Chris Franklin

Gonna result in some weird age gaps on certain platforms, is all

I am concerned about The Santa Clauses. The original film, The Santa Clause, released in the early 1990s and starred an up-and-coming sitcom actor named Tim Allen. It tells the story of Scott Calvin, a self-centered divorcee who unwittingly becomes Santa Claus when he accidentally kills the previous Santa by startling him off the roof, where he falls to his death. Striking a flawless balance of macabre humor, family-friendly Cronenberg-style body horror, and 90s-era Disney mid-budget live-action special effects fun, it became an instant Holiday favorite. It is such an indelible part of the Millennial childhood that to this day many of them are incapable of spelling Santa Claus correctly (the e is part of a pun, you're almost 40, you should have figured this out by now).

Yesterday The Santa Clauses, a nostalgia sequel that picks up 15 years after the nostalgia sequels that picked up 10 years after the original favorite, debuted on Disney Plus. I have only had time to watch the first episode, but what I saw are the sorts of things I dreaded seeing knowing too much about the people who were making it.

Tim Allen was always going to be a problem. Home Improvement, the 90s sitcom that propelled him from standup comedian to Hollywood star, solidified the "bumbling dad" sitcom archetype in the form of Tim Taylor, a power tool pitchman for a local access handyman show. Most episodes center around some kind of threat to Tim's concept of masculinity and the role of a man in the family, in the household, or in society.

In the Bumbling Dad mold, Tim tries to solve a problem with Man Solutions, but finds his tactics helpless against a complicated modern problem. It's only after a conversation with his sage-like neighbor Wilson or his more worldly wife Jill that Tim reconsiders his strategy, tries again, and usually reconciles his conflict with his friend or family member. It's a formula that consistently shows patriarchal solutions are ineffective, but also does not dismantle or challenge that patriarchy. Tim's viewpoint is always treated sympathetically, and the episode always ends with the status quo upheld. It's a show that doesn't hold up particularly well today, but can still be looked back upon with a kind of pitying nostalgia.

Tim Allen's career has slumped since the end of Home Improvement in the 90s. He has gone from headlining Galaxy Quest, the beloved Star Trek pastiche-parody, to making forty-year-old jokes on Twitter about Biden asking how long an episode of 60 minutes is (for the record, Tim, an episode of 60 minutes is 42 minutes long). He has joined the ranks of Randy Quaid, Kevin Sorbo, Scott Baio, Rob Schneider, Dean Cain, and other 90s show biz stars whose careers have cooled and fizzled due to their questionable talent and their pathetic adherence to right-wing rhetoric and ideology. Allen managed to stay relevant with Last Man Standing, essentially a copy of Home Improvement, which was saved from cancellation by studio executives desperate to court disillusioned MAGA voters with something, anything, resembling homeland sensibilities.

And so it was the creative team of Tim Allen and Jack Burditt, the executive producer of Last Man Standing, who joined forces to create The Santa Clauses. Once I knew of this pairing, I was concerned, but such is my nostalgia for the original The Santa Clause that I wanted to give it a chance. But, sadly, their pathetic little fingers are all over this first episode.

The biggest red alert comes from a scene midway through the episode. Santa attends a meeting with many elves to go over the naughty & nice list. Santa, who in previous films was shown to supernaturally know if somebody is naughty or nice, is now shown debating by a committee which list someone should be on. When a child is declared naughty for being disruptive in class, an elf speaks up and explains that the boy isn't naughty, he has ADHD. At another point, Santa complains that he can't say "Merry Christmas to All" anymore because it's "problematic."

The entire scene is stained by more extreme rightward politics that seem typical with Allen's rightward swing in behavior. We can see his position of power, the arbiter of naughty and nice, of right and wrong, disrupted by a diverse committee who argues with him over all his assumptions. We never learn who exactly thinks "Merry Christmas to All" is problematic, but that's typical of a strawman. The episode, and Santa, isn't interested in attributing the claim to somebody specific, but rather to a generalized group that exists only his imagination he can shadowbox with then pout when his own deflated ego loses to his imaginary foe.

We also get glimpses at Santa's family. He's had two children with Carol since the last movie. The older one, his son, is a tech-obsessed and emotionally stunted klutz who breaks things while wearing his VR helmet. His daughter is a budding social activist who asks him to free any deer he finds chained up on Christmas Tree farms (Santa complains about "hipsters" at this point, a right-wing epithet nobody has uttered since 2015). Carol is feeling lost in her role as Mrs. Claus, which she bitterly notes leaves her with little to do and--according to Santa Claus legend, anyway--literally without a name.

This is just the first episode, and though it left a bad taste in my mouth, I think I can see where the rest of the series is going. Santa, fed up with the changes in the world and his position as Santa, retires, handing it off to a struggling tech mogul played by Kal Penn. Going back to the human world with his family in tow, Tim finds none of his problems are magically solved. His wife is still depressed, he still can't connect with his children, and he finds the business world still filled with committees worried about treating people fairly. But after a talk with Carol he realizes how much magic he gave up. He makes up and reconnects with his family in a touching scene and they return to the North Pole to solve whatever calamity Kal Penn got the elves into, and they all live happily ever after. It's basically a Home Improvement episode with the characters changed to the ones from The Santa Clause.

The first The Santa Clause will always be a holiday favorite for me. I will watch it every year until it becomes impossible to do so, either because it becomes unavailable or because Tim Allen becomes too insufferable to ignore anymore. The sequels are inferior but watchable. Nothing I have seen of The Santa Clauses from its first episode has suggested to me it will be anything more than a hatewatch.

i.e.,

One thing that does seem harder to do on Cohost is to highlight TikToks. Because TikTok is obsessed with keeping people on-platform you can't really embed them the way you can embed a YouTube video. But at the same time video hosting costs are prohibitive: simply downloading the .mp4 and reposting it on Facebook or Twitter (with attribution) was an option because they're huge media conglomerates. Here it's not so viable. Really, though, I think it's more of a problem with TikTok as a platform refusing to facilitate embedding than anything else.

Anyways, I bring all of this up because this Call of Duty TikTok popped into my For You Page and for like 2 seconds I honestly thought it was me speaking and was deeply confused: http://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRQ47vPh/

Human voices are weird. Also, I blame that distinctive monotone delivery.