Far Out There Looks At Christmas Lights – page 7
Okay, I don’t have all of the comics drawn as I write this, but I’m just gonna call it right now: this is my favorite one of the year. Looking at this just makes me happy. And I’m not even much of a fan of the Rankin/Bass Rudolph special, so it’s not any kind of nostalgia thing. I just find this image itself delightful.
Honestly, seeing this my first thought was that you saw the Abominable Snowman & had to make an image of Dr Jarre turning it into a monster.
I can also honestly say that I have (with a 99% certainty) never seen that movie. I only vaguely remembered seeing a face with that art style due to you mentioning it.
It’s not really a movie, so much as a 1-hour made for TV kids Special. Dates way back to the ancient days when kids specials were actually special (ie rare/valuable/unique/hard to find) There were maybe a half dozen total in existence (3 Rankin Bass stop motion animated, like this one, plus cartoon Grinch, Frosty, and Charlie Brown, as far as I can recall) there were only 3 broadcast channels, each special only came on once per Christmas Season, no reruns, and no VCR to tape it either. If you weren’t in front of the TV at that exact time once a year, it was a disaster – like missing Halley’s Comet and having to wait another 76 years for another chance. Childhood was much more difficult back in the olden days!
So, yeah, unlike Blitz, I have a great fondness for this monster. Much less so for the horrifically tacky plastic inflatables that have cropped up on lawns like holiday fungus the past couple decades (I would refer to them as an abomination, but that would actually be correct naming for this character, the Abominable Snow Monster). Nevertheless, despite that, this is certainly smileworthy 🙂
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_the_Red-Nosed_Reindeer_(TV_special)
Also, someone tell Dr. J you don’t wear a hat on your hat. Makes me suspect there’s some secret, like the hat is keeping her alive, or there’s a brain slug hiding under there, or, better yet, the Hat *is* Delia Jarre and what’s below it is just a construct she created to carry her around.
I don’t think it’s an age thing that prevented me from watching it, but a country thing. I live in Australia, and the one time I actually watched Superbowl Ads on the internet (because, again, different country where we don’t actually watch or care about the Superbowl) my reaction was “Those are just normal ads for here”. That said, my family had VCR’s in my early childhood, but Australia does tend to pick up most new technology faster than the rest of the world (Pay TV being the exception. Our Commercial TV was/is good enough that it took time to get any level of popularity, and never reached the “required” level it is elsewhere in the English Speaking World).
Actually, to roughly age myself, I remember playing the Original Mario Kart on the NES Console as one of my toddler-age memories.
I have also never seen the Cartoon Grinch or the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, though I do think I’ve seen the original Frosty Cartoon Special. If I haven’t, I’ve seen enough Frosty-related cartoons long enough ago to not know the difference.
As for Dr Jarre wearing a hat, I feel like there’s a few good options, but a reasonable one is that she simply doesn’t like hair-care, and so shoves most of her hair under the hat. An alternative is that she’s mostly to completely bald, and the tophat (with a partial wig, if she’s completely bald) covers that up incredibly well. Yes, we have seen hair coming from the front of the hat, so her being completely bald is unlikely, but it’s still possible.
Alternatively, Dr Jarre could be face-blind (meaning that she can’t recognize people based on their facial features) and wears her costume to ensure that she can recognize herself in a mirror.
Another option is that Dr Jarre is doing the Dr McNinja hidden personal identity thing, ensuring that she can always escape a bad enough situation simply by changing clothes and removing the sunglasses/hat combo.
It’s not a question of her wearing a hat, it’s that rather than replace the normal hat with the seasonal hat, she wears both, implying that she can’t remove it (maybe…although the face blindness theory might cover that) **of course the non-in-universe reason being that readers might not instanty recognize her without the top hat
I’m struck by the irony that the only one of the bunch they broadcast in the land of Summer Christmas is the one about a Snowman.
I feel like there’d be some great meta-comedy if a character in this webcomic where only five or so faces exists had trouble telling people’s faces apart 😀
Also, re Rudolph & the other Rakin/Bass specials: I was born in a weird dead zone regarding their popularity, where I was too young to really imprint on them the first time around, but my parents were too old for me to just inherit any nostalgia from them.
…the one exception being Frosty, which we had on a VHS recording of specials taped off a local channel one year. That’s the lone Rankin/Bass thing I have true nostalgia for, so I find it interesting that that’s also the one even DD apparently managed to see.
That makes sense that that’s the one you had nostalgia for, Frosty’s animation was done by Mushi Studios in Japan…so technically, it’s Anime!
Yeah, that was Rankin/Bass’ whole racket, they outsourced all their stuff to Japan. The later traditional animated specials were done by Topcraft, most of whom would go on to form Studio Ghibli!