Santa Cláusula: Un Nuevo Santa

My family was looking forward to this show. My kids love the movies but this show is horrible. It's over acted and there is no warmth or heart. Both my kids walked out of the room after about 10 minutes. One of my kids went to do homework if that gives you a clue about how bad and boring this show is. And another thing what is up with Tom Allan's makeup? He just looks weird. He actually looks like Jack Frost from the third movie. Everyone looks bored in this series especially Mrs. Clause. Was Tim Allen hurting for money when he agreed to star in this show? Why does Disney seem to mess up a good thing?

The storyline deviates from the original premise pretty terribly.

Key take aways

• It's missing the other legendary characters (mother nature, sandman, father time, Cupid, Easter bunny)
• forest witch? Wtf. And that accent. Yikes
• we're the careers of Tim Allen, Elizabeth Mitchell, and Kal Penn really this desperate?

• David Krumholtz looks like he's had it rough but the explanation of him aging was decent.

• the only decent child actor in this was Elizabeth Allen-Dick (Tim Allen's real life daughter)
• most of the child actors were terrible, especially Devin Bright as Noel and Liam Kyle as Gary - terrible over acting by both and that stupid voice for Gary. This was the most painful part of watching this.

Redeeming qualities: Tim Allen was his usual funny part, and I liked Elizabeth Mitchell as feisty Mrs. Claus.

Now I never expected this to be some kind of masterpiece, of course not. But I used to love the movies, corny-ness n all, because they were funny and essentially heart felt. I've watched the first two episodes that are available so far and honestly it's shockingly bad. Where the movies traded off the corny-ness with sometimes blatant slapstick and sometimes tongue in cheek humour, this was just almost painful to watch. All the humour is forced, they've shoehorned cringe worthy music into it, and just made it generally heartless. And to say some of the acting is wooden does a disservice to trees. I will continue to watch and hope it redeems itself, but so far it's really disappointing.

The Santa Clause and The Santa Clause 2 are two of my favourite holiday films. I really don't like the third film very much, so I wasn't expecting much when I heard Disney+ would be releasing a mini-series continuation. Well, I'm glad I went in with low expectations, because it pretty much met them, with the exception of an episode that I actually thought was pretty great. This series wasn't good since the second film, and although there are redeeming things about this series, it ultimately shouldn't have been made. Here's why I believe this series was completely unnecessary.

Picking up many years after the events of the films, Scott (Tim Allen) has decided to take up his chance of retiring. Recruiting a new person as Santa and flocking off to live the city life with his family, things at the North Pole start to go very wrong and they must return. Other than some side plots with some newcomers, that's really all this series is. It was average at best, but one episode made me give the whole series a pass overall. It involves Santa learning about how the first film happened in the first place. That's all I will say in order to not ruin it.

The biggest issue this series has is the fact that it never feels like it's going anywhere. Once they left the North Pole to live their lives, I knew they would eventually have to return, but when they return and the series concludes, it all felt lazy and rushed. There wasn't much holiday magic throughout this series and not that much holiday music either. In fact, this series closes out with a pop song playing and it's not even a Christmas song. This entire series just felt off and it also felt like it had a distractingly low budget to boot.

In the end, I can't even really recommend it to those who enjoyed the films, because I don't feel that it lives up to them. With that said though, on its own, episode five is more than worth checking out. You probably don't even have to watch the previous episodes. It's a standalone episode that explores some neat ideas. If the entire series was more like that I would've liked it a lot more. I could complain for hours about the things that didn't work for me in this series, like Scott's real son feeling like a waste, Bernard there as just pure fan service or the fact that the series doesn't really seem to care about the fact that Tim Allen as Santa is what made the original films work so well in the first place. I enjoyed quite a few moments throughout this series, but it overall just feels pointless to me. All episodes are now streaming on Disney+.

I have to say I didn't expect much and even though I loved the first one and will even watch the sequels annually, I knew this was a nostalgic creation to add more content for Disney+. I was surprised they brought Tim Allen back since he seems to be too conservative for Disney these days but I'm glad they did. It's corny, cheesy, and at times absolutely cringey, but I watched it until the end and I'm glad I did.

I enjoyed the last 3 episodes the best. They brought back one of my favorite characters and I liked the message in the end. I also enjoyed that some of the questions I had from the other movies were resolved here. It had a few parts that had me absolutely cackling. I didn't know a single elf actor and Noel really drove me nuts, but Betty was a solid head elf. Will I rewatch it every year? No, but that's ok. It gave me what I was looking for this year.