12 Days of Watching (2024) #8: It's not Christmas...It's HBO! Actually, it's both!

CBS was the network of the holiday season for me back in the Eighties by virtue of showing the best animated specials. HBO may have been a close second, though. It has the advantage of being on all day (or most of it) and being able to show programs over and over again. Case in point: Two of the specials showcased in this clip:

Jug Band Christmas is a true classic, and to me it was one of the rites of December. It seemed to be on all the time, often at convenient times to dip in and out of while doing other stuff. Rich Little's A Christmas Carol is another staple of 1980s HBO. That one seemed to fall out of the rotation at some point and not turn up anywhere else, unlike Emmet Otter, but it sure made an impression when it was there. Ha! See what I did there!

Elsewhere in this segment, you see a promo for A Christmas Story when it was still relatively fresh and not the traditional marathon focus it would become. And how about the look at the "classic" 1st and Ten, a comedy that felt like IT lasted forever somehow. 

Welterweight champ Donald Curry is featured in an upcoming title bout, and there's a glimpse of Buddy Hackett in an On Location special. Throw in some clips of mediocre movies and the ever-thrilling transmission test, and you have something that epitomizes not just Christmas in the Eighties, but HBO in the Eighties!

Inside the Guide: TV Guide 40 years ago this week (April 28-May 4, 1984) Part 5: Tootsie on HBO

I believe the tradition of "world television premieres" of theatrical films on HBO started in the Nineties, but it feels like it has been even longer than that. It amuses me, then, to see the hype for the week's big movie debut in May 1984. It begins with this ad on Sunday:

May was only a couple days away! The actual premiere for the acclaimed flick Tootsie is not on the following Saturday, but on Thursday, May 3, and HBO has a big ad for that day, too.

In her column previewing the week's movies, Judith Crist says "hoorahs are in order" for Tootsie, calling it a delight. "It's not only a delicious comedic perception of bisexual humanism," (Note: I am not sure I know what that means) "but also a knockout farce that made Dustin Hoffman, in the title role, a prime candidate for Best Actor Oscar and Best Actress."

HBO never was just for fans of "Dream On" and "The Hitchhiker"

One of the many silly things about this ongoing HBO/MAX/Discovery/Warner saga is the idea that HBO Max would dump a bunch of animated and family titles, proclaim that the service was getting out of that realm (after burying a lot of that content on its platform), then rebrand mere months later and announce it was investing heavily in animated and family titles.

The reason given was that parents were uncomfortable with the "HBO" name in association with any kind of family programming but NOW it's all better with the new "MAX" name...even though many parents probably still associate that with Cinemax, the pay cable alternative for folks who thought HBO wasn't adult enough. But what's this about HBO being a turnoff for parents? This new concept ignores decades of the premium channel cranking out acclaimed and popular shows like...

And what about movies like...

And what about the seasonal specials like...

And that's just the Eighties!

It's amusing that so much of the messaging from the revamped company seems to want to "blame" the HBO identity, when the vast majority of complaints I hear since the merger are HBO fans dreading the "garbage" Discovery programming colliding with the Warners and HBO catalogue.

Well, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that Discovery executives who are running the joint don't want to mention how many people are repulsed by that "brand." I don't buy the idea that HBO is some kind of bogeyman for parents preventing them from hunting for kid shows on streaming, though, and I think that's a weak explanation.