By recreating classic movie moments that look so cathartic onscreen, Eliza Janssen hopes to improve her own life. For Christmas, that involves getting her grubby mitts on a Turbo Man action figure from the darkly commercial holiday thriller Jingle All The Way.
Jingle All the Way
Everyone thinks that toys were cooler when they were a kid. My plastic pieces of crap produced from Taiwanese sweatshops were way more fun and sophisticated than whatever Wifi-enabled, unicorn-shaped slime gadgets the brainwashed youth of today covet. Sure.
It’s part of what makes Jingle All The Way such an enduringly hilarious Christmas watch. Apart from seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger in one of his laughably ridiculous roles as a Normal Suburban Family Guy, and GOAT Phil Hartman’s slimy, horny supporting character.
The child demographic can laugh at the jokes of cranky Santas and reindeer slapstick, and their suffering parents relate to the mad dash to get your kiddo that Hottest Toy of the Year, whilst also being reminded of their once-naive faith that a chubby stranger just manifests expensive toys to the bottom of your tree.
The film’s writer Randy Kornfield and producer Chris Columbus had personal experience with this situation during various toy crazes of the early 1990s: Kornfield saw relatives lining up at a toy warehouse around dawn to buy Power Rangers action figures, and Columbus failed to secure a Buzz Lightyear toy for his son in 1995.
Cabbage Patch Dolls were perhaps the first widespread toy craze caused by low supply and high, sugar-crazed demand: riots broke out in toy stores across the US in 1983, with some angered parents bringing baseball bats to Toys R Us melees, and many leaving empty-handed after waiting in line for hours.
This isn’t something I grew up with. I think I was a relatively unfussy kid, happy to get any book or Bratz doll from Santa. I remember my brother unpacking the envied Thunderbirds Are Go Tracy Island Playset, the most desired toy of 2004, which now goes for up to $500 on eBay in mint condition. Ours is certainly not mint if it’s still in a cupboard somewhere, clagged with texta markings, mucus and festive sprinklings of Arnott’s Shapes dust.
In the year of our lord Schwarzenegger 2022, I got to feel like a grabby kid all over again with my Christmas wish for a Turbo Man action figure. Legendarily annoying/cute child actor Jake Lloyd explains the toy’s appeal to his dad Arnie as such: it has “arms and legs that move, and the boomerang shooter, and his rock’n roller jet pack and the realistic voice activator that says five different phrases including, ’it’s Turbo time!’ Accessories sold separately; batteries not included.”
The kid’s brainwashed recitation of the Turbo Man commercial aligns perfectly with an angry, anti-capital screed ranted by the film’s “villain” later. As an unhinged postie, Sinbad nails the true reason for the season in one monologue: Big Toy is using “subliminal messages to suck your children’s minds out! And then they sit there and they make your children feel like garbage and you, the father, who’s working 24/7…so you can make an alimony payment to a woman that slept with everybody at the post office, but me! And then when you get the toy, it breaks and you can’t fix it because it’s little cheap plastic!”
The stakes were high, then. Would I, like Schwarzenegger’s workaholic dad, be beaten by bootlegging Santas, launched into the air at my town’s holiday parade, and accused of pedophilia in my desperate search for a Turbo Man doll?
No. Because my editor found out about this piece quite early on its development, and very kindly bought me the hunk of “little cheap plastic” as a gift at our office Christmas party.
I am not a merch hunter by any means, and in fact despise Funko Pops’ line of dead-eyed, poorly-designed pop culture cash-ins (making the fact that Funko produced this recreation of the 1996 film’s prize souvenir kind of painful). But it was hard to contain my juvenile desire to immediately rush home, lie prone on the floor, and get to unboxing like some exploited 6-year-old YouTuber.
Boy, what a nostalgic feeling to untangle those kinky wire restraints holding my hero captive. As Schwarzenegger’s son warned me, batteries were not included, and putting them in myself brought back sweet memories of jumping on the spot as a helpful grown-up used a screwdriver to pop off a new plaything’s back panel.
This is what the holidays are all about, as my rewatch of the awful Christmas with the Kranks (absolutely a yuletide horror movie in its bleakest moments) drove home. Buying, eating, worship of the new and novel and entertaining: the season sees us acting more in idolatry of the greed demon Mammon than the 10th covetous Commandment. Kirk Cameron’s abysmal faith-based propaganda film Saving Christmas claims that spending is our finest way of expressing love for God and for one another, and the endless production line of glittery, meaningless Hallmark Christmas movies shows that he’s onto something.
capitalism breeds innovation, Christmas edition pic.twitter.com/tJejyb4kub
— ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ (@yogthos) December 11, 2021
So no, I did not strive and struggle to re-enact Jingle All The Way. It was astoundingly easy, because in today’s internet-centric gifting climate there is no scarcity—not for those of us atop the hierarchical Christmas tree of capital. Now piss off and let me play in my room, alone.
