B.C.: A Special Christmas

It's been about a dozen years since I've seen this. As I recall, Wiley comes up with a scheme to profit off of the holidays by selling gifts to his friends for them to give to one another. All the gifts are rocks.

The lead voices were done by Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding of radio fame. They provided a somewhat cynical edge to the humor making it, perhaps, a bit more advanced then the average overly saccharine Christmas special.

The animation quality was only average, which is appropriate as the style of the source artwork is minimal in detail.

I would like to see this again, though it's not easily available.

I own a "raggity" VHS copy of this taped off HBO! It's so old that it barely runs at all due to cable "copyguard". Done in a style closely copying the comic strip, it is well animated and includes Bob and Ray of radio and TV fame as the lead characters. A simple and effective fable about how the Christmas Myth of Santa Claus began, and no to be taken seriously except for a brief appearance of the wise men story in silhouette. A Canadian animated production. Of course B.C. is in it, as well as Clumsy, The Hot Girl, Grog, and all the rest!

While not as bad as the B.C. Thanksgiving special, which is truly horrible, this really isn't very good. Both the animation and the story are a vast improvement over the Thanksgiving effort, but the payoff, while strangely interesting in its attempt to make a point without resolving the fundamental time and space issues that recur in the B.C. universe, is spectacularly bizarre- especially in light of the overtly (and, I've always assumed, wantonly anachronistic) Christian elements of the comic strip.

I have both these atrocities on (a single) LaserDisc. They've not been released any other way as far as I know, and that's probably for the best, but if anyone ever needs evidence that B.C. isn't even a second rate property, look no further. There're good reasons this isn't aired every December.

I did enjoy the "B.C.'s Quest for Tires" video game on the Commodore 64 when I was a kid, though, so maybe it's not all bad. But still, Johnny Hart, Charles Schultz you ain't.