Short Film: Grandma (voice: Susan Blu), gets run over by Santa’s sleigh and then disappears. With her out of the way, Cousin Mel (voice: Michele Lee) attempts to sell the family store and destroy Christmas. It is up to grandson Jake (voice: Alex Doduk) to find Grandma.
The song Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer was recorded by Elmo and Patsy (husband-and-wife Elmo Shropshire and Patsy Trigg) in 1979, and elicited a few laughs, or at least smiles. It’s a novelty song, and like most everything done by Weird Al or Spike Jones, it’s mildly entertaining once or twice. After that it gets old very quickly. For many, this joke country song was never funny. Even for those who think it’s a “hoot,” the humor just barely stretches to three minutes. It’s hard to think of a piece of material that less needed expanding to fifty minutes. Oh well.
To fill out the extra forty-seven minutes, we’re introduced to bland, clichéd, humorless characters, crudely animated, that do exactly what I knew they would after the first few minutes. There are no new jokes. It only has what the song had to offer (and remember, that’s three minutes of so-so humor). There is a court scene, a lot of standing around in Grandma’s store, and quite a bit of Cousin Mel gloating. None of it is entertaining. Much of it is embarrassing. I find it embarrassing to be part of a society where this dreck is thought worthy of network broadcast time. It’s embarrassing to live in a country where something so inferior can be produced. And it’s embarrassing to be part of a species that has not hunted down and destroyed everyone connected to this atrocity.
Is that a bit too strong? Watch it and you won’t think so. Better yet, don’t watch it.