1972’s Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is probably the most threadbare excuse for a film I’ve seen so far. On the face of it, this is the story of Santa enlisting the help of some children after his sleigh gets stuck in the sand in Florida but it’s really just an excuse for producer Barry Mahon to repackage one of his previous 45 minute short films as a feature, bookending his 1970 telling of Jack and the Beanstalk with new godawful footage. Different prints feature Mahon’s Thumbelina instead, which I hope is better than this crap.
We open with some elves in the workshop, singing a wretched song about how Santa’s gone AWOL. Cut to Santa (Jay Ripley), sans reindeer, marooned on that beach. He looks like they just stuck a bunch of cotton wool on his face and moans about how the holidays will be ruined if he doesn’t get out of there.
So, he sends out a (telepathic?) call for help to the local kids who try to get different animals - including a sheep and a guy in a gorilla outfit - to pull the sleigh out, even though it does not at all look stuck. While all this is going on, Santa sings some bewildering, ear-harming tunes about how lonely and hot he is. None of this works, so Santa tells the kids a story about “never giving up hope” and we abruptly cut to Mahon’s fairytale short, featuring start and end credits and all.
The Jack and the Beanstalk part is similarly shoddy but at least features a coherent story. The giant’s “Fee Fi Fo Fum” song is pretty catchy but really is the only good thing about this filmic shambles.
I appreciate the retconning of the story to explain that the giant robbed the magic hen and harp etc from Jack’s family in the first place, thus justifying him pinching them back. We read this story to Amelia quite often and Jack’s thievery always bothers me as I really don’t think this is a cool message to send out to little kids. Hats off to them for that, I guess.
After the story, we’re back to that bloody beach as Santa’s pal “The Ice Cream Bunny” - some guy in a terrifying rabbit costume with soulless, coal-black eyes - arrives in a fire truck to give him a lift up the road. Brilliantly, the film presents the Ice Cream Bunny as though he’s some sort of established fictional legend like the tooth fairy that we should be familiar with. Why they don’t just call him the Easter Bunny, I have no idea.
A little research informs me that the movie-within-a-movie was made on set at a Florida theme park attraction known as ‘Pirate Land’. I can only assume that the films were made as some sort of promo for that park and I sure hope Pirate Land was more fun than this mess of a ‘movie’. I do laugh at the part where a dog, allegedly happy to see the Bunny, growls frenziedly, looking like it wants to murder it. I know how it feels.
Comments