It's now December so that means it's officially time for Christmas EVERYTHING! There's trees and elves and all that stuff. But one of the best parts of Christmas is all the specials on TV. I love them, especially all the stop-motion animation ones; so that means "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town", "The Year Without a Santa Claus", and of course, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". "Rudolph" is a classic; pretty much everyone I know loves it, but it's also a very weird special and I don't think enough people talk about just how weird and not happy it all is.
Let's start with Hermie the Elf. Hermie wants to be a dentist instead of spending his life in what is essentially a sweatshop making toys for no money. It's pretty courageous of him to tell his boss that he wants to unshackle himself from slave labor and learn a trade. But then his boss tells him that elves can't be dentists; which, if you ask me, is some Grade A internalized racism. But that also raises a larger question: if elves can't be dentists then who fixes their teeth? Do they just have perfect teeth all the time? Or are they like beavers where they have rootless teeth that never stop growing? If that's the case, how the hell did Hermie even find out what a dentist is? If the elves, presumably, don't need dentists then why would they need to know what they are? There are a lot of questions here.
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On the Island of Misfit Toys Rudolph and Hermie meet the inhabitants who are all toys who see themselves as worthless because they don't fit in, just like Rudolph and Hermie. But I don't get why these toys think they can't be played with. For example: one of the toys is a water gun filled with jelly and he believes that because he's filled with jelly that no child will want him; that makes no sense. If you've had a water gun in the past, or even if you haven't, you know that the water eventually runs out of it, and so the same thing would happen with this gun's jelly, and once all the jelly is gone then he can be refilled with water, problem solved. And another toy thinks no kid will want him because he's a Charlie-in-the-Box and not a Jack-in-the-Box, but does it even matter what his given name is? He has all the same functionality of a Jack-in-the-Box, so I don't see the problem here.
And finally we get to Rudolph. Rudolph is just like all the other reindeer except for his red-nose; and as a result he is ostracized from the reindeer society. I don't understand what the problem with his nose is. Rudolph is a member of a race of sentient, speaking, flying reindeer, but for some reason having a nose that lights up is where they draw the line as to what is acceptable. And so he makes friends with Hermie and they go on an adventure where they discover themselves and all that, and then they return just in time for Christmas to be cancelled by a big blizzard that Santa can't see through. And Santa then decides that Rudolph's light-up nose is useful to him and he then integrates Rudolph into the North Pole's social machine. Which is the real meaning of Rudolph; it attempts to pass itself off as being about the benefits of being yourself and being unique but it really isn't. "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is really about being shunned for being different until those same people find a way to exploit the very characteristic they looked down on you for.
Merry Christmas.
