Own the rights?
Here's something you don't see every day – a brand, new holiday special that attempts, consciously and effectively, to recreate the joyously fake, unabashedly plastic, toy-like universe of the beloved Rankin/Bass "Animagic" specials of the 1960s and 1970s. The animated puppets of TV classics like "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" and "The Year Without a Santa Claus" are indelible cultural icons, and "A Miser Brothers' Christmas" manages, via resurrecting the virtually-lost art of stop-motion animation, to bring these simultaneously retro and surreal characters back to life. Watching this new program can create an almost eerie sense of déjà vu in Babyboomer viewers, who grew up with the Animagic holiday specials. Indeed, "Miser Brothers" is advertised as a sequel to the 1974 classic, "The Year Without a Santa Claus," reviving that film's two most memorable characters, Heat Miser and Snow Miser. Even better, Santa Claus is played in both the old and the new films by Mickey Rooney, who sounds like he hasn't aged a day! "Miser Brothers" uncannily reinvents Kizo Nagashima and Tadahito "Tad" Mochinaga's delightful stop-motion animation of two decades ago, and the visual look almost slavishly reproduces Paul Coker's highly stylized production design for the Rankin/Bass films. Even the title sequence, with its combination of dimensional and cel animation, immediately evokes the opening sequences of the Animagic films. As an homage, "Miser Brothers" is almost perfect, perhaps even an improvement on Tim Burton's previous homage to Animagic, "The Nightmare Before Christmas." The only real deficit here is the tepid music score, which can't hold a candle to the stunningly original tunes of Maury Laws. (They wisely decided to include the original Miser Song penned by Maury Laws, which sticks out like a sore and beautiful thumb amidst the new songs). All in all, this is a hell of an homage, an awful lot of fun, and a most refreshing departure from the dreary CGI-saturated cultural landscape.
You may report errors and omissions on this page to the IMDb database managers. They will be examined and if approved will be included in a future update. Clicking the 'Update' button will take you through a step-by-step process.
