BOOTLEG FILES 897: “A Special Valentine with the Family Circus” (1978 animated television special).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: On VHS video.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It fell through the cracks.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Oh, God, I hope not.
If you ever want to encounter the most passionate vitriol to stain the Internet, type in the words “Family Circus Hate” into your search engine and then set aside several hours to read the blog posts and forum messages from people who have an aggressive loathing to that long-running newspaper comic strip “The Family Circus” about a wholesome family and their treacly-thick approach to life’s minor inanities. But if you really love to hate “The Family Circus” – or if you really hate yourself and you feel that you need to be punished for genuine or perceived character flaws – then please set aside about a half-hour to endure the 1978 animated TV special “A Special Valentine with the Family Circus.”
To be blunt, there’s nothing special about this “Special Valentine” – but there is enough pain generated by the production to warrant a complaint filed with Amnesty International. The plot is simple to the point of feebleness – February 14 is coming up and the wee children of this particular family are in competition with each other to make the most attractive and elaborate Valentine’s Day card for their parents. The father of the clan is barely on-screen – he is first seen kissing the tykes good night and then doesn’t appear until the end of the story when he arrives home from work. Considering how little he is involved in his children’s lives, he might as well be a weekend father.
The mother is a housewife, but she’s a rather bizarre looking thing. She has a football-shaped heat similar to Stewie Griffin’s cranium on “Family Guy” and black dots for eyes, but she also has huge tits and a bootylicious backside – she looks as if she was created by a 12-year-old who abruptly realized that girls aren’t icky.
The family also has four little kids – the oldest is blonde Billy, who has an irresponsible bully streak but can be nice when his conscience is choked; Dolly, the sole girl who is (naturally) both the most responsible and the bitchiest; Jeffy, who is the cute but stupid child; and PJ, the mute infant who sucks his thumb but walks in an adult bipedal gait. All four children are built like cinderblocks and lack necks.
While the three older siblings compete against each other for the creation of the most sophisticated Valentine’s Day card, little PJ creates a wobbly drawing that looks good to his infant eyes but creates contemptuous laughter from his brother and sister. PJ cries, which makes the others feel guilty, so they decide to create a supersized Valentine just for their little brother – but one of the family’s dogs decides to jump through it, reducing it to wreckage. In the end, the parents decide to frame PJ’s clumsy but sincere drawing – there may be a lesson in there, but I was too numb from this non-special special to figure it out.
Mercifully, the production lacks many of the emetic features of Bil Keane’s long-running comic strip, such as the invisible dead grandfather who visits from Heaven and the convoluted maps that follow the tykes in their wanderings from Points A to B. Instead, there is a musical number on a school bus about how wonderful Valentine’s Day is – the bus driver, a too-happy guy with a 70s porn mustache, leads a chorus of multicultural children who occupy the vehicle but who suddenly vanish once the Family Circus kids arrive in their NIMBY neighborhood. Keane played no role in this production, so we can’t blame him for the thudding voice performances (especially from the juvenile characters), the clumsy animation or the cockamamie story.
NBC broadcast “A Special Valentine with the Family Circus” on February 10, 1978. It wasn’t particularly popular, but the network later okayed a Christmas special with the characters in the following year and an Easter special in 1992.
This production had a VHS video release in 1992, but to date it has not been re-released in any other home entertainment format. There is an unauthorized upload to YouTube, but mercifully it gets interrupted with commercials that are more entertaining than the featured presentation.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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