
The holidays feel like they come faster every year when we’re living in a capitalist hellscape such as this, but your friends at AMP haven’t forgotten what makes this season so magical. Is it the spirit of generosity and gratitude that permeates the air? Perhaps it’s the comfort of gathering with loved ones — family, friends or otherwise? Both of these are incorrect, actually. The holiday season peaked in 2002 when two iconic animated films were released only five days apart, forever redefining the spiritual nature of this time of year and showing us what animation is truly capable of as a medium. Join us on this early 2000’s throwback as we relive the good times that gave us Ricky Rodgers halfheartedly freestyling about his dead mom and an animated Adam Sandler’s spiral into alcoholism spurred by parental trauma. Tis the season y’all!
Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa
“Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa” is a 2002 computer animated film that’s notorious to few and completely obscure for most. While several people have made video essays and reviews of this timelessly terrible production, I think it’s still worth watching on your own time. After all, There’s something so inimitable about pressing play and immediately being greeted by the most scuffed looking title sequence to ever grace a screen. Picture comic sans text while an unbearably slow camera shows you an aerial view of a small town that looks like it was ripped straight out of classical Runescape. This sets the tone perfectly for the film’s remaining 40 minutes of runtime.
The entire film looks like it was made in Roblox. That’s not a joke either, throughout my watch I half expected the models for the characters to fall apart into blocks anytime they made contact with something. Everyone has exactly one walking animation that’s reused constantly, and they don’t exactly walk but rather drift slowly over the ground like vengeful specters as they wiggle their limbs to mimic human locomotion. I’d say this film is the ghost of Christmas past made real, but there are no fond memories here — only low poly nightmares. These waking night terrors continue once you realize that this is also a musical.
That’s right, people sing in this film! And rap. Actually, only the main character Ricky Rodgers (played by Walter Emanuel Jones) raps, and only two other characters sing. Did you know there are only four songs in this musical? Does it even qualify as a musical at that point? Does God live in fear of his own creations? I won’t attempt to answer any of these questions, but I will give you an approximation of the plot. Emphasis on “approximation” because I’m not sure this film knows what’s happening either.
The story goes like this: Ricky Rodgers is POOR. He is arguably the only kid on Rapsittie Street that’s genuinely nice or tolerable in any sense. Despite this, nobody likes him. It’s never made clear if people dislike him because of his socioeconomic status, or because he freestyles everything he says like Dracula Flow, but either way everyone thinks he’s a loser and this includes the snobbish white girl he has a crush on. Her name is Nicole (played by Paige O’Hara) and she has no redeeming qualities — or any discernible qualities at all apart from being upper middle-class and having body proportions to rival slenderman. Ricky wants to give her a stuffed bear that his deceased mother gifted him years ago, but she thinks it’s beneath her because she’s a representative of the bourgeoisie and has no soul. Nicole yells at Ricky and storms off to go throw his bear in the trash, and he runs home in shambles. Or rather, he attempts to run home in shambles because he’s animated in 3D Choreographer which is a now defunct animation software from 1992 that functions like a slightly more convoluted version of MS Paint. Did I mention this film cost $650,000 to make? Anyway, he’s trying and that’s what really matters. Forget believing in Santa — I believe in you, Ricky.
After a misplaced letter that Ricky wrote to Santa makes its way to Nicole, she learns the story behind his gift and sees that he wished for all the kids in their class to get new toys, even though they mistreated him. Spontaneously recognizing the error of her ways, Nicole turns over a new leaf and decides to help get Ricky’s bear back by looking for it at the dump. Soon after this, we’re treated to the most nightmarish 3D renditions of two animated dachshunds that I’ve ever seen in my 25 years on this earth. The kids are chased around by these poorly rendered guard dogs until they find the coveted bear plush, escaping with their lives intact, sadly. Everybody then reunites with Ricky and Nicole returns his bear, exemplifying the spirit of generosity and friendship or whatever. They live happily ever after, I guess.
If you’re wondering when the titular “Believe in Santa” part comes in, it hardly even does! It’s all covered in a subplot that we don’t see until the latter half of the film, where one of Ricky’s classmates has a crisis of faith and is then (very unnervingly) reminded by her father that Santa IS real and you NEED to believe in him, you NEED to.
There’s a lot to be said about this 42-minute long trainwreck of a film, but honestly I’m just glad it exists and can be accessibly watched online. Everybody say thank you director Colin Slater for bestowing this holiday classic upon us.
Eight Crazy Nights
For the longest time I’ve never actually known anything about “Eight Crazy Nights” besides its really corny promotional art. Nothing has captivated my brain quite like the sight of a poorly drawn 2D Adam Sandler mischievously tossing a snowball at the viewers, while his silly little entourage of festive friends smile and watch. And so, I jumped at the chance to watch this for AMP. I had no clue what “Eight Crazy Nights” was about, or how good it was, or anything. But it didn’t matter to me — all that mattered was that I finally got to watch the goofy 2D Adam Sandler movie.
I should have known what I was getting into.
Fun fact: did you know I thought this was a family friendly movie? Those aren’t exactly Adam Sandler’s specialty, but between the Hanukkah theme and the genuinely endearing cel animated art style, I thought this was gonna be more like “Bedtime Stories” and its sanitized Sandlerisms. Alas, this film is actually a shining example of the wise, age-old truth that animation is an artistic medium that can be used to create mature stories. Or, well, it would be, if you somehow consider anything in this film mature. “Eight Crazy Nights” shows its hand as early as the opening scene, in which Sandler’s main character — Davey Stone — gets shit-faced drunk at a Chinese restaurant, loudly burps for eight seconds straight in the face of a stereotypically racist Asian waiter, goes outside to mime sex with his car, and then sings a musical number about his hatred for the holidays, as well as his tendencies towards alcoholism, theft, vandalism, and, uh, groping ladies’ melons. Don’t worry, he meant actual watermelons! Haha, that’s so funny!
Spare me.
In case the combination of Adam Sandler, a crass toilet humor script, and old-school Disney/Warner Bros-esque animation didn’t make for an inconsistent enough film, it’s also a musical. Seriously, who was this made for?
But enough complaining, what is the plot of this cinematic masterpiece? It’s about Davey, the aforementioned humbug holiday hater with a tragic backstory (his parents died 20 years ago and now he brazenly commits assault and destruction around town), learning to rediscover his love of the holiday season. He’s aided by Whitey Duvall, an extremely eccentric old man whose pure heart outshines his many quirks and flaws. Most pressing of said flaws is his voice, which is literally just Adam Sandler doing the most grating old man voice I’ve heard in my entire life.
After Davey’s musical rampage lands him in trouble for destroying the town’s holiday celebration, Whitey convinces the judge to sentence Davey to work as a referee-in-training for youth basketball. This is an awfully unsuitable sentence for an alcoholic who has shown inclinations towards harming others and destroying property. Great person to have around kids! But it’s okay, I told myself while watching. This is all part of the plan. Davey is supposed to be a vile piece of shit right now, but maybe his time coaching these kids will help him find the right path! That never happens. There’s like one scene of him actually being a ref-in-training, and it’s just him bullying a kid for being fat.
He also gets back in contact with his childhood sweetheart, who is now a single mom. It’s obvious from the start that she’s way out of his league, but maybe they’ll have some kind of special connection that brings them together and helps Davey find himself, right? No, they barely interact. Most of the time it’s just her (rightfully) telling him off for being such a jackass. They still get together in the end, of course.
What about Whitey? Maybe his kindness is what gets Davey to see the light! Nope. Most of their screentime together is just Davey insulting or tormenting Whitey. My personal favorite is when Davey shoves him into a porta-potty, pushes it down a hill, and then hoses off the poop-covered Whitey with frigid water, turning him into a frozen shit sculpture. This is a real movie.
The film acknowledges that Davey sucks. But he’s so absurdly, hilariously awful that any trace of empathy I had for him vanished, and I found myself wishing he’d get comeuppance over redemption. But instead, one day he just sorta… becomes good. I kid you not, he just magically becomes nicer to everyone. I don’t know. This isn’t even getting into the scene where he drunkenly breaks into the mall and somehow psychedelically hallucinates the stores coming to life and forcing him to confront his grief. Or the shit-eating deer scenes. I really don’t know.
There are some good things about “Eight Crazy Nights.” For starters, although the animation is rather shoddy at times, the art style is — as I’ve mentioned — genuinely impressive. They got animators from actual good movies like “The Iron Giant” to work on this, after all. And honestly? Adam Sandler’s got a decent singing voice. I don’t know if that’s something I should have expected or not, but still. Overall this was one stupid, stupid trip of a ride, one that made for One Crazy Night of my own. 3/10.
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