Scary little Christmas: The Snowman

Now this one is truly terrifying. This snowman morphs into something bordering on the Satanic. The accompanying text has a warning: "This ain't Frosty." It's not for kids under the age of twelve.

Second Annual Creepy Santa Smackdown!

Every year it's the same. (No it isn't, because this is only the second year I've done this.) Nowhere do you find creepier Santa images than in old kiddie shows, cartoons, puppet shows and the like.  Santa at his worst can be nearly as disturbing as a ventriloquist's dummy, or, worse, a clown.

In this one, I get an uncomfortable feeling from what Santa is doing under the bedclothes. And that narcissistic glance in the mirror just won't do. You'd think Santa was on Facebook or something.

Is this Black Peter? No, it's Santa in blackface, shaking himself down like a dog. The grimy ashes on the floor might be a pain to sweep up on Christmas morning. Myself, if I found footprints all over my living room floor, I'd be worried.

A butt joke. Rubbing your butt in front of the kiddies might not play well nowadays.

One does wonder why Santa laughs so much. At least, THIS Santa.

And this Santa looks like he might've gotten into the eggnog.

This one is from an extremely bizarre puppet show in which a cat with huge glassy eyes pretends to be Santa. Or trades places with Santa, at least. Santa pretenders are allowed here, since so many people dress up like him anyway. Though not many are cat marionettes.

Here, an evil-looking Santa meets his doppelganger, Santa Cat. The dog in between them is obviously trying to keep them apart.

The trouble with marionettes, I've found, is that they can't keep still. Because they're on strings, they bob around and shudder like Parkinson's patients. Adds yet another dimension to the creepiness.

True evil. So much for the "right jolly old elf". I haven't seen eyes like that since The Exorcist.

There has been a movement afoot to remove all images of pipe smoking from Santa pictures. Obviously they didn't give a fuck back then . (Oops, just slipped out.) The exact quote: "The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,/And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath." Here he is so wreathed in smoke that you can barely see the old blighter.

Papa in his kerchief or whatever-it-is - nightcap, I guess - is so terrified by this intruder that he ducks behind a chair. Santa appears to be having some sort of seizure. And how does he carry loose toys like that? Where is his sack? "A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,/And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack." Forgot the pack, I guess. Or do all of them contain electromagnets so that they can't come apart? Will he leave an enormous fused wad of toys sitting under the tree?

Oh, but he can dance! Or is he conducting some invisible orchestra? The dog is apparently not too impressed.

All right, enough of that shit. Let's get down to the REALLY Kreepy Kringles. Santa with that innocent little boy squicks me majorly.

I call this Third Reich Santa. Here he seems to be extolling the virtues of the Master Race. There is a certain swagger, even a nastiness to this Santa. It's that wagging beard that does it, I think. "Deuschland! Deuschland uber alles!"

This Santa is creepy mainly because the movie is about a million years old - around 1898, in fact. In spite of people's insistence that all of Santa's accoutrementes were invented by the Coca Cola Company in the 1930s, this guy is pretty much decked out like a conventional Santa. He's pretty thin, but things are tough all over, and most Santas now rely on padding. No one can tell what colour his robe is. I like the fact that he totes around a Christmas tree (?), and that supernatural touch at the end.

But here we have it. The. Creepiest. Santa. Or, at least the creepiest one I've found to date. It's from a stop-motion short called Hard Rock, Coco and Joe. I thought hard rock was a form of music, or a cafe of some kind, but - . Still, I have no doubt at all that this Santa is creepy enough to win the 2015 Creepy Santa Smackdown.

I think he won last year, too. Haven't made too many Christmas gifs lately.

HONORABLE MENTION!  I just keep finding these things, usually late at night when I'm in a kind of surreal  state. And this, believe me, is surreal. It's done with a form of animation which I really wish had never been invented. It took me many years to warm up to stop-motion, but this is way worse: it's a sort of stretch-face-motion. I've seen similar videos of Dylan Thomas and Edgar Allan Poe reading various things, and this one is The Night Before Christmas. It goes on and on. Much effort has gone into making it look "old". This guy would have won, except he just isn't very Christmassy.

The Night Before Christmas Disney's Silly Symphonies YouTube

Joys of the season: creepy old Santa cartoons

As everyone is aware, now is the season of love, laughter and creepy old cartoons. The best ones come from the 1930s, early '30s if possible: there are examples from the '20s, but to my taste they're a bit primitive. Who knows whether this one, Toyland Premier (a direct ripoff of Disney's Mickey's Premier, full of moving celebrity caricatures) was in color originally, or if someone filled in this gory and somehow voluptuous red.

The point is, my favorite YouTube-to-gif site, Y2gif, has gone bust, or at least catawampus. It won't do anything for me. If you enter the info, the web page code, as you're supposed to, this little thingie swirls and swirls forever, until it "times out". The fault is theirs, so the page tells us. So fuck 'em. I CANNOT wait any longer to make holiday gifs!

The search was on for an alternate, and fortunately there were several, because the first one I tried was so shitty it made me want to scream. The videos could be barely 5 minutes, the gifs were no more than 5 seconds, and it took at least 10 minutes for your poorly-made gif to be finished. So it was with a great gasp of astonishment that I found Gifsforum.com: not only did it take much longer videos, upwards of 15 minutes or maybe longer, it would also produce a large, high-quality video of UP TO 15 SECONDS  in a very short space of time.

Thus the dancing clowns, moving in a seemingly endless loop. I'm wondering now whether to remake all of my Harold gifs, but the thought of it is exhausting. Harold makes my heart ache these days, like a lost love or someone who has gone overseas to fight. You don't know if you'll ever see him again, and you never did get as close to him as you wanted. You got close enough to notice he always smelled good, and that's a rare trait in a man. Nothing special or fancy, just a tinge of tweed or saddle leather or even fresh hay.

I yearn because even though the hard part is supposed to be over, it ain't. If no one is interested in my work-of-the-heart, something is going to die inside me forever, and I know it. So I keep the home fires burning.

And just look at these gifs! Juicy, long gifs. I compare here the same logo on 2 different programs:

I think Gifsforum does something to these pictures, sharpens or crops them or something, because they lack that muddy black-barred quality. My favorite Harold reaction, the incredible 15 seconds while sitting in a chair 20 stories high, giffed up beautifully with no problems. Gifsforum also has a lot of alternate settings for size, speed and even color effects, though I have no idea what they mean. (They'll also run backwards.) Y2gif had only one real advantage: a feature that made them much harder to set up, but often produced the best effect. You could literally set the video for hundredths of a second, so that there would be no extraneous material to mar the little gems, the micro-videos these things truly are.

I've never been a filmmaker before, and this is likely as close as I will get. But goddamn it! These things are fun. I can spend hours doodling and diddling with them. I know some people can't stand them, and most of them seem to last less than a second so that the effect is stupid and jerky. Now that they're getting longer, who knows. All that needs to happen now is that someone will post Why Worry? in parts, so I can take Part 3 and excerpt the final, sizzling-hot kiss at the end, the only truly passionate Harold Lloyd kiss  in his repertoire (and rare in the entire silent comedy ouevre). Given that Harold had just started his first serious extramarital affair with his co-star, I think this kiss speaks volumes about where both of them were emotionally and sexually. Imagine having to take and retake, over and over, the way he seizes on her, catlike, like a great lion grasping a lioness by the back of her neck while they mate.

Enough of this, I've got to go trim the eggnog or whatever. I have seriously mixed feelings about this time of year, can be as fatuous as a puppy-dog when the lights start to ring-ting-tingle (or is that the bells?). Then I just sag into this morose mood that seems to have no end. My dreams seem to be slowly washing downhill, eroding like a sand cliff eaten by waves.

Never mind, everybody,  Santa's coming, let's all cheer up!

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm 

Christmas Cartoons from the Third Reich

I searched far and wide, long and hard for this special Xmas video. Took maybe 2 minutes. There are numerous weird, antiquated cartoons out there that express, supposedly, the spirit of the season, but this is the strangest: it's a Santa's Workshop kind-of-thing with a decidedly military flavour. This was from the early '30s and I don't think the Nazis had really happened yet, so this must have been a kind of foreshadowing.

From that disturbingly hearty beer-hall anthem at the beginning to the precision-march of the toys at the end, the whole thing is an exercise in conformity and obedience.  I was completely squicked out by Santa's final song, which reminds me of nothing more than that festive Yuletide carol,Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles. As with most cartoons and  film portrayals of Santa, he is terrifying, with an evil whiskey-voice that sounds like the guy who did Peg Leg Pete or whoever he was,  that big ugly guy with the villainous laugh. 

No wonder little kids' first encounter with Santa Claus seems to uniformly inspire terror and screams, until their parents force them to sit on this bizarre character's bum-hot lap and listen through a synthetic beard to his wet flabby lips pronouncing lies about what they'll get this year.  All that "well, we'll see" bullshit.

Who IS this monster who envelops them in the scent of sweaty polyester? As with almost all childhood mysteries, no one explains it to them. They have no idea who or what Santa is. It's a kind of initiation, almost a Christmas circumcision in which the cost of entry into the Spirit of the Season is bleeding and pain.

Kids want to believe, they really do, though it must really fly in the face of logic in these days of high technology. It was hard enough when I was a kid and technology had reached its apogee with our giant Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder in which the tapes constantly broke and had to be spliced with scotch tape. We could at least record the sound tracks of our favorite  cartoons and movies and play them over, and over, and over again until our parents screamed, the tape snapped and the reel went flap-flap-flap-flap-flapping around. 

So now how do they do it? How do they maintain such a transparent fiction? Aren't they frightened by some strange man dressed in a red fur costume breaking into their house? At some point, don't they realize that their parents have been lying to them?

My daughter, a TV news reporter who at 8 years old already had a gift for getting to the real story, one day asked me in a sort of "come on, tell me" voice, "There isn't really a Santa Claus, is there?"

So what was I to say? At eight, she wasn't even disillusioned. She just wanted to wring the truth out of me. 

"Well. . . ummm. . . Christmas is a lot more magical and fun if you pretend there's a. . . "

"I thought so." She looked more satisfied than dismayed, her suspicions confirmed. Then she looked at me again with that let's-get-the-real-story expression.

"What about the Easter Bunny?"

Ye gods! Was there anything left of childhood? Were there no harmless illusions we could maintain? Not in the face of an 8-year-old future TV news reporter.  It wasn't long until I overheard her talking to one of her little friends, sharing her newfound knowledge about how they'd all been blatantly deceived for years.

"Uh, Shannon. .. "

"WHAT? I'm just setting her straight here. I'm doing her a favor."

We never got to the Tooth Fairy, but I am sure by then she had figured it out on her own.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm 

Christmas Cartoons from the Third Reich

I searched far and wide, long and hard for this special Xmas video. Took maybe 2 minutes. There are numerous weird, antiquated cartoons out there that express, supposedly, the spirit of the season, but this is the strangest: it's a Santa's Workshop kind-of-thing with a decidedly military flavour. This was from the early '30s and I don't think the Nazis had really happened yet, so this must have been a kind of foreshadowing.

From that disturbingly hearty beer-hall anthem at the beginning to the precision-march of the toys at the end, the whole thing is an exercise in conformity and obedience.  I was completely squicked out by Santa's final song, which reminds me of nothing more than that festive Yuletide carol, Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles. As with most cartoons and  film portrayals of Santa, he is terrifying, with an evil whiskey-voice that sounds like the guy who did Peg Leg Pete or whoever he was,  that big ugly guy with the villainous laugh.

No wonder little kids' first encounter with Santa Claus seems to uniformly inspire terror and screams, until their parents force them to sit on this bizarre character's bum-hot lap and listen through a synthetic beard to his wet flabby lips pronouncing lies about what they'll get this year.  All that "well, we'll see" bullshit.

Who IS this monster who envelops them in the scent of sweaty polyester? As with almost all childhood mysteries, no one explains it to them. They have no idea who or what Santa is. It's a kind of initiation, almost a Christmas circumcision in which the cost of entry into the Spirit of the Season is bleeding and pain.

Kids want to believe, they really do, though it must really fly in the face of logic in these days of high technology. It was hard enough when I was a kid and technology had reached its apogee with our giant Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder in which the tapes constantly broke and had to be spliced with scotch tape. We could at least record the sound tracks of our favorite  cartoons and movies and play them over, and over, and over again until our parents screamed, the tape snapped and the reel went flap-flap-flap-flap-flapping around.

So now how do they do it? How do they maintain such a transparent fiction? Aren't they frightened by some strange man dressed in a red fur costume breaking into their house? At some point, don't they realize that their parents have been lying to them?

 

My daughter, a TV news reporter who at 8 years old already had a gift for getting to the real story, one day asked me in a sort of "come on, tell me" voice, "There isn't really a Santa Claus, is there?"

So what was I to say? At eight, she wasn't even disillusioned. She just wanted to wring the truth out of me.

"Well. . . ummm. . . Christmas is a lot more magical and fun if you pretend there's a. . . "

"I thought so." She looked more satisfied than dismayed, her suspicions confirmed. Then she looked at me again with that let's-get-the-real-story expression.

"What about the Easter Bunny?"

Ye gods! Was there anything left of childhood? Were there no harmless illusions we could maintain? Not in the face of an 8-year-old future TV news reporter.  It wasn't long until I overheard her talking to one of her little friends, sharing her newfound knowledge about how they'd all been blatantly deceived for years.

"Uh, Shannon. .. "

"WHAT? I'm just setting her straight here. I'm doing her a favor."

We never got to the Tooth Fairy, but I am sure by then she had figured it out on her own.