I clearly need more to do on Friday nights than be mean to reindeer, even wussy ones

Penned 12/8/2006 . . . this is just the first half hour. I'll post the rest if anyone really needs more of this.

I’m home. Flight was tolerable given my Jack and Coke. I always wonder why the flight attendant looks at a woman so strangely when she orders such a drink. Anyhoo, I’m in for the night. You know, given the frigid temps and me loving to go sleeveless and all. Might as well give you my interpretation of the holiday classic I came home to on Tivo.

Kris Likey Does 1964’s Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer:

Plump snowman enters stage left. Mumbles something about an awful winter and missing Christmas through his very Hitler-like facial hair. If this was a real movie, Wilford Brimley would be appropriately cast as this snowperson crystal cyborg.

Next scene. Mrs. Claus, looking like the redneck mom in A Time to Kill, nags Santa about eating. These two minutes of fluff permit the viewer to wonder why Santa and the Missus never did procreate. I hypothesize that cumbersome plastic joints may have been prohibitive.

Back to Snowborg. He wears a bowtie similar to that of the KFC Colonel. Without the tasty breading. And no pants, which I find particularly offensive given my extreme piety. Credits roll, and I attempt to interpret the MCMCV blah blah blah with minimal success.

Refocus on Snowborg, flashing back to Rudolph being born in a reindeer manger. His nose lights up and his skin is revealed to be papier-mâché-ish, nay, beige Astroturf-ish, which makes the child in me just furious. Like my first kiss, I so thought this was the real thing. Soon enough, Rudolph Mom and Dad totally freak, and the latter overreacts like a Republican discovering his son partying in Dupont in a mesh rainbow crop top. Santa enters, and I cringe at his sweaterdress. So 80s. He sings, and I’m pretty sure that the baby Jesus weeps in Rudolph’s pseudo-manger.

Buck Pops, wearing a lovely grey eye shadow I can only attribute to the genius that is MAC, wipes some of his greasy colored lid onto Rudolph’s “nonconformity.” It works for a time. Just like contraception.

It’s here that we first meet the abominable snowman, a tongue-twister name I’m pretty sure Burt Ives had to record for voiceover like 86-87 times, whatever it took, given well-established snowman tendencies toward extreme drunkenness.

Scene XVII: The Elf Workshop. There’s a small blonde elf who is being ridiculed at the work table, a scene which unfortunately resembles my 7th grade shop class, and who most closely resembles Andy Dick on Proactiv. The bully is a beefy elf, a la Kevin James with felt shoes, one who I’m pretty sure would be forced to post 10-year-old pics of himself to Match.com. All the elves are very, very White, and it’s no surprise that the Andy Dick one aspires to be a dentist. He’s mocked, and I’m reminded of Eddie Baumgartner who in the first grade caught his sneaker on my desk and proceeded to projectile vomit in pure slow motion as he fell. The memory can’t overcome the awesome terribleness of the brief Andy Dick singing that ensues. The n*ked Snowborg thankfully saves us.

Cut to Rudolph’s Dad ripping him a new one. We are apparently supposed to know that Rudolph has matured to young adulthood given the two Milk Duds placed atop his Astroturf head. The cartoon/Astro-turfmation director does a nice job of giving Dolph a Peter-Brady-like creaky voice here, and suddenly I’m thrown back into 9th grade when I was a reject, a burnout who drank Bartles and James and smoked Pall Malls under the bleachers while the jocks mocked me with their groin muscles.

Yeah, that never happened.

So anyhoo, we rejoin Burl Ives’ meth festivities and Snowborg is back in his Talbot’s clearance rack vest sans pantaloons, talking smack about elves and life lessons and the Christmas that almost never was. A taxing elfin song ensues, one for which I’m driven finally to employ the full power of my fast forward, and in which we finally meet a deer with a worse weave than Britney’s. The falsetto in this number hurts a part of my back I didn’t know existed.

Santa leaves the room after this aching theatrical number, and I confuse the door slamming abruptly with Santa putting a cap in his own ass. Would you blame him?

Next in the saga less entertaining than the epic that was Alexander: Kevin James begins screaming at Andy Dick in the elf sweatshop again (“You’ll never fit in!”) and I long for the sweetness and Dianetics that are Leah Remini.

And back to harsh Nature reality:“Coach” is introduced to us in the next scene, after Andy Dick bails out of the elf office, and I am forced to stifle the instinct to run into the HS locker room to avoid doing the vault. He wears an awful denim ball cap cocked to at least 45 degrees, and he attempts to assert his buck manhood by making the little ones do jumps and twists in the snow. The weave boy speaks twice too often.

Rudolph then meets his new girlfriend, Doe a Deer, (sentence removed due to content offensive to Jorge), just as I’m completely consumed by his ample ear hair. Wouldn’t you know it? His nose lights up at the most inopportune time, thanks to Lavitra. For all intents and purposes, Rudolph is now standing in front of the group in assless leather chaps. What a lesson of fellowship and acceptance for today’s youth. Awesome.

I beg for a commercial. And I am not at all rewarded.

More singing. This time by the bow-wearing doe, who is apparently named Clarice or some other FBI profiler name. And lots of lots raccoons wearing robber masks.

Are we not to the half hour yet?!?!? Next, Andy Dick pops out of the snow, and apparently Santa has shared the news that pants are completely unnecessary in the real world. Andy trills that he’ll accept Dolph despite his red stub, and the whole affair leaves me thinking that Dateline really needs to make a visit to the North Pole.