Olive the Other Reindeer

Punny, very punny.

Olive the Other Reindeer aired on FOX Friday, December 17th.

Christmas, bah humbug.

There's no way that Matt Groening is going to convince me that this dreck is the greatest Christmas Special since The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. Matt Groening's got nothing on the good Dr. Seuss, and Drew Barrymore? Give me a break.

The "story" such as it is centers around a dog named Olive and her attempts to rescue Christmas (oooh, there's an original Christmastime plot). Blitzen has broken a leg and they have to put him down (just in a wheelchair... no Old Yeller here.) Olive mistakes Santa's plea for "all of the other reindeer to pitch in" as "Olive the other reindeer must pitch in." Ha ha ha ha. How clever. Oh, I'm in stitches.

Dan "Homer Simpson" Castalanetta pitches in as the evil mailman Mr. Zipp. He sounds nothing like Homer; in fact, he tries his best to sound exactly like Vincent Price. Why? I don't know, maybe because Vincent Price is creepy and Wayne Knight didn't want to play another fat, evil postman. Mr. Zipp is sick of delivering Christmas cards, so he tries to keep Olive from helping Santa.

Olive is also helped by a wise cracking penguin con man (a 'conguin'?) who recently escaped from the zoo. His name is Martini. Get it? Olive... Martini. Ha ha ha ha ha. Martini gets the enviable task of reciting all the pop-culture jokes that won't make sense in five years, thus dooming this special to obscurity long before it can attain "classic" status.

The characters all look like they've been run over by a steamroller. This is supposed to be "stylistic" I guess, but it really just means the viewer feels like they're playing "Parrapa the Rappa" for an hour. Didn't mushed profiles go out of style with The Flintstones? I felt like I was watching a cartoon acted by an amoeba colony on a microscope slide.

The music also sucks. Nothing classic along the lines of "Mr. Grinch" and the lyrics sound like they were written in five minutes by an elementary school history teacher with a rhyming dictionary and an urgent case of the runs (since none of the songs last longer than two minutes).

But a funny thing happened to me around the midway point, when Olive had braved several puns to meet Schnitzel, Blitzen's flightless brother, voiced by Michael Stipe. In spite of myself, I laughed. Something crept under the increasingly grumpy exterior of my glazy tuber eyeballs and made me... well, made me like this whole debacle.

Steadily, my Christmas spirit starting kind of oozing out, and my Uncle Scrooge had turned into the ... other 'denoument' Uncle Scrooge. The great thing about Christmas television is that no matter how embittered you try to be, or cynically detached from the premise of Nicey-nice, these specials always find a way of sucking you in. I found something of the kid in me and began rooting for dorky little Olive to save Christmas.

I started realizing how genuinely funny some of the moments were, like when Olive is desperately trying to fly with the reindeer but is really just sort of dragged along in the air by the collar. Or when Deus ex Machina makes a cameo appearance. Gosh, by the time Infra-Man and Godzilla showed up (no kidding, folks), I was sold.

Sure, Olive isn't the most original Christmas special around. It relies a bit too much on the old Scream schtick of pop culture reference to break any new ground. But there's definitely a spark of child-like joy and belief in Christmas, Santa, reindeer, elves, etc. to make me smile. And as for the jokes aging... well, I'll be honest, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer hasn't aged all that well either -- it smacks of post war patriarchy and the songs are pretty darn corny.

So what the heck. It's the holidays. I'll drop the ornery streak just this once and admit that I really liked Olive the Other Reindeer, and I'm looking forward to seeing it again next year.

Merry Christmas, folks. Humbug not included.

Date: December 19, 1999

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