CHRISTMAS PARTY: A Wish For Wings That Work
Here's a blast from the past -- a rarely-seen Christmas special from 1991 has finally made it to DVD. Is it worth adding to your collection?
Opus and Bill in A Wish For Wings That Work (1991)
Opus, Berkely Breathed's latest comic strip featuring his classic characters from Bloom County, faces the same problems as many long-running strips. It's just not that sharp anymore, not that clever. In many ways, it's become a parody of itself. In fact, it had already done that in several ways back in 1991, several years after Bloom County gave way to Outland, which was the home of Opus the Penguin and Bill the Cat at the time that A Wish For Wings That Work made its appearance.
Based on Breathed's children's book of the same name, A Wish For Wings That Work features Opus on a quest to achieve the flight his penguin wings don't afford him. After several Wile E. Coyote-esque attempts that all invariably end in failure, Opus retires for the evening, only to wake up to find Santa Claus in a disaster-in-the-making that only the unique efforts of a penguin can avert.
Breathed himself reportedly hates this special, which is a shame, as it's actually pretty good. Some of the jokes are a bit too adult for the children that the book was aimed at (gags about a support group would go right over their heads, while jokes about a cross-dressing cockroach no doubt had parents squirming on the couch), but the ending is really well-done and very sweet. The animation, as well, is particularly good. This special comes from an age when animation was weak and television animation was terrible -- the Renaissance of Warner Brothers animation from shows like Animaniacs and Batman: The Animated Series hadn't happened yet, and the limited animation of the 80s was still ubiquitous. But the animation in this special is great -- easily as good as anything on television at the time, and in many scenes as good as anything that was put out by Don Bluth's studio in the 80s.
Whether Breathed likes it or not, whether the strip is currently any good or not, I know a lot of people with fond memories of this old special, and they're no doubt as happy as I am that they can finally keep it on DVD with this new release.