Episode 130: The Cricket on the Hearth

Christmas Creeps

Our pals Niall Flanagan and Dwayne Moloney, co-hosts of the Secret of the Sailor Madness podcast, join us this week to try and make sense of Rankin/Bass' 1967 Christmas special The Cricket on the Hearth!

Based on Charles Dickens' other holiday novella, Cricket plays fast and loose with its source material to make it suitable for television. Certain characters get cut out, new ones invented out of whole cloth, and no less than NINE musical numbers to fill up an hour of your valuable holiday viewing time.

It's nonsensical, it's absurd, but it's pure-strain Rankin/Bass. There's certainly a charm to the madness on display here, and honestly? We wouldn't have it any other way.

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Intro/Outro: Happy Christmas, You Guys! (Simon Panrucker) / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0