Santa on 8 mm (12/24/03)

The big sweaty guy in the rented red suit and the fake white beard can be pretty scary.

Just ask any four-year-old.

I have vague memories of childhood encounters with the big guy, probably at Wolf and Dessauer's department store in Fort Wayne.

But Santa Claus really crept into my sensibility via 8 mm movies.

The late Roy Hunt was the sort of merchant/entrepreneur that was the lifeblood of small towns for generations.

A skilled portrait photographer, he was also adept at marketing cameras and film during the first boom period in amateur photography, roughly 1925 to 1955.

At our house, one of the few indulgences my parents explored was photography. First Brownies, then 8 mm, then slides.

Of course, if you were going to shoot 8 mm silent movies — in overexposed or underexposed color with alternating patches of inexplicable yellow and indecipherable darkness — then you needed a projector.

And if you had a projector, you needed something more to show than the same old reel of last year's family reunion.

That's where Castle Films entered the picture.

Castle, an offshoot of an old B-movie studio, found that it could re-package Hollywood productions for the 8 mm projector audience.

That meant foregoing sound, since 8 mm films were silent.

The result was that Castle would take something like an Abbott and Costello movie, re-cut it into two or three short films, insert some "silent movie" titles to provide the dialogue, and sell them to entertainment-hungry families all over America.

My parents, seldom suckers, went for this one.

We had half a dozen such 8 mm productions at our house. A few cartoons, a couple of Abbott and Costellos, and — most memorably — “The Night Before Christmas.”

And that is where I got to know Santa, sitting in the darkness of the living room, smelling the dust burning on the bulb of the projector, fidgeting and fussing with my siblings.

He was less warm and fuzzy than the Coca-Cola Santa which dominated the years which followed. In his black and white silent version, he bore a much stronger resemblance to the original drawings by Thomas Nast.

He was fat, of course. And he shook like the obligatory bowl full of jelly.

Unlike any politically correct Santa, he also smoked a pipe as he did in the poem.

The movie, which essentially acted out the poem, was remarkably Victorian in its appearance.

It's as if every generation needed to look back a couple of generations in nostalgia to get a handle on Christmas. Nast and Clement Moore, who wrote the poem, were looking back on mid-19th century traditions. The black and white movie, probably produced in the 1930s, was looking back to the time of the turn of the century.

When it was marketed as an 8 mm movie for home audiences, it was already 20 years old and looked back another 30 to 100 years.

Yet here I am, further into the 21st century than I might have expected, looking back to that image, the 19th century distilled by the 20th century then recalled in the 21st.

That's quite a gift.

Thanks, Santa. Merry Christmas.[[In-content Ad]]