Sunday, December 20, 2015

Christmas Favorites Nobody Wants

I figured I'd sneak in one more entry before Christmas...

One of the local thrift stores had a stack of still-sealed Christmas CDs on their Christmas shelf. From my experience, almost everything in a thrift store that's still sealed is garbage nobody wants. I took a browse through the stack and it was most certainly interesting!

These were not audio CDs as I'd thought. They were VCDs. I was a bit hesitant to pick these up since my experience with VCDs has been pretty spotty. They played in my girlfriend's DVD player fine, but they sure as fuck don't work in my computer. Who the hell still manufactures VCDs anyway? (Answer: Malaysia)

The packaging is pretty magnificent...



There's nothing all that special about this copy of "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town". I own it on DVD. It's like the retarded brother of "Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer". The thing that caught my eye about this VCD and got me excited was this:



See the error? Honestly, I would have been more excited about getting "The Best of Countre & Western Songs" instead of the animated special. There is a good chance I'll never find the disc that the error was derived from (which was likely a karaoke VCD), but I can dream!



Well, well, look at this artwork! A square blurry wreath, and a title glowing with green toxic waste. There were about six volumes of this, but I only picked up the first one. I don't need all six.



These are all public domain Christmas specials that nobody wants to watch, all encoded with Dolby Digital which I'm guessing was the standard back in the 1940s. The crowning jewel of this one was stupidly titled "Santa in Animal Land" which was made in 1948. This was from Santa's glam days, as he wore heavy eye-liner while touring with David Bowie.



This special was creepy as hell and has completely ruined the magic of Christmas for me, at least for this year. If you want to watch it, it's readily available on Youtube. There, I just ruined your Christmas too.

Anyway, I'm off to drink copious amounts of alcohol to try and forget the horrors of Santa in Animal Land. I shall see you after Christmas is done, and I've hopefully sobered up by then.