Scary little Christmas: violence on the puppet stage

This has to rate, if it rates at all, as the most violent thing I've ever seen on a puppet stage. It's shocking not just for its casual and gratuitous violence, but for the stunned looks on the faces of the kiddie audience, held captive by the most un-jolly Santa I've ever seen. Most Santas just don't have it down, in particular the laugh: it comes out ha-ha-ha, or, as in this case, an evil little chuckle. There are moments when this guy is lecturing the kids in which his gestures are like something from the movie Downfall.  But that's nothing compared to the puppets, who rip into each other with heartless, sociopathic glee. There is a very fake soundtrack of forced children's laughter layered on top, which does not match the help-me/get-me-out-of-here faces of the kids at all.

There is no shorter version of this that I could find, or I'd post it. Eight minutes is just too much of your life to waste on something like this. And yet, it's fascinating. Here Santa is the ultimate authority figure. You WILL watch this puppet show, and you will like it.

A scary litttle Christmas

W'all, w'all, w'all (Jimmy Stewart festive stammer), usually this time of year I make gifs of weird, creepy or disturbing Christmas videos. Just the good bits. But not everyone likes gifs, and they don't always even run smoothly. They're being replaced by mp3 videos which are infinitely more sophisticated. But from the format of this blog, I think you can gather that I hate infinitely more sophisticated.

This year I'm posting whole videos. There's always the risk my zillions of readers won't bother to watch them (and with gifs, they don't have much choice: there they are, repeating, and repeating, and repeating). But some of these things cry out for context.

This is a harmless enough stop-motion video from the 1950s, and it used to run every year on public television. Kids looked forward to seeing it. The elves are cute enough, though Hardrock seems oddly named. Is there a cafe named after him, I wonder, or is he a hard rock musician, or what? The mystery is never solved.

But the reason I'm posting it under this Festival of Creepy Christmas Videos is that the Santa in this thing WON the First Annual Creepy Santa Smackdown in 2014 (which included gifs from all sorts of bizarre old cartoons and puppet shows from the '50s). That is, he won it in the first year. In the second year (link below), I found a whole bunch of new shit. I might re-run the whole post, which I don't like to do, but Lord-oh-Lord did it take a long time to make all those gifs!

(I just went back and looked at the actual post. He won in the second year, too.)

You're not going to believe or even comprehend the Santa in this thing. Why were so many children's programs so creepy back then, or were they maybe not creepy at all and our standards have changed?

You decide.
 

Second Annual Creepy Santa Smackdown!

(Read at your own risk.)

The Hardrock Cafe: a truly terrifying Santa story