Was there ever a more baffling and endearingly misguided attempt to create a holiday blockbuster than TriStar Pictures' 1985 offering Santa Claus: The Movie? My first Christmas on Earth, and this was what Hollywood had in store as its special festive treat for the families that year. This, and One Magic Christmas. What a jolly holly world I was born into.
Santa Claus: The Movie was realised by a lot of the same creative team who brought us Superman's initial wave of cinematic outings - among them, producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind, screenwriters David and Leslie Newman, and Supergirl director Jeannot Szwarc (apparently, John Carpenter was at one time in the running to direct, but he requested too much creative control). With the Superman movies losing their box office lustre, the idea was to kick-start a new franchise focussing on another superhuman figure who embodied the same kind of mythical virtue - and Santa has the additional virtue of being in the public domain (unlike Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, aka Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film). Unfortunately, the public themselves weren't hungry for a big budget Santa blockbuster, with Rocky IV knocking the stuffing out of the picture that holiday season, and if it's remembered at all nowadays it tends to be as this curio of 1980s Hollywood for which absolutely nothing went right - although John Lithgow, who plays the film's antagonist, B.Z., has noted with some bemusement that it appears to have acquired a bit of a cult following in the UK ("In England that's half what I'm known for...isn't that odd?"). I have to admit that I wasn't aware of Santa Claus: The Movie being quite as indispensable a part of the local festive zeitgeist as Lithgow describes, but then it is a film that I spent a good three decades of my existence going out of my way to avoid. Santa Claus: The Movie was one of those pictures that I saw very early in my childhood and utterly HATED at the time, although for the life of me I couldn't remember why. All I knew is that whenever I browsed through my parents' collection of home-recorded movies, looking for something to while away the afternoon, if I came across the tape housing Santa Claus: The Movie I'd get this weird, sickly vibe deep inside my gut and immediately pass it over. It wasn't until relatively recently that I started thinking about the movie again, and found my unease transmuting into morbid curiosity. What was it about this exceedingly innocuous-looking picture, from the outset, that could possibly have inspired such lingering horror in me as a small child? Surely the film was ripe for a rewatch after all these years? In December 2021 I finally took the trouble to sit down and watch it, hoping to stare one or two of my childhood demons in the face and to put this mystery to bed once and for all.
I thought I'd figured it out early on, during the film's prologue, which gives us a lengthy run-down of the origins of Santa. We open in the late 13th century, somewhere in northern Europe (the exact year and location are never specified), where a woodcutter named Claus (David Huddleston) and his wife Anya (Judy Cornwell) have become local legends for their annual practice of carving toys and delivering them to the children of nearby villages on the night before Christmas. On this particular winter their land has been hit by the mother of all blizzards, which threatens to disrupt the seasonal delivery. Claus can't bear the thought of all those disappointed children, so he makes the brave but foolhardy decision to venture out into the blizzard with the usual sled full of toys. He does not return, at least in mortal terms - Claus, Anya and their two beasts of burden, reindeer Donner and Blitzen, are implied to all freeze to death then and there, only to be mysteriously restored to life in an immortal state by the light of the North Star. They then find themselves in the vicinity of a community of elves ("vendegum" would be the more technical term, but they've rejected it), who invite Claus to continue his annual operations for all eternity, but on a global scale. Immediately, there is this inexplicably sinister aura about the elves, and if I didn't know better I might have hypothesised that this were all a Twilight Zone-type story in which the freezing Claus is ultimately revealed to be hallucinating with his last waning flickers of brain activity. "Mystery solved", I thought. "As a child, I must have been terrified of those elves." But no, it turns out, that wasn't it. Later in the story, there's this narrative development involving Patch (Dudley Moore), a misfit elf who's keen on technological efficiency but has no talent whatsoever for putting any of his grand ideas into practice. Long story short, he screws up a year's worth of toy manufacturing and blights the children of the world with a batch of defective toys that have all fallen apart by New Year's Eve. We cut to a scene where a boy is walking down the street dragging a wagon behind him, and the instant this kid appeared I suddenly felt that familiar weird, sickly vibe deep inside my gut, as if I knew, from some long-repressed memory, that something bad was going to happen. Sure enough, the wagon detaches from its pull and goes hurtling into the road, right into the path of a hulking great schoolbus, which makes swift work of it. And then it all came flooding back to me. THAT was why I hated Santa Claus: The Movie so much as a four-year-old - I had a very strong, very visceral reaction to seeing that child's Christmas present get brutally flattened. As an adult, I stand by that reaction. It is a surprisingly mean-spirited sequence that involves a lot of children suffering mishaps and crying over broken toys, and it still touches a raw nerve in me to this day, I'm afraid.
With that matter settled, here are a few of my assorted musings on Santa Claus: The Movie as a whole:
- The narrative is VERY episodic, to the extent that I can't help but feel that this would have worked a lot better broken up as a mini-series. That entire first act regarding Santa's origins honestly might as well not be there at all. The precise details behind his inception hold very little relevance for what he's having to contend with in Reagan's America.
- I was fully expecting Patch to get some kind of redemptive arc in which he demonstrates that he can be good at something. But no, he just sort of remains a screw-up to the end. Donner the reindeer had shown more personal growth by the closing credits.
- Lithgow is in full-on pantomime mode as B.Z., but his hammy-ass performance is by and far the best thing about this picture. When he's on screen, the action is certainly never dull.
- In his televised review with Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel complained that the movie lacked conflict, pointing out that there's never a direct face-off between Santa and B.Z.. He suggested his own alternative narrative direction, and inadvertently ended up pitching the plot of future seasonal classic The Nightmare Before Christmas.
- Another critic, Mark Kermode, claimed in one of his old "Kermode Uncut" videos that the reindeer animatronics in this film were made using the hides of actual reindeer (more accurately, he attributed such claims to a colleague of his, whom he did not identify, and then proceeded to back them up), but I'm not sure how serious he was being.
- Objectively, Santa Claus: The Movie is red hot mess of a film, but I could understand someone enjoying it as an annual guilty pleasure. If I were ever to watch it again, though, I think I'd be inclined to skip that entire first act and just go directly to when Lithgow appears. Did I mention that he is a hoot in this?
- The film has the most egregious product placement I've ever seen in ANYTHING. That FedEx scene that everybody complains about in Castaway? Mere French fry crumbs compared to what goes on here. And that's really what I wanted to focus on in this particular write-up.
In 1985, McDonald's ran a commercial tie-in with Santa Claus: The Movie. This kind of cross-promotional Happy Meal was still a relatively young concept back then (Star Trek: The Motion Picture being the first movie to advertise its existence through Happy Meal boxes, in 1979), and molded pieces of plastic had yet to become the standard incentive. Instead, you got one of four Santa Claus: The Movie-themed books - The Legend of Santa Claus, The Elves at The Top of The World, Workshop of Activities and Sleighful of Surprises. There was also a plush reindeer tree ornament, if you bought a $5 book of McDonald's gift certificates.
And as far as this promotion went, one hand washed the other. For its part, Santa Claus: The Movie straight-up stops the narrative (disjointed though it may be) to bring you a bona fide McDonald's commercial. I'm not exaggerating, once we get into the part of the story set in modern-day New York, we spend 30 gratuitous seconds inside a McDonald's eatery, watching close-up shots of families beaming at one another while shovelling burgers and milkshakes in between their jaws. Product placement this shamelessly heavy-handed really ought to get you onto the Naughty List.
I find the whole McDonald's sequence of Santa Claus: The Movie perversely entrancing for the way it perfectly replicates the visual language of your average 1980s McDonald's commercial, to the point that all that's missing is "It's A Good Time For The Great Taste" splashed across the bottom of the screen in bold white lettering beside the golden arches logo. The bulk of this footage could have been edited quite snugly into the concurrent McDonald's campaign. And yet it's all so hilariously offset by the presence of that homeless child with his face pressed up against the glass. So, the Reagan-era portion of the story involves
this kid named Joe (Christian Fitzpatrick) or, as he was dubbed by a
contemporary tie-in storybook, The Boy Who Didn't Believe In Christmas. Joe doesn't have masses of Christmas spirit because he's an orphan living on the streets, and to him the season is just a time for having corporate decadence rubbed aggressively in your face. His ethos runs contrary to Santa's own, which is rooted in the unabating assumption that the promise of Christmas brings "not a child alive who's not bursting with joy and happiness." (Tsk, Claus, you've been on this planet for seven centuries and you're still refusing to acknowledge the existence of Jewish children?) Naturally, he and Santa cross paths and the latter does a fine job of straightening him out over the course of the picture. Before then, though, Joe's favourite pastime is standing outside McDonald's restaurants and regarding, with envious desperation, the wonders within. It's not just the sustenance he craves, you understand, although naturally he'd have that too - McDonald's represents the spirit of family togetherness, warmth and security, values with which Santa himself is clearly interconnected, and which up until now have been denied to Joe. The in-universe explanation offered as to why Santa has passed the homeless Joe over year after year is that Joe has never written to him to ask for anything, but as far as subtext goes...well, any viewer over the age of 7 knows that Santa and your parents are really one and the same. The actual reason that Joe doesn't get to participate in the seasonal mythos is because he's an outsider to family life and all of its associated rituals - to which, as Santa Claus: The Movie would have it, regular outings to McDonald's are as indispensable a component as the giving of presents at Christmas. Joe is likewise an outsider to the consumerist forces that Santa also serves and puts the nicest possible face on - but boy oh boy, as that scene at McDonald's shows, does he ever want in.
Although what's really hysterical about the McDonald's sequence is that it does, inadvertently, make the restaurant's patrons look like complete and utter dickwads. This starving child observing them from the other side of the glass isn't being particularly subtle about his plight, yet they go about crassly stuffing their faces in front of him regardless. Worse still, one of them seems to acknowledge him and get a savage little kick out his suffering; following a close-up shot of Joe up against the window, we cut to a teenaged girl with a mouth full of burger meat, who turns her head and smiles triumphantly, and while it's not clear if she's meant to be smiling at Joe or another patron, the nature of the cut really does make it look like the former (whoever edited this sequence might have wanted to think more carefully about the Kuleshov effect). Clearly, we're being encouraged to see dining at McDonald's as both desirable and virtuous, as analogous to Santa's role in reinforcing family ties, but there is an aura of taunting insensitivity about it. All I see is McDonald's being part of a system that caters to those with cash while happily leaving the needy out in the cold, its patrons gleeful in their complicity.
Oh, but the egregious product placement doesn't stop there. Joe wanders off into the night and ends up outside the house of this rich kid named Cornelia (Carrie Kei Heim), who's more sympathetic toward him than those McDonald's patrons. While her nanny Ms Tucker (Dorothea Phillips) is off watching Masterpiece Theatre, Cornelia takes the opportunity to sneak Joe a plate of leftovers from her dining table, along with a can of New Coke. Joe takes a swig, grasping the can carefully so that the "Coke" lettering is directed legibly at the camera, and lets out a tremendous sigh of satisfaction. Yet another sequence that feels like a self-contained commercial in its own right; it's not at all hard to envision "Coke Is It!" materialising across the screen, these two puppy lovers and their fearless transcendence of social rank providing all the narrative you need for a holiday-themed promotion designed to tug on the heartstrings. It's probably not a coincidence that Santa enters Joe's life shortly after the refreshing taste of Coke does, his small moment of connection with Cornelia having provided a nascent induction into the familial sphere in which Santa (and Coca-Cola drinking) is so perfectly at home. A sip of Coke and it suddenly all becomes accessible to him. McDonald's and Coca-Cola are stealthily presented as extensions of the Santa magic, little bits of jolly old Saint Nick that are manifest all year round and on every street corner. Much like Santa, they are symbols of reassurance and of belonging, both to a family unit and to a broader culture. Santa Claus: The Movie doesn't go as far as suggesting that Santa would prefer it if you left him a Big Mac and Coke instead of the generic milk and cookies...but it might as well have done.
Which is odd, really, because it can't help but undermine what would appear to be the very point of the story - namely that commercialisation is a dangerous thing, and that's where Lithgow's evil, scenery-chewing toy mogul enters in. Following his self-imposed exile from the North Pole, Patch goes to work for B.Z. because he figures that he's the next best thing to Santa, only for their ideals to clash straight out of the gate. B.Z. is in the toy manufacturing business not because he likes making children happy, but because he wants to make money off of them, while Patch's seven hundred years of servitude to Santa have entrenched in him the mindset that toys are to be given away for free. Nevertheless, B.Z. gets the hopelessly naive elf into his pocket and enlisted in a nefarious scheme to drive Santa out of business by launching his own rival holiday, Christmas II (yep, this movie beat The Simpsons to that joke by twelve and a half years). The conflict of Santa Claus: The Movie, as muted as it was for Gene Siskel's tastes, has to do with old-fashioned family values versus corporate consumerism. On a broader level, it's about preserving tradition and resisting the temptations of modernity - Patch gets into his mess in the first place because he wants to revolutionise Santa's workshop into something more efficient and industrial, only to discover that industrialism results in lousy product. This lousiness is echoed in the output of B.Z., whose callous business model extends to such a flagrant lack of regard for the welfare of his young consumers that his toys are manufactured to ridiculously unsafe standards. Corporations, Santa Claus: The Movie teaches, are not to be trusted, with Santa and his operations being likened to that of a smaller family-run business, albeit one that's spiritually aligned itself with corporate giants McDonald's and Coca-Cola. Similar charges could potentially be levelled at them about a lack of regard for the well-being of young consumers, with business strategies that are dependent on encouraging children to adopt unhealthy eating habits. This is a film with mixed ideas about who's Naughty and who's Nice - leery of commercialism, while implicitly surrendering to its sovereignty.
What's telling is Joe's response when Santa asks him why he never wrote any
letters to the North Pole. Joe gets halfway through admitting that he
never believed in Santa, before backtracking and insisting that there
was never anything that he wanted. We know that Joe is only covering
here - obviously, he's too embarrassed to admit to Santa's face that he had doubts about his existence, and we've seen from earlier that actually there is something he really, really wants, which is to be stuffing his mouth with McDonald's and Coca-Cola (themselves shorthands for secretly craving a family). But that purported lack of material desire would be as much a threat to Santa as is B.Z. and his Christmas II - his existence is as dependent on this ongoing cycle of insatiability as those of the corporate forces with whom he's sleeping. And besides, to paraphrase Sideshow Bob, I'm aware of the irony of criticising a movie about Santa Claus for being an extended
Coca-Cola commercial, so, erm, don't bother pointing that out. Santa himself, at least in his modern incarnation, does have a bit of that stitched into in his red-suited DNA - Coca-Cola,
contrary to popular belief, did not invent the red-clad Santa, but they played their part in helping to solidify this particular depiction as the
default one. So maybe a Santa-themed feature film that's actually a stealthy sales pitch for the virtues of drinking Coke is its own piece of ingenious meta commentary.
Or maybe Santa Claus: The Movie is just an inherently silly piece of work all over. B.Z. might make it worth the watch, however. I haven't even touched on how fantastically ridiculous his character arc gets (spoiler: it ends with him overdosing on magic lollipops and flying off into outer space).
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