The Return of Conditional Santa
by Thomas Reed
Note: As before, this idea originated with the comic writer
Goodman Ace in the pages of Saturday Review. Always steal from the
best.
My sleigh travels over the night sky, pushing aside the cumulus clouds. The chill air is cut through with the aroma of Mrs. Esther Reed's Sour Cream Sugar Cookies baking in someone's oven. (And if you're good, you might get that recipe to cheer your nights.) At seven o'clock low, a family is playing with a dreidel. Holiday hymns of all faiths echo through the dark. In his hidden crypt in Silicon Valley, Bill Gates is sacrificing a lost young woman to Satan to assure his continued power and wealth. That's right, it's holiday time.
But I am Conditional Santa, and my mission excludes me from enjoying such joys. Rather, I bring joy...maybe. My gifts are designated for the big people in animation, and they are only good gifts if the recipients behave well. If they don't, they turn to coal, or something even worse. (Coal isn't a bad gift for Superman, for instance; he can squeeze it to make diamonds, or he used to be able to, anyway.)
I check the satellite-based Internet link to the computer in my sleigh (of course, it's a Mac). Yep, there it is...the web site of Spumco, the animation company of John Kricfalusi. He and his firm have had a long dry spell. As you know, Kricfalusi was the creator of Ren and Stimpy. He was a young, daring turk, and his creation was daring as well. Under the excuse of teaching kids not to be ashamed of bodily functions, an excuse swallowed whole by the educational consultants to Nickelodeon, Ren and Stimpy included references to nudity, excreta, constipation and other previously forbidden things.Kricfalusi also had a taste for the baroque, and he included music from 50's sitcoms and goofy jazz on the soundtrack.
The show depicted the world of adults and authority as something weird and incomprehensible, which to children, it is. Cultists also see the world that way, and loved John K. for it. Nickelodeon gained an audience of teens and adults it never expected to have, and became a respected and profitable cable channel. John Kricfalusi became the new young turk of animation.
But with great fame came great ego, and great problems. Fans of the show never knew whether - or if - a new episode would be aired. Kricfalusi's inability to produce episodes on time was the official reason he was fired, and his show taken over by Nickelodeon's production agency. But more reasons were apparent to anyone who watched the shows. Kricfalusi began baiting the censors with outrageous material, such as the name of his middle-class cretin, George Liquor - American. (Whether the name indicated alcohol abuse or oral sex, no one knows.) He deliberately raised a finger to his bosses by submitting material that no sane person would show to children. The people at Nick only had so much tolerance for such behavior from someone who couldn't perform.
When Kricfalusi left, Ren and Stimpy lost its edge and its cult following. But the cult didn't follow him to his other ventures. The only venue for Spumco became its web site. Attempts to sell dolls of George Liquor and Jimmy the Idiot Boy didn't set the world on fire. Just as Spumco introduced its comic book line, the comic industry went through its 1996 crash.
Recently, Spumco has found new life. The overpriced Old Navy clothing chain sold a lot of its expensive designer jeans with some Spumco-animated spots, and the commercials won awards. Cartoon Network contracted with Spumco to produce some new shorts with Yogi Bear and Ranger Smith. People can learn from disasters and tragedy - sometimes, it's the only way we can learn - and it may be that John Kricfalusi has learned.
Kricfalusi's gift is a high-profile project, a limited series or a movie, good enough to be considered a comeback by the show business community...IF he proves he can keep his ego under control, obey deadlines and not act like a middle-aged rebellious teen. If not...his present turns into another five years of invisible, unheralded work in the World Wide Wilderness.
My sleigh makes a wide bank over Hyperion Avenue in Los Angeles, over the old studio of Walt Disney. The old guy might be shocked to see some of Disney's current work - its support for gay and lesbian employees, its non-G rated stuff - but he would be pleased that his company is successful in its work. Or maybe he is pleased. According to Jim Phillips of Real Radio 104.1 in Orlando, Disney's living head is located in the secret chamber beneath Cinderella's Palace at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom. It's floating in a backlit glass container of liquid nitrogen, next to the head of Elvis Presley. Phillips believes that Disney's head sends telepathic commands to Michael Eisner. If you want proof, read Eisner's biography yourself and decide if he's smart enough to run a major corporation.
Disney animation has had a remarkably good year. This may sound strange, given their underperforming quarterly earnings, but I'm comparing it to the years Disney did no animation at all. Hercules was a good film which spawned a good TV series, and Mulan showed creative spirit that surprised even the cynics. More important, Disney's One Saturday Morning and its best show, Pepper Ann, revitalized Saturday cartoons. Smaller projects like the direct-to-video Beauty and the Beast: A Magical Christmas were original.
Now Disney is attempting something risky. Mickey Mouse is known to most as a Disney corporate symbol, only given two real appearances in the last twenty years; the short Runaway Brain and Mickey's Christmas Carol. Now, this fall, the series Mouseworks intends to animate Mickey as a weekday strip (airing Monday through Friday, to you non-Santas out there).
There's peril in Disney concretizing the symbol that represents all its corporate assets. The Mickey of Mouseworks will do physical comedy, something that Disney television animation has never carried out with any confidence. The really good Disney projects like Mulan were conducted by lesser people in the Disney hierarchy, who didn't have the bosses breathing down their necks.(Just as Dumbo, one of Disney's best classics, was animated while Walt was on a world tour.)
So, I drop a gift of Respectable Ratings (with new, improved Merchandising Income) down Eisner's chimney -if he allows Mouseworks intelligent contributions from his junior staff, and if he lets them work without that cold Eisnerian breath shooting down their shirt collars. If not, the gift turns into a mountainous pile of that crummy Dick Tracy merchandise that even Big Lots couldn't dispose of.
Passing over Palo Alto, I look over the side to see a darkened stadium...with a suburban garage and a basketball hoop built at one end. It's deserted, without a sign of life. That is, except for the light inside the garage, where sleeps the two people who created this strange construction. Yes, this is the stadium used for the movie Baseketball. Its owners are Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who have been reduced to sleeping in the stadium's garage.
Everyone knows how their little Christmas prank turned into a major industry. Sudden success is a standard part of show business in this electronic age. Sudden success...and then sudden disappointment and a sudden decline. In the old days, show people had to struggle in years of obscurity, doing vaudeville in dirtwater towns or singing bad radio commercials, before they could gain a rep as actors or singers. But that obscurity was a place to be bad, where young talents could learn what worked, what didn't, and how to keep going in times of rejection. The long, hard road toughened them for the greater challenges and disasters of the major leagues.
In our electronic age, entertainers aren't allowed time to get tough. The entertainment machine immediately shoves them to center stage, not allowing them time to adjust to this lunatic business. The results are the sad ends of John Belushi, Chris Farley, River Phoenix...and so many others. Lesser disasters appear in the careers of other talented people with hot starts and cold finishes. In my youth, the comic actors of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In were superstars. Now Arte Johnson's an unfunny supporting actor in a soap opera, Jo Anne Worley can't even find a game show to cackle on, and Judy Carne, The Sock-it-to-me Girl, is alternating jail time and drug rehab. If these names mean nothing to you, just watch the same things happen to Judy Tenuda and Imo Phillips.
Or just watch it happen to Parker and Stone. They are on the precipice. Baseketball proved their irreverent humor had no genuine human feelings under it. They imitated the external forms of previous irreverent comedies, but they couldn't hide the emptiness inside. South Park is just the same. The characters have the depths of the cardboard cutouts they resemble. To make them any deeper, Parker and Stone would have to know more about life, and that requires living.
Characters like Pepper Ann, The Brain, Clark Kent and Bugs Bunny have run for dozens or hundreds of episodes and are unforgettable. Because their creators based them on real life experiences, they are people. Kyle, Cartman and Chef are just attitudes. As everyone in a rave club or on the USENET newsgroups knows, attitude is what you have when you don't have a life.
Still, Parker and Stone have a chance. They have a guaranteed contract with Comedy Central - as long as Time Warner wants to honor it, that is. Given that time and space in which to create, they might take risks with the show, expanding from cheap laughs and the predictable Death of Kenny to delve into what their characters really mean. They might do for the Colorado soul what Joel Hodgson did for Minnesotans in his Mystery Science Theatre 3000; local flavor with universal appeal.
So, Parker and Stone each get a gift of Renewed Respect, if they can look in their souls and harness their minds to create something substantial. If not, their gifts become coal, which they will need to keep warm when they're reduced to living in the alleys of Hollywood.
And to all of you, I offer a gift of enlightened animation discussion, and joy in your personal life...if you are kind to each other and respectful of each other's opinions. The gift of the Internet is our salvation - even if the government and the phone company are making plans to charge confiscatory taxes on our use of it. While we still have the Internet available to us, and until we're forced to mortgage the house for its use...can't we all get along?
Thomas E. Reed is a television engineer in Orlando, Florida. His Christmas season has been given cheer by seeing the Fantasmic! show at Disney/MGM Studios. It's the kind of attraction you'd expect, with theatrical effects and all the hardware the Imagineers can throw at it. But it does something no Disney production has ever tried, in my awareness; it combines nearly all their characters, animated and live-action, heroes and villains, into a single show. Fantasmic! is a reminder that, whatever nasty things people call Disney, this company was responsible for some of the most affecting and touching entertainment of our lives. Disney isn't everything animation can or should be, but taken as a whole, it is impressive. Discuss this with him at tomreed@sundial.net, or start a message string right here on the ANP Cartoon Speakeasy.
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