A Holiday Wish
As I was sitting around on this snowy Sunday working on presentations, articles, and even a bit of work-related issues I was watching The Santa Clause for the 95th time with my kids and it hit me that there is a goldmine sitting out there for Hollywood: live action re-makes of those classic Rankin and Bass holiday specials. You know, those ones we people of a certain age grew up watching. They bring back memories of having waiting for the one time they would air on television. We would get permission to stay up until 9:00pm on those nights if they fell on a school night; we would get mom to pop corn or get a big bowl of ice cream and settle in to watch Rudolph and that monstrosity of a proboscis or watch Mrs. Claus goad the Baldwin Brothers Heat Miser and Snow Miser into playing friendly. Heck, we would even sit through The Little Drummer Boy or Rudolph’s Shiny New Year because it was an EVENT for us – even if it did pre-empt Happy Days!.
Now we’re all grow’d up with kids (and in some cases grandchildren) of our own and we see these specials now on demand. The magic is not necessasarily gone per-se, but it is a little more dim now that you can watch these shows whenever you want and TNT plays How the Grinch Stole Christmas every 30 minutes. These thoughts led me to think that my favorite of these shows – The Year Without a Santa Claus – would be ripe for a live action remake. It has everything: espionage, explosions, suspense, show tunes!
I started puting a little more thought into the idea and came up with the casting below.
Nathan Lane as Heat Miser
Gary Oldman as Snow Miser
Craig Ferguson as Santa Claus
Maria Bamford as Mrs. Claus
Michael Cera (tie) Patton Oswalt as Jingle Bells
Jack Black as Jangle Bells
Helen Mirren as Mother Nature
Seth Green as Ignatius Thistlewhite
Alec Baldwin (tie) Tracey Morgan as Mayor of South Town
(By the way, it pains me to see that this was attempted back in 2006. I found it out on imdb when researching this post and can only imagine the amount of fail juice this thing was soaked in.)
In this light week at work leading up to Christmas I’m curious to know who you would cast in your favorite Holiday Special of years’ past.