When Alexander and Ilya Salkind set out to create Santa Claus: The Movie, they went straight to their Superman: The Movie playbook from ’78. Same formula: massive production values, international cast, mythic origin story followed by a contemporary evil supervillain scenario. “The Movie” indeed. They even brought back David and Leslie Newman to write it. The plan was clearly to engineer a Christmas blockbuster that can become an annual tradition, something families would return to every December like clockwork. Sure we had It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street, but this was designed to knock the stockings off the mantle.
They wanted to give Santa the full Superman treatment – definable backstory, epic scope, a super-villain, the works. They wanted us to believe a sleigh can fly. It opens like a self-contained medieval fairy tale: a humble woodcutter and wife rescue lost children in a blizzard, get rewarded (?) with immortality and eternal toy-distribution duties. All laid out with the deliberate pacing of pastoral storytelling and sweeping orchestral cues.
Then everything shifts into yuppie workplace comedy. Dudley Moore’s inventive elf screws up and leaves Santa’s operation – no, not to be a dentist. Enter John Lithgow’s gleefully corrupt toy executive who convinces our wayward elf to industrialize Christmas magic. Suddenly we’re watching a broad corporate satire about magic dust that make things fly.
The first half works as a lovely fable. The second becomes a parody of the Reagan-era consumerism it’s simultaneously celebrating. Moore’s elf supposedly bridges these worlds, but the connection never quite holds.
The tonal whiplash is jarring, like watching two movies wrestle for control.
November 1985 saw it tank in North America while performing marginally better in the UK, where it became a repeated and beloved television fixture. But without critical champions stateside, it never cracked the rotation that keeps holiday films breathing. The home video release quickly migrated to that UV-blue wasteland of the kids’ section, and for years, no proper re-release materialized.
That disappearance gave it a unique afterlife for those of us who caught it at just the right age. The scarcity transformed it into something quasi-remembered, a ghost from a specific moment rather than a tradition that stuck around. Perfect cult material for connoisseurs of ambitious failures.
Looking back, the film’s approach is right on the nose. Christmas gets treated as corporate property, and Santa managed like an industrial asset. The Salkinds used every tool of modern marketing to Mc-Package a story that had always existed outside those systems. Even the release strategy revolved around maximizing sales cycles.
Then, when director Richard Donner (no relation to the reindeer) made Scrooged in 1988, he presented an interesting counter-argument.
Remember, the Salkinds had booted Donner off Superman II over creative differences, and if you squint, his own Christmas movie reads like a direct rebuttal to Santa Claus: The Movie. His film ridicules the idea that Christmas should be wrapped in shiny spectacle and exploited for profit – the same message Charlie Brown’s special delivered, but I like hearing it from Bill Murray.
These two films form an accidental dialogue with one another. One represents peak studio confidence and excessive boardroom ambition – the belief that any myth could be packaged and scaled with enough spectacle. Think ‘The night The reindeer died’. The other documents the hangover from that belief. Together they chart the trajectory from late-70s commercial optimism to late-80s cultural yuppie exhaustion.
For Gen X, this progression became foundational. We got served sincerity, then we were immediately taught to suspect it. Commercial wonder followed by its deconstruction. Both lessons took root, producing a generation that still responds to mythic storytelling but never stops noticing the machinery grinding beneath.
Santa Claus: The Movie never achieved its intended immortality in my neck of the woods. No North American success, no seasonal ubiquity. Yet for those who encountered it during its brief window, it captured something essential about how Christmas entertainment merged with it’s own raison-d’être until you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. The reason for the season is the season’s need for a reason.
It feels less like a story about belief and more like a snapshot of the industry that exploits that belief.
It’s excessive, uneven and exhausting but for the kids who caught it during that short run, it reflected the actual Christmas we inhabited: glossy, overproduced and indistinguishable from its own advertising. We loved the CBS specials, but we also loved the commercials.
That might not make Santa Claus: The Movie a classic, but it makes it accurate. -Pop
Santa Claus: The Movie landed on Home Video this week in 1986, after a November 27, 1985 theatrical lump of coal.