Thursday, December 22, 2011

Chanukah Puppet-Toon TV Special?

Growing up, there were always tons of Christmas specials on TV by Rankin Bass, etc., and I always wondered why there was no Chanukah special. By following the same type of storyline from the Christmas specials, we could have had another Supermarionation classic for all to enjoy! So, how would it work? Well, usually the Christmas specials were about something preventing Santa Claus from making it to Christmas, right? So then for the Chanukah special, it would have to be something that would prevent Chanukah from happening, and so I figured it would be something like this:

Some jerky character hoards all the string in the world, so no candles can be made for celebrating Chanukah, and someone must save the day. So Dreidel Man emerges from a disappointed populace to save the day! He finds this hoarder jerk's underground bunker where he's hiding all the string, and with his super dreidel powers, he spins on his head (he wears a dreidel for a helmet and spins on his head like a break dancer) and drills through the ground and into this bunker to retrieve all the necessary string to make the candles with (teaming with Wax Man: alter ego of mild-mannered dentist Dr. Waxman), and Chanukah is saved for everyone! (Yay!)

And naturally, along the way, various and sundry misfit/reject characters find their niche in the world and are accepted by everyone as winners thanks to the friendship, guidance and wisdom of Dreidel Man.

This kind of show would have been really fun, I'll bet, but for one thing (which is probably why nobody ever made anything like this): there are actual accounts of real-life evildoers persecuting Jews throughout history, and that makes this kind of lighthearted fable perhaps seem in poor taste. And that's something we should never forget, especially in the dangerous world we find ourselves in. But you know, maybe they could make fun of these modern day anti-Semites as villainous caricatures who are foiled and ridiculed in this tale, and in this way, beat them with silliness.