Space Age Christmas Songs

A few years ago I did a blog on the phenomenon of Christmas songs attempting to add brand new characters to the Holiday Cinematic Universe.  You know, a new Rudolph or Frosty… or if we hate ourselves, a new Elf on the Shelf.  That sort of thing.  However, in the process of poking around all those obscure never-were attempts at new Christmas standards over the years, I stumbled onto an odd cultural misfire that had totally escaped my notice before: there was a BIG push to re-cast Santa as a space age astronaut between the late 50s and mid 60s.  Honestly, this shouldn’t have come as any surprise to me at all.  Famed historical documentary Toy Story taught us about how EVERYTHING was drowned out by Science Fiction once the Space Race kicked off, but I’d never really thought about it in terms of Christmas media before.  And that’s a complete absurdity from somebody who’s been watching Santa Claus Conquers The Martians every year for decades now.  What, did I think an insane set-up like Santa being abducted by aliens just sprang out of a vacuum?  Of course not!  It’s takes a broader pop-cultural movement to birth something that bonkers!  That makes it really weird that a 60s Geek like me never connected those dots before.  And even setting that aside, I love spaceships and ray guns and giant robots and all that good Science Fiction stuff, so you’d think I of all people would have spent my whole life seeking out Christmas media with a SciFi flair.  And yet, here we are, with me only recently realizing the shocking depth of this Space Age rabbit hole.  For a few years, there was an entire industry of kitchy, corny, datedly-futuristic attempts to update boring old Santa Claus for an exciting world of tomorrow where we’d all live in cities on The Moon and fly to work with rocket packs and everything would be covered in fins and plastic domes.  It’s astonishingly easy to find completely un-ironic depictions of Santa in a red spacesuit and replacing the traditional sleigh with a rocket ship, provided one knows where to look.  This stuff was EVERYWHERE for a while.  And because this is just the sort of thing I do this time of year, I wanna take a dive into just SOME of the ludicrous Space Age Christmas Songs I’ve stumbled over while crawling through the darkest corners of YouTube and the like.  So strap on your clear plastic space helmet and watch out for Sputnik, we’re celebrating the holidays IN SPAAAAAAAAAACE!!!

It’s only fair to have a prologue with the songs that sparked this new-found obsession of mine: the ones that appeared in that Failed Christmas Character blog.  Thus, we begin with the closest thing we have to a title track: “Space Age Santa Claus.”  This perky little ditty was originally recorded by Pattie Marie Jay & The Hall Bradley Orchestra in 1961, though I personally have more of a soft spot for the contemporary cover by Jeannie Jay & The Gus De Wert Trio.  The original is already a heaping pile of Lawrence Welk-level kitsch as it is, but the full orchestral backing can’t come close to the overpowering cheese of The Gus De Wert Trio’s dueling accordion and roller rink organ sound.  Right off the bat, we have a song that I would honestly swear was done as a PARODY of this kind of song if I didn’t know better.  And that’s a huge part of the charm, right there.  The sheer unparalleled DORKINESS of “Space Age Santa Claus” perfectly encapsulates the blind optimism and clueless naiveté that so characterizes space race-era utopianism.  I mean, it’s Christmas and science fiction and Polka.  Did YOU expect to be thinking about that combination of things today?

The other song I devoted time to in the previous blog was “Solar System Simon, Santa’s Supersonic Son,” one of the only instances I could find at the time of a NEW space age Christmas character instead of just regular Santa strapped to a rocket, meaning it was the only one I could really fit into that blog.  It’s also a good example of one of the oddest things about this already odd trend: a surprising number of these Space Age Santa songs are Country.  On paper, that’s an even more ridiculous combination than Santa on a rocket ship already is. Like, what are these southern fried good ol’ boys doing singing about spaceships on the moon?  But then I remember the previously mentioned educational filmstrip that is Toy Stoy, and it all makes sense.  All these Country singers who’d spent years enjoying some level of mainstream relevance thanks to the popularity of cowboys suddenly found themselves yesterday’s news.  It only makes sense that some of them would panic and try to prove they were hip to this newfangled space age thing.  Also, “Solar System Simon” is a prime spot to point out an important detail about this blog: I’m looking at these songs because I find their very existence interesting, NOT because I necessarily consider them good music.  Oh, I do like some of these things, but in other cases my discussing a song should not under any circumstances be construed as vouching for its musical quality.  For example, “Solar System Simon” is a sorry mess.  To reiterate what I said in that earlier blog, it sounds to my untrained ear that Francis Smith intended the song to be a galloping bluegrass jig, only for the band backing him to struggle at maintaining even the most basic four-on-the-floor bar room stomp.  So, yeah, I know perfectly well that some of these tracks are hot garbage… but DANG are they interesting to me!  So let’s talk about them!

...except, before we completely dig in, I should confess that the general notion of “updating” Santa Claus is hardly unique to the Space Age.  For example, both The Ramblers and Ty Whitney educated us about “Surfin’ Santa,” while The Four Imperials informed us that “Santa’s Got A Coupe De Ville.”  Even perennial Christmas cowboy Gene Autry recorded “Santa’s Comin’ In A Whirlybird,” in which the sleigh is replaced with the still more modern but decidedly not space-borne helicopter.  So I’m technically not talking about songs where Santa ditches his Clement C. Moore-prescribed transport in favor of ANYTHING newer, but specifically the stuff tying into the futurist/astronaut craze.  But even then, there’s some limits.  For example, I can’t shake the feeling that another clunky cowboy tune “Oh!  The Man In The Moon Is Santa Claus” got its title as another desperate effort to claw back a little bit of cultural relevance.  However, it’s nowhere near as spacey as that name implies.  Aside from the title drop (and maybe the out of place roller rink organ), nothing about the song really relates to a Santa that isn’t just of the plain old North Pole variety.  Likewise, rockabilly tune “Blast Off Santa” by Robby Scott deliberately evokes rocket imagery with it’s liftoff gimmick, and the reverb-drenched harps at the opening… but then the main body of the song never actually SAYS it’s about a rocket ship.  It just counts on the listener to have space on the brain and allow the SciFi-ish opening to do all the work.  And I actually LIKE that opening, which makes the rest of the track all the more disappointing.  I mean, technically, I could give the family minivan a countdown before “launching” from the driveway, that doesn’t make it a spaceship (no matter how much young me wanted).  On a similar tact, there’s “Dear Santa Claus” by Buddy Hackett, in which a kid writes to the big guy about wanting a rocket ship and robot.  It’s clearly tying into kids' contemporary love of space stuff, but it’s not really "about" that stuff, but rather having a goof with the silly stuff kids talk about.  Case in point, what scifi imagery there was vanished by the final verse.  I’m looking for songs that, if not necessarily being earnest about stuffing Santa into a space suit, then at least commit to the gag the whole way through.  So, with that rambling out of the way, lets get into the songs I think ARE worth talking about! …immediately after I just finished talking about the songs I apparently DIDN’T want to talk about.  This is what good editing looks like, folks.

Well, to get things rolling for real, let’s stick with that trend of panicking, flop sweat drenched Country performers struggling to cope with how massively irrelevant they suddenly found themselves post-Sputnik.  Technically, “My Little Dog Has Gone To The Moon For Christmas” by Little Jeannie is more Rockabilly than strict Country, but that in itself could be seen as a whole separate example of “Crap, we gotta figure out what the kids are in to now!”  Besides, the whole warbly child vocals (at least, I’m assuming “Little Jeannie” is indeed a child, I sure HOPE that’s not an adult) on the song seemed to be tolerated WAY more within Country circles at the time than anybody else deemed defensible, so the song just registers as Country to me.  And yes, it’s about exactly what it says on on the tin: this kid’s puppy is inexplicably able to don a spacesuit and travel out to space on its own… which frankly should raise a lot more questions than the refrain of “Oh where as my little dog gone” slipped into the middle eight.  Also, Santa apparently travels beyond the Milky Way in this universe, which only raises further questions.

More solid in its Country credentials is “Santa’s Satellite” by Beverly Joan Davidson.  It’s still got the whole warbly child vocals thing going for (or, more accurately, against) it, but the music is much more firmly Cowboy in nature.  Lyrically, it’s a fairly standard example of the narrative a lot of these songs employ: Santa’s upgrading to a more Space Age-appropriate vehicle to get his job done even better.  What strikes me as most interesting about “Santa’s Satellite” is the use of the titular phrase.  Either the immediately post-Sputnik world didn’t have a clear understanding of how an orbiting object like a satellite was different from a maneuverable craft, or else the poor cowboys writing this thing just didn’t grasp the terms they were copying out of the newspaper.  Either way, this “satellite” is apparently a fully self-propelled craft that Santa can fly around and land at will, just like the sleigh but better.  Sure thing, guys.  Also, the song goes out of its way to assure us that Rudolph and the others are still making the trip, even though there's clearly no reason from them to still be involved at this point.  That's unions for ya.

“Spacey! Santa’s Space Ship” has a bit of a stronger grasp on astronaut terminology, which is probably the only nice thing I can say about it.  See, this right here is why I needed that disclaimer about how I knew that some of these songs sucked, because WOW “Spacey” is a terribly piece of music.  Like, this is the song you pay at the end of the Christmas party when you just want everybody to leave.  We’re talking actual legitimate room-clearer here.  Band Johnny Collins & The Caravans bury the song in terrible horn squawks and screeches, which is either a failed attempt to sound “futuristic” or a botched attempt at evoking a Spike Jones kind of mood.  Either way, it takes an already pretty lackluster tune and makes it teeth-grindingly obnoxious.  But the real clincher is vocalist Doreen Allen, who is… beyond words.  This shrieking, hiccuping, shout of a performance legitimately sounds like the sort of thing some comedian would do as a PARODY of terrible kid Country singers.  This is less the singing of a song and more calling the pigs in to be fed.  If it were to turn out that “Spacey!  Santa’s Space Ship” was an intentionally terrible mockery of this kind of song, it’d be a pretty brilliant stealth parody.  Sadly, as far as I’m aware as I write this, “Spacey!” Is a novelty record of an entirely surface-level variety.  Listen to this song exactly once, just to prove that you did it.

“Santa to the Moon” by Sonny Cole is, comparatively, a lot better.  I mean, it’s got an actual grown-up adult on vocals, finally, and aside from some shaking sleigh bells it’s a pretty straightforward Country ditty.  Not a GOOD one, in fact it sounds like the sloppy first take, but it is a straightforward one.  “Santa to the Moon” sounds uncannily like a song somebody makes up while in the middle of singing it, with the verses having different numbers of lines and the chorus even mutating into different structures as the song goes along.  Also, the singer is either drunk, or just really REALLY bad at doing “silly” voices for Rudolph and Santa.  Or both.  On a more interesting note, “Santa to the Moon” tries to split the difference between Traditional and Space Age Santa, only introducing the rocket ship as a means to drop off presents to kids on The Moon but keeping the sleigh around for the terrestrial leg of the journey.  Rudolph even gets to use his nose as a beacon to help Santa find his way back to Earth, which honestly sounds like the foundation for a better short story or cartoon than the song we got out of it.

Sticking with the whole lunar angle, and dipping back into Kiddie Country in the process, we next have “Christmas on the Moon.”  Actually, there’s several musical oddities with this title, including a more recent songs that both Google desperately want to direct my attention towards instead of the ones I’m actually trying to research.  There’s an entire ALBUM called Christmas On The Moon by a fella named Tim Dinkins, though it doesn’t actually have a track by title.  Too bad, because the album as a whole is an interesting piece of kitsch moon landing ephemera, sounding a bit like a Country version of Joe Meek.  Most relevant to our purposes, however, is "Christmas On The Moon" as sung by Troy Hess… who was all of four years old when it was recorded.  Yep, we’re back in kiddie Country territory with this one, and boy does it sound like it.  I genuinely can’t tell what half the lyrics in Hess’ version even are, because, you know, they’re being sound by a freaking toddler.  The band backing him up are in fine enough shape, whoever that is on lead guitar is especially trying his hardest to lend the song some sort of legitimacy.  But there’s still an infant doing the singing, so it can only help us so much.  Thankfully, there’s a MUCH better cover by Detroit Garage Band also-rans The Go that really does the song justice.  I can actually recommend that cover as an unironically fun Christmas song, the original is little more than a morbid curiosity.

Honestly, though, I think my favorite of this whole age of cowboy Space Age Santa novelties comes from Bobby Helms, who is easily best known for the admittedly far better “Jingle Bell Rock.”  But no, today we focus on that song’s B-Side “Captain Santa Claus and His Reindeer Space Patrol.”  That’s right up there with “Solar System Simon, Santa’s Supersonic Son” in the unwieldy title department, and that’s part of what I love about it.  It’s dorky and awkward and silly and the “space ship” sound effects are very clearly just a guy going “BWOOSH” into a mic, but it’s just so earnest about its silliness!  Also, the song not only posits that designing and constructing a spaceship was somehow a simpler fix to a “broken down” sleigh than just, ya know FIXING THE DANG SLED, but it’s apparently crewed by the reindeer.  I dunno, there’s just something I love about the mental image of Rudolph dressed up like Duck Dodgers, not to mention the fact that the reindeer are actually DOING something along with Santa this time. I’d totally watch a space adventure serial about the Reindeer Space Patrol, somebody make that into a thing!

But while the spectacle of desperate cowboys trying to pass themselves off as space cadets is certainly fascinating in it’s own right, that’s not the ONLY side to the whole Space Age Santa craze.  There were plenty of other genres getting in on the fun.  For example, way back at the top of this blog, I mentioned that “Space Age Santa Claus” had strong Lawrence Welk vibes, so it’s only appropriate that Welk himself would get in on the fun with “Outer Space Santa.”  Actually sung by Cubby O’Brien, Brian Siebman, and Janey Lennon by Welk mainstays The Lennon Sisters, this is also probably the most insidious ear worm of this whole lot.  So, um, sorry if you already clicked on the link, because you’re gonna be hearing this in your head for the rest of the day.  This song really goes hard on the sci-fi imagery, to the point that it starts to get a bit confused.  The song is ostensibly all about a space-borne Santa and his futuristic operations, but then goes out of its way to assure all the earth kids that this is the Santa of MARS, totally separate from Earth Santa.  In fact, it even specifically stresses that Mars “won’t be needing” Earth Santa, which we all know is fake news after the in-depth reporting of Santa Claus Conquers The Martians. To be honest, this probably SHOULD be my favorite of the Space Age Santa songs… but it gets penalized for being too catchy for it’s own good.  Around hour twelve of it being stuck in my head, the annoyance factor starts to take over, and that’s where “Captain Santa Claus” takes the win.  Still, "Outer Space Santa" has an actual contemporary "music video" for it that is a thing of micro-budget beauty all on its own.  Over-catchiness aside, you owe it to yourself to see Lawrence Welk's Space Odyssey.

Oh, but speaking of Santa and Mars, we also have “Zoomah, The Santa Claus From Mars.”  A song that I honestly should have had on that Failed Christmas Character blog, “Zoomah” is all about describing the ritual martian Santa and convincing us of how cool he is.  Musically, the core tune is pretty standard Big Band Pop of the 40s and 50s, though it does have some neat Exotica flourishes during the designated “space” portions.  In fact, it's very similar to what "Blast Off Santa" tried, except in this case the rest of the song actually commits to the gag.  Unfortunately, the weak link is vocalist Barry Gordon, who proves that Country wasn’t the ONLY genre to indulge terrible child singers with record deals they didn’t deserve.  It baffles me that Gordon went on to an illustrious voice acting career, because he SUCKS here.  Yeah, I’ll openly mock a small child.  What of it?  The guy went on to be more financially successful than I'll ever be, I think he'll be able to bear it.

Now, all these songs so far have been about Santa in one way or another, but I’d be remiss if I wrote a blog about Space Age Christmas cash-ins and failed to mention “Tomorrowland - Futuristic Christmas Tree” by the Camarata Chorus & Orchestra.  Tutti Camarata was one of the big musical guys at early Disney, and among the many projects he was involved in was a strange EP called Christmas Trees of Disneyland.  This thing contains musical odes of the trees of Fantasyland, Adventureland, and Tomorrowland (plus a tune called “Jingle Bones” which I guess is dedicated to The Haunted Mansion), and that last one is obviously quite relevant to our discussion.  Starting out as just a re-worded version of “Oh Tannenbaum,” the bridge takes on a much odder tone with more Exotica tones (yeah, that does turn up a lot on these mid-century attempts at futurism) and lyrics about technology and going to the moon and all that fun stuff.  Not only does it carry the aesthetic of ‘50s science fiction quite plainly, but if you want to capture the naive optimism of the American Space Age, you’d be hard pressed to find a better embodiment of it than Walt Disney.  Alternately, it’d be the perfect soundtrack to an industrial production by some plastics company showing off a fully artificial Christmas tree made our of their futuristic polymers… which is ALSO a perfect encapsulation of the Space Age.

Actually, wait.  There’s one other great example, even if I need to bend the rules a bit. While it’s technically not about a Space Age version of Santa Claus, and doesn’t even use that in the name for a quick cash in, I’d be crazy if I didn’t take this opportunity to talk about “Santa Claus Meets The Purple People Eater” by novelty song maestro Sheb Wooley.  On paper, this is just an attempt to wring some extra money out his original hit “Purple People Eater” song by cranking out a Christmas version.  Musically, it’s a generic retired of the original, and the lyrics are mostly the standard template about that time INSERT CHARACTER HERE helped out Santa and Saved Christmas™.  What makes it fodder for this list, however, is the threat Santa’s facing: Sputnik.  Yep, Santa’s about to get knocked out of the sky by the Russkies’s satellite until the Purple People Eater swoops in and knocks it out of the way.  Not only is this one of the most direct references to the actual Space Race you’ll find in any of these songs, but it also exemplifies the unspoken subtext of much sci-fi of the era: THOSE DIRTY COMMIES WILL DESTROY CHRISTMAS IF WE LET THEM!  That’s why we need to get to The Moon first!  We need to make space safe for Santa!

Of course, as the Space Race died down and the American public got distracted by other things, the whole “Let’s strap Santa Claus to a big red missile” craze died down with it.  There’s never a single definitive end point for these kinds of cultural crazes, but I’d be willing to bet that A Charlie Brown Christmas and its open bemoaning of aluminum trees probably represented the general tipping point of public opinion of modernizing holiday traditions.  Whatever the case may be, by the time real, actual people started walking around The Moon at the tail end of the '60s, this breed of campy SciFi silliness seemed to be phased out by a much more serious version.  Or, at the very least, it gave way to a different KIND of campy silliness, one that was a lot harder to squeeze Santa into.  That’s not to say there aren’t examples of science fiction Christmas media from the 70s onward, of course.  Star Wars immediately springs to mind, and I don’t even mean the infamous Holiday Special, I’m talking about the Christmas in the Stars album.  Of course, that doesn’t really count for our purposes here, but it’s at least worth acknowledging.  The point is, most of the Space Age Christmas stuff I know of past this point have some level of knowing irony or deliberate nostalgia to them.

For the latter, I present “Zoot Zoot Zoot Here Comes Santa In His New Space Suit” by Tiny Tim.  Now, before you draw any conclusions from the sentence I just wrote, understand that this song dates from 1981.  So this is not “Tiptoe Through The Tulips” or “Living In The Sunlight” era Tiny Tim.  This is embarrassing himself singing “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy" on The Tonight Show era Tiny Tim.  Oh and speaking of being well past one’s prime, “Zoot Zoot Zoot” is also a Disco song.  Released in 1981.  In America.  Yeah, this one was dead on arrival no matter how you looked at it, but it nevertheless is a decent summery of what all the tropes of those 50s Space Age songs would sound like transposed into a late 70s context… even if it missed the window of opportunity by a few years.

Coming even later is “Space Age Santa” by Jaymz Bee & His Royal Jelly Orchestra from the mid-90s.  First off, no, it's not another cover of the song we started out with, this is a totally different tune.  More importantly, it nicely represents the “knowing irony” issue I brought up.  Part of me wants to like this song, but there’s a suffocating layer of camp throughout that makes it really dang annoying for me to hear too often. The vocals are far too deliberately "I am doing a silly twee voice right now" for me to put up with for very long, and the forcefully quirky melody doesn't help much either.  It’s a shame, too, because there’s this really lovely little Exotica-esque florist at the end of the chorus that’s genuinely nice, but the goofy march that leads up to it is just too deliberately showy and smarmy for my tastes.  A little earnestness really goes a long way in these things.

And speaking of earnestness, I can’t close a blog like this out without the ANTI Space Age Christmas anthem: “Please Mr. Santa” by Tex Valen.  Musically, it’s basically another Country song that buries its cowboy bones beneath a thick layer of roller rink organ trying to sound like church bells, and the melody is pretty ramble and unfocused.  But the lyrics are a direct plea to Santa NOT to ditch the reindeer in favor of a rocket ship.  Like, not a song about how the Space Age fixations are bad and shouldn’t be a part of Christmas imagery, but rather an open letter to Santa HIMSELF to stick with the sleigh.  It don’t get much more earnest than that.  And the funniest thing to me is imagining the (admittedly probably minimal) people in 1965 and writing it off as some oldhead whining about how he doesn’t understand the way things are now …only him to turn out to have been on the wining side all along.  And maybe that’s the true lesson of this blog: the fact that everything you think is new and exciting and modern today will, without exception, be lame and embarrassing and forgettable tomorrow.  But then, I was lame and embarrassing from the very beginning, so what do I know?  I just like spaceships and robots, that’s all.