The Berenstain Bears’ First Ever Special!

To start off my second day of reviews, I watched a special I had never seen, but came highly recommended by my girlfriend. The Berenstain Bears’ Christmas Tree was, from what I can tell, the very first animated TV episode the characters ever appeared in, and in true form they chose to start things off with a bang by going with a Christmas episode. While this is a Christmas centric episode, this was animated back in 1979, long before the Berenstain Bears switched their focus from family life to Christianity. So rather than being preachy, it is more about family and community than about God and Jesus. But now let’s get to the point here, what is the special about?

Cover of the VHS tape I watched it on

This special takes place on Christmas Eve day. Papa Bear has just returned home from fishing and has caught himself a very big Christmas Salmon, and after putting it in the fridge, he and his family get out all of their Christmas decorations to put up around the house. They pull out all of the boxes from all over the house, and are now ready to decorate their tree, except, low and behold, they haven’t picked one up yet. Papa Bear tells his children, Brother and Sister Bear, to get dressed, as they are going out to get themselves the biggest, fattest, straightest tree they can find. Mother Bear dresses her cubs warmly, as she senses snow in the air, and that a storm may be on the horizon. The three bears leave their house (Itself a large, hollowed out tree), and while the cubs think they are going to buy a tree from Grizzly Gus, the local vendor, Papa has a plan of his own. He grabs his axe and tells the kids they are going to go cut one down themselves. The cubs are luke warm about the idea at first, but Papa brings them around to his way of thinking by singing them a song, and they go marching up into the mountains to find a tree.

The Bear trio marching into the mountains

The first tree they come across after walking for a while looks great! It’s big, and fat and tall, and everything else he’s been looking for. But just as he’s swinging his axe, Sister Bear yells at him to stop. Papa Bear looks down and sees that their is a mailbox out front of the tree, and realizes the tree is the home of a skunk. Papa looks closer and notices that not only does a skunk live in it, but so do some squirrels, and chipmunks and a family of crows. He picks up his axe and moves on, realizing it would be wrong to cut down the home of all of those critters, because it is their Christmas too! The three bears keep walking and singing, and eventually come across another fine looking tree. Again, as Papa is about to cut it down, he stops when a large eagle pokes its head out of the tree. Turns out the tree is home to an eagle and a falcon, and they are none too pleased to see a bear with an axe standing in front of their home. The eagle chases them away from the tree and even throws Papa’s axe at him! (I was unsure what they were going for here. As much as this was a cartoon, the flying axe was a little too crazy for my tastes. The rest of the special is grounded in a sense, but when the bears duck under the axe, it hits a tree stump and digs pretty far into it! It is implied that if they hadn’t ducked, it would have cut them pretty seriously, so I personally think the axe bit wasn’t needed)

The flying axe, getting dangerously close to Papa and the cubs

By this time, the snow has started coming down, and it is really starting to come down pretty hard. Brother and Sister tell Papa they should just turn around, but Papa is obsessed with finding a perfect tree (They show this by making Papa’s eyes change into dancing Christmas trees every so often) At long last, Papa comes across a tree that is magnificent! It is huge, it is more than fat, and is very straight! Brother and Sister love it! Papa raises his axe, and is about to take a swing when he sees a tiny window in the trunk of the tree. He peeks inside and sees a bird, with his own little family, spending time together and decorating their own teeny tiny little tree! That’s when Papa realizes he shouldn’t have been wasting his day looking for the perfect tree, he should have just bought a tree and spent the day with his family decorating and having fun, instead of freezing their butts off in the mountains! Papa tells the kids it’s time to go buy a tree from Gus and go home, so he cuts out 3 pairs of skis from a nearby stump and the bears go down the mountain back to town. By the time they get their however, Gus has packed up his shop and there are no trees left for sale. Sister Bear is about to cry, but then she looks over at their house only to see that all of the forest animals whose houses they had spared that afternoon, have decorated the Bear’s tree of a house to be one giant Christmas tree! Then all of the animals sing a song with the Bear family, and the Christmas star rises in the sky, making a perfect star for the top of their tree.

The top of their decorated tree house, complete with Christmas Star

So what category does this special fall under? Well, it is basically a one off episode that is used to get a message across. The message the episode tries to get across is that it is more important to spend time with your loved ones than it is to obsess over the little details, like how perfect your tree is, or whether you cut it down yourself or bought it at a lot. For a family of Bears that has recently turned very preachy, they do a very good job of getting such a sweet message across without resorting to religion to bring the message home. The special is chock full of songs to keep the little ones entertained, and while they certainly aren’t of a Disney calibre, they are catchy enough and kind of cute. The episode clocks in at just under a half hour, which is the perfect amount of time for this episode. Any longer and it may have become boring or slightly over the top.

Overall, I would recommend this special to anyone looking to watch a sweet Christmas special that isn’t about the joy of giving over receiving, rather, it focuses on the importance of families during the holidays, and the time that should be spent together, not appart. It is perfect to watch with kids and adults alike.

Jolly Snowflake Day!

Jolly Snowflake Day everyone! Yes, because it was the first TV show boxed set I grabbed off of my shelf today, my first review will be of the classic Clone High episode “Snowflake Day: A Very Special Holiday Episode”, which happens to be episode 11 of Clone High’s one and only season.

The main characters of Clone High

For those who do not know of the show, Clone High was a cartoon that aired on MTV in the States, and on Teletoon in Canada. As I previously mentioned, it ran for only one 13 episode season in the 2002-2003 television season. Like most MTV cartoons, it was aimed at ages 15 and up, and is not for children.

Done in a high school soap opera style, the show was about clones of famous historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Joan of Arc, Cleopatra and John F. Kennedy. They all attend the same high school, and the show focussed on the problems and pressures that they encounter as not only teenagers, but clones of such great historical figures. Rather than take itself seriously, the show was mainly a parody of popular teenage dramas like Beverly Hills 90210 and The O.C, and usually poked fun at the “Very Special” episodes of such shows. In fact, most episodes started with “Tonight, on a very special Clone High….”. It was a very funny show that was cancelled before it’s time, but that’s enough about the show, and now on to the special!

The story focusses on our main character Abe (Abraham Lincoln), and his attempts to make money to buy a great Snowflake Day present for his girlfriend Cleo (Cleopatra), while Abe’s friend Joan (Joan of Arc) struggles to see why she should care about this holiday, what with her house having just burned down, and now she and her adoptive dad have to move in with Cleo, whom Joan does not get along with. That’s the basic plot, but I can hear you asking yourselves, what is Snowflake Day? In the town of Exclamation! U.S.A, where our show takes place, Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanza have been done away with for being exclusionary, and everyone now celebrates Snowflake Day! The holiday’s mascot is Snowflake Jake, a salty pirate. If you are good, Snowflake Jake will bring you spices to spice up your Snowflake Day holiday meats! He doesn’t come down your chimney like Santa though, but instead, in true pirate fashion, he fires your spices from his ship using his cannon!

Snowflake Jake, this holiday's mascot!

Anyways, now that you know what Snowflake Day is, we’ll get back to the plot. Cleo expects Abe to get her a very big and expensive gift for Snowflake Day, and he is to give it to her at her anual Snowflake Day party. Joan is also expected to attend this party, even though her and Cleo are enemies, because she is living at Cleo’s house, and because Cleo wants Joan to be a server at the party. Abe has no money and gets a job at the mall with his best friend Gandhi with the hopes that he can make enough money to buy Cleo something great. While working at a restaurant, Abe and Gandhi accidentally invent the Knork, a half knife, half fork utensil. As you may have guessed, combining those two utensils doesn’t really work, and in trying to market the item, Abe wastes all of his money. Gandhi helps Abe realize however, that maybe what he should get for Cleo is something from the heart. Abe makes Cleo a gift and bring it to her party. In the meantime, Joan has been angry about living with Cleo, and ends up meeting a very attractive homeless girl who happens to look an awful lot like Mandy Moore (This episode’s special guest star). The homeless girl takes Joan to Joan’s old home, now just charred rubble, and inside she finds a group of homeless people celebrating the holiday, even without any spices. Joan realizes she isn’t so bad off after all and that she should go to the people she loves, back at Cleo’s house. The episode comes to its end with The Homeless girl leading everyone into the basement because they all hear the cannon fire of Snowflake Jake! The episode ends with everyone wondering whether or not The Homeless girl is some kind of holiday angel, while she and her homeless friends are stealing everything of value from Cleo.

Our cast with their new friend, Homeless Mandy Moore

Snowflake Day: A Very Special Holiday Episode, is a combination of two of the styles of Christmas Specials. It is a “Very Special” episode (as indicated by it’s name), trying to show one of the characters the true meaning of the holidays, as well as being a regular episode that does further certain plot elements of the show, and is part of the show’s cannon, not at all a one off episode. Since this show is a spoof of teen dramas, it’s “Very Special” elements mainly poke fun at how absurd and preachy most episodes of that style can be, complete with celebrity guest star and a lesson in the true meaning of the holiday. It’s hard to judge how well it got its point across, because really, this show was just trying to make fun of episodes that try to teach a lesson. In it’s mockery, however, it is spot on, and people who watch a lot of TV shows will definitely get a kick out of this take on a Very Special episode.

This is a great holiday episode for fans of the show, but isn’t one I’d recommend for people not familiar with the show or it’s characters. It is fairly ingrained in the show’s overall story arc, and might be hard to understand for people not familiar with the comedy style of the show and its characters. However, since there is only one season of this show that could easily be watched in a few hours, I recommend that those of you who haven’t watched Clone High give it a chance. By the time you make it to this episode, you’ll more than likely be a fan of this very funny show.