Claymation Christmas: Why Aren’t We Watching This Holiday Classic?
Pondering why a well-received Claymation holiday special, turning 30 this year, hasn’t become a lasting holiday classic like most of the other junk on TV.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
The strange thing about holiday classics, whether TV or film, is the way that they get drilled into the canon of nostalgia, a mush of themed entertainment along the lines of A Charlie Brown Christmas or A Christmas Story. These pieces of entertainment get repeated in part because we build memories around them. I wrote a piece about this phenomenon a couple of years ago.
But what happens if you create a piece of art that seems destined for the Christmas nostalgia ringer, and … for whatever reason, it just doesn’t happen?
That happens to a lot of content, of course, but it perhaps stings hardest in the case of Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas Celebration, a 24-minute showcase of how awesome Vinton was at molding clay into a holiday yarn. The special turns 30 this year, making now as good a time as ever to dig into the “why” of that question.
