It's Not Christmas Without...David Letterman's Christmas Episode!

There are a few Holiday movies, specials, episodes, etc, that RigbyMel and I simply must watch every year.

One of our favorite ongoing TV Christmas traditions is the annual Christmas episode of The Late Show With David Letterman.

One recurring Holiday bit is band leader Paul Shaffer’s hilarious impersonation of Cher singing "O Holy Night," which he began performing in 1983 on Letterman’s old NBC show.  For many years, I had only heard the Shaffer version.  But a clip of the song from The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour recently showed up on dvd and youtube.  It originally aired on December 19, 1973, the special guest that week was actor William Conrad, who sings "The First Noel" in the same scene (and don't miss Terri Garr in this scene, she was a regular back-up singer & dancer on Sonny And Cher). 

I always enjoyed Cher's work in comedy sketches with Sonny, but this is not her finest moment.  Here it is, if you find the “Holiday medley” unbearable, go to the 3:55 mark in the video to hear "O Holy Night":

And here’s Shaffer imitating Cher singing "O Holy Night," from 1998:

Another Letterman show tradition is Darlene Love’s performance of her classic song "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)". The song was first released in 1963, Letterman calls it his favorite Christmas song of the Rock Era, and it’s one of my favorites as well.

Love began performing the song on Late Night  in 1986 and in recent year's she's become a permanent fixture on Letterman's last show before Christmas.  Here’s Love's 2008 Late Show appearance:

Darlene Love returns to ‘The Late Show’ on Thursday, December 23, don’t miss it!

Two Rarely Seen 'Simpsons' Christmas short toons

As I mentioned in an earlier review, ‘The Simpsons’ has given us quite a few Christmas-related episodes over the past 20 years. Our review of last night’s episode is forthcoming, but I’ve recently discovered two ‘Simpsons’ Christmas rarities.

The first clip comes from a 1988 episode of ‘Tracy Ullman Show’, where the Simpsons got their start in short interstitial cartoons. Thanks to Joanna @ the Christmas TV Companion blog for finding this one!

The second clip is simply titled ‘The Simpsons Christmas Message’. This aired in the UK back in 2004. Gotta love the “British-centric” jokes and Homer’s Father Christmas suit.

Eight Crazy Nights

Eight Crazy Nights

Originally released November 27, 2002

Directed by Seth Kearsley

And now we have our first Hanukkah review.

In the town of Dukesberry, New Hampshire, local drunk Davey Stone (Adam Sandler), described by the narrator as a “33 year-old crazy Jewish guy", leaves a restaurant without paying his tab, goes on a drunken rampage and ends up in a high-speed chase that results in the destruction of Dukesberry’s Christmas and Hanukkah displays. Davey is about to be sent to prison when his old basketball coach Whitey Duvall(also voiced by Sandler) comes forward and begs the judge to give Davey one more chance and sentence him to community service. The judge agrees and Davey becomes Whitey’s assistant youth basketball coach.

Later, Davey’s trailer burns down, so he’s forced to move in with Whitey and his sister Eleanore (voiced by, you guessed it, Sandler).

Davey spends most of the rest of the movie belittling and abusing Whitey & Eleanore…blah blah blah…(SPOILER ALERT!) he gets redeemed at the end, reforms himself and lives happily ever after with his childhood sweetheart Jennifer Friedman. That’s all that needs to be said about it.

JA Morris says:

Let me begin by saying Adam Sandler's ‘The Hanukkah Song’ is one of my favorite “modern” Holiday songs. I’ve bought two versions of the song and played it at every office Holiday party I’ve organized. I even have a “karaoke” version of the song. So I was excited when I first heard that an animated feature length movie was being made based on the song. I also don’t mind “gross-out” humor when it’s done right.

This was not only one of the worst holiday-themed movies I’ve ever seen, it’s one of the worst I’ve ever seen full stop. The movie opens with Davey committing multiple felonies. After he avoids prison time and gets a second chance, he makes fun of an obese child, knocks down a port-a-john while an old man is inside (yes, he winds up covered in excrement, which is eaten off him by some reindeer) and breaks into a mall before he has a moment of clarity, admits he's an alcoholic and shows he’s really not so bad after all. Actually, Davey IS bad, the filmmakers just want us to think he’s not so bad. But Davey is one of the most unsympathetic “protagonists” you’ll ever see in a movie.

In the middle of the story, we learn that Davey is such a repulsive human being because his parents died in a car accident when he was a kid, which led to his drinking problem and life of crime. But by this time in the story, Davey has been presented as irredeemably bad, so giving him dead parents doesn’t build any sympathy for him.

Lots of Holiday films & specials end with a villain coming to their senses, seeing the error of their ways and reforming (The Grinch and The Bumble from ‘Rudolph’ being obvious examples). I believe in rehabilitation, but Davey Stone is a walking obscenity, utterly without redeeming social value, his “change of heart” can’t be taken seriously. He doesn’t deserve a “happy ending” with Jennifer, he should have gone to prison.

‘Eight Crazy Nights’ also has some of the most annoying usage of Product Placements I’ve ever seen. Corporate logos in the backgrounds (in some cases the foregrounds too!) of just about every scene. During one of the musical numbers, logos even come to life and sing!

Speaking of musical numbers, there are several forgettable new songs in this film, sung by the likes of Allison Krauss and Ann Wilson (singer for the band Heart), who deserve better material. 'The Hanukkah Song' does not show up at all during the movie, only plays over the closing credits.

Avoid this at all costs. Listen to ‘The Hanukkah Song’ again instead of watching this.

We have our first ever lump of coal.

RigbyMel says:This movie is a steaming pile of reindeer poop! ‘Nuff said.

Macca Christmas-y songs

As some of my readers will know, I am a bit of a fan of the Beatles. Hence, I figured I'd throw in some bonus blog material. This will probably become a once a week thing during the next month or so.

So today, I figured I would start with some solo Beatles material, specifically, some Christmas-y music videos courtesy of Sir Paul McCartney.

First, we have the ubiquitous 1979 chestnut "Wonderful Christmastime" which seems to have no middle ground (or not much anyway), people seem to either really like it or really REALLY hate it. I reckon it is slight (especially where work from a former Beatle is concerned), but fun. Here is the video (my advice to the haters is, don't click the play button!):



Here are a couple of fun facts about the song:

* The pub you see in the video is the Fountain Inn in Ashurst, West Sussex.
* The synthesizer riff was played on a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5.
* The song did not crack the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in the year of its release, but did chart at #6 in the U.K. singles chart.
* The song can be heard in the 1998 animated film "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Movie," as well as all over your local pop radio station during the holidays.

The second video from Sir Paul that I am including is for "Pipes of Peace." Written for the 1983 album of the same title (released October 31, 1983), the title song was released as a single on December 5, 1983. Although it is not explicitly a holiday song from a lyrical standpoint (except in a "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All" sort of way), the video is most definitely Christmas-y. The video depicts the famous WWI Christmas truce between British and German troops. Macca plays soldiers on both sides of the trenches who meet up in No Man's Land while other soldiers fraternize and play football.



* This song was Paul McCartney's first and *only* number 1 single as a solo artist in the U.K. (!)
* The single (with "So Bad" as the B-side) reached number 23 on the U.S. charts.
* The video was my introduction to the WWI Christmas truce of December 1914.

The Christmas Truce is also dramatized in the film Joyeux Noel, about which more later (hopefully).

So there you have some Beatle-y Christmas-y music videos for your viewing and listening pleasure. I plan to post a few more of these as the holidaze progress.