Scary little Christmas: violence on the puppet stage

This has to rate, if it rates at all, as the most violent thing I've ever seen on a puppet stage. It's shocking not just for its casual and gratuitous violence, but for the stunned looks on the faces of the kiddie audience, held captive by the most un-jolly Santa I've ever seen. Most Santas just don't have it down, in particular the laugh: it comes out ha-ha-ha, or, as in this case, an evil little chuckle. There are moments when this guy is lecturing the kids in which his gestures are like something from the movie Downfall.  But that's nothing compared to the puppets, who rip into each other with heartless, sociopathic glee. There is a very fake soundtrack of forced children's laughter layered on top, which does not match the help-me/get-me-out-of-here faces of the kids at all.

There is no shorter version of this that I could find, or I'd post it. Eight minutes is just too much of your life to waste on something like this. And yet, it's fascinating. Here Santa is the ultimate authority figure. You WILL watch this puppet show, and you will like it.

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 horror, the horror. . . let's ring in the Christmas season!

It's already the goddamn start of December, and at this point I hate Christmas, as so many people have come to hate it.  I hate it cuzzadafact that it's now almost exclusively a retail opportunity. The sight of people knocking each other over and trampling one another on Black Friday has been enough to put me off it forever. And we don't even have Black Friday in Canada: more like Brown Friday, or maybe off-white.

But then, I found this!

I don't think I have ever watched this video all the way through, because it's so interminable. The violence in it, even puppet-show violence, is horrifying and makes me gasp.The children sit there helpless, not knowing how to react, as Santa presides over the whole thing like some creepy forerunner of the Grinch.

 

He has no warmth or Christmas cheer at all, but intones his phony greetings in a nasal Brooklyn accent that is freaky and utterly repellent. Santa is borderline creepy anyway: most small children scream in terror when their turn comes up at the mall, and no wonder! Haven't they been warned not to talk to strangers? And here they're being asked - expected - even commanded not only to speak to a stranger, but to sit on his knee!

Through most of this video the children look frozen in fear. Fake squealy noises that sound like they are on a continuous loop have been added to the soundtrack, resembling nothing more than a pack of coyotes on a frosty December night.

Numerous animals pop up from this magically-appearing stage, but my favorite, around 5:00, is something called a Golliwog: an incredibly racist doll, a Little Black Sambo-type of thing, more animal than human. One can imagine it eating watermelon and singing "I'm coming, Mammy".

I vaguely remember Punch and Judy from the hand puppets we had as kids. Like most puppets, they were creepy. Marionettes are even worse, with bodies like skeletons held together with bolts and string. Those jerky, dangly, macabre movements are anything but "lifelike" unless you are referring to something from Edgar Allan Poe. I don't know where Punch and Judy came from, but probably they're some bloodthirsty medieval thing like the Commedia dell'Arte (and how the fuck DO you spell that anyway??).

The very essence of Punch and Judy is violence, which makes one wonder why it was considered acceptable for children. In remote corners of the world, such as Etobicoke, it may be acceptable still.

The last shot in this remarkable artifact is a sweep of the mantlepiece on the Nght before Christmas. Withered empty stockings, probably about three feet long, dangle like immense dead worms, and the tinsel looks like something scrounged from a 1940s brothel.

Anyway, this should set you up nicely for the season and remind you of the True Meaning of Christmas: bashing the living shit out of each other. No-hell!