Saturday, November 29, 2003
The Iron Giant-athon
Right now I estimate that Cartoon Network will soon be done with its marathon of the recent animated film The Iron Giant, and I've kept the TV on almost the entire time. It certainly beats the marathon of exceedingly weird-ass holiday special Thanksgiving cartoons they showed before it, which at best are rather hokey and goofy, and at beast, hideously revisionist. These holiday cartoons date back to a time when the success of Christmas specials such as A Charlie Brown Christmas made the networks try to cash in on every other day of the year with boldface lettering underneath it (there is a Peanuts special for Arbor Day, for crying profusely into a white washing machine), which over the years have given us some of the weirdest cartoons still available for viewing, usually during one of these Cartoon Network holiday orgies.
But a few years ago, on co-owned cable network brother TNT, desperately seeking its own identity in a world filled with cable networks with themes almost as ostentatious as those of a second-string superhero, they decided to hell with ratings for that one day out of the year, there was nothing they really could do to attract viewers during that uncoveted Christmas morning timeslot, so they instead aired the then-lesser-known holiday film transcription of Jean Shepherds' slice-of-life recollections of growing up in middle-class America circa-fifties, A Christmas Story, twelve times in a 24 hour period.
I mean, they showed the same movie twelve times in a row for the sake of bouncing Christ! And they did the next year, and the year after, and so on, even unto... dramatic pause... the present day.
And it's great! You're now more certain of being able to catch A Christmas Story at least once this holiday season, regardless of whatever crackers schedule da Boss has you on, than you were of catching It's A Wonderful Life back when it was hot-public-domain-stuff, and in my opinion it's even a more deserving movie. It's not sappy, it's brutally hilarious, doesn't feature so much a happy or sad ending (the glasses and turkey episodes) as just sort of reaches the right-most edge of that small window into little Ralph's childhood, and best of all, it rings true. It was A Christmas Story that got me interested in Jean Shepherd, and if you love the movie as much as I do, you absolutely must seek out In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. You might also be interested in knowing that there are at least three sequels to A Christmas Story, apparently made for premium cable. I caught Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss on PBS one day, and a couple of the others at very odd times (one in Comedy Central's afternoon movie slot). They don't have the same actors but they're still at least seventy-percent wonderful, and the narrator's the same in any case.
But I digress. It seems like Cartoon Network may be aiming to try a similar rehabilitation of a woefully underrated film with this marathon of The Iron Giant. I say more power to them, provisionally. I love the idea because it's another of my favorite movies, that didn't stick in the cultural mindspace like a dozen less deserving (and, let's be honest, a good number of equally deserving) Disney animated movies did. If they make this a yearly thing they can count me as a committed viewer. The provision, however, is that you really have to be sure of the movie's worth to pull this thing off. I can picture other networks trying it, it becoming just another way for a media conglomerate to try to boost back-market DVD sales, and let's face it, these folks are not always the best judge of cinematic quality. If they were we wouldn't have gotten that damn Cat in the Hat dungbox.
Right now I estimate that Cartoon Network will soon be done with its marathon of the recent animated film The Iron Giant, and I've kept the TV on almost the entire time. It certainly beats the marathon of exceedingly weird-ass holiday special Thanksgiving cartoons they showed before it, which at best are rather hokey and goofy, and at beast, hideously revisionist. These holiday cartoons date back to a time when the success of Christmas specials such as A Charlie Brown Christmas made the networks try to cash in on every other day of the year with boldface lettering underneath it (there is a Peanuts special for Arbor Day, for crying profusely into a white washing machine), which over the years have given us some of the weirdest cartoons still available for viewing, usually during one of these Cartoon Network holiday orgies.
But a few years ago, on co-owned cable network brother TNT, desperately seeking its own identity in a world filled with cable networks with themes almost as ostentatious as those of a second-string superhero, they decided to hell with ratings for that one day out of the year, there was nothing they really could do to attract viewers during that uncoveted Christmas morning timeslot, so they instead aired the then-lesser-known holiday film transcription of Jean Shepherds' slice-of-life recollections of growing up in middle-class America circa-fifties, A Christmas Story, twelve times in a 24 hour period.
I mean, they showed the same movie twelve times in a row for the sake of bouncing Christ! And they did the next year, and the year after, and so on, even unto... dramatic pause... the present day.
And it's great! You're now more certain of being able to catch A Christmas Story at least once this holiday season, regardless of whatever crackers schedule da Boss has you on, than you were of catching It's A Wonderful Life back when it was hot-public-domain-stuff, and in my opinion it's even a more deserving movie. It's not sappy, it's brutally hilarious, doesn't feature so much a happy or sad ending (the glasses and turkey episodes) as just sort of reaches the right-most edge of that small window into little Ralph's childhood, and best of all, it rings true. It was A Christmas Story that got me interested in Jean Shepherd, and if you love the movie as much as I do, you absolutely must seek out In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash. You might also be interested in knowing that there are at least three sequels to A Christmas Story, apparently made for premium cable. I caught Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss on PBS one day, and a couple of the others at very odd times (one in Comedy Central's afternoon movie slot). They don't have the same actors but they're still at least seventy-percent wonderful, and the narrator's the same in any case.
But I digress. It seems like Cartoon Network may be aiming to try a similar rehabilitation of a woefully underrated film with this marathon of The Iron Giant. I say more power to them, provisionally. I love the idea because it's another of my favorite movies, that didn't stick in the cultural mindspace like a dozen less deserving (and, let's be honest, a good number of equally deserving) Disney animated movies did. If they make this a yearly thing they can count me as a committed viewer. The provision, however, is that you really have to be sure of the movie's worth to pull this thing off. I can picture other networks trying it, it becoming just another way for a media conglomerate to try to boost back-market DVD sales, and let's face it, these folks are not always the best judge of cinematic quality. If they were we wouldn't have gotten that damn Cat in the Hat dungbox.
