‘Tis the season to dredge up another obscure Xmas cartoon from deep within my worthless memory and make of it what I will. There’s so many to choose from, but in general they’re all about the same—to think, there was once a time when network television couldn’t air enough animated holiday specials to fill all those primetime hours that midseason breaks left vacant. Just sticking to what already worked, the Rudolphs and the Frostys and Charlie Brown’s existential lamentations, didn’t provide enough material to wedge between all the obnoxiously cloying holiday commercials, so they commissioned so many more, very few destined to become perennial classics like their forebears. I mean, that seems to be a consistent theme whenever I write about lame cartoons: they hacked them out at such a rate, how could most of them be even remotely memorable? Christmas just gave the same sorts of stuff a consistent, and oftentimes consistently sickening, tone. But I’ve already talked about the Christmas cartoon industry before, and it might be a challenge to write about another one of these things without repeating some of the same points, or just defaulting to sneering at well-meaning pablum.
Thankfully, I have Yogi Bear’s All-Star Comedy Christmas Caper from 1982 in my back pocket, and that at least has something extra to go along with the usual holiday treacle. This was a special that aired semi-regularly on TV for quite a while, and my younger self had no objection to stopping on it when I saw it was on. I was part of what was probably the last generation of kids who was still inundated with Hanna-Barbera’s non-Scooby-Doo cartoon catalogue, with Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound and the rest—and you know what? I liked them just fine. Maybe that was just the television addiction talking, as I’d more or less accept any cartoon that happened to be on, but I do think in terms of design and voice acting, the wider H-B gang are an enjoyable group of characters. It’s just that none of those elements can sustain more than a few episodes of a series before they’ve used up all their real comedy potential (or at least the comedy potential found in their extremely limited animation)—maybe that’s why most of those shows don’t actually have long runs, and maybe that’s why once those shows ran their course, all those characters just started showing up together in other things.
The mixing and matching of H-B’s “classic” comedy characters has been going on for most of their existence, which in some ways is actually kind of fun (and it continues to this day on the streaming series Jellystone, which I would probably check out if HBO Max is ever made available in my country—what’s your deal, Warner Brothers?), similar to the group dynamism of the Universal Monsters or the Muppets. But, after a while, it also has the effect of making everyone forget that most of them came from somewhere else or had any sort of preexisting history. I can imagine kids watching something like Laff-A-Lympics in the seventies or the nineties or now would be very confused about who half of those jokers even are (and even on that show, Scooby-Doo got top billing, showing how that popularity hierarchy worked.) Regardless, this Christmas special starring the Hanna-Barbera players (which is actually the third such special—one of them also featured the non-H-B character Casper the Friendly Ghost for some probably inane reason) has that element going for it, even if it’s arguable that it lives up to the “All-Star” in the title (no one considers Hokey Wolf a star of any kind), never mind the “Comedy” or the “Caper.” It’s also the only thing that really stands out from the sea of cliches throughout this special.
This special was written by Mark Evanier, who as an entertainment industry veteran (both in the realm of cartoons and non-cartoons), historian, comics writer, and podcast guest is an irreplaceable treasure, and I don’t doubt his sincerity in this work—but I also think he’s ultimately writing at the level that is expected of a Yogi Bear holiday special made decades after Yogi Bear’s peak popularity. So, you see, it’s Christmas Eve, and the likes of Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Quickdraw McGraw, Snooper & Blabber, and Augie Doggie & Doggie Daddy all pile into a van (do they all live near each other? In the same house?) and drive to Jellystone Park to spend the holidays with Yogi and Boo-Boo. The Ranger is perturbed by this motley gang of cartoon animals stealing the mannerisms of famous comedians (I mean, his whole character is to be in a constant state of perturbation), especially since Yogi and Boo-Boo should be hibernating, but of course they aren’t (you can tell it’s the early eighties because there’s an answering machine joke in there.) Considering that there are multiple Xmas specials with Yogi, it seems that he basically never hibernates at all—way to teach kids proper biology, cartoons! It turns out that Yogi and Boo-Boo hid themselves on a bus going to “the big city” in order to visit the others at their homes. Whoops! I guess everyone in this special is just stupid!
While the rest of the cast drive all the way back to the city, a journey that would be overcast with a fog of angry silence if it was anything like real life, Yogi has to run away from animal control, escaping into a mall and dressing up as Santa to hide among the mall Santas. They’re being trained by a drill sergeant, you see, and according to the rulebook that does indeed count as a joke. The actual factual Christmas-y plot of this special involves a moppet named Judy whose dad seems to be a Reagan-era rich corporate raider, driven around in his limo and talking to random people on the phone about vaguely business-sounding nonsense—if you guessed that he doesn’t pay enough attention to her and she’s fed up, you’ve obviously encountered fiction before (try to guess what the ending is, you might be surprised—but if you are, what’s wrong with you?) This basic narrative conflict was omnipresent through the eighties and into the nineties, and it’s hard not to groan when it gets trotted out so they can pretend that they have some sort of meaningful family drama going on. She ends up hanging out with Yogi and Boo-Boo and they get into hijinks of varying levels of mild amusement, but everyone else realizes that a missing rich kid raises the stakes more than just two bears wandering a large city (as strange as that sounds)—Judy’s father does, in fact, threaten to murder Yogi. Happy holidays!
In terms of animation, this is pretty stock eighties Hanna-Barbera, if a smidgen more consistent (I’d hope so, given that it’s a one-off and not a series they had to churn out)—at least in my eyes, the visuals carry that slightly distinctive post-Smurfs character, which is hard for me to quantify at all but I’m sticking to it anyway. Maybe if you’re big into the company’s history, it might be interesting to see their older characters animated in a later style (or, probably more accurately, being subsumed by the more popular series’ style)…that’s probably the only potentially interesting thing about the company’s animation, because aside from a few halfhearted attempts at frenetic squash-and-stretch movement, it’s all pretty mundane here. At least the hand-painted stuff looks kind of nice.
Eventually, all the All-Star Comedy Caperers gather in order to reunite Judy with her dad—by visiting every person in the phone book with her last name, Jones. Did I mention that these characters are portrayed as being dimwitted and prone to wasting time? This sequence allows them to throw in a few more brief cameos, such as Magilla Gorilla and Wally Gator, two animals who are not well-suited to a wintry climate in the slightest. Probably the most enjoyable moment in the special is when Snagglepuss meets Fred Flinstone and Barney Rubble on the city streets—not only does Snagglepuss know who they are, but he knows that it makes no sense for them to be there. They do not acknowledge his very reasonable question of “Wait, what?”, but instead trick him into asking a random passerby for donations, and when that person reacts to Snagglepuss as if he is a real mountain lion, they beat him up and get their donation. So, Yogi and Boo-Boo are treated as actual bears for the most part, but do people think of all the other characters as animals in that world, even if they talk and wear human clothes and drive vans? At the same time, that person does not recognize that Fred and Barney are actual time-displaced cavemen. You know, I think Evanier is having fun with the basic absurdity of the situation here, which I appreciate.
Before Fred and Barney show up, though, Henry Corden (voice of Fred) and Mel Blanc (voice of Barney) voice two random security guards, and since it’s very obviously them, it’s honestly quite distracting. Did H-B cheap out when it came to hiring any other actors for incidental characters? It’s strange.
An equally absurd moment that is confusingly played for pathos has Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy staying in a park with Judy, ignoring her while they fawn over each other with familial affection, which obviously makes her feel bad. What a pair of jerks! I’ve never seen an actual Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy cartoon, and aside from the latter’s Jimmy Durante-imitating voice, I don’t really know how much comedy can be derived from the concept of “father and son love each other.” This all culminates with the entire cast gathering, Yogi being briefly arrested (can you try a bear under the human legal system? Apparently you can in that state!), and Judy’s dad finally realizing that he was in the wrong and everything is totally fine. Even the Ranger has to wish Yogi, the likely source of his inevitable death by aneurysm, a Merry Christmas.
When it comes to these specials that use familiar characters to tell holiday-inflected stories, the reason for making them is quite obvious—you already like the stars, so seeing them during Christmas should give you some warm, fuzzy feelings—but in terms of actual quality, it really does feel like they are either genuinely affecting (like, say, the Muppets specials) or supremely lame. There is no way I can rationally argue that this isn’t the latter, and probably its only real saving grace is that it aired within days of “Christmas Comes to Pac-Land” (part of the Pac-Man series, obviously), an even lamer Hanna-Barbera-produced holiday special from 1982—for as bog-standard as the story is here, at least Yogi didn’t have to help Santa for the nine-hundredth time. Despite the amusing use of Fred and Barney, I can’t even argue that seeing Yogi pal around with all the “all-stars” is that special, considering that palling around is pretty much all they did at that point. But, you know, I was suckered into liking Yogi Bear and the rest, so I guess even seeing them doing nothing of any import during Christmas provided the minimum amount of cheer to keep me watching.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 