You start to hear the sounds of the morning, the wind rustling the leaves, the chirping of the birds and that’s when you realize what day it is–Saturday! Cartoons! All week long you’ve been starved of cartoons, and now it is your time to feast! You throw off the covers, shove your feet in your slippers and sprint downstairs!
Grab that big bowl of C-3POs, adjust the antennae and plop down on the floor for your weekly dose of animated fun!
This is Analog Agent Benjamin coming at you this week with…. Nutcracker Fantasy
When you are a kid, you remember seeing an odd animated Christmas special or movie on TV that you never knew the name of, but you would always remember it because it was so weird. For me, that movie was the Nutcracker Fantasy.
The real weird thing about this movie is that while it does look like a Rankin-Bass special (like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” & “The Year without a Santa Claus”), it is not, it was made by a Japanese movie company called Sanrio. But its director, Takeo Nakamura, did worked as an animator on the Rankin-Bass special, “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”.
From what I know, this movie has not come out on DVD here in the U.S. yet, and you can only find it on old VHS videos for sell on eBay. But because it’s so rare, the price for it can go anywhere from $60.00 up to $200.00.
Did you ever see or hear of this movie as a kid? Did you think it was too scary to be a Christmas cartoon? What do Nutcrackers have to do with Christmas anyway?
There’s always asking Sanrio if or when this may ever get released again domestically since they do own the movie. I think it did get a DVD release in Japan some years back.
Hi, yes I’m so glad someone else remembers how odd and to me terrifying Xmas special this was. I’ve always asked other people my age, I’m 38, if they recall this on tv around 1979 or. 1980 and nobody remembers it. All I remember was this scary nutcracker guy would walk the streets at night peeping in children’s windows and if they weren’t asleep by midnight he turned them into a rat! It was so scary that I slept with my head under my blanket for a few years after that. I still can’t believe that was made for children. Lots of movies for kids back in the 70’s and 80’s were kinda scary and probably wouldn’t even be marketed for kids nowadays. A few examples Are gremlins, chitty chitty bang bang, the dark crystal. But nothing creeped me out more than the nutcracker fantasy. I’ve never liked decorating for Xmas using nutcrackers and can’t stand the sight of them now at Xmas. They’re weird looking and downright creepy the way their mouths open and some have teeth showing which is even worse lol. Thanks for posting this, because now I know I wasn’t alone in being creeped out by that horror show of a children’s movie .