A scary litttle Christmas

W'all, w'all, w'all (Jimmy Stewart festive stammer), usually this time of year I make gifs of weird, creepy or disturbing Christmas videos. Just the good bits. But not everyone likes gifs, and they don't always even run smoothly. They're being replaced by mp3 videos which are infinitely more sophisticated. But from the format of this blog, I think you can gather that I hate infinitely more sophisticated.

This year I'm posting whole videos. There's always the risk my zillions of readers won't bother to watch them (and with gifs, they don't have much choice: there they are, repeating, and repeating, and repeating). But some of these things cry out for context.

This is a harmless enough stop-motion video from the 1950s, and it used to run every year on public television. Kids looked forward to seeing it. The elves are cute enough, though Hardrock seems oddly named. Is there a cafe named after him, I wonder, or is he a hard rock musician, or what? The mystery is never solved.

But the reason I'm posting it under this Festival of Creepy Christmas Videos is that the Santa in this thing WON the First Annual Creepy Santa Smackdown in 2014 (which included gifs from all sorts of bizarre old cartoons and puppet shows from the '50s). That is, he won it in the first year. In the second year (link below), I found a whole bunch of new shit. I might re-run the whole post, which I don't like to do, but Lord-oh-Lord did it take a long time to make all those gifs!

(I just went back and looked at the actual post. He won in the second year, too.)

You're not going to believe or even comprehend the Santa in this thing. Why were so many children's programs so creepy back then, or were they maybe not creepy at all and our standards have changed?

You decide.
 

Second Annual Creepy Santa Smackdown!

(Read at your own risk.)

Mother cat and kitten: furry love

Lazy cats

A Margaret Atwood Christmas

Atwood is a great subject for my PicMix art because every one of her images on Google is a posed, professional author photo. That means lots of blank space in behind - either that, or walls of books, and both of them gif up really nicely. As it turned out, there was a minimum of silliness in these (a little disappointing, really, but these aren't meant to be mockery). At the same time, the greatest weakness of these photos is that they are posed, professional author photos, meaning they are virtually interchangeable.

You have to try on all sorts of background effects for these things. One of them had her entire library in flames, and her in it. I didn't use it. This has some sort of vibrating Santa in the background, but that part doesn't show. The feverish, shifting stars are a nice touch. The animation is so bad in these that it's a kind of poetry.

Atwood as Santa was just too tempting to resist. 

In this one she looks uncannily like Barbra Streisand. I think the background of exploding roses is, if anything, restrained, so I had to use puppies and kittens to balance it.

This will cause seasickness if viewed for longer than ten seconds.

Jinglebell rock.