Hollywood & Spine Archive: Groan-Up Christmas List

While Santa Claus: The Movie is not particularly good, you have to..."admire" isn't the right word; let's say "appreciate"...the fact that it's a certain type of movie that isn't quite made anymore. The closest analogues in today's cinematic landscape are probably those Netflix action movies that star someone who was in a Marvel movie and a press release says it was "consumed by 11 billion hours of viewers" or some nonsense invented metric meant to distract everyone from the likely tax schemes that are going on behind the scenes. If streamers still cared enough about those movies to make them "good" or "bad" and not simply just "there," these are the kinds of movies that would be getting as appealingly odd novelizations as this one did. Also: that shot in the header was absolutely, inexplicably reused in a very familiar TV commercial for the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. (originally published 12/20/2019)

Santa Claus: The Movie by Joan D. Vinge (based on a story by David & Leslie Newman; screenplay by David Newman) (Berkley, 1985)

The pitch: A simple woodcarver is discovered by elves at the North Pole and brings joy to the world by delivering gifts to children on Christmas Eve. That's the tweet.

The author: A celebrated writer of sci-fi short stories, Joan D. Vinge won a Hugo Award in 1981 for her novel The Snow Queen. Santa Claus was published during a fruitful few years for Vinge as a novelization writer, with bylines on Return to Oz and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in 1985 alone.

The lowdown: When I was a child, I was given a book for Christmas from one of my relatives - one of those thin volumes that a company would put your name in, to make you the hero of the story. In it, I observed how rushed everyone seemed to feel around the holidays, and solemnly wished everyone could receive the gift of time. That wish was heard by Santa Claus himself, so touched by my unselfish dream that he took me on his famous annual midnight ride. It's a wholesome gift made vaguely insane when you learn I was, at most, three years old when I received it. (Imagining a child who could barely read wishing for something that profound is like finding the prototype for woke toddler tweets.)

I thought about that book a lot while watching Santa Claus: The Movie, a film both fascinating and wretched. In many ways, the "realistic Santa Claus origin story" conceit wouldn't be out of place in today's Hollywood, where millions of dollars have been spent making gritty, realistic versions of flights of fancy. Indeed, Santa Claus was produced by Alexander and Ilya Salkind, who oversaw a winning combination of fantasy and verisimilitude in 1978's Superman: The Movie, then a losing combination of fantasy and plodding plots in two sequels and a semi-spinoff, Supergirl.

Santa Claus is overstuffed Salkind hooey: sets and special effects are whimsical but not breathtaking, the elf cast features diminutive actors inconsistently framed in forced perspective, and there's no real conflict until an hour into the film's 110-minute runtime. Dudley Moore is charming but adrift as Santa's most rascally elf Patch, and John Lithgow's villainous toy exec vacillates between "loud" and "swallowing scenery whole". (The picture's barely-there conflict - that elfin magic is manipulated to screw over Santa's favor with kids, complete with a literal attempt to create "Christmas II" in March - would have felt only like a parody of capitalism before the last decade or so.)

Somehow, this all makes Vinge's book something of a godsend. Sure, it doesn't dive too deep into the whats and wherefores of the plot, and it's even more annoying seeing the elves' self-referential patter ("elf-confidence," "elf-assured") on the page than it is on the screen. But without the garish workmanship of the production itself, the story beats - a friendly bearded woodcutter, his wife and two reindeer getting lost in a snowstorm and fulfilling an elf-driven (not self-driven) prophecy to deliver toys to all loving children - have some heart to them instead of the clinical "this is why it's happening" type of end product we get on screen.

With Vinge's simple but effective prose, the North Pole workshop has more of the scale you'd expect, and its "toy tunnel," where finished presents are loaded onto Santa's sleigh, has more heft than "a corridor built on a set." The elf tribe's elder can be a true, wizened sage in the mind's eye, not Burgess Meredith collecting a paycheck behind a wispy long beard. Even Santa's conflicts - a resistance to modernization and his subsequent regret over driving the tech-obsessed Patch into the arms of a greedy jackass - have more weight on the page, since it doesn't feel as perfunctory as it does on film.

Granted, Vinge can't save Santa Claus: The Movie from being largely stupid. The conflict still largely unfolds a few weeks after Christmas. The two children that come into contact with Santa are cloying tropes. And the script is obsessed with the word "puce." But by divorcing oneself from the swing-and-a-miss visuals, Santa Claus: The Movie (the book) has enough warmth and heart as any good Christmas tale.

The cutting room floor: Beyond some characterization here and there to add dimension to the first act, there's not a lot of excised scenes surviving in Santa Claus, save for a few elf moments (Mrs. Claus bonds with the tribe's head chef, Groot, and there's briefly some humorous hay made about elves using their beards to paint toys. The child protagonists Joe and Cornelia are sometimes better characterized on screen than on the page (like the brief, peculiar scenes of each child getting roughed up by other kids for...talking about encountering Santa?) and sometimes make more sense in the book (where it's much clearer that they're ultimately adopted by Santa and his wife, who'd always longed for children of their own).

The last word: It';s not a story you need to check twice - but if you must do so even once, Santa Claus: The Movie is like its jolly protagonist: often better read about than seen.