When I was a kid there were a number of specials that played year after year. And they remain classics. How the Grinch Stole Christmas, of course, tops the list. (Boris Karloff kicks Jim Carrey's butt.)
A Charlie Brown Christmas also is one I fondly remember from my youth, but I can't watch it anymore because it depresses me too much. Same with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (even after I realized the guy who voiced the elf also voiced Spider-Man in the famous 1960s cartoon series - Canadian icon Paul Soles).
Funnily enough there were also some specials that had nothing to do with Christmas, yet always were aired around the holidays on my local TV station. There was an animated version of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince (David Essex intoning "Tonight I'm going to Egypt!" as the talking bird and Christopher Plummer as the statue asking the bird to distribute his gold leaf paint to the needy still sticks in my mind). There was also an animated version of The Little Mermaid - the original Hans Christian Anderson story, not the Disney cartoon.
But there is one special that never gets released on DVD, and I haven't seen it broadcast in 30 years. The Christmas Messenger starred Richard Chamberlain as a mysterious man in black (a very Doctor-like figure, actually) who encounters the viewer - the show is partly filmed in first person - wandering the streets in Victorian England. David Essex provides the voice of the unseen young man. Chamberlain makes surreal comments about Christmas as transitions into various animated music videos of Christmas carols. I'm not explaining it very well, but it was a very surreal, artistic show, and I wish they'd put it on DVD.
Thankfully, there's always YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkAOfUXMoU
And watching the clip this very moment I discovered that the music for this special was composed by Jeff Wayne, with whom Essex would later work on The War of the Worlds musical!
Alex
