Welcome back to the Countdown! December 5th already...only 19 shopping days left, for those of you keeping track. I don't buy many gifts these days, so I usually wait until I get home and spend a day out with the family buying this and that. I'm looking forward to the annual trip to the Best Buy shopping center and lunch at Sonny's Barbecue. I get a kick out of seeing people out shopping for Christmas...not so much the kids screaming in the stores, though. It's easier to do all your shopping online these days, but you've just gotta go to a mall, at least once during the season, to see the giant ornaments and sneak a peek at a Mall Santa. You've gotta!
Anyway, today I wanna talk a little bit about my second favorite holiday TV special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. A CBS tradition, it runs about 75 times before Christmas these days and it's filled with approximately a million commercials, give or take a million. Remember when special TV presentations used to start like this?
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That's what I miss! I don't want Charlie Sheen to tell me to stick around after Rudolph for a hilarious new 'Two and Half Men.' I remember sitting in front of the TV after Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy finished up, eating popcorn out of a colored, plastic cereal bowl and waiting for those words to spin onto the screen. After that, it was all Rudolph!
I'm not gonna bother with a plot synopsis. If you're not familiar with the animated special, just listen to the song, of the same name, and it'll pretty much bring you up to speed. I was always a much bigger fan of the tertiary characters than of Rudolph himself. Everybody knows what he ends up doing with his noisy, shiny nose. But kudos to Rankin Bass for creating characters to fill out a whole hour of animated fun. Up top we've got Clarice, Rudolph's main squeeze. Hermie, the world's first dentist elf, and the leading champion of rights for gay elves in the workplace. Good ol' Yukon Cornelius rounds out the pack, whose survival supplies consist solely of gunpowder, ham hocks and guitar strings.
Down below we see all the reindeer, gearing up for the big haul on Christmas Eve. Scary old Bumble used to drive me out of the room with fear...that thing is a killer! I seen it! And there's our boy himself, shiny-nosed Rudolph. I watched it in broadcast high-definition this year on my new TV and, I gotta tell ya, it looked great. It would have looked better if it weren't interrupted by low-def commercials every 40 seconds, but you do what you gotta do, CBS. It's not like we could stop you if we tried...unless, of course, we had a Christmas Miracle! But probably not. I guess what I'm gettin' at is that even though there are a million commercials and Charlie Sheen has to endorse it, you should still watch Rudolph! In high-def, if you can! It's a Christmas classic that's really stood the test of time and I love it just as much as I ever did.
Today's commercial will ring true in all of our adult hearts, as the holidays tend to evolve from visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads to dreams of booze bottles rolling towards our feet. ROLL IT!
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Coors! To! You! Cheers to the fine folks at Coors for coming up with their own holiday jingle, rather than ripping off an existing Christmas carol. I love the 12-pack driving around the party, but I kind of hate that horn. I would've given it a sleigh bell, but hey, that's just me. I think they got The Incredible Hulk in there to rip open the package, and look at how quickly those hands dip in for the beers! Yoink, yoink, yoink! And then they poured the cans into glass mugs? Now that's a classy holiday get-together! I can't figure out why the 12-pack is competing for the guy's attention versus his girlfriend, though. Any ideas? What's your favorite alcoholic holiday beverage? Let's hear it! Happy Wednesday, everybody!
Paul