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Well…this is awkward.
When I first wrote this review, it opened with Cynicism saying “Bad news, Shelf. Since you shat on Rudolph last week, Patreon’s taking money AWAY from you. If you don’t say more nice things about this week’s special, we’re going to have to file for bankruptcy.” Just a fun little way of letting you know today’s post is going to be a bit less harsh than the previous one.
But then I checked my Patreon hours after the Rudolph review went up, and the numbers had shrunk substantially.
It actually happened.
A silly one-off joke I wrote to ease you, the reader, into the review, accidentally came true.
It’s like the universe itself is punishing me for daring to not like Rudolph.
Okay, the truth of the matter is a bit more complicated than that, but nobody actually quit being a patron based on my feelings towards Rudolph, for which I am relieved and grateful for. It’s already been sorted out and I certainly don’t hold this mishap against anyone because of events beyond their control.
Anyway, enough of my rambling. If you can’t already tell, today’s holiday outing is Frosty The Snowman.
Frosty, Frosty, Frosty…yeah, not a big fan of this one either.
“YOU HATE FROSTY TOO, YOU MONSTER?!”
“I didn’t say THAT!”
Frosty, like Rudolph, was another Rankin-Bass special I lost my taste for due to forced overexposure. It’s light on story and character, the animation is nothing to write home over, and we trade a bunch of subpar songs for one song dragged across the entire affair. But I’ll give it this over Rudolph:
- It’s shorter. Slashed right down the middle of Rudolph’s runtime, Frosty’s only twenty-five minutes of schmaltzy bland holiday fare instead of nearly an hour.
- The only jerk in the special is the clear-cut villain, who’s the most fun character in this thing.
- The cheap stop-motion has been replaced by cheap traditional animation. Not much of an exchange, I’ll take any crumbs of hand-drawn goodness I can get these days.
If I may elaborate on the latter, the designs for the characters and backgrounds are kind of interesting. The man behind them is Paul Coker Jr., who also created comics for MAD Magazine, hence why the characters have a bit of a unique geometric aesthetic but are still kind of…weird-looking. Alfred E. Neuman wouldn’t feel out of place among this cast.
Up On The Shelf 