Newsbusters
November 30, 2018
WARNING: This post contains strong language.
Now that we’re into the “Holiday Season” – which begins at Thanksgiving, runs through Christmas and ends on New Year’s Day (or, for some, starts earlier) — ABC, CBS, and NBC always celebrate “the most wonderful time of the year” by airing classic TV specials, including such A Charlie Brown Christmas, Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
But this year, Rudolph has come under fire from liberal viewers who dismiss the tale as everything from “seriously problematic” to “not so jolly after all” because the lead character is bullied by other reindeer and even Santa Claus himself, all of whom treat him and the misfit dentist elf as outcasts just because they’re different.
The vulgarity-laden backlash to Tuesday night’s airing of Rudolph included an article and a Twitter post from Ed Mazza, the overnight editor for the Huffington Post, who asserted that viewers noted the holiday classic “contains some very disturbing details.”
He began by noting:
Twitter users gathered around the digital fireplace to share the moment. And what a moment it was.
Some people joked that they noticed a few things in the Christmas classic that they didn’t always spot — or simply ignored — when they saw it years ago.
Mazza referred to a Twitter video that quoted several characters and listed several sequences out of context while calling Rudolph “the Marginalized Reindeer.”
The video quoted a post from Garytt Potner, who referred to the episode as an annual “reminder” that it is “a parable on racism & homophobia w/Santa as a bigoted exploitative prick.”
A Twitter poster simply identified as “Dave” also took “Santa’s operation” to task as a Human Relations “nightmare” that is “in serious need of diversity and inclusion.”