25 Days of Christmas: Day One

The Night They Saved Christmas (1984)

"If you continue, there's a very good chance you're going to blow up Santa Claus!" -- Ed









Like I said in the last post... I watched this on YouTube. It's a movie from my childhood and it was good to revisit it after all these years. Heck... decades. Plus it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be.

The whole story is that there is a man, Michael Baldwin, drilling for oil in the North Pole and all the blasting he's doing is wrecking house over at North Pole City where Santa lives. So Santa sends his chief elf, Ed, to see about getting them to stop blasting. As you might guess, this doesn't go over as smooth as planned.
When Ed comes back to offer Michael a visit to North Pole City and a chance to talk to Santa about the matter the disbelieving Michael pushes the elf onto his unsuspecting wife and children and rushes out to a meeting with his boss. The elf takes the family to North Pole City and soon they realize that it isn't a practical joke and that Santa is real and the danger to the city is growing.
The race to stop the blasting continues and the family must find a way to convince Michael that there really is a Santa Claus before Christmas is doomed forever.

It's a pretty simple story and the effects are low budget but it was made for tv so I didn't expect much in the area of visuals. The Santa in this story relies more on technology than the magic you would normally see as some of the things he uses to get all those toys to the kids include transporters, orbiting toy holding satellites, and even a machine that slows time. Some of the things were pretty cool and a nice change from the usual magic stuff I feel I'm going to be seeing a lot of as I get through all these movies.

The acting was really good on the part of Art Carney as Santa but the rest of the cast were really hamming it up for the camera. There are two times during the movie when Jaclyn Smith, as the mother Claudia, and the kids go missing and are presumed either kidnapped or dead and the father gets a little bummed out and heads to work. He doesn't seem to broken up that his wife and kids could be gone forever but by golly... he is going to be upset if he doesn't find that oil.

The music is way cheesy and like most movie productions in the 80's it's heavy on the sax. It ends with a song that's supposed to be good I think but it's pretty bad. I'm not sure if it's bad in a good way or not.

We also get to see a toy of the future near the end that's given to one of the boys as a present from Santa and let me tell you... if this movie wasn't dated before this will make it show it's age. It's a small rolling robot that has the ability to store over a hundred riddles on it's hard drive. OVER A HUNDRED! Man... it's almost magic!

The kids are pretty bad but you don't mind them. The rest of the cast pulls it off enough so that there is little to no cringing. In the end it's a fine little family flick for it's time. I had fun watching it.

The first flick of the 25 Days came out a success. I don't know how many sappy Christmas movies I'm going to get through before I crack...