Magic Gift of the Snowman is a 1995 straight-to-video holiday special. It was made by Good Times Entertainment and Jetlag Productions, and they were both known for producing cheap knock-offs of Disney movies, or in this case, wannabe Rankin/Bass titles. If you want to know what I’m talking about, these would usually be found in dollar stores or grocery checkout lines. You get the idea. But I guess someone must have kept buying these.

Anyway, the story here begins with a little girl who is dying of some vague disease. She is not in the hospital for some reason. Instead, her “doctor” informs her parents that if she can “make it till Christmas, she’ll be alright.” What does that even mean? That her sickness has an expiration date? Anyway, the parents appear to be only sort of but kind of not really concerned about their daughter potentially only having days left to live, so it’s up to their son to give her a reason to keep going by telling her a story of a magical snowman named…Snowden. God damn it.

What follows is the tale of two children who go on an adventure with Snowden. Snowden has a voice that sounds, well, I’m not sure how to put this. It sounds sleazy. Like, very sleazy. Like I’m pretty sure Snowden is wanted for unspeakable crimes in at least five states. There are kids whose pictures are on milk cartons because of this guy. Anyway, in addition to behaving like he belongs in prison, Snowden is also the most ablest snowman you will ever fucking meet. And yes, while I feel that “ablest” has become an overused and even misused term in recent years on certain corners of the internet, it 100% applies to this fucker. You see, Snowden guilt trips the aforementioned sick girl (who the boy inserts into the story, and no, I am not going to bother to look up any names that I don’t have to for this) for being in a wheelchair. “Maybe if you didn’t spend so much time feeling sorry for yourself, you wouldn’t be in that thing.” Like bro, what the hell? #CancelSnowden

There’s also a villain who, um, has a bunch of slave children. I guess he watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and thought “yeah, I could do that.” (Also, this amazingly isn’t the only family-friendly Christmas film to feature slavery as a plot element. Thanks a lot, Elf Bowling: The Movie!) He forces his prisoners with jobs to mine something called “yuck” for him so he can “yuck up the entire world.” No, I don’t know what that means either. So Snowden and the kids have to liberate the imprisoned kids, I guess, and there are also singing birds, a princess who has her “smile get stolen” (why does that sound so dark?), and there may or may not be a “moral” about how if you have a physical disability, it’s only because you aren’t trying hard enough. Or maybe it’s that snow people are just jerks. Maybe we were all wrong and The Snowman actually had a happy ending.

Have a merry night, y’all!