Tim and Jen enlist the help of Bitter Karella to wade through the 22 minutes of treacle that is the forgotten faux-Peanuts special, Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus.
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See this slab of gelatinous treacle for yourself at the Internet Archive.
William Conant Church, brother of Francis Church, did indeed help found the NRA in 1871, in an effort to improve marksmanship amongst the broader American militia. He and brother Francis co-founded several news publications, including the New York Sun, and he also co-founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Additionally, Frank Church was not the volcel depicted in the Yes, Virginia special— he was married to a woman named Elizabeth Wickham. In spite of Tim’s joshing, it appears that Church did not have a severe yet shapely assistant who browbeat him into publishing the editorial addressed to Virginia O’Hanlon. The O’Hanlon letter was passed on by Edward Page Mitchell, the real-life editor-in-chief of the Sun.
Mike alluded to the “Season’s Greetings” meme drawn from Douglas Dixon’s Man After Man, a kind of speculative art book about possible evolutions of Homo sapiens. If you want to see more of the weird art, the book is free to browse at the Internet Archive.
Finally, if you want to pretend that it’s 1974 again and you’re spinning some 45s, you can hear the theme song for the special sung by a piercing li’l Jimmy Osmond.
Want more weird cartoons? Check out Tim & Jen’s riff on the animated short “Eveready Harton” from 1975’s Self Service Girls, or one of our other episodes on trauma-inducing animation.
