That magical period between the age of three and four. One's first real memories start to take hold, and one begins to look back at experiences for the first time and cement some of those moments in vivid detail... or allow some of them to skew until you almost convince yourself that some of them were just in your imagination. For me, that year was 1981, and I have a little of both in the memory department. Since the original Star Wars was before my time, it wasn't until 1981 that I saw it for the first time in theatrical re-release, and my first memory of it-- perhaps the earliest memory I have of anything-- is a towering C-3PO and R2-D2 cardboard standee in front of the theater. I stared at it while my mother complained to the ticket seller that the traffic had made us late to the start of the movie. I think she was afraid that the theater wouldn't let us in or that it might have sold out. I remember the packed house. It took a minute or two to find seats, but I wasn't paying attention to that. As my mother led me by the hand, my eyes were locked on the vast expanse of Tatooine as Threepio and Artoo wandered through the desert. Mom claims she took me to see The Empire Strikes Back a year earlier, but I have no recollection of that. She often told me that she never would have given the movies a chance at all if not for having a child, and she remained a fan for the rest of her life, glad that she hadn't passed it off forever on looks alone (she found the prequel trilogy "terrible," by the way... her word).
And so this is Christmas, and my memory goes back once again to 1981. My mother had remarried someone who seemed like a successful and loving man (AT FIRST), and I was having what would be the last few moments with my biological father that I would have for the rest of his life. But this is a happy time, so I'll forego the sad stories of what went on in my family most of the time and focus on the point: that sponge phase when a child wants to soak in the entire world. I didn't watch television as much as one might think I did as a child despite my vast memories of movies and shows, but when I did, I had the benefit of early 1980s premium cable in my home. It was, indeed, a time of great privilege (i.e.: starry-eyed parents of poverty living beyond their means and unable to see it would come back to bite them in a couple of years after the honeymoon was over). Cable was dying for programming in those days, and they still didn't run on a 24-hour schedule yet. Premium cable used to go off the air, folks. Believe it. Even in 1981, a lot of theatrical movies hadn't made the jump to television, so many stations turned to low-budget films and foreign programming to pick up the slack. Channels like HBO had been around for a decade already, but premium cable was just starting to find its place by 1981. When it came to children's programming on cable in the early '80s, I can't think of a single program that came from the United States. I had Romper Room and Friends and Sesame Street, but those were on public broadcasting. I got most of my enjoyment in children's programming from cable, and perhaps it was that multicultural and international diversity that lured me into it. HBO had Babar (Canada/France), Nickelodeon's Pinwheel came out of Canada and featured cartoons and shorts from no less than a dozen foreign countries (Denmark, Italy, Sweden, France, Norway, Germany, Finland, just to name a few), and The Movie Channel and other premium outlets were filling their prime youth hours with animated shorts like Hungary's Állatságok (AKA Animalia, not to be confused with the 1986 children's book or the 2007 Australian CG-animated series) Animalia has an IMDB entry and aired as filler on HBO, but I have yet to find any video or other information about it. I used to have one episode on VHS, but it is long since lost. Finding a complete set of the series is one of my holy grails. Many of these cartoons were open to the domestic market because they had no dialogue, but the foreign market also drew in English language programming from Britain, Australia and New Zealand, which brings us to our live tweet feature.
Memories of annual Christmas specials like A Charlie Brown Christmas are a dime a dozen, but my memory of The Monster's Christmas was so vivid and yet so hard to substantiate that I almost had myself convinced that it never really existed. I saw it a total of one and a half times on a premium cable channel in December 1981, possibly 1982, and then it was gone. All I had was the memory of it for thirty years until I found it again, and it was exactly as I remembered it. The Monster's Christmas was filmed in New Zealand, and it gave audiences an early view of the magnificent landscape that would become a standard filming location for Power Rangers, Hercules - The Legendary Journeys, Xena - Warrior Princess, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, among many others. In a sort of Wizard of Oz/Alice in Wonderland style, The Monster's Christmas tells the tale of a little girl who must become a champion and save the denizens of the land of monsters. A wicked witch has cast a spell and taken away all of the monsters' voices, reducing them to creatures capable only of grunts and groans. Only the power of a magic scepter and the actions of a human with the power of speech can break the spell. Journeying across the land, the girl meets a number of different monsters that aid her in her quest while the witch's rat-like servant attempts to steal the scepter and foil the monsters' chances of being free to sing again.
I'm glad places like YouTube and the Internet exist so that obscure little gems like this don't disappear forever, and I hope you'll join me as we send the 2015 holidays off into their own corner of well-deserved obscurity on Twitter with The Monster's Christmas at 10PM EST on #GHWP, following a special 8PM EST presentation of the 1974 classic Black Christmas hosted by one of the great folks of #TrashTue, @SullaBlack.
REMINDER: #GHWP kicks off its Star Wars celebration Sunday, December 27, at 4:45PM EST with the Toei classic Message from Space.
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