what Santa really looked like (though I've long suspected that idea is bullshit, and that Santa just evolved over the years into the stereotype of today).




I promise you, this is the last Santa/bug gif. I share this with you only because, bizarrely, the bugs seem to be taking the ornaments OFF the tree. What they do with them next, we don't know. This is a very early stop-action movie which I don't want to research, so I won't. Figure it out for yourself. It's only six seconds.




Christmas puppet shows are a genre unto themselves, and an evil one. I may never recover from this video, in which Santa decides he's tired of delivering toys to the kiddies and hands the whole thing over to a stoned-looking cat. 




No one seems capable of producing a pleasant-looking Santa puppet, or, in fact, a Santa puppet that is anything less than terrifying. This Santa's eyes are especially horrific: they drill into the core of your black, un-toy-worthy soul.




As with the frog and Santa, there is funny business going on, this time with a dog. Interspecies romance was never my thing, but here it is, in a children's program.




Santa meets his doppelganger, presumably the cat, but we can't see it, so we don't know for sure. Is his handshake suspiciously hearty?




One of the earliest, and strangest, Christmas videos I could find, only about a minute long and made in 1898 by the Edison Corporation. In this vignette, Santa or Father Christmas descends from a bubble in the sky, wearing a sort of long monk's robe with a hood. Though I have not seen this before or since, he carries the Christmas tree around with him. He drops a small something-or-other into each of the long skinny socks hung at the foot of the bed. Batteries not included. (Watch carefully - I just saw this now - the second "toy" misses the mark and drops on the floor, but I guess in Edison's time there were no retakes.)


Maybe it's true what they say about those Coca-Cola ads, as suspicious at it sounds. Earlier Santas did look weird, and in one silent-era video he even had a spotted velvet smoking jacket with brown fur trim. 




This whole writhing display is beginning to resemble a fever-driven Walpurgisnacht. So I bid you good night. Or bad. Or however it turns out to be.



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The Hardrock Cafe: a truly terrifying Santa story




Thursday, December 19, 2013

Creepy Santa Smackdown!




Yes, it's here again - the competition of a lifetime, or at least this week. Back when I could make really great gifs on the new program, Gifsforum (I mean last night), I did some kick-ass weird Santa ones from old cartoons and childrens' programs. Oh, and then guess what? The whole thing shut down. It stopped working. I can't find anything on the internet to explain this, as it does not seem to happen to anyone else. There should not be a quota! Gifsforum, when it worked (last night!), would do a 15-second video of pristine quality in less than half a minute. Well, back when it was working. Now it has stopped.

Like my mouse. Something supernatural is happening with my mouse. Or mice. A few mices ago, my mouse just conked, and I finally had to put a new battery in which seemed to solve the problem. A week or so later, it conked. Bill gave me a brand-new one, I put a battery in, and a week later it conked. On the THIRD mouse I began to suspect supernatural forces, or a batch of bad batteries. My son the computer genius, who has NEVER been stumped by a problem, has no idea what this is. Like people who can't wear a watch because it stops, I get huge, searing, visible electric shocks off car doors, and I don't know of anyone else who does. I have to literally ground myself with my elbow when I get out. What the fuck?

Perhaps that's the price of toying with supernatural forces. Never mind, here are the few I made before this disaster took it all away from me again.

The first Santa looks like something from the Third Reich: the Hitlerian gestures, swaggering and head-shakes. This was part of an archaic Punch and Judy show that was indescribably violent.




And this one. Just what is Santa doing under the bedclothes? At one point he appears to give himself a narcissistic kiss. I don't think children should see things like this.




Santa in blackface, looking menacing during his yearly break-and-enter. In the old cartoons, his bag always has patches on it. Obviously he is from the Al Jolson school of chimney-sliding.




Santa burns his ass off.




Ummm. . . 




The strangest video, a movie shot in 1898 when most movies lasted a minute or so. Here Santa is wraithlike, carrying something like a bush (a Christmas tree?) This was one of the 15-second ones that I'll never make again because it has all STOPPED WORKING.




And here he is. . . winner of the 2013 Creepy Santa Smackdown! Are those his teeth that he is baring under his moustache? If so, he also wins the Evil Santa award. The things you find on the internet. Until Gifsforum stopped working.