All right, yes, I’ve already written about how much I hated Red One, and why. But it’s frustrating to me that in order to criticize a film for being, to my mind, negative and cynical, I wrote a 4,800-word-long hatchet job. Isn’t that compounding the problem? Adding some extra hate-bacon to a towering cynicism BLT, as it were?
In that spirit, and, dare I say, in the spirit of Christmas itself, I’m going to talk about why I HATE Red One—constructively. And I’m going to do that by talking about why I LOVE The Tick’s 1994 holiday episode, “The Tick Loves Santa!”.
For the uninitiated: The Tick was created by Ben Edlund in 1986, the titular character in a comic series, cartoon, and two different live-action series—each of which has been, somehow, nigh-miraculously, hilarious, each in its own unique way. The Tick is a superhero, either a man dressed as a blue tick, or possibly a mystical being who IS a blue tick—it’s never made clear because we don’t really need to know. All we need to know is that he’s innocent, optimistic, enthusiastic, nigh-invulnerable, and absolutely dedicated to justice. He works in “The City” with a sidekick, an accountant named Arthur, who dresses as a moth. They’re the constants in the Tick universe, while side characters and villains change in each new iteration.
The story I talk about below is the Christmas episode from animated series The Tick, which ran from 1994 to 1996 as Fox Kids show, and where Big Blue and Arthur are assisted by their friends in The Civic-Minded Five: Feral Boy, Sewer Urchin, Four-Legged Man, American Maid, and Die Fledermaus. The episode’s villain is a bank robber who gets zapped by an electrified cola billboard, and consequently transforms into “Multiple Santa”—basically an evil Santa and an army of Santa Clones who do his bidding.
Red One is a movie that stars Chris Evans as a hacker named Jack who has to help Callum Drift, one of Santa’s bodyguards, after Santa is kidnapped by Grýla (an Icelandic ogre, whom the film terms a “Christmas witch”) after Jack unknowingly hacks the North Pole’s security protocols. Red One is terrible. (To be clear, I love the concept of the film. I like Chris Evans and J.K. Simmons and Bonnie Hunt [she plays. Mrs. Claus], and I’m willing to tolerate Dwayne Johnson.) My purpose here is simply to point out the The Tick did a similar premise and vibe way better, and that we, the human species, deserve better Christmas movies.
One of the things Red One is bringing to the Christmas Special Table is the idea of a hardcore, even militarized view of Santa’s mission to bring joy to the children of the world. Hence, you know, the title: “Red One” is Santa’s codename. And the film applies this Lockheed Martin sheen to everything: Mrs. Claus is codenamed Partridge for some reason, an organization called M.O.R.A (Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority) manages magical creatures, Callum Drift isn’t one of Santa’s elves, he’s the head of security for ELF (Enforcement Logistics and Fortification—the only other member of ELF we meet is an aggro polar bear unfortunately named Agent Garcia rather than Iorek Christmasson or something like that), and the North Pole is a gleaming high-tech city rather than a quaint village. It’s a lot. I think the film is trying to say that Santa’s operation has to be a well oiled machine if he wants to hit all those chimneys in one night, but it doesn’t really interrogate the idea enough for the audience to know if Santa’s happy about this, if this is a new innovation, if perhaps the ELF are a little over-the-top in their mission.
The film introduces Santa as he visits a mall, which Cal treats like a tactical strike, physically intimidating one visitor and generally acting like Santa—who appears to most people as a normal department store Santa—has to be hustled from location to location like a head of state. (Santa, meanwhile, seems to think the whole thing is a lark.)
Now in The Tick, a similar situation plays out. Tick and Arthur come home from patrol, arguing about whether Santa even exists. (I’ll come back to this.) Tick points out that Arthur said his childhood pop-gun was a gift from Santa, and Arthur replies that that’s what he believed when he was little, describing Santa as a “wonderful fantasy”. As they open the door, their apartment is crawling with elves checking under the couch, looking at the books on the shelves, peering inside trashcans. One elf, codenamed “Gingerbread”, introduces himself as a member of “Santa’s Little Secret Service”, and uses a wristwatch walkie-talkie to speak with “Candy Cane” and confirm the arrival of “Big Red”. In a few seconds the show has told us that Santa is real, and that his elves behave more like an elite intelligence agency than anyone who would be at home in the Keebler tree.
But it goes further that that. While Santa is discussing Multiple Santa with Tick, Arthur digs up the aforementioned pop-gun. You see, Arthur, the skeptic, has kept the toy all these years, buried in a trunk in his small apartment. He runs out to show Santa that he still has it, and the SLSS spring into action. One yells “HE’S GOT A GUNNNN!!!” as three of them throw themselves on Arthur, slamming him to the floor and snapping the toy gun in half. Santa recognizes the gun and calls them off, instantly producing a gift-wrapped pencil set to replace it. But he’s also fully cognizant of the reality of the situation, telling Arthur: “Most people are nice, but every once in a while a naughty little boy loses it, and comes after Santa.”
That one line is darker than anything in Red One. (Emotionally I mean—the film is not well lit.) The elves’ instantaneous response and Santa’s grim comment let us know that this scenario has happened before—and the weapon wasn’t always a nostalgic toy.
Given the ad campaign and general tone, Red One seems dedicated to the idea that it’s giving audiences an “edgy” and “grown up” take on a family friendly holiday film. For instance, once Jack discovers that Callum has a device that can embiggen toys, he repeatedly ask the proprietors of the toy shops he and Cal visit if they have Wonder Woman figurines, presumably so he can embiggen them and embark on a relationship of some kind. So, the bad reading is that the character in a children’s film wants to create a human sized sex doll (and I guess the more complicated, meta joke is that Captain America is specifically attracted to a DC character), and the slightly better read is that the black hat hacker wants to be tied up with the Lasso of Truth—not my personal kink, but go off. It’s further complicated by the fact that when a pair of Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots are brought to life, they seem to have some form of consciousness before they’re destroyed. Would a theoretical Wonder Woman action figure come to life have sentience? Because the implications of that are even worse. In any case, this is kind of an icky running gag for a kids film!
Now let’s look at how The Tick does it: At the Tick and Arthur’s holiday party, Die Fledermaus (The Tick‘s hapless parody of Batman) asks American Maid (their extremely competent Wonder Woman/Captain America mashup riff) to join him under the mistletoe and “make his Christmas”. This is slightly gross, but slightly joking, and at least ties in with a recognized Christmas tradition. American Maid responds by saying “Fieldmouse, get under a missile. Make everybody’s Christmas”. A great pun, a great putdown for the guy who lightly sexually harasses her all the time, and that’s it! It’s one gag, there’s no need to hammer it into the ground, it doesn’t affect their working relationship, all the other superheroes at the party laugh at American Maid’s quip, and everyone moves on.
Both Red One and The Tick celebrate Christmas through the joy of action sequences, but only The Tick believes you should be able to see those action sequences, or have any kind of emotional investment in the stakes. Grýla comes to Red One with hundreds of years of lore, powers, and even her 13 sons, the Yule Lads. The lore? Ignored! The Lads? Under-yule-tilized! And the final showdown with Grýla takes place in darkness. I do not mean spiritual darkness, or the darkness of the void of space—I mean that the scene is so dim and blurry I’m still not sure what happened. I think I think Jack unhooks Santa’s hijacked sleigh to foil Grýla’s attempt to steal Christmas, and then she transforms from a small blonde human-looking creature into her monstrous persona—but since we’ve never seen her fight, and we have no idea how strong she is, and we can’t fucking see her final form because the fight is happening in the dark, it’s hard to feel invested. Even when Jack says: “For a guy like me, there are worse ways to go out than trying to save Santa Claus”, an objectively good line, there’s no weight to it. He says it, Cal nods, neither of them seem to be in any actual danger from the CGI creature that’s going to be animated onto the green screen at a later date, and the film hastens towards its ending.
In contrast: each time the Tick or his compatriots fight Multiple Santa and his clones, we can see everything—a huge plus! The action is clearly choreographed. We understand who is punching whom, and why. After a fight between the clone army and the Tick’s friends in the Civic-Minded Five, we both hear Die Fledermaus saying that “everybody got creamed!” and we see that he’s bruised up, and that American Maid is in a neck brace carefully drinking a milkshake through a straw. We saw the fight, we saw that it was not going well, an we see the aftermath! Stakes! Later, when several of the clones accost Arthur and plan to throw him off the top of a dam, we both see him being swung by the clones, and hear him shrieking “Help!”—thus creating a sense of imminent danger—and having seen the previous fight, we know that they might actually chuck him to his death. Or well, we know that won’t happen because it’s a children’s cartoon, but Arthur the character doesn’t know that. He thinks he’s in mortal danger. Emotional investment!
Red One‘s other big action setpiece is between violent sentient snowmen and Jack and Cal. (Again, why not send the Yule Lads and have them do something in keeping with their lore? Why not send the Yule Cat, or even Mari Lwyd, since Krampus is also in the movie, and we’re not just restricting their story to Icelandic stuff? Should I just shut up and be glad no one looked up Zwarte Piet?) But OK, so they’re fighting evil snowmen in a Caribbean resort. Neither the bright sunshine, nor fire, nor even a sizzling grill can melt them. If I squint I can almost see a joke there. But want to know how you defeat an evil sentient snowman in this movie’s universe?
You pull its carrot nose out.
What?
W H A T ?
This makes no sense—why is a nose the key to sentience? And in what lore, ever, is a sentient snowman’s nose important? If they wanted to do a sentient snowman gag, shouldn’t it have been a magical hat or scarf of some kind???
MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.
Here again, The Tick shows us a better way. Since his clones are born of an electrical current, Multiple Santa is defeated when an overload of static electricity overwhelms them and essentially shorts them out—or as Tick puts it, “their Achilles heel is the ‘noogie’!” This not only makes sense (I mean, kinda) but it’s also visually satisfying to see multiple Multiple Santas rubbed together, the way a kid might gently rub a balloon on his cat’s fur—it’s not inherently violent or upsetting, but since the Multiple Santas are villains, watching them go poof is fun.
Red One gestures toward a subversive take on Santa. Rather than a jolly, bearded elder, jiggling like a bowlful of jelly and twinkling at everyone, he’s a lean, ropy, carb-loading J.K. Simmons, who seems extremely intense and kind of bro-y. He does, however, love being Santa. He loves the kids, he loves going undercover to visit malls, he loves—well, he loves everyone, actually, even his estranged brother Krampus, and even Jack, who’s been on the Naughty list since forever. So it’s kind of a fake out faux subversion, because J.K. Simmons’ Santa is actually as kindhearted as you’d hope Santa would be.
Unfortunately the film barely uses him, because he spend 80% of the movie in a Grýla-induced magical coma, in a sort of giant snowglobe, whose glass is as smudgy as all the terrible CGI. He’s dispatched so quickly that we never get to know his thoughts on Grýla’s plot, or on Jack’s growth, or Cal’s grudging attempts to get Jack to be Nice. We’re supposed to be invested in Jack and Cal’s mission to save Santa, but, aside from one long conversation with Cal about Cal’s resignation from ELF, the film never shows us who this Santa IS.
In “The Tick Loves Santa!” the bank robber who eventually becomes Multiple Santa is terrible. He steals a Santa suit from a man collecting for charity, he’s gleeful not only in his pursuit of larceny, but he seems to revel in the desecration of Santa. He happens to break into a store just as two security guards are discussing seasonal depression and terrorizes them—he rips the head off an animatronic St. Nick and hurls it at one guard, bellowing “YOU TELL THE WORLD, MULTIPLE SANTA’S COMIN’ TO TOWN!”
After the Civic-Minded Five are attacked, Tick laments: “Odds are it wasn’t the real Santa… but how can you ever be sure?” to which Die Fledermaus replies: “If he jumps up, and kicks you in the stomach, it’s probably not Santa!”—which tells you all you need to know about Multiple Santa’s underhanded fighting style. When he plots world domination via Clone, he screams: “The streets will run RED with Santas!” When he hijacks the hydroelectric dam (re-terrorizing those same two poor security guards) he snarls at them to connect the power to clone him, saying: “Hook me up fuzzball. it’s time to get my jollies!”
In other words, everything he does, he does knowing he’s ruining Christmas and traumatizing children. And he doesn’t care even a little.
But the writers of The Tick know that we have to see him being, well, Naughty, to show just how terrible he is, and to underscore Santa’s Niceness as a contrast. And the writers trust their audience—kids and nerds—to come with them as they drag Santa through the mud a little, and to get a little subversive joy from seeing an Evil Santa. They trust the kids to know both that some people have lost it “and come after Santa”, and also the Santa is a powerful mythical being who doesn’t really need a human to save him.
When we meet the Real Santa, we’ve already seen a skinny Charity Santa, Multiple Santa, an army of Santa Clones, and an animatronic Santa. And yet, Real Santa has a sort of glow of SANTA-ness that overshadows all the others. His voice is deeper and more authoritative, while also being warm. He dispenses a constant stream of wrapped gifts—tellingly, his gifts are small and functional (pencil sets, travel alarm clocks, in-the-egg egg scramblers) where Multiple Santa instructs his Santa Clones to go after stereos and TVS that are “strictly top-of-the-line!”
This Santa actually feels like a centuries-old quasi-deity who wants the best for everyone.
I think the key here is that Santa is a main character. While Santa’s Little Secret Service is hilarious—with earpieces, wristband walkie talkies, toothpicks sticking out of their mouths, and posture of either slouched boredom or coiled fighting stance—it’s Santa who’s always in control. It’s his idea to ask the Tick for help. He remembers exactly who Arthur is. He knows where Multiple Santa has gone to enact his nefarious plot, and he’s not in a coma for most of the runtime. And at the heart of the episode he’s trying to stop Multiple Santa not for his own safety—there’s no indication that Santa’s in any real physical danger—but because kids are crying themselves to sleep after seeing Santas wreaking havoc on the news. He needs Tick’s help to save Christmas, not to save himself.
Both Red One and “The Tick Loves Santa” are meditations on belief in Santa. When we meet young Jack, he’s already a non-believer who wants to disabuse other kids of their faith in Santa. We never learn why, exactly, he stopped believing in Santa, or if he wants to believe, or why he feels the need to enlighten other kids. His dad is AWOL, and his mom leaves him to the care of his aunts and uncles fairly often, but also the one uncle we meet is caring and kind, so if the film is trying to paint him a Tragic Backstory, it falls way short. But with that set-up, you’d think that his arc would be about learning that Santa is real, then learning out that creatures he’d never even heard of before, like Grýla and Krampus, are also real, and dealing with how that shatters his view of reality, and lead to him reassessing his own Nice and Naughty behavior. Instead he rolls with all of it very easily, and doesn’t really ask any follow-up questions beyond how much M.O.R.A. will pay him to help find Santa. This ends up being fine, because Jack’s character arc suddenly jumps tracks to focus on what a terrible dad he’s been. His big revelatory moment has nothing to do with Santa’s existence—Santa’s not even there—it’s an apology to his son that is somehow so transcendently Nice that it frees both of them from Grýla’s trap. Even though apologizing to your kid when you’re wrong seems more um, “Baseline Decent” than “Nice”—but again, the movie never defines any of these concepts in any way.
The other element here is that Cal has decided to quit the ELF, because, as he repeatedly says, he “can’t see it any more”—the film doesn’t let us in on what this means until the last few minutes, withholding it as a sort of twist that the harshness of the human world means that Cal can’t see people as the children they used to be.
Now, once Grýla’s been defeated and Santa’s restored to consciousness, Red One invites Jack and his kid to join them on the Christmas Eve gift run—this non-believer who learned Santa was objectively real without ever having to believe in him, and a kid whose relationship to Santa is never made clear at all, get to go on this magical journey. And somehow, for some reason, Cal looks at Jack and sees his kid-self, and this restores Cal’s belief in Christmas or whatever and he rescinds his resignation. Voila! All the plots are tied up, except there was never any serious consideration of Jack’s belief or lack thereof, of the idea of Objective Naughtiness, of Jack’s son’s thoughts about anything, or about the fact that it took Jack almost sacrificing his life for Santa for Cal to be able to see him as a child. Is he just gonna quit again next year when a different grizzled adult fails to meet his impossible standards?
Compare this with The Tick. The episode opens with Tick boggled by the sugar plums that are, literally, dancing around his head. (Arthur: [deep sigh] “…I don’t know, maybe they’re plums dipped in sugar, maybe they’re made out of sugar—I just don’t know, I’ve never had one.”) After they see the bank-robber-who-will-soon-be-Multiple-Santa get electrocuted, Tick is, understandably, despondent, and his dancing sugar plums have vanished. At their Christmas party, Arthur tries to tell Tick that it’s OK, because there is no Santa. When the Tick protests that there isn’t a Santa because “He got fried”, Arthur gently says, “No, this is bigger than that…” and that “there is not now, nor was there ever, a Santa.” Tick, being Tick, responds thusly: “I’ve heard about people like you! Are you saying… you don’t believe in Santa Claus???” The rest of the Civic-Minded Five agree with Arthur, leading Tick to yell in shock: “AND YOU CALL YOURSELVES SUPERHEROES???”
They table the theological conversation to go caroling, but they don’t drop it. Tick’s belief in Santa is integral to the plot—he realizes that even when he’s pretty sure it’s a Clone Santa pummeling him, he can’t bring himself to fight back, which means that all the heroes get their asses kicked by Santa Clones. And later, when discussing Arthur’s pop-gun, Arthur tells his friend, “It’s a wonderful fantasy, I know, but it’s just not real.”
It’s important to note that the cartoon, in the midst of all its silliness, takes this question of belief completely seriously. Arthur doesn’t mock or deride Tick for believing in Santa, but he feels a responsibility to help his friend see the truth. As with a lot of kids’ holiday media, de-mystifying Santa can be seen as a gentle nudge out of the magical thinking of childhood.
But to its credit, the show, which is about superheroes, and whose view of reality is, shall we say, flexible, throws that crap right out the garland-festooned window.
When Tick and Arthur open their apartment door and discover the Santa’s Little Secret Service, Tick is overjoyed. His face is split in an even bigger grin than usual. Arthur, meanwhile, goes to pieces. His expression is not that of a person who had a secret faith confirmed, but rather one whose whole worldview just got snapped in half. His legs shake. He can’t speak. And then when he does try to show Santa that long-cherished toy, it’s taken away and broken. Encountering the numinous has changed him.
Meanwhile, the show once again underlines that most people do (and should?) step into a more grounded reality, when Santa tells Tick: “Tick, I love ya like a son. You’ve kept the faith longer than any sane adult could. But get a grip on yourself!”
Their fight against Multiple Santa now sanctioned by Big Red himself, Tick and Arthur head off to deal with “epic naughty” while Santa begins his Christmas Eve flight. And then a beautiful exchange takes place: Santa doesn’t give Tick and Arthur a ride on the sleigh or anything—he’s got gifts to deliver, and defeating supervillains is their job—but he does sail past the moon (still sporting the phrase “HA” courtesy of Chairface Chippendale) and bellows out a festive “SPOOOON!” But even that isn’t festive enough for The Tick! As the episode returns to the two chums on the roof of the hydroelectric plant, we see that Tick’s sugar plum visions are back, and they’re DANCING. But even better, Arthur has them, too.
In one (literally) sweet, simple image, The Tick found a way to visualize a holiday epiphany without resorting to treacly sentiment or top-heavy religious messages. Rather than having Santa reward the heroes directly, and publicly, with a ride on the sleigh, the sugar plums are a private, personal sign that Tick and Arthur’s Christmas spirit been restored. The episode isn’t really about Multiple Santa, or Santa being in any actual danger. It’s about Tick having Christmas Spirit, and losing it, and Arthur going through the rituals of a holiday he hasn’t felt connected to since childhood—if then. (“I don’t know, I’ve never had them.” ) In the end, both with sugar plums dancing in their heads, they’ve defeated an external villain, and more important, they’re sharing the holiday in a new and profound way.
