“Beware the Ragman If You Stay Up Late!” (or — A Most Fanciful Flavorof Nightmare Fuel)

EDIT: This post gets a quite a few clicks from people looking for high-quality video from the movie. If this is you, click here to check out a new post where with a better version of the Ragman clip.

Surely, some language must have a word for those dimly remembered childhood events that seem so surreal that you suspect you remember them wrong — that you’re actually remembering a dream, maybe, or that the passage of time and your stupid child brain have jumbled the details. If no word exists, then I motion that one should be created, specifically so I can more easily explain the half-remembered movies and TV shows that I saw on early cable, back when I was too young to be in charge of the remote. Even when the programming was intended for children, the deeper recesses of the cableverse exposed me to some wild stuff.

And one of the weirdest would have to be Nutcracker Fantasy, a Sanrio-produced, stop-motion retelling of The Nutcracker that seesawed wildly between cheerfully colorful and horrifically dark.

The trailer for the Japanese version hints at these extremes.

The version I saw had been dubbed in English. Melissa Gilbert voiced Clara, years before she’d return to voicework playing Batgirl on Batman: The Animated Series. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, Eva Gabor provided the voice of the Queen of Time, whom I have no memory of but who seems like someone that should exist in a Japanese retelling of The Nutcracker, I guess. The page also notes that the film is often mistaken for being a Rankin-Bass production. It’s not, but it’s just as creepy; those puppets herka-jerking around onscreen tread into Uncanny Valley territory just as easily as anything you’d see in Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.

I found one YouTube user who’d posted three of the film’s more beautiful segments — and they do look beautiful.

Sanrio spared no expense on the sets, and this miniature world is one kids should probably like. However, like I said, this movie has a dark side. Even scarier than the snarling Mouse King is another character unique to this version of The Nutcracker: the Ragman, a horrifying boogeyman who haunts the opening few minutes of the film and who walks the streets at night, preying upon children impudent enough to stay up past their bedtime. Believe me, it’s no exaggeration that this clip was posted with the simple description: “Welcome to the worst 2.5 minutes I experienced as a two-year-old.”

Long after I forgot about the rest of this movie, the Ragman lingered. I cannot tell you how many nights of my young life were spent trying hard not to think about the Ragman out of worry that I’d accidentally summon him, because that’s how these kind of things work. It didn’t occur to me that my house existed far from the quaint cobblestone streets that he walked on and that boogeyman can’t fly on airplanes. Watching it today, I’m surprised how accurately I remember it: It’s essentially as scary as I remember.

The quality of that clip isn’t great, but I did find a supercut of the scariest scenes from Nutcracker Fantasy that more clearly demonstrates the Ragman doing his awful thing. The supercut is, alas, set to Orgy’s cover of “Blue Monday,” which you may remember from the I Still Know What You Did Last Summer soundtrack and which exists in a different sector of my brain’s vaguely remembered pop cultural experiences. Still, you get to see more of the Ragman doing his thing as well as other ways the film’s director sought to counteract the candy-colored sweetness of the other scenes.

Rock out and enjoy:

Miscellaneous notes:

• If I remember correctly, Clara’s flights into fantasy land are the result from a terrible fever. Because fevers are magic. Go get a fever, kids!
• Two other inappropriately terrifying scenes from movies intended for children? The Jabberwocky scene from the 1985 version of Alice in Wonderland and the “Bunyip Moon” sequence from Dot and the Red Kangaroo. Go, watch, experience my trauma.
• The English version also includes a performance by Jo Anne Worley as Queen Morphia, and I think there’s a joke in there somewhere but I have yet to find it.
• The person who uploaded the Japanese Nutcracker Fantasy clips has collected a whole lot of older Japanese cartoons. There’s one titled “The Phantom Ship” that’s worth watching — every bit as beautiful and disturbing as the Ragman scenes. Silhouettes are creepy too, just not as much as stop-motion puppets.
• I appreciate how this poster advertising the Japanese release skews more creepy than cheerful.
  
  
  
  
  
• Finally, this little ambulatory strawberry bears a striking resemblance to Toad from Super Mario Bros., don’t you think?

Encyclopedia Drew and the Mystery of the Knock-Off Clock

(A narrative of obscured origins.)

Where to begin?

I have websites saved on my list of Google bookmarks that I cannot remember saving. Nor can I remember why I found it necessary to save these sites for later viewing. Like this: the Wikipedia page for the fictional card game Cripple Mr. Onion, which I saved on December 13, 2006. I have no clue why. I don’t play cards and I have almost no awareness of the works of Terry Pratchett, from which the game originated — and, for all I know, remains.

Other things have meaning, but I can’t remember why or how the entered my life. This post concerns this type of mysterious bookmark — specifically one concerning Cinnamoroll.

A quick Google search tells me — and likely you too! — that Cinnamoroll is a Sanrio character, which apparently means he exists in the same universe as Hello Kitty. I have almost no understanding of the Sanrioverse. In fact, the closest my personal universe has ever come to treading into this land of things anthropomorphic, big-headed, and relentlessly cheerful was a girl in my seventh grade class who had a Sanrio-themed pencil set. She was mocked ceaselessly, even after the pencil set stopped going to school with her.

Regardless of whether I acknowledge the Sanrioverse or not, Wikipedia tell us that Cinnamoroll is “a white puppy with long ears that enable him to fly, blue eyes, and a plump and curly tail that resembles a cinnamon roll. He starred in his own anime movie which was released in autumn 2007. Some people mistake Cinnamoroll for a rabbit because of his long ears and rabbit-like looks. Cinnamoroll was created in 2001.”

Somehow, I or someone who knows me stumbled onto a YouTube clip of a Japanese commercial for a Cinnamoroll toy. Now, I am not an eight-year-old girl, but to this day the toy looks like one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.

Call it good marketing. I don’t know if it’s the jingle or the fact that doll seems to be powered by, among other things, a motorized ass, but I can’t help but think this toy must be amazing. If it had been available to a younger me, I would have demanded it and then told no one that I had it. Its mechanobutt would drive it to countless flips and twirls in my room — my own private dancer. Also, in my imagination of how this would go, it would sing the song from the commercial and move in time with it.

Somehow — whether before The Age of Cinnamoroll or during, I’m not sure — my house came into possession of an alarm clock that looks a hell of a lot like Cinnamoroll, though just enough unlike him that its creators would avoid a lawsuit. The alarm clock lives in Aly’s room, though knock-off Sanrio appliances aren’t really her thing.

One day last summer, while I was home and bored, I took photos and videos of various strange things in the house and included in the long list of subjects was the Pseudo-Cinnamoroll alarm clock. As a YouTube user informed me via comment, the clock is Korean, not Japanese, thus more points in favor of the theory that it’s a knock-off.

The video has been viewed 435 times since I posted it in July. This itself I find strange, that 435 people would sit through even a short video of an alarm clock making noise. But I must remind myself that people will watch anything on YouTube. Even the video I took to document our downstairs neighbor covering A Taste of Honey’s “Boogie Oogie Oogie,” which I posted under the title “not worth your attention, this video” and with no tags, still managed to get sixteen views. (Yes, she had no idea I took the video. No, you can’t see her in the video so I don’t think it’s creepy. Yes, all the sound was recorded from within the walls of my house, which means she was singing too loudly. And no, she doesn’t do a very good job, but that wouldn’t stop her from singing the song as loudly as she could — often repeatedly but sometimes alternating with “Son of a Preacher Man.”) No comments have yet clarified whether the character is supposed to be Cinnamoroll or just something that happens to look just like him.

I am personally unable to say which came first — the Cinamoroll clip or the clock — but both have been languishing on the Google bookmark list and I felt they needed to be freed and shared with the world. Spencer or Aly could probably talk me through how the house apparently became fixated upon them for a period, but until then, they shall remain parts of one of the stranger and more Asian-influences Encyclopedia Drew mysteries yet.

EDIT: The story has been clarified, not that any of you all were on the edge of your seats. Aly received the clock from a roommate some time before she moved in here. The Cinnamoroll video was found in an effort to look into what character the clock was ripping off. While Spencer was in Hong Kong, he took some photos of licensed, legal uses of Cinnamoroll’s image. He — she? — apparently shares equal standing with Hello Kitty nowadays.



Previous Encyclopedia Drew mysteries:

• The Phantom Skull
• The Mixed-Up Currency
• The Troublesome Tang
• The Look-Alike Cats
• The Barfing Bathtub
• The Rabbit-Eared Woman