Warning: this post is about Bing Crosby, not global warming. Sunday night, I made a typical TV-watching trade with my wife. I agreed to watch the holiday schmaltz-fest White Christmas on Lifetime after she agreed to watch an old Doctor Who I had saved on the DVR. I was pretty pleased with how I thought this was going to turn out. After a decade of being forced to watch White Christmas each year, I now secretly enjoy every absurd minute of it. The musical numbers on the front lines in World War II Germany? The extravagant production values of a show in a barn in Vermont? Bring it on. Call it Stockholm Syndrome if you like, but you have to admit that Danny Kaye is one hell of an entertainer. Much to my dismay, however, things did not turn out the way I had planned. Lifetime has totally butchered the film to make it fit into a two-hour time slot with commercials, eliminating several of the best (read corniest) musical numbers ("Snow", "Choreography"). The resulting product points out the cluelessness of the cable network. If a fifty year-old movie is a perennial holiday favorite, did they think that people wouldn't notice that large chunks of it were missing? Or maybe some network hack thought he could improve on the work of director Michael Curtiz, director of over a hundred other films including a little known work called Casablanca.
