HOLLYWOOD Q&A

Q: I used to love an old Christmas movie that was about a group of toys in a playroom on Christmas Eve. I’m pretty sure it was done by Jim Henson but it wasn’t the Muppets or “Sesame Street” characters. What was the name of it?

A: The ‘80s were a big time for Jim Henson’s workshop. “The Muppet Show” and “Sesame Street” were runaway hits that had made Henson a household name, and he seemed to be churning out new shows and films all the time.

For that reason, smaller-scale productions like the 1986 onehour Christmas special “The Christmas Toy” have sort of fallen through the cracks of our cultural memory. Make no mistake, though, it’s pure Henson magic.

It’s about a group of toys that come to life when people aren’t around — an idea that has since become a sort of children’s-story trope. In this one, they come alive on Christmas Eve and start making plans to welcome the new toys that will be joining them on Christmas morning. One character, Rugby Tiger, recalls how special he felt when he was the child’s new favorite toy, and decides to hide himself under the tree again this year to get the feeling back. A grand toy rescue ensues when things don’t go as planned.

Q: What ever happened to the half-hour animated special from the ‘60s, “The Littlest Angel”? I think Bing

Crosby sang the song in it. It ran every Christmas for years, and then one year it was gone.

A: The only thing that really “happened” is it was remade. That might go some way to explaining its absence from the airwaves, but so does time.

Sure, there are a few timeworn old holiday specials that have aired every year for decades, but they’re exceptions to the general rule, which is that most holiday TV has a limited lifespan. As you say, “The Littlest Angel” had a better run than most, and aired for quite a while, but it eventually gave way to the crushing weight of new specials being produced every year, vying for limited airtime.

The remakes (there were actually two) have added to that weight, but, as I say, they only go partway to explaining things, because they were animated and lacked the major backing of your 1969 version (which was made for NBC). Thus, they were never really a threat to the older one as the go-to TV special.

Also, the 1969 live-action version (which also had some star power, thanks to famous TV faces Fred Gwynne, Tony Randall and Connie Stevens, as well as musician Cab Calloway) was itself a remake — it had previously been filmed in 1950 as a lowbudget animated short.

They were all, however, just screen versions of the even older children’s book of the same name, written by Charles Tazewell and released way back in the mid-1940s.