With apologies to Kenny Loggins. At least, this is what I heard the first time this came through on the Christmas radio station.

Hey, they all don’t have to be TV specials.

Nation! Okay, my Colbert looks more like The Medic from Team Fortress. Caricatures are difficult.

Playing catchup with the sketchblog tonight. Going to get interesting later this week when I hit the road for home… means I should probably not be drawing these the night before.

Kevin started up a thread in our much-neglected forum for sketchblog discussion.  If you have a suggestion for what special you’d like to see next, let me know!

So if they can remake one of the best science fiction movies ever, surely we can get an updated version of this. It’s public domain now, so why not??

This would be Dropo and… I forget the robot’s name. But he’s cool, he’s a 50s style box robot with dryer hose limbs, programmed to crush kill destroy Santa and little children. It’s a holiday classic!

You knew he was on the way.

Fun fact via Wikipedia: Snow Miser and Heat Miser were designed to resemble Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon respectively. Of course, Wikipedia also said Snow Miser was the Prime Minister of Neptune, so take it with a grain of salt. But hey, something new to look for when you re-watch the show!

Snow Miser has icicles growing off of his nose. That’s kind of gross.

There’s this scene in both Frosty cartoons where the snowman runs across a traffic cop, startling the officer so much that he accidentally swallows his whistle. It’s played for laughs, sure, but as a kid I wasn’t really prepared for an asphyxiation joke in my happy snowman cartoons. I was always like, did Frosty just kill that guy??
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Oh man, Twas the Night Before Christmas was one of my favorites when I was a kid. This was taped on the same cassette as Christmas Toy, so it got quite a fair share of replay growing up. The mice family that was a mirror of the clockmaker family? So great. Even more so when you realize it’s Gomez Addams doing the voice of the father mouse. EDIT: D’oh, I’m wrong, it’s a totally different actor. Childhood=ruined.

The best character is Albert, the nerdy Santa skeptic who puts his entire town on Santa’s naughty list. Apparently all it takes is one nasty letter to the Kringle before he scratches your city off his flight plan, regardless of species.

Remember kids, never teach mice to write.

A slight reinterpretation of the balmier Miser Brother.

Never did see The Year Without a Santa Claus when I was little. ‘Twas only a couple of years ago when they began rerunning entire back catalog of Rankin-Bass specials on cable that I first heard the infamous Snow Miser/Heat Miser song.  AND IT’S STILL. STUCK. IN. HEAD. OW.

It is kinda fun to watch the Rankin-Bass folks sink more and more into insanity the further they get away from Rudolph and Frosty.  By the time they got to this special, they were throwing in Mother Nature and Elvis music alongside Santa and the reindeer.  Wasn’t there also a special with Santa and leprechauns or something? I might have made that one up, not sure.

Now that we got Charlie Brown outta the way, we’ve got A Garfield Christmas airing Tuesday at 7 on ABC Family.

The comic strip version of Garfield gets a lot of flak, and rightfully so, but animated Garfield is actually kinda funny.  Either sarcasm works better when spoken, or it’s because of the increased supporting cast in the animated shows.  In the Christmas special, Garfield is totally upstaged by Jon’s Grandma, a woman who plays a mean rockabilly piano and dares people to punch her in the stomach. Man, that’s how I wanna live.