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| - Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is a 1972 Christmas film directed by Barry Mahon and R. Winer that aired as a weekend afternoon kiddie matinee. It stars Jay Clark as Santa Claus and "Kids" from Ruth Foreman's Pied Piper Playhouse. Actually, no, that description doesn't nearly do it justice. The Thumbelina segment was shot at the long-defunct Pirates World theme park in Florida in 1970, and stars Shay Garner as the title character. It is a re-telling of said story done in the style of a museum exhibit, complete with models of the sets. So, that makes the theme park itself a Framing Device, too!
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| abstract
| - Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is a 1972 Christmas film directed by Barry Mahon and R. Winer that aired as a weekend afternoon kiddie matinee. It stars Jay Clark as Santa Claus and "Kids" from Ruth Foreman's Pied Piper Playhouse. Actually, no, that description doesn't nearly do it justice. It's actually a complete and utter Mind Screw from start to finish. Standard movie-watching logic does not apply to this film. In fact, any attempt to apply basic storytelling logic to the film will probably give you a brain aneurysm. It ignores every basic dramatic convention. The final episode of The Prisoner was less of a brainrape than this movie. Santa and his sleigh are stranded on a beach somewhere in Florida in inch-deep sand, his reindeer having flew back to the North Pole to cool off. Several kids (including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn) try to help him out with a variety of farm animals (and a guy dressed in a gorilla suit!), but to no avail. Just when all hope is given up, Santa is reminded of the story of Thumbelina, where the film sidetracks us to said plot. The eponymous Ice Cream Bunny doesn't show up to help Santa until the very end, where the two drive off in his old fire truck. Did we mention that the Thumbelina segment is actually an entirely different film, complete with it's own opening and closing credits left intact? Yep, Santa's story to the children includes detailed descriptions of who the executive producer was. By now you should start to understand why this film is basically a Logic Bomb for humans. The Thumbelina segment was shot at the long-defunct Pirates World theme park in Florida in 1970, and stars Shay Garner as the title character. It is a re-telling of said story done in the style of a museum exhibit, complete with models of the sets. So, that makes the theme park itself a Framing Device, too! Oddly enough, depending on where the film was shown, certain prints substituted the story of Jack and the Beanstalk for Thumbelina, also shot at Pirates World, with Mitchell Poulos as the boy hero. This was no improvement, especially as the Giant (Renato Boracherro) offered such lines as, "Wife, bring me my creepy-crawlies! Mmmm-mmmmmm!". Barry Mahon, one of the directors, was actually a fugitive from the true story of The Great Escape. What did Those Wacky Nazis do to him that caused him to produce this? Read The Agony Booth's recap here. Also available as a Riff Trax video download.
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