15 Favorite New Year’s Eve Sitcom Episodes

I’ve talked about my favorite sitcom episodes based around Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. There is one holiday I have sadly overlooked. Well, two. But we have a few more weeks to dive into Valentine’s Day. No what I want to discuss is the popular New Year’s Eve episode.

       

New Year’s may not be the most popular holiday to devote a sitcom episode on, but there are still plenty of them out there. They usually always revolve around making resolutions or finding a date for the night. Or both. What I love is that these are all almost all honorary Christmas episodes, since most of these shows decorate the sets with Christmas decorations seeing how the episode is set days later. And the theme of the holiday season is still very much present.

Here are some of them. And since it seems like every list I see forgets that TV shows happened in the 70’s, 80’s or early 90’s, these are mostly from that era.




Laverne & Shirley, “New Years Eve 1959”

Penny Marshall was the best. I failed to find a clip of the Christmas episode last time, but this episode I did find. And there isn’t much to it. It’s just the gang finding dates for New Year’s. Which doesn’t end well for poor Laverne. But give Garry Marshall credit that final scene of them all singing Auld Lang Syne is pretty cool, he really knew how to hit the sentimental button.

A Look at TV Theme Opening Evolution

I talked earlier this year about how a TV show opening will be kind of lousy in a show’s early years. So lousy it gets chucked and replaced. Some shows never change their opening, it’s the same year after year. And then there’s that third category of TV show opening, when the opening music and even some of the visuals remains the same, but evolves as the show progresses. Maybe the music is jazzed up a bit or the graphics improved, but it’s not a replacement as much as an improvement to what had been. For example, The Brady Bunch was basically the same opening every year but the music was re-recorded as the kids grew and they updated the visuals to reflect the fact the kids were growing.

You can see this in Friends, Saved By The Bell, and countless other shows where it was the same opening they just replaced some of the clips.

Some shows do a little more than simply replace the visuals however. Here are a few examples of what I mean, TV openings that weren’t changed because they sucked as much as they took an opening theme that was just fine and improved on it to evolve with the show.



A Different World

This is one of my favorite examples. This was of course The Cosby spin-off starring Lisa Bonet (at first). Here is the Season 1 version:

Pretty..awful. It really looks like “The Denise Huxtable Show”, which I guess is what it was at first. Thankfully when Debbie Allen came in she retooled everything, even the theme. So we got the same theme, re-sung, with this interesting concept:

This was sooo much better. The same song but it gave the feeling it was more of an ensemble show than the other opening did. It got a couple minor tweaks until the final season when it was revamped with a jazzier theme (sang by Boyz II Men) and was a lot faster. No disrespect to Aretha Franklin of course who turned that boring theme from Season 1 into something memorable.

Oh and yes, that is Jada Pinkett, Cree Summer and Ajai Sanders in the credits.

Merry Christmas From the Variety Specials

There a lot of things that were huge on TV at one time that have vanished over the years. Believe it or not there was a time when Westerns were huge. When was the last time you saw on of those on TV? Another example are the old variety Christmas specials. And to be honest, these are so passe that even I barely got to see any of them. Except for Bob Hope I never watched Bing or Perry Como or any of those others.




It’s hard to really discuss these without video clips but these specials were so awesome. They had celebrity guests, sketches, and lots of singing. Can you imagine a time when people performed rehearsed numbers? Good times. Were they corny? Oh my yes. But there was also something so great about them. It’s really hard to explain. Since it’s Christmas very shortly I thought it would be fun to dig through YouTube and share some clips from these specials.





Judy Garland
Man does this one go back a aways! I mean, black and white? I think this was her only special but thought it would be fun to mention it. It’s also funny to see Mel Torme so young. Here is a classic clip of him singing his biggest Christmas song along with Judy Garland

Five Favorite Disney Christmas Shorts

I’m really quite shocked I never covered this one. I guess it feels like I did because I’ve commented on great blogs done by others.

Thirty-five years ago Mickey’s Christmas Carol premiered in theaters. But since I’ve talked about that many times before, I decided to do something different. Disney has been doing Christmas shorts for ages. Even more if you include Silly Symphonies. But which one’s are my favorite that I still watch every year, despite my advanced age?






Here are my five favorite Disney Christmas cartoons. And to be clear, I mean shorts featuring Mickey and the gang not full length episodes and/or movies. Oh, and you may know my gripe about how Disney somehow seems to think snow and ice automatically equal Christmas. No, these have to be CHRISTMAS cartoons. And no Christmas Carol does count it’s a short not a movie. When it premiered in theaters it was accompanied by other Disney cartoons to make it long enough for a theatrical release.



Santa’s Workship

While I have issues with the follow up to this, ‘The Night Before Christmas”, this one is more tolerable. Yeah the Santa is still kinda xcreepy but at least teh scenario makes more sense. It’s Santa getting ready for the big sleigh ride. The animation and music are really nice.

Five Awful 4th Wall Breakers

4th wall breaks in Movies and TV are always fun. Sometimes it’s a wink to the audience or a gag, and other times the character is also serving as a narrator. Oh sure sometimes it works, it’s clear that Winnie the Pooh and friends know they are storybook characters for instance. And do I even need to mention Deadpool or Ferris Bueller? But there have been a few times when the wall breaking comes out of nowhere, or makes no sense. And I had to ask, why was this 4th wall break here?

Here are five 4th wall breaks which are either bizarrely random, or just plain stupid.






Mary Poppins

Someone please explain to me why Bert introduces us to the Banks at the start of the film? It would be fine if HE EVER DID IT AGAIN but he doesn’t. He’s no narrator, he’s just in the movie after that point. And he doesn’t tell us anything that couldn’t have been handed off to another character with a line or two. Yeah he tells us who Admiral Boom is but why couldn’t have the housekeepers told us that? And why did we need to know the address anyway, are we having a test at the end of the movie?

Five AWFUL TV Replacement Characters

A few months ago I talked about replacements for superheroes and theme songs, and how they can be hit or miss. This of course happens on TV shows too. But it’s often more miss than hit. Replacing a popular character is very hard to do. For example, I mentioned Chloris Leachman the other day who did a decent job replacing Mrs. Garrett on The Facts of Life. Others may disagree with that, but I liked it. Other examples where it worked include Don Knotts on Three’s Company, Col Potter on MASH, and Rebecca Howe on Cheers. But for the few that worked you have examples like Budd Bronski on Wings. Remember him? Course not. Do I even need to mention Cory and Vance? Ughhhhh

\



Sadly, it usually doesn’t work. Here are five sitcom replacements which were just failures. And of course, just opinion.




Ted McGinley on Happy Days

Poor Ted McGinely! I mean that, I mean talk about walking into a no win scenario! There was no way that they could duplicate the chemistry Ron Howard and Henry Winkler had. He portrayed Roger Phillips for the last few years, and for the most part is just a forgotten memory as far as that show is concerned.

“It’s a Wonderful” Sitcom Episode

 

This is one I have been putting off for awhile. We all know the classic movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” where George Bailey gets to see what the world would have been like without him. It’s a great premise, so great pretty much everyone has done a take on it inducing Tiny Toons, SNL, and The Muppets. And of course, sitcoms are no exception.



While not quite as common as the “Christmas Carol” episode, there are still a few out there. And they don;t all follow the exact same structure either, the only criteria is some sort of angel (for most) and seeing what everyone would be like if something did or didn’t happen. One reason I have not discussed this yet is because it doesn’t need to be a Christmas episode for the premise to work. Though very often it is. I’ll be honest I am a major sucker for this particular plot device. Possibilities are always fun to see, especially with characters you have gotten to really know. Seeing what they could have been like if things were different, and while some shows play it more seriously than others these episodes are always fun to watch.




Here we go, buckle in folks!




Benson, “Home for Christmas”

One of my favorite episodes of anything ever. For the longest time it was just a memory, I had only seen it once, and killed to see it again. Thank you TV Land for finally re-airing it so I could record it! Benson is injured and in heaven, his mother shows him what life would be like for his friends if he left them then. And the picture above is not from the episode, all I could find.