How Many Ex-Wives Did Kris Kringle Have?

Each year at this time, I play classic Christmas movies on my DVD player. I have several movies/TV specials that I play over a period of four days:

Frosty the Snowman
A Christmas Carol (1938)
It Happened on Fifth Avenue
The Shop Around the Corner
Christmas in Connecticut
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Holiday Inn
White Christmas
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
A Charlie Brown Christmas
It's a Wonderful Life
Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

This year I added another animated classic from Rankin/Bass productions, Santa Claus is Comin' to Town. It was first broadcast on television in 1970, but I never saw it when it came out, and, until yesterday, had never seen it. Rankin/Bass liked to do specials based upon songs, and this one was no exception. It was done with puppets/bendable figurines with stop-motion animation, which must have taken the filmmakers at least a couple of years to do. It was very difficult to do stop-action animation; a simple scene could take weeks if not months.

This one had several big name actors doing the voices, including Keenan Wynn, Fred Astaire (the voice of the mailman who narrated the story), and Mickey Rooney. The plotline was simply a biography of Santa Claus or Kris Kringle. Of course, it wasn't about the REAL "Santa Claus," St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children from which the legend sprang. It was all about him from childhood up to and through the time he began his first Christmas delivering gifts. It was a good movie, especially for children, with great special effects from the animation, but I couldn't help but laugh at the "in-jokes," intentional or not.

I laughed my ass off over the casting of Mickey Rooney as the voice of Santa Claus as an adult. Santa, of course, has always been depicted as an elf, which seem to be an appropriate role for the diminutive Rooney even if he never appeared onscreen. If you pay close attention to the movie, Santa Claus, far from being elfin in height, seems to tower over every other puppet in the movie, with the exception of "Winter," voiced by Keenan Wynn. I wonder if Rooney demanded it as a condition for signing a contract to do the movie.

That was funny enough, but then the movie continued on, depicting a romance between Kringle and his future wife, a puppet much tinier than Kringle/Claus, and it was even funnier. Finally the pair got married, which was shown in this show. I almost fell on the floor from laughter because of course Mickey Rooney was infamous for having so many marriages, so many divorces, paying up so much alimony and child support, and bankruptcies. I wondered aloud where the ex-wives of Kringle were.

Now it is very possible the producers of the film didn't intend to have these in-jokes in the movie, and such in-jokes would go over the head of kids, especially now, but it is equally possible that the producers knew exactly what they were doing when they hired Rooney for the title role.

Anyway, I will never see Santa Claus the same way ever again.