Among the banes of parents during the late 80s and early 90s was kid-aimed 1-900 numbers. Those pay-per-call services have largely died out these days, but for a while, they generated huge revenues for phone companies and the companies setting up the number. Many of those numbers were devoted to adult pastimes, such as getting to have phone sex with a (supposedly) hot woman or (as memorably parodied in a 1992 episode of The Simpsons) getting advice on betting on sports. However, a solid percentage of those numbers were devoted to services specifically designed to attract kids (as memorability parodied in a 1993 episode of The Simpsons). Yes, the commercials for such hotlines would rapidly remind kids to "get your parents' permission before you call." But as upset parents from coast to coast learned every month when they got their surprisingly huge phone bills, the appeal of getting to hear from their favorite rapper or wrestler proved too strong a temptation to kids to do a silly thing like tell Mom and Dad first.
A commercial for one such service that has lived rent free in my head for nearly 40 years now was for Candy Claus, Santa's daughter, who would tell the eager kids calling a brand new story every day until Christmas, at a mere $2 for the first minute and 35 cents each additional minute (according to an inflation calculator, that $2 starting charge is equivalent to over $5 today). At least I discovered, thanks to the commercial being uploaded onto YouTube, that it was for a good cause, as proceeds would benefit the American Lung Association. What I didn't realize at the time is that the animated clips of Candy and Santa that made up the ad was from a full special--one that had achieved internet notoriety for its unusually poor quality.
The Adventures of Candy Claus opens on a family busy getting ready for Christmas. The young son asks what Santa gets for Christmas, which leads to the first song of the special over a montage of the family apparently dropping everything to make two dolls, a boy and a girl doll, for Santa (why they think Santa, who has an entire factory devoted to making toys, would want toys is a question never explored). The dad, in our last glimpse of this family, slips the toys into Santa's sleigh, where the boy doll is promptly stolen by a weird flying bearded dude named, of all things, Oh No. Santa gets back home, finds the two boxes, including the empty box that once held the boy, and proclaims the girl doll beautiful. Somehow, this brings her to life and Santa and Mrs. Claus promptly name her Candy.
The rest of the special is mostly devoted to how Oh No, for some reason seething with jealousy that Santa now has a kid, tries to make Candy's life as miserable as possible by turning invisible and causing everyone to think she's destructively klutzy by constantly knocking her down, which prompts the elves to ban her from the workshop (after their passive-aggressive suggestions to Candy that she go help someplace, anyplace else are all ignored), which causes Candy to run away, which triggers Santa going into search and rescue mode, and so on. This doesn't even address the fact that Oh No has somehow brought the boy doll to life as well, and the poor kid is serving basically as a slave to Oh No.
All of this is fairly poorly animated, with the song montages being really strange (they tend to be played over a kaleidoscope of live-action images and Christmas tree green). The voiceovers aren't much better. There are only two credited voices. Robyn Moore, an Australian voice-over artist, gives Candy an obnoxiously high and almost-squeaky voice that gets rather grating to listen to. Keith Scott, also Australian as that's where the special was made, apparently provides most of the male voices, most of which seem to be impersonations of better-known voice over artists and also Jimmy Stewart, for some reason (Scott, at least, went on to some mainstream success, providing the narration for the hit 1997 live-action George of the Jungle and voicing Bullwinkle in the forgettable 2000 The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle).
The really bizarre thing here, though, is the ending. After getting rescued, Santa gives Candy a new bracelet, which prompts everyone to tell Candy how much they love her and Candy, in tern, telling everyone how much she loves them. In some versions, that's it, and the special immediately cuts to the closing credits. In others, however, Candy learns that the bracelet is actually a wearable talking computer with essentially a proto-Google built in, in which Candy and Santa learn for the first time she has a brother. After Oh No, who of course, is spying on the whole thing, successfully jams the signal, Candy vows to find and rescue her brother--and then the special ends.
As the screenshot above reveals, The Adventures of Candy Claus was originally intended to be a two-part special, which Part 2 presumably having Candy rescue his brother and Oh No's malicious mischief being properly punished. But, for whatever reason, Part 2 was never made, leading to the never-resolved cliffhanger. Even the version that remove that sequence still devotes a lot of time to Oh No's mistreatment of both Candy and the boy, none of which, of course, is resolved at all.
The Adventures of Candy Claus was syndicated every holiday season for a few years in the mid-80s, and numerous stations bought it as a cheap way to fill a half-hour of screentime. How this thing managed to convince the American Lung Association to make Candy their Christmas Seal spokesperson for a couple of seasons is beyond me. It also got a video release, allowing the special to remain in the collective conscious of kids from this era, who have devoted multiple websites to figuring out just what this thing was. To be sure, it's pretty awful, but if it had gotten a traditional resolution, it, like most other bad specials of the era, would likely have been forgotten. In a very weird way, the special's incompleteness is probably the reason it is still (not-so) fondly remembered.
Next time: How was ventriloquism still a thing in 2018?
No comments:
Post a Comment