One of the great WTF? film experiences of all time. According to this film, Santa lives above the North Pole, not with Mrs. Claus and a staff of toy-making elves, but with his Longtime Companion Merlin The Magician and a children from around the world who may or may not be slave labor. (The question of whether Santa and Merlin feel That Way about each other is not answered, but this is a film for kids). Santa's nemesis in this film is a demon named Pitch, who is sent up from H-E-Doubletoothpicks (where the major hobby would seem to be interpretive dancing) to cause the children of earth to do Bad Things. Pitch has some success with three brothers (their hobbies include vandalism, fibbing, theft, and kidnapping--or at least talking about them), but he runs into a brick wall in the form of a sad-faced little girl named Lupita, who is very poor and wants a doll for Christmas, but won't resort to theft to get it (her family is struggling--Dad is out of work and Mom Could Have Been a Dancer). There's also a rich kid who would like his parents to do more than wish him good-night on the way out to yet another nightclub (for reasons of economy, both sets of parents seem to be played by the same two actors). The film's big action climax involves Santa being chased up a tree by a noisy dog and Pitch getting soaked with a fire-hose . . . Artistically dubious, in short, but the film was a marketing triumph for a Florida-based film hustler named Ken Murray, who had started out working with a traveling circus and by the late 50's was applying his huckstering skills to selling everything from Sunday-School movies to "Adults Only" epics. He took Santa Claus from town to town, showed it only at weekend "kiddie matinees," and preceded the appearance of the film with saturation marketing over television. The movie (which Murray had re-dubbed at his own sound studio near Miami, using professors and students from the University of Miami School of Drama) essentially invented the concept of the Kiddie Matinee, which would be used by everyone from fellow low-budget practitioners like Barry Mahon to major studios like M-G-M, which dug through their back library of family-friendly films during the 60's and 70's to copy Murray's success. Frankly, I have a sneaking affection for the film; it's a full-throated expression of Mexican pop culture of the time, warts and all (the long sequence introducing the various children working in Santa's castle is a parade of ethnic stereotypes that outdoes even It's a Small World, and that's saying something). Some of the set design is wildly imaginative, and the actors seem to be having a whale of time playing the paper-thin characters. And little Lupita Quezedas, who played, well, Lupita, is oddly compelling and convincing as a girl struggling not to be ground down by poverty, not even of the movie sort.

Hi there, this is Cave Johnson from Aperture Science. You may know us as the inventors of "Aperture Shower Curtain Fixtures"™, "Aperture Quantum Tunneling Device"™ and the famous "Aperture Long Fall Boots"™. But I tell you we are not banging rocks together here so today I can proudly present to you the "Kid's Aperture Quantum Tunneling Devices" or simply KAQTD™ [ka:ckt]. It is based on the adult device but with less martial outfit, completely made of high quality PET and only capable of wormholes of maximum 1 meter distance (we don't want your precious kids to get lost in another dimension). I won't lie to you: this toy is damn expensive but then again the kids are our future and only a future can guarantee us further science. And science is what it is all about. Cave Johnson, we're done here.