On the Third Day of Christmas...

On the Third Day of Christmas, I saw on DVD… the X-Men episode “Have Yourself a Morlock Little Christmas”

Yes, the X-men cartoon from the mid-90’s had a Christmas episode. It wasn’t very good. I loved the cartoon and still do, despite its choppy animation and bad writing, however this Christmas episode just didn’t work for me.

So you have the X-Men doing stuff to prepare for Christmas. Rogue, Jubilee and Cyclops decorate a massive tree while singing carols. Cyclops is singing ridiculously bad… like beyond tone-deaf bad. He was singing so bad that you would think it was deliberate (which I guess it sort of was). Of course curmudgeonly old Wolverine won’t sing. He is pouting about it being Christmas or something. Like many things in the cartoon it is never really explained, we just fall back on the 2 dimensional personalities of the various X-Men… in this case it is that Wolverine is always angry.

Meanwhile, Beast is doing a science experiment because his personality is that he is smart… which isn’t really a personality but for the X-Men cartoon it somehow counts as one. In the kitchen, Jean Grey is preparing food because her personality is that she is boring and a woman, so she must be a housewife. Seriously, the cartoon really had no idea how to write Jean Grey. She and Cyclops were so boring. Anyways, Jean Grey is mad because Gambit is trying to give her food a kick using Cajun spices, because Gambit’s personality is that he’s Cajun. Yes, I know Cajun is not a personality, but again the X-Men have decided it is so just go with it. 

So Storm, Wolverine and Jubilee go Christmas shopping and then go ice skating. Suddenly an ambulance crashes onto the rink. It was stolen by a couple of Morlocks, those sewer dwelling freak mutants to ugly to live among humans. Apparently fellow Morlock Leech is dying and they were trying to help him. So Storm, Wolverine and Jubilee go help.

Part of my problem with this episode is that it has the plot of a children’s book. Where’s the action? Where’s the conflict. You could have replaced Jubilee with Elmo and had the same result. Plus the humor in the episode feels so forced. Cyclops is singing every other note way off key. Gambit and Jean Grey argue in the kitchen. Those are not jokes. They’re just annoyances.

My biggest problem with this episode is that in the attempt to make the X-Men look like good, kind and generous souls, they instead come across as assholes. Some time before, Storm won leadership of the Morlocks by defeating the previous leader Callisto in a game of Dance Dance Revolution… okay, they just fought, but how awesome would that have been? Anyways, it turns out Storm hasn’t bothered to help the Morlocks out at all since becoming their leader. She just went on living in the X-Mansion.

And that’s another thing; here the X-Men are living in a massive decadent palace and their fellow mutants, ones who are under the care of an X-Man, live in the sewers surviving on scraps. Seriously, there are NINE people living in that huge mansion, but they can’t give even a few rooms to the Morlocks? In fact, at the end of the episode, the Morlocks offer the X-Men some of their own meager amounts of food for Christmas dinner in an act of thankful generosity. So the Storm, Wolverine, Jubilee and Beast (he showed up to help too… because he’s smart) accept and give Professor X a call to tell them to cancel their own elaborate Christmas dinner. Why the hell didn’t the X-Men invite the Morlocks over to partake in their huge feast?

Lastly, the entire plot of the episode hinges on whether Wolverine will allow his blood to be transfused into Leech as it is the best chance he has at survival. Wolverine doesn’t want to! He is afraid it might not work because of some incident from his past (again, it is never explained… wait, I thought Wolverine couldn’t remember his past?). So basically Leech will die for sure without said transfusion, but because he still might die, Wolverine doesn’t want to go through with it. See? They all seem like dicks!

So yeah, Leech lives. The X-Men sort of learn the true meaning of Christmas. It’s a happy ending to a boring and very forced episode. It wasn’t funny or touching, it was just there. Couldn’t Juggernaut have been trying to steal presents or something? That would have at least created some action.

On the Merry Meter I give “We Wish You a Morlock Christmas” a 2 out of 10. (I give it 2 because of nostalgic value and because they had Gambit wearing a chef’s hat. That’s just funny to me… even if it wasn’t meant to be.)

Stay tuned tomorrow for something much, much better.