Review: How Murray Saved Christmas

Spoilers Below

I honestly can’t recall a Christmas that had THIS many Holiday specials produced, but I’m happy as hell as a result. We already had the Toy Story That Time Forgot, this Tuesday sees an animated depiction of Will Ferrell’s Elf come to life, and How Murray Saved Christmas drops off some holiday cheer that may have been geared towards a slightly older audience!

Yea, I know the special is rated TV-G, but we had poop, fart, Jewish, and gay jokes galore which I honestly think esxhibited more of a Family Guy-produced special than that of a Mike Reiss one. Hell, if the closing credits hadn’t said Rough Draft Studios at the end, I would’ve sworn this thing was produced at Fuzzy Door…THAT’s how close it was. Even Family Guy’s  musical composer Walter Murphy co-wrote the songs used in the special, and if that doesn’t say Family Guy, I don’t know what does.

The voice cast has me a bit divided. I overall enjoyed Jerry Stiller’s take on Murray and the 87-year old actor is just as snappy as he was 30 years ago. He’s got one heck of a singing voice, and his banter opposite Sean Hayes’ ‘Edison’ was the glue that held a lot of this special together. Kevin Michael Richardson checked in as Santa and while his more low-key vocals for the jolly man held up, his cuckoo-laden voice whenever he got hit in the head had me thinking Cleveland Jr. every, single, time. I was literally looking all over the place for Rallo to see if he was close behind when Santa was in la-la land, but the closest I got was Dennis Haysbert as the Baby New Year. The cast was nicely filled out by some of my personal favorites like Billy West, Maurice LaMarche, and Tress MacNeille, all of whom were part of the brilliant Futurama cast, so it was a joy to hear those guys again, but Seinfeld’s take on a doctor from Colombia was questionable to say the least.

Overall, we get a decent holiday special. The songs are funny, the dialogue was as edgy as can be, and to be quite honest I wouldn’t mind seeing an entire series about Murray, and think he should do more holidays. The Easter Bunny (also played by Richardson) already sounds like a funny bastard, and who wouldn’t want a Woody Allen-inspired Groundhog for Groundhog Day? Here’s hoping at the very least, these animated specials convince NBC that you can make money off of cartoons and that they have a future on this network.