Xmas Marks the Spot

Every cartoon series has a Christmas special (well, most of them). They are, mostly, pretty terrible, churned out with little thought to what might make them different to all the others. A few stand out, though, and one has stuck with me from my earliest years. That most special of Christmas specials is “Xmas Marks the Spot,” the last episode of the first season of The Real Ghostbusters.

RGB has stood the test of time as my favourite animated series, and arguably my favourite children's programme (that depends on how you categorise Doctor Who). For the first couple of years – the first season and then the long run in syndication – RGB featured genuinely witty, well-written scripts, some surprisingly creepy moments and some of the most memorable monster designs in telefantasy. Yes, it became dumbed down as it went on further and ended as a shadow of its former self, but to begin with, it was a truly brilliant show.

“Xmas Marks the Spot” is not my favourite episode of the series (that's the baseball episode, “Night Game – every American show needs a baseball episode too), nor is it the most remarkable or unique (for my money, that has to be the truly surreal “Chicken, He Clucked.”) It is, however, one of the most memorable, most effective and cleverest episodes of the series, one that takes a ludicrous concept and runs with it for twenty ingenious minutes.

Written by chief scriptwriter J. Michael Straczynski – better known now as the creator of Babylon 5 – the RGB Christmas special takes a not uncommon route for a festive episode. Yes, it's a take on Charles Dickens's classic A Christmas Carol. Now, pop cultural takes on the classic Christmas novella would make for an article in itself. The Muppets have done it, Doctor Who has done it, even The Flintstones have done it. It doesn't matter. It's a more interesting, more potent way of doing a Christmas special than just having the characters give each other presents or going on a winter vacation. There's scope for the episode to actually be about something.

Peter Venkman (played by the original and best voice artist, Lorenzo Music) doesn't hate Christmas, but to him, it's just another day. Christmas is no fun when your wheeler-dealer dad is always out of town, and so, over the years Peter has managed to convince himself that he doesn't care about the holidays. He needs a lesson in Christmas spirit... fortunately, some Christmas spirits are available to teach him.

The episode has a more contrived set up than most. Usually, there's a spectral menace that needs dealing with in or around New York. This time, however, the 'busters have to abandon their faithful hearse Ecto 1 when they are stranded in a snowstorm, only to be whisked through time and space to 19^th century London. It all seems fairly unlikely, but it gets even more so when the 'busters immediately stumble upon the home of one Ebenezer Scrooge. (The episode end makes it clear that there are forces at work ensuring this all happens, so it isn't purely down to a cosmic coincidence.)

The four heroes are too late to stop the ghost of Jacob Marley from escaping back into the spirit world, but they are just in time to encounter three more spirits... “big, powerful,” and heading straight for Scrooge's place. It's the Ghostbusters to the rescue, storming in and immediately busting the three Ghosts of Christmas. It's one of those ideas that's just inspired. Of course, Scrooge isn't keen to give up his hard-earned cash to pay the Ghostbusters, but after some negotiation, they go on their way, and are swept back through the time slip.

Scrooge (guest voice Peter Renaday), inspired, sits down to write his memoir, A Christmas Humbug. It's the story of how he bested the Ghosts of Christmas (all by himself, of course). Meanwhile, 150 years later, the 'busters return to New York to find the book a perennial bestseller. So influential, in fact, that now no one celebrates Christmas at all, and people are incredible arseholes to each other all the time (just like in New York most of the time). “We've really done it this time,” says Ray, (the great Frank Welker) “we've just killed Christmas.” Or, as my good friend Jim put it, “They've gone and fucked Christmas royally in the A!” But then, he's always had a way with words.

From then (and this is after only about ten minutes runtime) the narrative takes two tracks. Peter, Ray and Winston go back to the time slip in an attempt to convince Scrooge of the error of his ways. This involves the three of them taking the place of the ghosts, with Peter dragging up as the very feminine Ghost of Christmas Past. As a nice nod to the blazing light of the ghost in the book, he's equipped with a set of blinding magnesium flares. What follows is an unforgettable sequence in which Venkman tries to convince Scrooge that he's flying through his past by running him in circles in a wheelchair with a ViewMaster on his face. The question of where he got ViewMaster slides of Scrooge's schoolhouse remains unanswered.

In the 20^th century, Egon resolves to enter the containment unit and rescue the three ghosts. Now, we'd had a glimpse into the inside of the unit in the Hallowe'en episode, “When Hallowe'en Was Forever,” but this is something else. Egon (Maurice LaMarche, who also voices Bob Cratchit and the Ghost of Christmas Present) constructs a sort of environmental suit that “demolecularises” him, while another lash-up opens a crack in the containment field. He has one hour to get in and out, or he'll be permanently spectral and trapped inside forever. And so he enters the otherworldly interior of the unit, a strange pocket dimension in which the ghosts are imprisoned after capture.

While these two epic threads are playing out, Janine (the faithful secretary, voiced by Laura Summer) is of course convinced that Christmas is nothing but humbug, but agrees to help out of her love for Egon. She is assisted, sort of, by Slimer (Frank Welker's other great role in the series), although he mostly gets himself into trouble and is nearly pulled into the containment unit. Now, one thing we never found out is who or what Slimer was the ghost of. Fan lore is that he's the ghost of John Belushi, but the backstory for the films suggests that he was summoned into existence by arcane rituals, as a being of pure appetite. You might say that there is more of gravy than of grave to this ghost.

In 1837, Winston (Arsenio Hall) tries his luck as the Ghost of Christmas Present, while Ray gets robed up as the Ghost of Christmas Future. In 1986, Egon manages to find the three Christmas Spirits, but there's trouble: the other ghosts have figured out what's going on. Cue every ghost captured in the run of the series so far, including the Sandman, the Winged Puma, Samhain the spirit of Hallowe'en, Big Ugly, the fat blue sleepy ghost... all coming after him at once. After a breakneck chase out of the unit, Egon escapes with the three ghosts in the nick of time.

In the end, of course, everything works out fine. The three Ghosts of Christmas are returned to their proper time to give Scrooge a slightly more convincing lesson, and Christmas is saved for futurity. While defending Christmas to the old miser, Peter has realised just how much he's missed by shutting himself off from it all, and resolves to appreciate it in the future. Subtle it isn't, but then it's Christmas. We don't want subtle, we want hammered home platitudes.

It's a tremendous episode packed with incident and Christmas spirit (literal and figurative). I watch it every year, sometimes several times. It's a classic.

“Merry Christmas to all – and to all, a good night!”

I Was Raised by Spacemen - 1 (Mike and Angelo, Watt on Earth)

This is the first in what I plan to be a series of posts, looking back at the science fiction and fantasy of my childhood. I've experienced a severe pang of nostalgia lately (probably to be attributed to a night spent singing along to cartoon theme tunes on YouTube with my best friend - so yes, this is your fault, Shelly). I realise, of course, that the golden era of children's telefantasy was the 1970s. Being born in 1984, I arrived rather too late for that. Nonetheless, I look back with fondness at the series that played during my youth, and thanks to the wonder of the internet, I can relive some small part of it. It's true that nineties TV is not as good as I remember it  - but then, whatever is?

Firstly, I'm going to look at two series that are frequently confused with one another: CITV's Mike and Angelo and CBBC's Watt on Earth. Raising the question with friends and family of my age - "Do you remember Mike and Angelo?" - what I usually get is a blank look, followed by a moment of revelation and an "Oh god, yes." However, it usually seems that what they are remembering is Watt on Earth, in spite of this series having a far shorter run and, to my mind, being considerably less memorable. And yet, when I come to watch them again, the tables are turned.

Mike and Angelo was a children's sitcom that seemed to run forever. In fact, it ran from 1989 to 2000, an eleven year period which corresponds pretty much exactly with my TV-watching childhood. Before '89, I am unable to remember much of what I may have watched. After 2000, I had, ostensibly, grown out of that stuff (I grew back into it pretty soon after though). A run of 123 episodes over twelve seasons is not to be sniffed at, and the series is remembered fondly by those who grew up in Britain during the nineties. The episodes were twenty to twenty-five minutes long, designed to slip between ITV ad breaks, and with, on average, ten episodes a year, there was reasonable time for them to make an impression.

The series was written and created by Lee Pressman and Grant Cathro, the writing team previously responsible for T-Bag (oh yes, there'll be an entry on that one) and later Spatz, another fondly remembered CITV sitcom. A lot of actors crossed over from Mike and Angelo to Spatz and vice versa. The two shows were mainstays of my childhood.

I don't think it's any coincidence that Mike and Angelo sits right in Doctor Who's Wilderness Years. It's pretty blatantly clear that, if not full-fledged fans, Pressman and Cathro were at least influenced by Doctor Who. Angelo is an extraterrestrial from Ptarg, a distant planet, possibly in another universe (if continuity announcers are to be believed), who arrives on Earth (Cricklewood, to be precise) in a pyramidal spaceship that disguises itself as a wardrobe. The spaceship acts a portal of sorts, letting the occasional Ptargian creature or doodad through to cause trouble, but more often than not, it was Angelo's schemes and inventions that caused the problems.

Angelo himself was played, for the first two series, by Tyler Butterworth. The accomplished comedy actor is the son of Peter Butterworth, most famous for his Carry On roles, but well known to Doctor Who fans as the Meddling Monk (thus, in my diseased head, Angelo is the offspring of renegade time traveller the Monk, perennial thorn in the Doctor's side). At the beginning of the third series, Angelo regenerated, with near-death Angelo One transforming into the manic Angelo Two, played by manic, multi-talented Tim Whitnall. Whitnall remained in the role for the full ten years until the show was cancelled, and is thus much better remembered than Butterworth. They both had the ability to walk on the ceiling, though. Here's the title sequence from around 1996, in which Angelo arrives in his spaceship (already in his Whitnall incarnation, though):