The Christmas Toy 1986

[6.0/10] What a bizarre, fever dream of a holiday special this is. The Christmas Toy finishes better than it starts, with a heartwarming dose of that trademark Jim Henson sap, and the special’s best song. But along the way, it is a cavalcade of unlikable characters, strange dynamics, and downright dark choices.

Let’s start with the most glaring problem in this one. Rugby the Tiger is unlikable for 85% of the Special. He’s conceited and thinks he’s better than the rest of the toys. He’s ungrateful when scads of his fellow playthings risk their necks to save him. And his attitude is just off-putting, where he’s rude to everyone who tries to help him and feels entitled to be the fabled “Christmas Toy” for the rest of his days.

I get that for a transformation story to mean something, you have to have the character start some place they can grow from. But Rugby is like this for most of the runtime, so even if you like where he ends up, you have to spend *a lot*of time with an unpleasant and unrepentant protagonist for the bulk of the special. And more than that, Rugby doesn’t do much to earn his redemption or have a change of heart, with his empathizing with Apple, the doll he replaced, and expressing his appreciation for Mew, the cat toy he’s been so rude to, coming very late in the day.

That's the other thing, Rugby, like pretty much all the other toys, is bigoted against poor Mew for being a cat toy, and it’s really jarring. Again, characters need something to grow from, so while it would be in keeping with Rugby’s repugnant personality for him to hold that prejudice only to let go of it later, what’s striking is how *all*of the toys treat Mew poorly and say that he smells on account of him not being a “people toy”. Even the characters we’re supposed to like!

Which is funny, because Mew is the character I like most of all. He’s put-upon, but earnest; frightened but courageous, and underappreciated but determined to do good. He’s a better friend than Rugby deserves, something even the arrogant tiger toy acknowledges eventually. Maybe the racism he’s forced to suffer serves to make him more sympathetic. Whatever the reason, the noble little mouse is a keeper.

The other player here worth hanging onto is Apple, the baby doll who was discarded in favor of Rugby the Xmas before. Again, she’s treated pretty shabbily by our protagonist, but still risks her life to help him out, because she knows how hard it is to be the former favorite toy discarded for the flavor of the month, and wants to help Rugby cope with the same epiphany, no matter how rude he is to her. Once more, it’s better than the tiger plush deserves, but makes Apple one of the few characters here worth rooting for.

All of that said, it can’t go unremarked upon how much A Christmas Story presages Toy Story, despite the two being separated by almost a decade. The similarities play out in the big stuff. This is, after all, a tale about a favored classic toy who feels threatened when a new space-themed figure arrives to blow up his spot. It centers on toys who hang around and do their own thing when the humans aren't around, and share a certain amount of anxiety that arises when it’s time for the kids of the family to get new presents. It even has the “play dead” and “avoid detection” elements as they evade the notice of their human counterparts.

But it also plays out in the little stuff. The fact that there’s a Barbie-style doll is perhaps no shock given the toy’s reality popularity. It’s strange, however, when she dons a full-blown Bo Peep outfit. While he’s not a villain, the presence of an old bear who hobbles around with a cane is the forerunner to Lotso in Toy Story 3. And god help us all, Apple’s sorrowful, musical recollection of when she was supplanted as the little girl’s preferred plaything is the earlier echo of the Jesse the Cowgirl’s famed “When She Loved Me” sequence.

I would not, by any means, go so far as to accuse the Pixar team of plagiarism. These are traditional enough tropes to be playing with across multiple eras of all-ages stories. But the commonalities between the two works are downright eerie.

That goes down to the fact that both get surprisingly dark, albeit in different ways. I gotta tell you, I balked when I realized that the playthings in The Christmas Toy effectively die if they’re spotted by humans out of place. At one point in the special, a dopey clown gets caught unawares and collapses, while the film time lapses his limp body. He’s then carted away and dumped into a makeshift mass grave for the toys who’ve suffered the same fate. Holy shit, folks.

I get that the special needs to establish stakes for what our heroes are risking by sneaking off to the living room to try to disrupt/save Xmas. And I get that, through the mysteries of a loving song at the end of the piece, all of the seemingly departed toys are revived and get to join the merriment. But good lord, the whole thing takes a dark turn rather quickly, with the other toys wringing their hands over the misadventures of their living room-exploring brethren, while the dead bodies of their departed friends lay in the foreground. If you or a loved one has been traumatized by the dead playthings in The Christmas Toy, you may be entitled to compensation.

Meanwhile, the sheer craft of the piece is a mixed bag. The songs are forgettable and trite for the most part, removing one of the prime boons of muppet productions. The exception is the closing “Old Friends, New Friends” song which, while manipulative, still warms even the coldest of critics’ hearts. What can I say? Credit where it’s due.

The puppets themselves, though, are wildly hit or miss. Mew has an endearingly scraggly look to him, and the creativity on display in how Henson and company bring a whole playroom’s worth of toys to life cannot be denied. But the glass eyes of Rugby, the expressionless mouth of Apple, and the creepy visage of Meteora in particular, all veer into the uncanny valley in a way felt-founded presentations usually avoid.

The cinematherapy isn’t bad though! The showpiece scene in The Christmas Toy comes when Rugby ventures out to pay his respects to Mew, who’s been spotted and thus frozen like the redshirt clown before him. His admission that he was not appreciative enough or worthy of Mew’s friendship is the most humility the otherwise self-centered plush shows. His lament of his departed brother in arms has more pathos than the rest of the special combined. And director Eric Till’s ambition to follow the stuffed tiger, circling around Mew’s death bed in synchronous orbit with Rugby himself, adds a striking quality to one toy’s lament for another. It’s not the only ambitious camera move in the piece, and it's the artistic element of the special that comes off the best.

You could reach the end of this puppet fest and think to yourself, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad.” It ends on a cheery note, with all the toys revived and reunited, and even a benediction from the little girl herself declaring that she loves all her toys. Them joining with none other than Kermit to sing the special’s best song together tugs the heartstrings. But to credit such sap completely is to ignore the strange waking nightmare, led by a largely-contemptible protagonist, that is The Christmas Toy. Maybe leave this one in the toybox.

(As an aside, as the special’s strange plot gradually unfolded, and Apple the doll revealed that the little girl declares a new favorite toy every Xmas, I was half-expecting the puppet crew to decide that their owner was a fickle master and choose to revolt and/or escape rather than be subject to her whims for yet another holiday season. But I guess that would be a bridge too far for even this bizarre yuletide tale.)