Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July - Musical Hell Review 106

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* This episode of Musical Hell is brought to you by Midnight Musicals: welcome to the podcast musical underground. And by Cafe Himbo cookbooks, celebrating his 10th anniversary. Thank you.

**Diva:** Greetings, mortals. Welcome to another session of the Infernal Court in Musical Hell. I'm Diva: your judge, jury, executioner, and- oh, sweet Lucifer, what now?

*Donna, Diva's angelic foil, suddenly appears in a flash of light.*

**Donna:** Salutations and blessings upon-

**Diva:** Oh, cut the annunciation routine and get to the point, Donna.

**Donna:** Hm! I will have you know that I am here on official business!

**Diva:** Really? And what have I done that's got your higher-ups' halos in a twist?

**Donna:** You know full well that one of our conditions for making these trials public is doing a Christmas episode every year!

**Diva:** Come on, I was asked to do "La La Land"! Besides, it *kinda* counts, there's that one scene in the restaurant.

**Donna:** Now, now. You may have gotten away with that for "Mame", but we will not be fooled twice!

**Diva:** Fine, but what do you expect me to do about it now? It's July, and thanks to global warming, parts of the mortal world are making this place look positively balmy.

**Donna:** Well, it just so happens that I have just the solution!

*Cut to a DVD cover of the film we are about to see.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Oh, sweet Lucifer, not a third-tier Rankin/Bass sequel-slash-crossover.

**Donna:** You can't deny that it's thematically appropriate.

**Diva:** All right, all right, if it'll keep you off my tail! It was probably only a matter of time before I dove into the darker recesses of holiday stop-motion anyway.

**Donna:** That's what I thought. I'll leave you to it~!

*Donna disappears in another flash of light.*

**Diva:** \*sarcastic\* Gee, thanks. Well, let's examine the case of "Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July".

## Review

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* It's a steamy, minus-10-degree June day at the North Pole, and Rudolph and Frosty are hanging together because, by the way, they're friends now. Frosty and his wife, Crystal - he was married in one of the other specials, I'm not looking up which one - now have two kids named Millie and Chilly. and it is *way* too early in this trial to make me think about the mechanics of snowperson conception. But then, Rudolph's nose starts going on the fritz, and the music gets rather cheerful for how grim everybody looks about that.

*A blizzard swirls around Rudolph, Frosty, and his family as the overture swells up.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* After a lengthy credits sequence, Santa comes on to do some backstory. It seems that long ago, the North Pole was ruled by an evil sorcerer king named Winterbolt, who spread fear and terror as evil sorcerer kings are wanted to do. But one day, Lady Boreal, the corporeal form of the Northern Lights, decided to put a stop to that nonsense.

**Lady Boreal (Nellie Bellflower):** King Winterbolt! For years, I have seen your malevolent cruelty, and now I take human form to command thee: stop this tyranny at once!

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Let's make this quick, I have a selfish prince to turn into a beast at 3. Boreal defeats Winterbolt and puts him in a magic coma, but can only keep him there for as long as her magic holds out. Meanwhile, the good creatures return to the North Pole, first the animals, and then the toymaking elves, and then the Clauses, and Sin number one: this movie has more prologue exposition than "Fellowship of the Ring"!

* **Sin 1: Too Much Backstory**

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* This is some of the most convoluted backstory of any holiday media out there, and I'm including that weird shit L. Frank Baum cooked up. It's a bit excessive for something that has the same basic premise as a used car dealership promotion.

*Cut to a clip of Rankin/Bass's 1985 stop-motion adaptation of "The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus", followed by an advertisement for a 'Christmas in July' used car sale from 2016.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Eventually, Boreal's power begins to wane, Winterbolt awakes from his long winter's nap, and is none too pleased to find a major toy factory and distribution center has sprung up in his backyard. So, he asks the Genie of the Ice Scepter - there's a Genie of the ice Scepter, by the way - how he can put Santa out of commission.

**Genie of the Ice Scepter (Thurl Ravenscroft):** Have the snow dragons create a storm of ice and fog, the likes of which the North has never seen. Santa will become hopelessly lost.

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Yeah, you can probably guess where this is going, Lady Boreal uses her last bit of magic on baby Rudolph, granting him his trademark nose, and also a mark on his right forehoof as a sign of her favor. Before she departs for the Northern Lights, she warns Rudolph that if he ever uses her gift for evil, he'll lose it... which is quite a lot to be putting on an hour-old fawn. You all know the rest.

*"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is sung as his backstory is shown, including an appearance from Clarice.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Although that isn't going to stop the movie from showing it anyway.

* **Sin 2: SEEN IT.**

**Diva:** There are a lot of these recaps in this film, and they're *all* irritating.

*Cut to a DVD cover for "The Looney. Looney, Looney Bugs Bunny Movie".*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* It's like watching those old Looney Tunes movies that were mostly cobbled together from earlier shorts, only not as entertaining. So, now we're back where we started with Winterbolt being the cause of Rudolph's nose issues... except he shouldn't be able to do that, based on what we've seen so far. Whatever, it doesn't stick, so Winterbolt goes back to the Genie for an explanation.

**Genie of the Ice Scepter:** He has the wonder of the Aurora Borealis within him, a power far greater than thine.

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* And this is why research is an important stage in every evil scheme. The Genie explains that Lady Boreal's protection is still on the North Pole, so Rudolph needs to be away from the Arctic to be vulnerable. Winterbolt isn't interested in waiting for Rudolph to go on his usual holiday journey, so he looks into his magic snow palantír for a solution.

**Winterbolt (Paul Frees):** \*observing his crystal snowball\* W-what's this? A balloon?!

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Apparently, the key to stopping Rudolph is the Wizard of Oz. This balloon contains Milton, the flying ice cream man... by the way, there's a flying ice cream man now.

* **Sin 3: Oh, The Randomness**

**Diva:** Look, I know this is a cheesy holiday special and not even a top-tier one at that, but it's still really lousy at setting stuff up. It feels more like that creative exercise, where you take turns making up a story as you go along.

*Cut to a group of people in a classroom.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* But then, Winterbolt woke up and he was determined to destroy Santa Claus! So, he... asked the magic genie who lived in a scepter what to do, and the genie showed him... uh, an ice cream man in a hot air balloon! Milton, who looks like roughly 73 percent of adult men in Rankin/Bass specials, keeps his stock of ice cream cold at the North Pole, having never heard of a miraculous invention called the freezer. He's swinging by to pick up inventory for the Fourth of July, but his heart's not in it as he is in love with the beautiful Laine Loraine, star of the Circus by the Sea. They were supposed to be married on the highwire, but the circus has fallen on hard times, and an evil showman named Sam Spangles is threatening to buy it out. This gives Winterbolt an idea, and he uses a little inception magic to nudge Milton in the right direction.

**Milton (Red Buttons):** I just got a great idea! There's only one guy who could draw the kind of crowds the Circus by the Sea needs... and that's *you*, Rudolph!

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Crystal and the kids have a yearning to go see the circus and the fireworks, despite the *obvious* drawbacks. This is Winterbolt's cue to step in on the pretense of being a friendly neighborhood sorcerer, and propose a solution to the laws of physics.

**Winterbolt:** Magic amulets. If Frosty, Crystal, Millie, and Chilly wear them about their necks, they cannot melt, even though the temperature will be hot enough to melt steel!

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Hey, he swiped those from Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego!

*Cut to an illustration of the three biblical characters in the fiery furnace.*

**Donna:** Shut up~!

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Oh, you stay in your flight lane. The drawback here is that the magic amulets will only last until the last firework fades on July 4th, which is a... really big deadline. I mean, are we talking Eastern or Pacific time? Do bottle rockets shot off by annoying neighbors count? I feel like we need to get the guys from "Gremlins 2" in here to sort this out.

*Cut to a clip from "Gremlins 2: The New Batch".*

**Technician:** What if they're eating in an airplane, and they cross a time zone? I mean, it's always midnight somewhere.

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Anyway, Santa is perplexed by the 'icy fairy godfather', but agrees to let Rudolph have some vacation time, and thanks to Winterbolt's snow mind manipulation thingy, proposes swinging by on Independence Day to pick everyone up himself. So, Rudolph, Frosty, and the fam set off in Milton's balloon to the circus, which is being set up by outdated stereotypes, and is overseen by Laine's mother, Lily.

**Lily Loraine (Ethel Merman):** If there's one thing life's taught me, you can't live on banana splits!

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* And thank Lucifer, she is voiced by none other than Ethel Merman: music theatre legend, one of the great voices of the 20th century, and this movie's Saving Grace!

* **Saving Grace: Ethel Merman**

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* She gets several opportunities to do what she does best, but my favorite is "Chicken Today and Feathers Tomorrow", a song about rolling with life's punches that showcases her style and personality to best effect.

**Lily Loraine:** \*singing\* Chicken today and feathers tomorrow

Life is that way, there's some joy and some sorrow

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Winterbolt's next order of business is to find a reindeer who is the anti-Rudolph.

**Genie of the Ice Scepter:** But why, o master?

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* A question the writers of this movie didn't ask near enough. Nevertheless, the Genie directs Winterbolt to the Caves of Lost Rejections, just past the Forest of Burned Christmas Trees and the Hill of Broken Baubles. I'm not joking, those are the honest-to-opposition directions. Here, Winterbolt finds a sniveling reindeer reject named Scratcher.

**Scratcher (Alan Sues):** Rudolph? *Don't mention that name.* I was all set to be one of Santa's reindeer when *he* came along.

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* And here we also find Sin number four, which is that this movie has *way* too many villains.

* **Sin 4: Too Many Villains**

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* It's like Rankin and Bass knew this was going to be their last Rudolph movie, and just threw in all their remaining ideas. Winterbolt is effective enough, but Scratcher is just your run-of-the-mill sneaky creep, and Sam Spangles - remember him? - barely figures in the plot at all. Winterbolt sends Scratcher out to lure Rudolph over to the dark side, and then sets about delaying the Clauses' trip south, using his ice dragons to summon up a storm that the Rudolph-less couple will be unable to navigate.

**Mrs. Claus (Darlene Conley):** Papa! Look!

*A funnel-shaped storm cloud is shown as an audio clip from "The Wizard of Oz" plays in the background.*

**Zeke:** It's a twister! It's a twister!

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* This dramatic turn of events hits a screeching halt when Santa decides to indulge in Sin number five: "I See Rainbows".

* **Sin 5: "I See Rainbows"**

**Santa Claus (Mickey Rooney):** \*singing\* All things wonderful are what you are

You shine brighter than the brightest star

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* This movie is already crowded enough without throwing a Santa Claus love song into the mix, and it's not improving my opinion of dopey 70s ballads. Also, the Clauses' habits of calling each other 'Mama' and 'Papa' is an affectation that hits *very* differently post-Mike Pence.

*Cut to a photo of Mike Pence and his wife, Karen.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* The Clauses decide to continue on the ground, even though it would be faster *and* easier to just fly over the storm, which is what Winterbolt is doing in his own sleigh pulled by flying rein-snakes. \*beat\* Yes, rein-snakes. Don't look at me like that. Meanwhile, Scratcher has hooked up with Sam Spangles and put their part of the evil scheme into motion, which involves Scratcher hitting Rudolph up for a job with the circus, then claiming he's been tasked to grab something from Lily's wagon and needs Rudolph's bioluminescence to help.

**Rudolph (Billie Mae Richards):** Hey, this bag is filled with money! The night's receipts!

**Scratcher:** Oh, *that's* why she wants to give it to the cop!

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Maybe Boreal should have granted some common sense in addition to that shiny nose. At Scratcher's direction, Rudolph hands the money to Sam Spangles in the guise of a police officer. Oblivious to all these shady doings, the circus continues.

*A brief clip of Laine Loraine (voiced by Shelby Flint) performing "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" is shown.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* The best thing that I can say for this is that it's not "Wonderful Christmastime". Rudolph finally gets it through his tiny antlers that something's not right, what with Scratcher acting suspicious and Santa behind schedule. Frosty's a bit worried himself, and suggests stopping the fireworks as a means of loopholing their way out of the situation.

**Millie (Steffi Cali):** Why do you want to stop them, daddy? Aren't you patriotic?

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Seriously, kid, you think Frosty's an American citizen? He's lucky that traffic cop didn't turn him into ICE.

*Cut to a photo of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Unfortunately, Lily has already started the fireworks. And once the initial fuse has been lit, they can't be stopped... which seems like a bit of a safety hazard, but hey, we have to introduce tension somewhere. So, while the Frostys watch stock firework footage with the kids having no idea their time as solid matter is numbered, Lily discovers the theft of the receipts, and Rudolph realizes he's been had, at which point Winterbolt shows up to get his gloat on.

**Frosty (Jackie Vernon):** Go ahead, Rudolph!

**Rudolph:** \*struggling to light his nose\* I'm... trying! I'm trying... real hard!

**Diva:** What the...? Donna, get down here!

*Donna appears once more in a flash of light.*

**Donna:** Oh, *now* you want my input!

**Diva:** Look, it's a morality thing, and I want someone from the other side to back me up on this. Do Rudolph's actions here *really* constitute as using his powers for evil?

**Donna:** Well, while the common wisdom does hold that the road of good intentions leads in *your* direction, there *are* arguments to be made in his favor. Valjean's defense, for example, could be considered applicable in this case. But... I'm inclined to think that 'Hanlon's razor' is most appropriate.

**Diva:** You can't attribute to malice what can be explained by sheer stupidity?

**Donna:** That's the one~!

**Diva:** Yeah, that's what I thought.

* **Sin 6: Not Evil, Just Dumb**

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Winterbolt forces Rudolph to take the fall for the robbery in return for keeping the Frosty clan unmelted. and Rudolph agrees... which only further proves his selflessness, but never mind. As a result, Spangles gets ready to take over the circus and Rudolph is shunned by everybody except Frosty, who is the only one who knows the truth, and Milton, who is just a generic nice guy like that. So, we get Rudolph singing a sad, low point song.

**Rudolph:** \*singing\* No bed of roses,

no easy way for me

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* But Winterbolt decides he's not done eviling yet and makes a play for Frosty's magic hat, planning to use it to create his own snow army. Given how dumb the average snowperson seems to be, I can't imagine that would be an elite fighting force. He lies to Frosty, telling him he can restore Rudolph's nose if Frosty will give him the hat and trade. Meanwhile, Rudolph meets Big Ben, the clockwork whale... he was in the New Year's special, I guess? If the cameos get any more convoluted, we'll be in Marvel territory.

*Cut to an image of all the current Marvel movie posters.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Big Ben gets caught up to speed and heads down to South America for a solution, and Rudolph finds Winterbolt gloating over an inanimate Frosty and leaps into action.

*Rudolph charges into Winterbolt, causing him to stumble and lose his grip on Frosty's hat. Rudolph catches the hat on his head in mid-air and regains his nose glow.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Rudolph not only nabs the magic hat, but also the circus money and a traditional Irish cop to put Sam Spangles under arrest. Apologies are made, happy singing all around, then- oh yeah, evil ice sorcerer.

*Lily throws her revolvers at Winterbolt's scepter, shattering it.*

**Winterbolt:** No... NOOOOOOOO! My... my powers are *gone!*

*His scepter melts into the ground as he starts transforming into a tree.*

**Winterbolt:** When the scepter dies, I go, too! I turn... I turn... turn! I... turn... into... a... tree...

* **Sin 7: ...Okay then.**

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* ...Wow, way to make your villain death both creepy and disappointing. With Winterbolt's power gone, Santa and the wife are now free to move at the speed of plot. Unfortunately, the magic amulets don't work anymore with predictable results. Not to worry, as Big Ben is back carrying Jack Frost, who had been chilling literally and figuratively in the southern hemisphere, and whose cold magic can restore the Frostys.

*Santa's sleigh finally arrives at the circus lot.*

**Lily Loraine:** Great jumpin' geraniums! Santa Claus is finally comin' to town!

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Oh hey, Santa. You're just in time to be absolutely useless for everything but an Uber North. Rudolph decides to stay with the circus until they're completely out of debt, and Santa helps out by contributing enough flying reindeer feed to get the entire operation airborne. So, why they need Rudolph anymore is anybody's guess. But hey, we get Ethel Merman singing his theme song, so it's not all bad.

**Lily Loraine:** \*singing\* Then how the reindeer loved him,

as they shouted out with glee

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,

you'll go down in history!

## The Verdict

**Diva:** "Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July" is... ambitious, I'll give it that. Rankin/Bass pulled out all the stops for this one, throwing together all their beloved characters and decent antagonists for one big hurrah. But some of the stops should have stayed pushed in. There's too many characters to do everyone justice, too many narrative ideas to flow smoothly, and the whole thing runs about a half-hour longer than it needs to. It's an exercise in excess, so the court of Musical Hell condemns those responsible to be eternally caught in a Black Friday shopping mob.

*Cut to a photo of a crowd of Black Friday shoppers.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* So, let it be recorded. This session of the Infernal Court in Musical Hell is now adjourned.