A Christmas (?) Movie
That you may haven't seen in a while (read: ever).
Welcome to week two of Something New. If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing, for free, which will send these entries straight to you, and I won’t have to keep texting people. Win win.
As with most things, my relationship with Christmastime can be defined by my short, specific time on planet earth (1990-present), as well as those of my parents (1950’s-present), and their parents, and their parents, and, you get it. I celebrate with the things that I was given growing up, when the magic of the season was set in place. I celebrate with the resuscitation of ephemera that is so narrow in scope and popularity that the mention of today’s subject will likely ring no bells for you, Christmas or otherwise.
In 1969, Russell Hoban published a children’s book, illustrated by his life and creative partner Lillian Hoban. Eight years later, Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets, Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and much more, produced a fifty-minute TV special adaptation of the book for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. A year later, it aired in the U.S. on HBO. Roughly twenty years after that, one of the songs snuck its way into my younger brother’s VHS collection, in a Muppets music compilation video.
It wasn’t for another fifteen years, in the mid 2010’s and my mid twenties, that I was deep into a YouTube rabbit hole when I found Emmet Otter’s Jug Band Christmas. A charming puppet adaptation took on huge personal weight when, after 25 minutes setting up a classic tale of family and class and sacrifice, in came that damn washboard lick.
chicky-chick, chicky-chick, chicky chicky CHICKYchick
It’s those little things that stick with me, and that I look for, in all works of art, but especially movies and television, where the merging of sights and sounds and story and performance all mash together to create an infinite pool of possibility. Turn on Emmet Otter, and the moment the first image fades in from black, you’ll know what you’re in for. Admittedly, for someone alive and young today, it might seem questionable. A high resolution transfer of the film doesn’t exist, the audio peaks and is full of noise, and everything you see on screen was built and sewn by hand fifty-three years ago. And the songs, for a Christmas special, are bizarre. Especially the opening track, “The Bathing Suit that Grandma Otter Wore”.
What allows this production to continue capturing my interest and my winters’ free time are the things you can find beneath the superficial, beneath the obvious. The inventive craftsmanship and imagination of Henson’s crew to use hand puppets, marionettes, bunraku and black theater techniques (even I had to Google that one), and radio controlled devices, all for the first time together. They built an entire world with removable floors and partitions, to allow different camera and puppet setups for individual locations. They make Kermit ride a freaking bike. He wears a wonderful golden sweater. Puppets slide down a sledding hill on a lake, they row a boat, they wipe out in convertibles. This story exists entirely in the physical world, just like you and me.
My favorite and most valued gift found here is the music and the songwriting, crafted by Paul Williams. Along with that opening track, he wrote what has become a beloved song in my head, and sometimes my family’s home on Christmas, “When the River Meets the Sea”, later covered by THE John Danver and THE Kermit the Frog on the Muppets’ Christmas record A Christmas Together. He also wrote every song for the talent show, including one of history’s greatest fake-band rock singles, “Riverbottom Nightmare Band”:
Alongside all that silly stuff, there is a heart, and a soul, and an oomph, in the performances and the creativity and the involvement across the board. The story of risk for others’ reward, and loss, and togetherness, and what matters, really works for me coming from a fake otter being mimed by a grown man’s hand. These people know what they are making, why they are making it, and who they are making it for. They are in the joke, working with no irony or bad faith.
All it takes for art to have staying power is for someone’s work to connect with you — in any way — across their medium or through digital translation, and through unknowable time and space; a task simultaneously simple and Sisyphusian. Maybe you could luck your way into it, but Jim Henson, and his deep roster of collaborators, never did.
Ahh, it feels good to tell on myself on a public platform. Christmas movies are a real skeleton key to a person’s childhood/life. I told you one of my favorites, now you gotta tell me one of yours. Fair is fair.
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TTFN,
B