by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie we went to was a
Rifftrax presentation of a thoroughly terrible movie called Santa and the
Ice Cream Bunny, made in 1972 as a
promotion for a pathetically inept theme park in Dania, Florida called Pirate’s
World that attempted to duplicate the success of Walt Disney World and —
predictably, if the rest of the place was as dull as what we see in this movie
— went out of business in 1975. Rifftrax is a project of the final cast of Mystery
Science Theatre 3000 — Mike Nelson, Kevin “Tom
Servo” Murphy and Bill “Crow” Corbett — and though Murphy and Corbett no longer
play their robot personae the concept is still basically the same: the three make jokes while a
thoroughly rotten movie is playing. And not just dumb jokes, either; one of their
lines last night referenced John Cage and their dialogue is a marvelous mash-up
of high, low and middlebrow culture along with general snideness. It occurred
to me that Charles and I were having a date night that was nostalgic for the
early days of our relationship — we’d eaten at a restaurant we’d frequented
when we were just starting out as a couple and now we were enjoying a new
project from the crew of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, which had been in the latter stages of its
original run when we first got together. To fill out Santa and the Ice Cream
Bunny the Rifftrax crew dug up
three Christmas-themed shorts and riffed on them. One was Santa Claus Story (1945), a weird farrago of The Night Before
Christmas, the “Yes, Virginia, there
is a Santa Claus” article and documentary footage of monkeys fighting over a
pretzel (I’m not making this up, you know!). The actor playing Santa was a
repulsive presence with a beard whose webbing was all too visible, but at least
he was better than the Santas we saw in the other movies, and it probably
helped that Santa Claus Story was in black-and-white so we didn’t have to see his bright red costume
in Runnycolor. Then they showed Custard the Dragon, a 1965 short so obscure imdb.com doesn’t even
have a page for it; it’s based on a 1936 poem by Ogden Nash that might have
been a perfectly nice piece of whimsy on the page (the Rifftrax crew
invidiously compared Nash to Dr. Seuss but I’ve always liked him — I was
especially fond of a poem he wrote comparing a romance to various fruits and
vegetables even though the only line from it I remember is, “If we cantaloupe,
lettuce marry”) but looked absolutely absurd with children in ill-fitting and really tacky trick-or-treat costumes enacting it on
screen.
The plot, if you cared, is about Custard the Dragon coming out of his
“cage” (actually a crib set up to look like an isolation cell at Abu Ghraib) to
vanquish a pirate, then going back in his cage again. After that the Rifftraxers inflicted on us a short that, like
their feature, was aimed at promoting a really cheesy theme park (these places
compared to Disneyland about as well as Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny compares to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) called Santa’s Enchanted Village, in which one of the actors seems to have accordions
in his shoes (at least that’s what we hear on the soundtrack “music,” if — as
Dwight Macdonald said about talentless actresses — I may use the term for
courtesy) called Santa’s Village, which was apparently constructed on identical
plans in both California and Illinois. The hope that the abysmal quality of
these films might make Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny look good — or even mediocre — by comparison was
quickly dashed. It seems that this wasn’t the first attempt of the Pirate’s
World management to dabble in filmmaking; in 1970 they’d filmed short versions
of three classic fairy tales, Thumbelina, Jack and the Beanstalk and an Oz story (how they got away with the last
remains a mystery, since the rights to the first Wizard of Oz were still owned by what was left of MGM and the
rest of the Oz books had been sewn up by Disney), and in the original version
of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny they spliced in their version of Thumbelina in the middle as a moral tale Santa narrated to
the kids who are trying to get his sled unstuck from the Florida beach where
he’s been stranded. That’s the plot of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny: Santa got stuck on a Florida beach when his
reindeer decided it was too hot for them down there and bolted back to the
North Pole, and various local kids (introduced in footage so grainy and ineptly
staged it looks like they borrowed their parents’ home movies and spliced them
in) bring in various animals (including a pig, a cow, a dray horse and an
unusually fat sheep) to try to pull Santa’s sleigh out.
The plot, such as it
is, stops in the middle so Santa can narrate a fairy tale from one of the
Pirate’s World people’s previous productions — originally it was Thumbelina but in the version the Rifftraxers were riffing
on, it was Jack and the Beanstalk, which was considerably better than the feature it was included in. While no great shakes as a movie or a fairy-tale adaptation (just as the gap in
quality between films set in the California mission country is between Vertigo at the top and Incubus at the bottom, the gap between musical adaptations
of Jack and the Beanstalk puts Stephen Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s Into the Woods at the top and this one at the bottom), it’s at
least more watchable than the framing film: Mitchell Poulos as an adolescent
Jack is at least cute and fun to look at (he can’t act for shit, but what do
you expect?), and Christopher Brooks
as “Honest John,” a parody of a used-car salesman who sells Jack the magic
beans for his cow, actually has some acting talent even though he’s obviously
channeling Gene Wilder. (Well, there are worse models.) Also the photography is
considerably clearer, crisper and brighter than that of Santa and the Ice
Cream Bunny, whose plot resolves
itself (in a manner of speaking) when the second title character (an actor in a
preposterously ill-fitting and tacky rabbit suit) arrives in a slow-moving red
fire engine that looks like it began life as a Model “T” Ford and gives Santa a
ride — whereupon the sleigh magically teleports itself back to the North Pole
(as one imdb.com contributor pointed out, if the sleigh could do that why didn’t Santa just use it to teleport back home
at the start? Because then we wouldn’t have a movie, which would have been just
fine by me except it wouldn’t have given the Rifftrax people something to riff
off of). The news of a possible MST3K reunion (with the original host, Joel Hodgson, instead of Mike Nelson)
seems rather appalling in its way — one fears it would be like all those
wretched “comeback tours” of old rock bands like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac —
but the Rifftraxers are still good at providing their odd sort of entertainment
and they made Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny far more watchable than it would have been au
naturel.
