I conclude my series of posts about the 1987 Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas Celebration special with my favorite segment in the program: “The Carol of the Bells.” The humor in “Carol of the Bells” is the Claymation Christmas special’s tightest and most sophisticated, to the extent that it almost seems designed to lead children in… Read More →

Now we move on through Will Vinton’s 1987 “Claymation Christmas Celebration” to a significant moment in the Emmy Award-winning stop-motion animation special, the Walruses and the Penguins. This is the most blatant comic relief in the half-hour Claymation Christmas special, relying heavily on the physical comedy of amorous walruses attempting to figure skate to “Angels… Read More →

As I continue through Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas Celebration special of 1987, we now go to the Claymation Christmas special’s first musical animation, the opening salvo in this barrage of holiday-themed stop motion videos. “We Three Kings” opens with the somber version of the song, sung by the actual kings, you might expect. But then… Read More →

It’s sometimes odd the things from your childhood that endure in memory. I’ve lost the sound of my uncle’s voice, for instance, but I remember Will Vinton’s Emmy-winning Claymation Christmas Celebration special which first aired on CBS in December of 1987. A later VHS recording of this broadcast would become a precious family possession for… Read More →

They say it will snow this weekend in northern Minnesota. I saw this floating around social media as sort of a local joke, but it is a real product: Behold the “Snow Wolf” wheeled shovel in action. It’s an ergonomic dream, they say. A snowblower without the dirty engine attached, they say. I see a… Read More →

A joke in Monday night’s “How I Met Your Mother” suggested that prostitutes in Duluth, Minnesota dress very conservatively. Because of the cold? Kind of a context thing, I think. Didn’t watch. Could have, but didn’t. Anyway, the Duluth News-Tribune ran this as a “namedrop” in the today’s culture page. I really don’t know how… Read More →

One of my favorite blogs, TYWKIWDBI, posts the following question: “Is English a Scandinavian language?” Some professors in Norway apparently believe so, saying that viking domination of the early English nation had more lingual influence than “Old English” or later intermingling with the romance languages of central Europe. Specifically, sentence structure is one area of… Read More →

Growing up in northern Minnesota in the ’80s and ’90s, we saw moose in the woods just outside the Iron Range. No, we didn’t see moose every day, the way we often see whitetail deer. But you saw a moose or two every year, more if you lived farther north than the Range. Those days… Read More →