Enter The Christmas Special Thunderdome

Christmas specials: They’ve survived unchanged for decades and still pull absolutely crazy TV viewership. ABC Family¹ and the Hallmark Channel are wall-to-wall with this stuff right now, and the numbers explain why: ABC Family’s showing of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” on Sunday night pulled in 2.7 million viewers. ABC’s “25 Days of Christmas” programming was the most watched thing on cable among women last year in the three weeks leading up to Christmas. But in the abstract, it’s fascinating that there’s an entire chunk of culture that people have absolutely no interest in for 90 percent of the year but go nuts for in the remaining 10 percent.

And just like we see with music, the oeuvre is by and large dated: Anchoring the universe of holiday specials is a batch of claymation holdovers from the 1960s and 1970s by the Rankin-Bass studio.

I wanted to quasi-scientifically figure out what makes a good holiday special. So since it only comes around once a year: Welcome to The Christmas Thunderdome! Like we did with James Bonds and Matt Damon before, I pitted Santas, Rankin-Bass movies and Christmas special characters against one another in a series of head-to-head matchups and invited America, or really just my Twitter followers,² to weigh in and crown some winners.

First up, the Santa Clauses:

The most popular Santa Clauses
RANK	ACTOR	FILM	WIN PERCENTAGE
1	Edmund Gwenn	Miracle on 34th Street (1947)	79%
2	Stan Francis	Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer	76
3	Richard Attenborough	Miracle on 34th Street (1994)	71
4	Ed Asner	Elf	72
5	Tim Allen	The Santa Clause series	68
6	Tom Hanks	The Polar Express	58
7	Paul Giamatti	Fred Claus	48
8	Jeff Gillen	A Christmas Story	44
9	Edward Ivory	The Nightmare Before Christmas	44
10	David Huddleston	Santa Claus	43
11	James Cosmo	The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe	42
12	Al ‘Red Dog’ Weber	Scrooged	40
13	Ken Hudson Campbell	Home Alone	31
14	Billy Bob Thornton	Bad Santa	40
15	Alec Baldwin	Rise of the Guardians	30
16	John Call	Santa Claus Conquers the Martians	25
17	Jim Broadbent	Arthur Christmas	22

The top five is fascinating. Two of them are the Santas from “Miracle on 34th Street” — the original film (No. 1) won 79 percent of its matchups, while the remake (No. 3) won 71 percent. Rounding out the top 3 is the claymation Claus from the Rankin-Bass “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” No. 4 is Ed Asner’s Santa in “Elf,” a movie that did for holiday films what “All I Want for Christmas Is You” did for holiday music. And, finally, there’s Tim Allen’s turn in “The Santa Clause” movie franchise — the first of which is iconic for the younger crowd for any number of reasons (it also might be the only quality film made because of a legal pun).

But why is the claymation Santa from “Rudolph” so big? Well, it is the most popular Rankin-Bass special:

Rankin’ the Rankin-Bass Christmas specials
RANK	COMPETITOR NAME	WIN PERCENTAGE
1	Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer	93%
2	Frosty the Snowman	83
3	Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town	84
4	The Year Without a Santa Claus	79
5	Frosty’s Winter Wonderland	57
6	The Little Drummer Boy	57
7	Jack Frost	57
8	‘Twas the Night Before Christmas	55
9	Rudolph’s Shiny New Year	51
10	Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas in July	47
11	Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey	37
12	The Life & Adventures of Santa Claus	34
13	The First Christmas: The Story of the First Christmas Snow	23
14	The Little Drummer Boy, Book II	22
15	Pinocchio’s Christmas	20
16	The Leprechauns’ Christmas Gold	18
17	The Stingiest Man in Town	18
18	Cricket on the Hearth	17

I think my favorite part of these results is the massive drop in quality seen after the top four films. You have Rudolph and Frosty, sure. They’re followed by “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town,” the story of a monarchist subversive attempting to overthrow the elected leader of a small hamlet with the help of a wizard. And next comes “The Year Without a Santa Claus,” which is the one with Heat Miser, Snow Miser and the best damn soundtrack ever.

And after that, you have absolutely nothing. The Rankin-Bass crowd apparently ran out of ideas or new intellectual property sometime in the early 1970s. They tried going super biblical, they tried to build a Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer Cinematic Universe, they adapted a batshit L. Frank Baum book into an even more absurd claymation special. In 1981, they went the leprechaun route, making a film in which a stereotype releases a banshee and tries to get some gold. The big idea to promote the film, according to a very helpful wikia page, was that “prizes would be buried in random places throughout the United States for children to dig up.” However, “this was scrapped because of safety concerns.” I have a lot of concerns — sure, safety among them — about that plan.

While the Rankin-Bass specials absolutely have volume, they don’t feature the most popular holiday characters. I asked people to select which was the better character from a holiday special. Frosty didn’t even make the top 10:

The most popular Christmas characters
RANK	COMPETITOR NAME	WIN PERCENTAGE
1	The Grinch	84%
2	Max, the Dog	79
3	The Abominable Snowmonster of the North	77
4	Snoopy	75
5	Yukon Cornelius	73
6	Rudolph	73
7	Charlie Brown	72
8	Linus	70
9	Sam Snowman	67
10	Hermey	63
11	Cindy Lou Who	62
12	Schroeder	61
13	Frosty	61
14	Lucy	54
15	Burgermeister Meisterburger	53

Big wins for the Grinch (the 1966 version) and Max, his dog.³ The Abominable Snowmonster of the North from “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” — who would go on to get his arm cut off by a Jedi — is in third place, followed by Snoopy from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” and then Yukon Cornelius, also from “Rudolph.”

And to think, within three days, we’ll want absolutely nothing to do with them for 11 months.

Footnotes

FiveThirtyEight is owned by ESPN, which is owned by Disney, which also owns ABC.
Actually, definitely only my Twitter followers and whoever else saw it; this is not a scientific study.
It’s worth pointing out here that people are far too sympathetic to Max, the dog from “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” He’s pretty much the most insidious villain of the entire holiday canon and a character study of the banality of evil. Consider: The Grinch is an unambiguous baddie, heart several sizes too small and an altogether unsympathetic character — at least in the beginning. He’s Palpatine from “Star Wars,” Sauron from “The Lord of the Rings,” someone whose malice is so central to his being that he’s essentially a caricature of badness. There’s a song about that. But Max takes the predilection toward malice to another level. He’s portrayed as a good dog, the audience stand-in and a character worthy of our empathy. We can identify with Max — we all think we’re good people, conscientious workers, maybe not always totally in control but in our hearts good — even though it’s difficult to identify with the Grinch.

But Max goes along with the Grinch’s crime spree even though he knows what he’s doing is wrong. Max is blindly obedient. On his own, the Grinch couldn’t possibly steal Christmas. He needed the aid of an unquestioning assistant. Evil only progresses when good people don’t try to stop it — as someone said — and emerges victorious when good people abet it out of self-preservation. And that should scare the hell out of you. Were it not for the Grinch’s change of heart, Max would have willingly gone along with the destruction of the haul. Good people can be convinced by bad people to do horrible things, and Max is an interrogation of that notion, and a very clever one at that. And I’m very sure this was wholly intentional. After all, it’s right there in the title: If you want to know “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” the answer is Max.

Footnotes

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