Some of you may be old enough to remember these most excellent MADtv parodies of Rankin/Bass stop-motion kids' movies, and some of you need a pop culture elder like myself to point you to them. Either way, I think they're brilliant and hope they'll make you laugh as hard as I did when I first saw them. They're definitely not for little eyes though!
This first one is called "Raging Rudolph" (1995) and it's an ultra-violent, Scorsese-esque takeoff of the perennial favorite, Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964):
After the success of the first one, MADtv came out with "Reinfather" a year or two later which, as you guessed, spoofs The Godfather:
In 1999, they aired "A Pack of Gifts Now," a take on Apocalypse Now. A bit of trivia on this one, Patton Oswalt pitched this skit when he was a writer at MADtv. They produced it a year after he left:
Now, all three of these were created by Corky Quakenbush of Space Bass Films. If you liked them, you'll be happy to know he made more in the spirit of the MADtv ones.
On this later one for Larry the Cable Guy, Quakenbush writes, "This is the cleaned up for television version. Jinno was tasked with digitally removing all the bloodshed we meticulously animated as well as us having to edit out 30 seconds of the senseless massacring of every virtually unarmed character from the original Rudolph special prior to rocket bombing Santa's castle..." That's Blake Shelton in the intro:
There's more... but you're going to have to dig those up yourself!
One last note, I would really love to see the high-rez versions of these. _Someone_ out there must have better copies.
"Have a merry freaking Christmas!"
