“Full episode” my foot. They left this scene out.
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Oh, not this crap again.
It seems like every year someone has to post a video or an article or even shove lyrics into the Christmas classic Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer insisting our hero must tell the bullies what to do with themselves. Specifically, Callahan is focused on the classic Rankin-Bass version of the story, a Christmas special I have done my own review of here at BW Media Spotlight back when I still had time to make videos. It’s still one of my favorite Christmas specials. It’s not perfect. I even noted in my review that Santa’s grumpiness was out of character and young Rudolph seems to suffer from it among other things. Maybe this sets up The Year Without A Santa Claus or something?
I haven’t seen the Billy Joel documentary she talks about, but I was a bully victim myself, and psychological warfare was their tool at the time. For the record I actually get along with some of them now as they matured and became better people. Even Flash Thompson became Peter Parker’s friend eventually in the Spider-Man comics. Stephen King should have been so lucky given the bullies in his stories. I know in real life what Rudolph went through in fiction. I just hate the idea that Rudolph should have told them to fly off because he “suddenly became useful”. It’s a bad interpretation and once again I have to speak on it.
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For the record I don’t hate the song. Maybe I miss the monotony everyone else hears because I don’t get out much these days and have my own music playlist, which I think does include that song. Fair warning.
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I’m not going to tell you that Supergirl is one of my top superheroes, but I do really like her when done right. Kara Zor-El, last survivor of a chunk of Krypton that flew off into space and gave science the finger until science pushed back by turning the place into Kryptonite clearly has a tragic history. In a couple of other versions, Argo City or something similar survives in a pocket dimension or something, and Kara has to get home. There’s also the “Matrix” Supergirl, a protoplasmic being created in a pocket dimension post-Crisis On Infinite Earths, when DC decided messing with their “no multiverse” change was less objectionable than not messing with their “no Kryptonians except Kal-El” rule, which might have been the wrong choice, but she certainly has her fans and I like what little I saw of her…until her story went into this weird twist involving angels, demons, a suicidal girl who was part of a two-person cult, and someone who may or may not be God because they really don’t care about Biblical accuracy in the Big Two anymore. There’s a reason I dropped that title pretty early.
One of the defenses I see for the James Gunn version of Kara, and make no mistake that Gunn is seriously influencing this despite not being the screenwriter or director but is promoting the hell out of…himself again mostly, and using Tom King’s Woman Of Tomorrow comic is that this version of Kara, born of the DC plague that is the New 52, is finally addressing watching her people die. The pain has clearly gotten to her and the only direction you can take her is a broken, self-destructive, angry girl who needs to learn to be better. To quote Colonel Potter from M*A*S*H, horse hockey.
The Kara Zor-El I knew pre-Crisis and the original Matrix version of Supergirl both suffered loss. They were also good, caring people who attached themselves to something familiar like family or the alternate universe version of her creator. As I wrote recently, Supergirl and Captain “Shazam” Marvel were seriously altered in the New 52 and that’s the version Tom King turned into someone who shunned her family in favor of going off to get drunk on an alien planet with a lower drinking age in his Supergirl: Woman Of Tomorrow miniseries. King is notorious for “breaking the toys”, making Mister Miracle suicidal, anti-drug hero The Protector into an addict to deal with the stress of his mission in a story where a freaked out Wally West kills a bunch of people at a superhero therapy retreat accidentally then has to die to rectify the situation and create an alternate timeline counterpart, and having Bane trick Catwoman into leaving Batman at the altar because he “needs his pain”, which is clearly just Bane ruining Bruce’s life again. (Bane is the TRUE master of “prep time”.) That’s not even all of it, but this isn’t about King, it’s about his Supergirl story and why I reject the idea that adding trauma to Supergirl’s backstory means making her a self-destructive, rage-filled party bitch.
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First, let me show you the trailer.
And this is being distributed by Angel Studios, who I thought would know better given their previous original productions. If you don’t understand the problem, the Critical Drinker (who as you’ll recall swears) explains everything.
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Understand that I’m a big “Weird Al” Yankovic fan. There are easily bigger fans, but I do enjoy his parodies and even his original songs that parody song styles. “One More Minute” is one of my favorite Weird Al songs, and it’s about all the personal mutilation he’d rather do to himself than supposedly spend time with his new ex. Being a dark comedy song doesn’t bother me.
Being a dark Christmas song, however, will.
And it’s not parody that bothers me. Just this week I added an Irish drinking song about not giving Guinness to a reindeer to warm them up, or at least Santa’s magic flying reindeer that can talk. You’ll find other parodies in my “BW Yule Log” playlist. I can allow for a bit of silliness. This is supposed to be as much about having fun as honoring our Savior’s birth.
It’s just something about Al’s two Christmas songs, “Christmas At Ground Zero” and especially “The Night Santa Went Crazy” where the accordion legend and I have to part ways. In the continued spirit of “don’t get me wrong”, I’m not even saying you are a bad person if you make it part of your Christmas music playlist. Nothing wrong with the songs and I don’t think Al is trying to attack the holiday or the Christ child or anything extreme like that. It’s just for me, while amusing on their own, they don’t really put me in a festive spirit because of how dark they are. Let’s go over them and I’ll explain.
