A REVIEW OF A CHRISTMAS EVENT THAT ISN’T AT ALL HOW I REMEMBERED IT: Have you seen Rudolph lately?
Donner and Mrs. Donner are snuggling with their newborn foal. He baby-voices “mama” and “dada” for the first time, but when his nose twinkles, Donner is all “The hell? No son of mine … you better not embarrass me, newborn. Now put on this mud and a rubber stopper to hide our family shame, you freak.” Donner: Father of the Year.
Then we meet Hermey the Elf. Some of you – the ones in the Vai Sikahema Football League – know my undying love for Hermey, but for those of you who don’t, he’s the overly-theatrical elf with the calculatedly-insouciant twist of longish blond hair (the same haircut as all of the girl elves; all of the other boy elves are bald), the lisping twitter, the ineptitude at manual labor, and the singular ambition to work with orthodontia. And he sounds like Rip Taylor, for crying out loud. Anyway, he works in a factory, and his boss is an irredeemable dick. Boss Elf rips Hermey a new one for not working quickly enough (note: he’s applying red paint, and this is the Eisenhower era, so Hermey is basically eating lead chips, I think), then rips Hermey another new one for wanting to be a dentist, then rips Hermey another one for all of the ones he had to rip him, basically. What on earth could make a boss that hateful?
Oh, his boss, that’s what. Boss Elf organizes a nice little factory-elf sing-along for Santa. Guys, Santa is an asshole. When the elves finish their a-capella tour-de-force, a visibly-bored Santa just says, “needs work,” and walks out. Withholding love as a motivational tool? Brilliant. So when Boss Elf finds Hermey (who, confusingly, went truant from the choir stuff), in the nature of all dysfunctional families, he redirects all the abuse he took to Hermey.
Reindeer games. What you need to know: (1) reindeers are basically racist (no red-nosers!) and sexist (girls need not apply!); (2) Coach Reindeer is a dick. There are no positive role models in Christmastown; (3) when Santa sees Rudolph’s red nose, he’s all “Jesus doesn’t love you.”
So Rudolph runs away, and he meets up with Hermey, and Hermey does a little dance and tells Rudolph that they should be misfits together, and it’s exactly as gay as you think it would be.
Rudolph and Hermey meet up with Yukon Cornelius, basically a coked-up dog-beater who punctuates every sentence by whipping his lead mutt. On the run from the Abominable Snow Monster, they run aground on the Island of Misfit Toys, because Santa is such a prima donna that he refuses to deliver misnamed jacks-in-the-box, slightly irregular trains, and dolls with leftist tendencies. The king of IoMT, who is neither a toy nor a misfit, so we’ll call him a colonial governor, helps Rudolph, Hermey, and Yukon Cornelius back to the mainland, where they discover that Rudolph’s selfish lack of conformity has endangered the lives of Rudolph’s family and colorblind girlfriend (a doe with distressingly dilated pupils, take that for what you will). Hermey saves the day by removing all of the Snow Monster’s teeth and spending an awkwardly long time dawdling in the Snow Monster’s crotch. If you don’t believe me, watch the show. Then Yukon Cornelius pushes the Snow Monster over a cliff.
Rudolph and family show up back at Christmastown, where everybody is like “Rudolph, we hate your nose and everything that it represents, but to make ourselves feel better, we will tolerate you.” So basically this is a parable of white guilt. “You still can’t have a job on the sleigh; no offense, but you’re still a freak.”
Yukon Cornelius is back! And, having gotten rid of Snow Monster’s scary bits and put him on a leash, YC now says that Snow Monster is in his permanently-unpaid employ. YC’s dogs: “yeah, that’s about right. Mind the whip, Snowy.”
Then it snows really hard, and none of the reindeer want to fly, but they’re all, “okay, fine, Karl Malden, you can have a job.” And the rest is history.
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