Jason F.C. Clarke

Your seasonal reminder that I have operated a Snow Miser fan site since the twentieth century.

The Snow Miser is a character from the 1974 Rankin-Bass holiday special The Year Without a Santa Claus – one of dozens of holiday specials I watched over and over as a kid. I created The Snow Miser’s Cooler in response to a Geocities Heat Miser fansite that is long gone (sort of still around, I guess?). I am a Snow Miser partisan, and it bugged me only the Heat Miser had a fansite, so I decided to use my fledgling HTML skills to correct that.

When I first created the site in 1999 while in in college, it was just hosted on my college account. Eventually I was able to purchase snowmiser.net, but snowmiser.com was taken. But when you keep a website up for decades, you can wait them out and eventually you’re able to nab snowmiser.com.

You can view a very early version of the site at the Internet Archive here. By this time, I had moved it to my parent’s Adelphia internet cable account.

I did not, at this time, understand what “the Big Chill” actually meant (i.e., death), as I had not then and still have not to this day watched the movie, and so I assumed it meant something like “chilling out,” and so I viewed “The Snow Miser’s Big Chill” as being something like “The Snow Miser’s Hangout.” More importantly, I hadn’t struck on the obvious “Snow Miser’s Cooler” pun yet.

My favorite thing I ever did on the site was host “Rumble Vote 2000,” a contest between the Snow Miser and the Heat Miser. This was a “sequel” to a previous “rumble” between the Winter Warlock* (of Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town) and the Bumble (from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer). As I recall, Heat Miser won by a few votes. The “results” page, which sadly was evidently never archived, was an odd little thing where I had edited an at-the-time CNN homepage to reflect the results of the vote. This was January 2001, so there were more than a few jokes about the recent controversy surrounding the Bush/Gore fiasco.

The other thing I love about the site, which has been on it since day one through every iteration, can be found at the bottom: This website is dedicated to my Dad, who used to dance around his college dorm room to the Snow Miser song.

*And if I’m being honest, my true favorite Rankin-Bass character.

Spoilers for Picard below.

I was excited as anyone for Picard, a series that served as a sequel to my favorite television series of all time (okay, it’s second to MST3K).

As hopeful as I was for it, I thought Picard was pretty uneven at best and downright bad at its worst.

One thing I realized was that Gene Roddenberry would have *loathed* this show. Not all of Roddenberry’s ideas about the future (e.g., that humanity would have moved beyond grieving) were great, and they certainly weren’t conducive to drama. But I have to say that I’ve quite had my fill of “the Federation isn’t the utopia you think it is” angle since Deep Space Nine introduced it in the ’90s. Every bit of Star Trek media since then has doubled down on this idea, including the reboot films.

I think there’s this sense among some people that the original Star Trek series was birthed in the midst of this period of optimism and big dreams for American society. This probably comes from the space race stuff that was going on at the time. But the show debuted three years after JFK’s assassination, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, at a time when American society was in upheaval. Star Trek offered a chance to see us as our best selves at a time when we weren’t.

I think we need that version of Star Trek again, and we needed the Picard of TNG, the humanist exemplar who represented our best selves. Instead, we got a show where that Picard is mocked, lectured and ridiculed (and sworn at) for those very qualities, and a Federation as incompetent and corrupt as much of our own world’s leaders.

I suspect the producers and writers were concerned today’s audiences would be too cynical to accept the TNG version of Picard, and that he had to be shown as flawed and arrogant and pompous or audiences would never take him or the show seriously. It’s the grimdark take on Star Trek, and it’s not something I’m that interested in.

To be clear, I’m not looking for a fairy tale. I think DS9 did a decent job, for most of its run, with wrestling with the ideas of utopia and its potential problems without dismissing the concept entirely. But similar to what happened to superhero comics in the ’80s and ’90s after Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Killing Joke and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, the later Star Trek creators became obsessed with the idea of the Federation being flawed. Maybe this is a reflection of American anxieties for the last thirty years, or maybe it’s the libertarianism that has historically run through so much American sci-fi asserting itself over Roddenberry’s utopianism, I don’t know. But I hope the next season of Picard can get back to some of the more hopeful views of our future. I’ve had enough of the post-apocalypse.

And on a less philosophical note, the show was just badly written at times. There were unbelievable coincidences, completely superfluous characters and subplots, and many unearned moments of pathos. It just needs better writing (and to be clear, bringing in Ronald D. Moore is not the answer).

One final note: the whole ludicrous rift-in-space-with-robotic-tentacles was such a ripoff of both the first Hellboy movie and the Mass Effect games that I can’t help but think it was intentional.

Original Air Date: December 8, 1974

Wikipedia Page

Synopsis: A sentient teenaged mouse named Albert sends an insulting letter to Santa Claus, causing Santa to spurn the entire town of Junctionville (sentient mice and humans alike). A clockmaker named Joshua Trundel concocts a scheme to build a big clock tower that will play a treacly Christmas song on Christmas Eve to placate St. Nick. The mayor not only signs on to this huge construction project but (presumably) spends a fortune in taxpayer money to get it built within weeks. Albert then breaks the damned clock, but fixes it in time for Santa’s arrival. Santa, pleased by this idolatry, rewards the townspeople with consumer goods they could have bought themselves for about 1% of the cost of building the clock tower.

Review: My fondness for this Christmas special, like my fondness for Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, is solely due to nostalgia. In particular, I seem to recall that this special would tend to air very close to Christmas itself, possibly on Christmas Eve, as my memories of it are very closely tied to the anticipation of Christmas morning. By that same token, however, watching this special felt more like an obligation than a pleasure.

Because it really is a pretty weak entry in the Christmas special canon. The story appears to have been inspired by the mere mention of a mouse in Clement Moore’s eponymous poem (and said mouse wasn’t even stirring). Santa comes off as a thin-skinned jerk for evidently writing off an entire town because a snotty teenager sent him a letter calling him a “fraudulent myth.” Since this is very clearly a world where Santa exists and delivers presents every year and everyone – including human adults – knows it, Albert’s predicament doesn’t play like the paean to faith it’s meant to be, but rather an instance of mental illness. One wonders whether Albert also believes the moon landing was faked and Sandy Hook was a false flag operation.

Of course, all of this takes a backseat to the utter insanity of Joshua Trundel’s plan to get back on Santa’s good side. If you found out Santa was insulted by a letter some kid in town wrote him, wouldn’t your first move be to, I don’t know, write him another letter saying the kid didn’t speak for all of you? Or give him a call, since evidently Santa has a phone (and a switchboard operator) in this universe? No, let’s build a clock tower in a matter of weeks that will play a song on Christmas Eve that will somehow entice Santa to stop by! To Trundel’s credit, the plan actually works, though again, the investment-to-gains results seem way off to me. I suppose if Santa continues to deliver free gifts every Christmas for the foreseeable future, the townspeople will get their money back in 40-50 years (especially if they find a way to monetize the clock tower – turn it into a tourist trap or something).

The songs aren’t as catchy or memorable as the ones from classics such as Rudolph (or even The Hobbit), but they will get stuck in your brain for days afterward. So there’s that.

I’ve made an effort to introduce my daughter (currently four years old) to the Christmas specials of my youth, and fortunately, we now live in an era where television shows and movies from decades ago are as accessible to new audiences as books have been for centuries. Five minutes into this show, though, and she was asking to watch Frosty again. Back in 1974 and through to the 1990s, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas benefited from being the only Christmas cartoon on network television for whatever half-hour it aired. You watched it because it was on. With the massive amount of on-demand content available today, this special has become less of a Christmas standard and more of a nostalgic curiosity.