Santa and the
Ice Cream Bunny
(1972, U.S.) color 96 minutes
With: Jay Ripley, James Clark, Scotty, Steve, Robin, Sandy, Mike, Kathy, David, Ruth Foreman's Pied Piper Playhouse
Plot Outline (IMDb): Poor Santa Claus. This live-action feature finds his sleigh stuck in the sand on a Florida beach only days before Christmas Eve. He psychically summons prepubescent aid from a nearby subdivision. In order to extricate Santa's sleigh, the local children bring many different animals (presumably the sheep was someone's house pet), but nothing works, and the kids are afraid they won't get any gifts this year. To boost their spirits, Santa tells them the story of Thumbelina, and the setting dissolves into a "fantasy within a fantasy". Thumbelina is a beautiful but very tiny girl, "not much larger than a clothes pin". She becomes lost in the forest during the winter and finds refuge in the underground home of Mrs. Mole. A neighbor mole, Mr. Digger, falls in love and wants to marry Thumbelina, but she's having none of it. When warm weather returns, she runs back into the forest and deserts the two kindly creatures who saved her life, crushing their spirits forever ... the end. As Santa is finishing his story and yes, that is its intended conclusion he and the children hear the wail of a siren. The "Ice Cream Bunny" has arrived in his antique fire engine to save the day!
***
SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY is one of the most primitive and virtually incoherent films ever made for kids. Shot silent and overdubbed, the film comes across at times like little more than an elaborate home movie.
Shot in Florida, in part at Pirate's World amusement park, parts of the film look like promotional footage for a tourism guide.
The Santa segment consists of meandering silent footage which is not well clarified by a faint, indecipherable female narrator (Dorothy Brown Green) and an equally muffled, wheezy Santa, who vainly attempts to ad-lib his lines throughout.
In a shameless attempt to pad what is essentially a short subject, Santa tells the kids a story, and its an entire movie (THUMBELINA or JACK AND THE BEANSTALK depending on your location).
After the film-within-a-film, Santa is rescued by the title rabbit, a pitiful man-in-suit aberration, a droopy, matted thing with absurd cheeks, easily a match for K. Gordon Murray's Stinky the Skunk and the Ferocious Wolf.
There are some hilarious close-ups of the Ice Cream Bunny doing a constipated jig to a kazoo rendition of "Jingle Bells". As an Ice Cream Bunny, though, he stinks; there is not one single scoop of ice cream in the entire film!
Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn show up for pointless cameos.
This piece of Kidsploitation is infernal myth-bashing at its worst, a joyless, retarded torture test that must be seen to be believed. As such, we love the little devil, for all the wrong reasons, and SANTA AND THE ICE CREAM BUNNY boasts a big cult following, possibly larger than that for SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS. This is no mean feat.
Video/DVD availability: VHS (United American Video, oop)
Links of related interest:
R&S Film Enterprises / Cinepix Film Properties
Produced by C.T. Robertson
Music: B. Martin
Directed by R. Winer
a review