I spent the last two weeks cobbling this together for Drink Special’s Christmas in July event last night at Bar Mattachine in downtown L.A. And while it was cool to see something I’d stitched together projected onto the wall, probably bigger than anything else I’d had a hand in making, I’m also putting the video online, just because a few people have enjoyed my past videos. And who knows? Maybe this will come in handy in a few months, when you’re planning your own holiday party and you want to play some wallpaper video that encourages people to point and say, “Hey, I also remember this thing!”
The Drink Special party had its own soundtrack, so while VHSmas was playing on a loop you couldn’t hear the soundtrack I included with it. That’s okay. The music in the video is really just placeholder music anyway, and I feel like anyone playing this at parties will probably just mute it and put on their own Christmas music instead.
In case you’re wondering, here is a list of the TV shows and movies I included, in order of when each first appears in the montage.
- The 1964 Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special
- The Nutcracker Fantasy (read more about this high-octane nightmare fuel here)
- 1974’s other Rankin/Bass special, The Year Without Santa Claus
- Gremlins
- A Muppet Family Christmas
- Black Christmas (1974 version)
- A fairly unknown 1984 slasher movie called Don’t Open Till Christmas
- 1984's Christmas Top of the Pops, featuring Baltimora
- 1977’s The Carpenters at Christmas
- The Star Wars Holiday Special
- The “Tendo Family Christmas Scramble” episode of Ranma 1/2
- The finale to Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
- Ann-Marget on an unidentified Christmas special from 1981
- The Joan Collins sequence from the 1972 Tales From the Crypt movie
- The video for “Christmas in Hollis,” by Run–D.M.C.
- The video for “Last Christmas” by Wham
- “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” the show’s original Christmas special
- “Christmas at Pee-Wee’s Playhouse”
- A Charlie Brown Christmas
- “The Bird! The Bird!” — the premiere episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show
- National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
- Sailor Moon S: The Movie
- Scrooged
- White Christmas
- An amazing Philip Morris video about marketing cigarettes that I think I passed off as Christmassy well enough
- The Solid Gold Christmas specials from 1983 and 1985
- He-Man & She-Ra: A Christmas Special
- How the Grinch Stole Christmas
- Babes in Toyland (1986 version)
- Batman Returns
- The video for the original version of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You”
- Bing Crosby's Merrie Olde Christmas (1977)
- The 1989 Christian Lacroix fall-winter fashion show
- Profondo Rosso
- Die Hard
- The Snowman (1982)
- This 1951 Russian cartoon that may or may not be an adaptation of The Night Before Christmas
- Christmas Comes to Pac-Land (1982)
- “Koopa Klaus,” the Christmas episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super
- “Miracle at the Teen Club,” the Beverly Hills Teens Christmas special
- “Christmas Memories,” the holiday special for Heathcliff and the Cadillac Cats
- A Christmas Story
- A 1980 clip of Kate Bush performing a Christmas version of “Babooshka”
- The video for Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love,” which it should be noted was originally written as a Christmas song
- The Christmas Toy (1986)
- A Claymation Christmas Celebration (1987)
I’m not listing all the commercials separately because there are simply too many of them and I found them all in these treasure trove YouTube clips of old broadcast commercials broadcast around the holidays. But ask if there’s something you want identified. And feel free to use this montage as you will.
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