Sonic Christmas Blast

Yes, I realize I've taken two "breaks" within the last couple of months. In my defense, Christmas means family and finals, and family and finals means "go from staying up all night working on group projects to having to clean up the house and getting ready for a party that includes at least twenty other people". Which means less updates. I feel kind of bad for leaving this site to its own devices, so to speak, and not giving any new content, so to make up for it, I'm doing one more Christmas special.

And it's one that's very special to me, because it involves one of my childhood heroes, Sonic the Hedgehog.

And it's every bit as awesome as it sounds.

But first, some backstory. After the end of both Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog and the other show, Sonic the Hedgehog (aka SatAM), DiC Entertainment decided that they wanted to try their hand at making a Christmas special and decided to combine elements of both shows and create a special that will hopefully unite the fans of both shows and join them in the holy war.

...unfortunately, since this special is basically Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog with some minor SatAM elements, it largely didn't work. Oh well, they tried at least. Barely.

What also didn't work was the original title. Sonic Christmas Blast was originally called An X-Tremely Sonic Christmas in order to promote Sonic X-Treme (aka one of the most infamous cancelled videogames of all time) but Sega was having some problems with that game and therefore, they changed the name to promote the game that actually did come out, Sonic 3D Blast. Somehow, that just envelopes this entire special with a subtle blanket of sadness. I know that while I'm watching this, I'm going to imagine the dying hopes of hapless X-Treme programmers from Christmas Past.

I will say this though, hopefully to lighten the mood. While doing some light Internet research on this special, I found the best out-of-context line I have ever discovered in a fan wiki page. While taking a sip out of my lukewarm eggnog, I came across this: "This was the final episode of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. Therefore in that universe, Sonic is now permanently Santa Claus." If that doesn't put you in a holiday mood, then you are beyond help. By the way, spoilers.


Now with that out of the way...

Sonic Christmas Blast

Frosty the Snowman

Since it's December and all that, and the television is currently assaulting me with holiday special after holiday special, I might as well do the same on my own blog. Like October and its deadly array of Halloween specials, I'm going to shell out nothing but Christmas specials. This is going to be the equivalent of me stringing up Christmas lights and inflating giant, annoying-looking Santa Clauses on my lawn, and the best part is, since there's way more Christmas specials than there are Halloween specials (which makes sense, since Christmas is the hugest holiday of the year), I have no way of running out of steam at the end of the month like I sort of did this year.

And what a better way to start off on the topic of Christmas specials with one of the most well-known Christmas specials of all, Frosty the Snowman.

Produced by Rankin/Bass, aka the people who cranked out a bazillion other really memorable Christmas specials that crop up on cable whenever December strikes, Frosty the Snowman is a fondly remembered special that ranks on many people's favorite holiday specials' list, partly because the animators took the easy way out and created something that already had its plot laid out in the form of a song. Oddly, when I brought this topic up around my fellow peers, the answer was always the same. They remembered liking it, but no one could ever give me a single description of any scene that happened in the film. Everyone just remembered a singing snowman, a magic hat, and kids that would dance around their hideous animated golem. I mean, geez, the special runs at a full thirty minutes. There has to be something.

So thus, I began my mystical journey. I desperately want to figure out just what exactly is so special about this special. Like a Tim Burton-designed skeleton, I'm going to desperately try to figure out the meaning of Christmas by performing experiments on this beloved children's classic.

Without further ado...

Frosty the Snowman

Buttons and Rusty in Which Witch is Which

While I'm on the topic of Halloween specials, it's time for me to talk about a movie that somehow was a big part of my childhood even though it took me a lot of google-fu in order to remember the name of the stupid thing, partly because the VHS isn't even correctly labelled. Buttons and Rusty, everyone!

Fun fact: There are no ghosts in this movie. This cover is a big fat lie.

Everyone has one of these films. An obscure film that just makes it into your video library when you're a kid even though you have no idea how the hell it got there. Maybe a relative gave it to you when you were little, maybe your parents spotted it in the bargain bin and mistook it for a Disney film, or maybe your VCR recorded it because your house is haunted and the ghosts in your house happen to be hipsters and hate everything with a recognizable brand name. These movies are never really well-known, but they're everywhere, just waiting to be talked about, waiting to be brought to our attention after they've been passed off in favor of something by Fox Entertainment or Warner Brothers.

But yeah, long story short, I think this blog post is going to be something my parents dug up from a bargain bin. Hooray!

Anyways, like Fluppy Dogs, I watched this a couple times as a kid, the VHS wore out, and a good portion of my life was spent recalling weird images of a bear cub and a fox kit having appropriately cute woodland fun even though I couldn't recall the name or much of the plot points. It's that feeling you get where you watch something, you remember liking it, but all you can dreg up is just that vague feeling that you watched something alright. It's sort of like recalling elevator music, really.

But unlike Fluppy Dogs, which was a standalone film, not only did this film exist, but there were multiple films and there was a TV series in the late 90's based off of this concept, with this entire franchise branded as "The Chucklewood Critters". I don't know about you, but when the Internet told me this, my jaw hit the floor and I spent a good ten minutes going "Holy crap! That thing! That thing that I watched! It had sequels!". It took all of my willpower to avoid just running out and buying the other VHSes, but mostly because Youtube happens to still exist at the time I write this.

...that being said, it's actually rather sad that even though Buttons and Rusty starred in like six specials and an entire cartoon that lasted two seasons, the only time I had even heard of any of these things is because I happened to punch in the name into an Internet search engine. Considering I frequent quite a few cartoon sites and talk to people who were raised on 90's cartoons, that's saying a lot. I mean, geez, even Project GeeKeR is mentioned more than the Chucklewood Critters. I have to wonder what the hell the animators did in order to earn such bad luck on their product.

With the introduction out of the way, I'm going to dive right into a giant lake of obscurity and fish up some animation that I'm sure only a handful of people has ever seen. If I don't make any blog posts after this one, it's probably because the VHS of this thing happened to be haunted and I was devoured by the creepy fox corpse that came out of my television screen.

Buttons and Rusty in Which Witch is Which

Fluppy Dogs - Part 2 (Final Part)

Part 1

Hey, guys! You know what's awesome? Prismatic canines that have a magic key that can open doors to other dimensions.

"We'll acknowledge Atlantis: Milo's Return and Belle's Magical World but not this."

That's right, today I'm going to tackle the second and final half of Fluppy Dogs, closing the book (at least until I find another one that did just as badly) on forgotten Disney specials that failed miserably in the ratings. So far, this strange special has brought flying beds, dogs that are supposedly not dogs but just look like dogs and happen to be called dogs, a villain that feels like he should be hanging out in France and attacking cursed princes in enchanted castles, and a really cool idea that's somehow buried underneath all of this. The first half set the whole story up, and now the second half is where we'll get to see some action.

But all in all, there's not much more to say about the Fluppy Dogs, cute as they may be, that hasn't already been said in Part 1, so I'm just going to use this space to inform the readers that, as always, start with Part 1 first. Because I'm not responsible for breaking your brain if you enter Part 2 unprepared.

Time to once again touch upon the piece of animation Disney likes to pretend doesn't exist (on account they forgot it exists), this is...

Fluppy Dogs - Part 2

Fluppy Dogs - Part 1

Everybody has a cartoon they remember bits and pieces of but can't remember the name or what it's about. A cartoon that you saw as a kid, but now you wish you could remember the name because you're a little unsure if it was actually something you saw or something you made up in your head.

In my case, it was Disney's Fluppy Dogs. Never heard of it? I wouldn't be surprised really.

Whenever some Disney fan acts like they're the only person in the world that
knows about The Black Cauldron, bring this up.

This might sound silly, but for a very large portion of my life I swore I saw an animated film on the Disney Channel about talking dogs that could open up doors out of midair with a magic key but I couldn't remember the plot, the title, or even most of the movie beyond little snippets that would appear in my head. But no matter who I talked to, no one had heard of this film. I quickly became more and more distraught, gradually going from "hey, remember this animated TV special Disney would air in the 90's about talking dogs with magic keys?" to "I swear to god this happened why won't anyone listen to me!?" to unfortunate souls like my various roommates and the people standing in line for Space Mountain. Luckily YouTube came to the rescue and proved that I was at least sort of sane (because no sane person would get an art degree, believe me) and didn't suffer from hallucinations as a child.

The reason this movie hasn't been released on DVD or even so much as mentioned by Disney is that Fluppy Dogs could really be dubbed Floppy Dogs on account, when this special first aired, it was one of Disney's lowest rated programs. I'm picturing a room of animators, all pleased that the grueling months are over and they made this really awesome pilot, and then the Nielsen Ratings come in and everyone starts hitting the bottle.

Which kind of sucked for Disney because they had aspirations of turning this into a series and even had released a couple pieces of merchandise (because Disney can and will release merchandise of anything they make) before they knew how much this movie was going to fail in terms of gaining an audience. See, before they released the special, Disney joined up with Kenner Toys (the makers behind Strawberry Shortcake) in an attempt to make a merchandise-driven cartoon similar to My Little Pony or He-Man. Only problem; no one bought the merchandise. I can tell because this stuff shows up on eBay for dirt cheap.

Yeah, this still probably isn't ringing a bell with anyone.

Had this movie been a hit and had the show been picked up, it would've been in-between Adventures of the Gummi Bears and DuckTales chronologically. As it stands, the closest you'll probably get to having a Fluppy Dogs show is watching reruns of The Wuzzles, which by the way, isn't very well-remembered either.

Since this movie is only like 45-50 minutes long, it makes sense that I divide this analysis of this movie into exactly two parts, like a Subway sandwich meant for two. I will also apologize for the quality of this movie's screenshots because, since it never got a DVD or even a VHS release, the only surviving copies that circulate the darkest reaches of the Internet today was pulled from video recordings from the 80's.

So let's dive into one of the most forgotten TV specials bearing the Disney name. This is...

Fluppy Dogs - Part 1