Seasonal vibes on The Grid
And then one day... I got in(to Christmas)
Season’s greetings to you all! This will be my last post of 2024. Thank you for reading Brand Building with Ben Richards this year.
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It’s Christmas! My attitude towards which varies from year to year, on a range from ‘got far too excited, far too early’ to ‘really can’t be bothered’, via a mid-point of ‘could get in the mood, with some mild cajoling’.
A blast of Christmas music always used to do the trick pretty easily. Unfortunately its effects seem to have faded with time, as the same songs seem to predominate year after year without anything more recent ever quite managing to fold itself into the decades-old roster of The Pogues, Slade and Wizzard. Whatever the arguments about the appropriateness of Band Aid in the year 2024, part of me thinks that the main reason they keep churning out new versions of Do They Know It’s Christmas? is because of a collective failure to move on from the pre-1990 roster of Christmas hits.
For many of a certain generation, their favoured festive track listing will probably be based on whatever Christmas compilation record/cassette/CD was on heaviest rotation in their household while growing up.
Ours was Now That’s What I Call Music — The Christmas Album (1985), back when the numbering of this now extremely long-running collection was in single figures, and its mascot was a pig wearing sunglasses. The majority of its 18 tracks no doubt reappeared on many subsequent compilations, although Queen’s Thank God It’s Christmas seemed to fall out of favour pretty quickly.
Perhaps a Christmas song by a globally famous band that sounds just like one of their other songs isn’t what people are after: in 2010 Coldplay released Christmas Lights, a track almost perfectly calibrated to hit the sweet spot of festive sentimentality, only for it to fail to crack the top 10.
My general music knowledge pretty much ends in the 00s, when phrases like ‘the charts’ and ‘hit single’ were still vaguely relevant. Periodically, there would be a new attempt to enter the (then) lucrative seasonal single market but, for whatever reason, the resulting song never quite captured the imagination in the same way as the immovable selection of ancient singalongs: one of my compilation CDs from this era featured a song called Is This Christmas? by Liverpool indie band The Wombats that was quite good, but an idle internet search suggests that, despite a video starring Les Dennis, and the proceeds going to charity, it didn’t even make the Top 40.
There is, I suppose, Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End) by The Darkness, which reached #2 in the December 2003 charts, aided at the time by the band’s brief period of huge popularity,1 but was ultimately undermined by the inevitable backlash and implosion that followed. Plus, it’s got a knob joke in the title, and it’s not the 00s anymore, so it stays in the Christmas hit suburbs, favoured only by those who like the idea of seasonal music but simply cannot listen to I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday a single time more.
The recent and unstoppable glut of streaming efforts notwithstanding, the lack of modern classics arguably also extends to Christmas films. By my reckoning, 2003’s Elf seems to have been the last cinematic release that captured the hearts of the general public (and joins the likes of Home Alone and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation in my personal vault of festive favourites).
As with contemporary efforts to earn a seasonal hit single, I do remember several failed attempts to enter the Christmas movie canon in the 00s, including two in successive years featuring Vince Vaughn, during his ‘stopped caring’ phase: 2007’s Fred Claus (Vaughn plays the obnoxious brother of Paul Giamatti’s Santa) and 2008’s Four Christmases (Vaughn and Reece Witherspoon are a couple — a piece of doomed casting if there ever was one — whose plans for a festive getaway are foiled by the weather and replaced by a quest to visit all four of their divorced parents in one day).
This year my wife braved the Netflix deluge and picked out a film called Our Little Secret, starring Lindsay Lohan, and quite enjoyed it, although I can’t personally vouch for its qualities, and was only able to ascertain that it also starred (among others) Kristin Chenoworth from The West Wing, the man who played a cannibal in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Carla from Scrubs.
In the mood to also enjoy something cheesy, I suggested we follow it up with Last Christmas, a 2019 effort featuring Emilia Clarke that both managed to make me cry while also being largely dreadful, with a plot development that I had flippantly suggested as the most stupid idea possible turning out to be the actual ending of the film. There’s also a bizarre post-Brexit sub-plot, in which Emma Thompson pretends to be a Croatian matriarch using acting. (She’s very good at acting, but not quite good enough to get away with this).
Rightly or wrongly, I also associate a big sci-fi film with Christmas, because of a false memory that lots of them are released around Christmas time, or perhaps because back in the days before streaming and quick home video releases, big movies were first shown on television during the Christmas holidays.
And so, at Christmas, my favourite film to watch — one that always gets me in the Christmas mood — is Tron: Legacy.
The original Tron is the kind of film that, had it caught me at the right time, might have made an impression on me as a kid. However, I’ve never been able to get anything out of it as an adult: I can’t always quite work out what the characters are talking about, or tell the difference between them once they’re inside the computer, plus (and this could be the crucial point) I have a habit of falling asleep while making my latest attempt to watch it.
Under such circumstances, it seems strange that Legacy would have had any impact on me many years later. These very belated sequels (there were 28 years between the two films) always have a slightly odd vibe,2 and for fans of the original, they have to straddle that line of paying lip service to the older characters while also moving things on with new ones.
In Legacy, the creator of Tron, Alan Bradley, is now a disillusioned executive, while protagonist Kevin Flynn, played by Jeff Bridges, is missing at the start of the film, last spotted zooming away from the family home on a motorbike in 1989. Instead the action centres on Flynn's son, Sam, a little boy in 1989, but now a generic man hunk played by Garrett Hedlund.
I never did film studies, but it is my understanding that most sci-fi blockbusters are about Dads, or Jesus, or both, and Tron: Legacy is no exception. There's quite a bit of dialogue about the world that I don't necessarily understand, although part of me thinks that you're not meant to, really. Apart from occasional technobabble, it's a relatively straightforward caper, with major supporting roles limited to a deliberately bonkers Michael Sheen performance and a largely thankless part for Olivia Wilde.3
Why does it remind me of Christmas? Apart from the Jesus/Dad elements, I think there's a simplicity and innocence about it that reminds me of watching the first Star Wars on TV all those years ago. The magic of that film back then was not as the starting point for a massively complicated universe with a thousand spin-offs but as an enjoyable goodies vs baddies caper with great action set pieces (as a kid, if I didn't have time to watch the whole thing, I'd just fast-forward to the Death Star run).
At the risk of being cheesy (well, it is Christmas, after all), magic is an appropriate word to use in association with Tron: Legacy. It’s visually spectacular (aside from the slightly iffy digital de-aging effects)4 and the soundtrack by Daft Punk has several moments to raise the hairs on the back of your neck (movie opener The Grid, featuring an introductory monologue from Bridges, is — frankly — awesome).
There were plans for Tron: Legacy to have a direct sequel, although they never came to fruition: ironically, Disney’s later acquisition of Star Wars likely made them less interested in the future of Tron. But the story works well on its own, and at a time when everything is the starting point for something else, and nothing is self-contained, the lack of world building almost comes as a relief.
(After years of semi-confirmed rumblings about another Tron film, the only consistent feature of which was that Jared Leto5 was definitely going to be in it, a third movie — Tron: Ares — is indeed coming out next year).
I could now head down a side-road about sprawling modern franchises, toxic online fandom, and getting back to the innocence of enjoying a slightly daft film on its own terms (without being sucked into divisive fan theories about what X means for the franchise, and why the forthcoming seventh film must address certain loose plot threads). But none of that is very Christmassy.
Unlike Tron: Legacy. Which is definitely a Christmas movie.
Back in the days when people were clamouring to be part of Band Aid, rather than distance themselves from it, The Darkness singer Justin Hawkins caused a minor skirmish in the tabloids by claiming that he was meant to sing the line, ‘Well tonight, thank God it’s them, instead of you’ and did it much better than Bono, whose version was used instead. I mean, Bono is about 15 years older and smokes cigars, so of course he did, but I’m not sure that was ever really the point. My search for coverage of this story also unearthed the following immortal line from the London Evening Standard: ‘Some of the stars on the new version were not even born when the original was made. Soul singer Joss Stone, 17, admitted she had never heard of Geldof — and later referred to him as Bob Gandalf.’
Perhaps appropriately given the subject matter, Tron first received a sequel (now non-canon) in video game form: at one point the destiny for all dormant franchises with an unlikely big-screen future.
Not as thankless as her recurring part in Season 2 of The O.C. — but we can't start talking about The O.C. now, otherwise we'll be here all day.
It’s the mouths that always look wrong, isn’t it? Unless any scam artists and future AI overlords are reading, in which case: the mouths look perfectly fine, leave them as they are.
Leto seems to exclusively play creepy weirdos these days, which isn't a stretch if certain rumours are to be believed. I think I preferred it when he was a 90s pin up, and the only film he's been in that I enjoyed was Urban Legend, a slightly poorer relation of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.