The Night They Saved Christmas
Richard Auty

Review by Richard Auty

The Night They Saved Christmas 1984

★★

Rewatched 01 Dec 2022

I saw this mid-80s TV movie once, many many years ago. I was 7 or 8 years old and in my memory it was either on Christmas Eve evening or early Christmas Day morning. I remember being absolutely entranced by the depiction of Santa's secret North Pole base. It's an incredibly fond childhood Christmas memory, and although I remembered the name of this wonderous film into adulthood, I had no recollection of what it was actually about.

Turns out it's about drilling for oil. Santa (played by TV icon Art Carney) finds North Pole City is under threat of destruction from dynamite blasts being used in an attempt to establish a new oil field nearby. He tries to get the wife and children of the oil mission's chief engineer (said wife being played by Charlie's Angel Jaclyn Smith) to persuade them to stop, lest North Pole City be destroyed and Christmas ruined for ever.

The scenes at Santa's base are actually quite fun - sometimes all you really need are sets and lovely matte paintings - and that's exacty what you get. There's also various pseudo-scientific attempts to explain how Santa can actually do what he does.

The oil drilling stuff on the other hand is not much fun and the film has a really odd anti-climactic conclusion. So no, it's not the Christmas masterpiece I remembered, but at least it's not completely terrible.

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