The One Messed Up Thing About These Christmas Movies Nobody Talks About

May 2024 ยท 2 minute read

Not every Christmas special can be as beloved as Rudolph or Charlie Brown. Take, for instance, Christmas Comes to Pac-Land, the 1982 tie-in to the Pac-Man animated series. As you might expect from a cartoon tasked with building a narrative from a game about eating dots in a maze while being hunted by ghosts, the series took a lot of liberties with the source material, and when it came time to talk about Christmas, they accidentally revealed something truly harrowing about Pac-Man and his world.

It's a pretty simple plot: After getting into a high-speed chase where they're almost murdered, Pac-Man and his family encounter Santa Claus, whose sleigh was brought down in a midair collision with the ghosts as they flee the scene of the car crash. With Santa and the Reindeer injured, Pac-Man has to go searching for his bag of toys and cure the reindeer by feeding them the glowing orbs that give him the ability to devour ghosts. He does, and Christmas is saved. Simple.

The weird part, if this thing can be said to have only one weird part, is that Pac-Man, his family, the ghosts, and all the other residents of Pac-Land have no idea what Christmas is. That's not that unusual in and of itself. He-Man & She-Ra: A Christmas Special from a few years later also features characters who need to have Christmas explained to them, but Eternia is in another dimension. Considering that Santa is able to fly there on Christmas Eve, Pac-Land has to at least be Earth-adjacent. Start thinking about it, though, and the answer becomes clear: a place that only a Saint can travel to, full of people defined by gluttony, where the souls of the dead can't leave and must remain as ghosts, and where no one has ever heard of Christmas or Jesus Christ? Pac-Land is Hell, folks, where damned souls must toil in a never-ending maze.

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