The Leprechauns' Christmas Gold USA, NR, 25 m, 1981
The Leprechauns’ Christmas Gold premiered on ABC circa 1981 to a halfhearted reception, and though there’s nothing remotely slack or unoriginal about it, spotty re-airings over the last three decades have doomed it to become a mere footnote in the long and prolific history of Rankin/Bass holiday TV specials. Year after year, tiny tots with their eyes all aglow watch as stop-motion wonderments like The Little Drummer Boy and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town at long last justify the existence of the boob tube, but the Nielsens’ littlest have trouble latching on to undersized potato-munchers in ugly, green suits and a medusa-headed hag cursed with an incurable case of gold fever. The Leprechauns’ Christmas Gold might play better around St. Patrick’s Day than the most wonderful time of the year, and though combining disparate holiday mythologies may have worked for the folks at Rankin/Bass in Rudolph’s Shiny New Year, it doesn’t really fly when the festivals in question are separated by several months as opposed to several days. That said, The Leprechauns’ Christmas Gold is beautifully designed by Paul Coker, Jr., who collaborated with producers/directors Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass on earlier pictures like The Easter Bunny is Comin’ to Town, Nestor, the Long-Eared Donkey, and The Year Without a Santa Claus (to name just a few). Every shot looks like it might’ve been taken from one of those 3-D fairy tale books that Playmore Inc. used to put out. It’s de rigueur
for Rankin/Bass productions to feature a storyteller, and you can always count
on that role being voiced by one Hollywood legend or another: Frosty
the Snowman had Jimmy Durante, Here
Comes Peter Cottontail had Danny Kaye, Rudolph
the Red-Nosed Reindeer had Burl Ives, Santa
Claus is Comin’ to Town had Fred Astaire, and The
Story of the First Christmas Snow had Angela Lansbury. The big casting coup
in The Leprechauns’ Christmas Gold
is the one and only Art Carney, and it’s a testament to his brilliance as an
actor that he can affect a brogue that doesn’t make you want to put your
eardrums out. He does the voice work for Blarney Kilakilarney, an aged
leprechaun who has spent the last century in seclusion on Emerald Island while
keeping watch over his people’s fabled pot o’ gold. (He might remind you of
that unfortunate knight that was charged with guarding the Holy Grail for all
eternity in Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade.) The number one reason the little folk have hidden their riches
under a patch of clover at the end of the rainbow is to keep a repulsive,
caterwauling banshee from getting her grubby mitts on it. Legend tells us that
if the banshee doesn’t get the leprechauns’ gold by Christmas morning, she
will turn to salty tears and wash away forever. But she can’t just clock
Blarney over the noggin and take the treasure; it must be given to her freely or
it doesn’t count. It appears that the gods also permit theft by deception: the
banshee can inspire offerings of gold (as well as frankincense and myrrh) by
shifting her shape into Mother Theresa or Sally Struthers. (You might wonder why
we’re supposed to begrudge the old bat for wanting to hang on to her life.)
But no matter what disguise she assumes, one thing will give her away: the tracks of her tears. For whatever reason, banshees
can’t turn off the waterworks; tears pour from their eyes like water in a
Kohler high-flow urinal. But Blarney hasn’t had to deal with the grasping
witch since Christ was a teenager: once upon a time, a leprechaun lord reduced
her to tears (literally), and then sentenced her to life plus twenty-five
beneath a pine tree. There was no possibility for parole. That’s all about to change. Not too far out in the big
blue, the captain of the Belle of Erin is having trouble getting into the
Xmas spirit. But then he spots a lone pine tree growing along the shore of
Emerald Island (which was once a part of Ireland, but broke off when— ah,
let’s not get into all that), so he sends one of his swabbies, Dinty, out to
dig it up. Dinty, a lanky kid with long, blonde hair that he keeps in a
ponytail, does his captain’s bidding, but unleashes the madness of the banshee
in the process. The heavens turn gray, flashes of lightning illuminate the
revolting growths on the banshee’s cackling face (her freedom cry is twice as
chilling as General Zod’s in Superman
II: The Richard Donner Cut), and Dinty collapses to the muddy earth,
shaking his fist and shouting, “I’m done for!” But then the storm recedes as quickly as it appeared. A
rainbow forms overhead, which Dinty follows (unwittingly guiding the banshee to
the motherlode) until he stumbles upon Blarney’s place. Blarney (who
would’ve been smarter to guard that godforsaken tree than the gold) takes
Dinty for a robber and beats the holy hell out of his ankle. Soon realizing that
Dinty is about as harmless as Stephen Hawking on Valium, he invites him in for a
spot of tea, and tells him all about the island, the leprechauns, and the
banshee. But that same banshee has bewitched Blarney’s beverage with “the
potion of generosity.” Of course, it doesn’t work like the banshee had
hoped: Blarney signs over all of the leprechaun’s gold to Dinty. But Dinty is
too driven by his little head to notice the tears that cascade from the eyes of
the comely lass that the banshee has transformed into. Desperate for a piece of
arse (he has been out to sea for a long time, you know), he can’t refuse the
girl when she asks him to give her all of the faerie folks’ precious metal.
You haven’t seen enough of these silly things if you fear that the bean si
is going to win the day. (And go rent some morally dubious piece of crap like The
Strangers if you want to see evil take all.) What would a Rankin/Bass production be without a good musical number? We don’t get anything here as inspired as “There’s Always Tomorrow” and “The First Toymaker to the King,” but Carney and company turn in a rousing number called “The Golden Gold of Ireland.” As expected, Rankin and Bass’s patented “Animagic” (which combines conventional animation with stop-motion puppetry) looks terrific, but there are too many shots that aren’t given enough room to breathe; screenwriter Romeo Muller (a Rankin/Bass regular) tries to cram in too much within the picture’s anemic thirty-minute running time (which, if you account for commercials, is more like twenty-two). The Leprechauns’ Christmas Gold may not be up to the level of The Little Drummer Boy or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (few films are; those were veritable works of art), but any Rankin/Bass fan worthy of the name shouldn’t miss it. December 16, 2008 “The Leprechauns’ Christmas Gold” Review. © Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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