You know, I’m not feeling my usual sympathy for Eon the Vulture’s plan to save his own life by keeping the current year from expiring.
I was trying to think what 2020’s representative in the Archipelago of Last Years would look like, and then I remembered Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
So in the Rankin/Bass special, the crisis was caused by Baby New Year having comically enormous ears. What the heck did Baby 2020 look like? I have to figure 2020 started at “Rudy Giuliani” and aged badly.
So we were watching the Rankin/Bass special Jack Frost, the Christmas special about how the Groundhog got his magic shadow and … uh … yeah, the Rankin/Bass holiday canon drifted in some weird ways. But the thing is at one point they’re talking with Father Winter and that made us think: Father Winter? Surely they mean Old Man Winter? But then I could see an explanation. Maybe they’re separate people. Maybe they’re related. I can see it now. “Old Man Winter? Oh, no, Old Man Winter is my father. Call me Father Winter.” And much merriment ensues as meetings and parcels intended for Old Man Winter go to Father Winter or vice-versa and the two have to deal with the people who are going to the wrong one and Father Winter’s trying to be all folksy and casual and Old Man Winter’s really not any more stiff, he’s just from a generation where you only use casual names with friends and all that. Anyway, I leave this premise free to a needy improv troupe.
What if Santa isn’t always cancelling Christmas because he’s kind of a jerk and instead he’s just wracked with the sort of Imposter Syndrome that my whole generation is dealing with all the time? Like, “This mouse wrote something mean in an upstate New York newspaper in September! A competent Santa doesn’t have to deal with issues like that! … And it’s snowing too? Oh I can’t even.”
Which I’ll grant is not all that deep an observation, but the alternative is to fret about the ways the rules of that snowfall magic seem to get tossed willy-nilly about in Frosty’s Winter Wonderland. I mean there’s something about just tossing in a snow-parson into things that seems dangerous. So let me conclude with this observation from Wikipedia’s page on Frost’s Winter Wonderland:
The engine on the train is a 2–4–2 or an American type steam locomotive. Locomotives of this wheel arrangement were used most common during the 1800s on American railroads, and from the 1830s until 1928, were given the name “American” in 1872, because of how they did all the work of every railroad in the United States. These types of engines have eight wheels (two leading wheels, four driving wheels, and two trailing wheels).
This means something. (It means I’m very tired.)
I should take a moment to look at my actual statistics for December 2013. The raw numbers are a little disheartening: the total number of views dropped from 357 to 301, and the number of unique visitors dropped from 188 to 168. Even the number of views per visitor dropped, from 1.90 to 1.79. This is even though I feel like I’m doing a better job at the writing, that is, producing bits that are more clearly my own voice and more amusing to me. I need to work on the problem of finding people who’re likely to enjoy the kinds of things I write. If you know where to find some, please, let me know.
The most popular articles for … well, I can’t figure how to get the numbers for exactly December 2013, but for the 30 days ending today, were:
The top countries for that same 30-day period in terms of sending me readers were, as usual, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Canada. Sending me a single reader each were: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, and Turkey. Repeat single-visitor countries from last time are Austria, Spain, and Turkey, so at least I’m steadily marginally popular.
Like most people do this time of year we’ve been watching Rankin/Bass stop-motion animated specials and trying to figure out more of how the whole Rankin/Bass Christmasverse works together. But we were on The Year Without A Santa Claus yesterday and noticed that a lot of Mickey Rooney’s dialogue as Santa is various grunts and groans and aching and paining about, which fits the whole plot about calling Christmas off because he’s too grumpy this year.
Thing is that’s got us wondering about the voice recording sessions. Did Mickey Rooney just do his dialogue for every scene in order, including his grunts about his aching ball joins and whatnot, as they came, or did they crowd all those into a single afternoon of recording Mickey Rooney go “Oooh. Owww. Ugh. Argh”? And, did he get all the groans down in one take, or did the director have to say stuff like, “OK, Mickey, that was great but could you do that round of grunting again, this time with maybe a hint of the agony from suspecting that somewhere there might be a mouse writing bad stuff about you in the local newspaper? How many feet of recording tape are nothing but out-takes of Santa groans? And who has possession of that Santa groan out-take tape today? What are they keeping it for? What do they intend to do with it?
To borrow a phrase, these are all questions I feel I cannot answer.
