Once again, thanks to the late great Goodman Ace, radio comedian of the 1930's and 40's, who created this character in the 1960's in a Saturday Review article.

As I guide my sleigh across the Atlantic towards America, I think about how hard it was to get the sleigh into the air. This year I'm carrying an especially heavy load, which is the last load of the night. After I drop that one off, I can head to bed and sleep this off.

I shake my head. It must be the Thereflu getting to me. I have to medicate myself to keep working. After all, I'm Conditional Santa for Animation. I give gifts to people and institutions in the animation business. These gifts are only good if the people behave properly over the next year. If they don't, the gifts turn into coal, or something equally sooty and unentertaining.

Magical Scatterings

First stop is in Florida. The signs around the four Disney theme parks promote the holiday season as "Magical Gatherings." Right, I think as I blow my nose with a harsh honking sound. Tell that to the many 2-D animators that were magically gathered together to be fired.

What happened to Disney? Let's just look at their animation. Disney has a fine cartoon on their own ABC network on Saturday morning. Kim Possible is Disney's most honest action heroine since Montoya on Gargoyles. She could be as big as AOL Time Warner's Powerpuff Girls. But only about six episodes of the series run on ABC, time and time again. The rest all run on The Disney Channel. With the show growing steadily more stale in its free TV version (the only place where kids in poor families can see it) Kim Possible will never grow to be a big hit.

What's the deal? The cable episodes are too violent for broadcast TV? Is the TV network only intended to lure people to cable? Are the arms of this massive corporation fighting each other? If so, it wouldn't be new. Corporate in-fighting also strangled Disney's fine The Adventures of Tarzan last year.

The poor performance of their 2-D animated features has ended the careers of many fine animation artists, and ended the Disney tradition of quality drawn animation. But the problem isn't Disney's art, which has continued its tradition of excellence. The 2-D films like Treasure Planet and Brother Bear look terrific. But their stories and characters are cliched and predictable. No one cares about Disney's new stories any more - and people know that it's Pixar, not Disney, who did the heavy lifting on Finding Nemo and Toy Story.

As final proof that Disney storytelling is dead, look at the animated sequels they're dumping on the home video market. Where were the crowds demanding sequels to Cinderella, Lady and the Tramp and Lion King? Who wanted stories that recapitulated the older Disney originals without adding anything new? That clamor came from Disney's executive suite, which has grown frightened of creating new stories and just want to squeeze money out of the old ones. We can only assume that the loudest voice came from the head of the table.

The upshot was something that surprised everyone - the resignation of Roy E. Disney, Walt's nephew and the last Disney to have a position on the Board of Directors. As the head of the Animation Department, Disney's harsh words hit home to animation fans, although he mentioned the company's other ventures. He said what was apparent to everyone for a long time; Disney has lost its way. And he specifically blamed Michael Eisner.

I drop this first gift down the chimney of Cinderella's castle. It goes to The Walt Disney Company itself - which, as a corporation, is considered a living, breathing, tax-paying entity by the government. The gift is renewed vitality, greater stock values and more memorable productions - but only if the Disney stockholders demand changes. And those changes must include the person with the greatest compensation and the greatest responsibility for the company.

Michael Eisner saved Disney from extinction in the 1970's. But his decisions have caused Disney nothing but trouble in the last ten years. It is time for him to go, with what respect he has left. If not, Disney will make a sequel to the so-so film it released just before Eisner took over. Only this time, Disney itself will be sucked into The Black Hole.

That's a real masculine name, "Seth."

I zigzag to California, and find the Bel Air address of Seth McFarlane. For a while, I thought he was off my animator's list for good. His one TV series, Family Guy, hung on for three seasons before croaking. But amazingly, the series revived faster than Rush Limbaugh after robbing a drugstore. Cartoon Network's reruns of Family Guy have been a surprise success, leading off the Adult Swim nightly block.

Family Guy was intended to copy the success of The Simpsons, but annoyed the public with its desperation. "Anything for a laugh" sounds like a way to make comedy, until the "anything" becomes literal.McFarlane did "anything for a laugh," and wound up making nobody laugh.

In one episode, Peter and Lois Griffin - the show's Homer and Marge, if you are among the multitudes that never saw the show - discuss their daughter's irresponsibility. The joke is that while talking, they are changing into S-and-M gear, with Lois preparing to beat up on her hubby. This is absolutely not in their character. It never occurred again. McFarlane broke their characters for the sake of a cheap, throwaway joke.

The show was infamous for interrupting story lines for quick, pointless puns. For example, Lois angrily reminds Peter, "Be careful while driving. Remember the time you hit that deer." Quick flash-back to Peter talking to a deer on the highway, exchanging insurance information about their mutual fender-bender. Then back to the story. This kind of humor is acceptable once in a while. But not all the time, when they're supposed to be telling a story!

Family Guy didn't treat the audience with respect. It didn't treat its characters with respect. It didn't even treat ideas with respect. No matter how dark the humor on The Simpsons grew, you could understand and love Bart, Homer and the others, because Matt Groenig and his writers loved them. But it's hard to see anyone who Seth McFarlane loves. Except...

There was one character on Family Guy with a consistant character, and he was the most hateful. Stewie, the homicidal infant, made it clear that he despised everyone in his family, and continually tried to kill them all. Even with the toning down in later episodes that was apparently ordered by the Fox Network, he remained a fountain of hatred and spite. Even as kindly a soul as I, Conditional Santa, wanted to strangle the little Damien-clone every time he showed up on screen.

It's been said that one member of every cartoon family is a stand-in for its creator. Bart, the mischevious but basically good kid, and Fry, the space delivery guy, are said to be Matt Groenig's stand-ins. Could Stewie be McFarlane's?

With Family Guy a "rediscovered hit," some people asked at Anime Expo Atlanta 2003 about the possibility of producing new episodes of the series. CN representatives said that was impossible, because McFarlane set the production cost at one million dollars. Per episode. Point of order, Mister McFarlane. Where would this money go? Not the animation (not too far above Home Movies quality) or the voice talent (Katie Sagal was the only big star on the voice cast, and was replaced).

Or maybe McFarlane wants to sell a new series - or maybe the old series in a new guise.  In this news story on Animation World Network (http://news.awn.com/index.php3?ltype=top&newsitem_no=9206) it's announced that McFarlane is pitching a series called American Dad. Only this time, the dad is a CIA agent and has a French-speaking goldfish. It still sounds like "anything for a laugh" - except, of course, anything that's funny.

And the latest scuttlebutt says that the Fox Network, despairing of its declining ratings for sadistic reality shows and screaming British twit critics, might finance new episodes of Family Guy after all.

But Conditional Santa is nothing if not forgiving. This gift for Seth McFarlane is success with American Dad, or his renewed Family Guy. That is, if he has learned something and creates characters and not coathooks for his series, and if he's learned that humor comes from character, not Bob Hope's joke files. If not...the gift morphs into all those unsold (and unproduced) Family Guy Cursing Stewie Dolls, which will follow him around, insult him and pee on his rug. And all the things that make him f-in' cry!

Not Doctor Katz, but Doctored Cats

Hacking up into my Kleenex, which I carefully discard in the trash bag, I head my sleigh towards the south, to the headquarters of Dreamworks SKG. They've been riding high on the well-deserved success of Shrek. But there are some nasty questions about their upcoming projects. Even at San Diego Comic-Con, the place where people announce things that aren't ready, the Dreamworks team said little or nothing. It took months after the convention to see the two new projects they were announcing.

The only one about which anything beyond a plot outline has been released is Father of the Pride. When the poster showed lions, the thought of parodying The Lion King came to mind. But this series, already sold to NBC, looks like a disaster in the making. The premise: A family of lions works in Las Vegas, in the Siegfried and Roy show.

Long before Roy's tragic mauling, and the close of this long-running Vegas attraction, this was lame. First off, a previous show about show biz lions was a dismal failure.The Lionhearts was about the family of the lion who does the MGM logo; it was a disasterous attempt of MGM to re-enter the animation biz, and it ran only thirteen episodes.

And the human co-stars had their animated failure, too. Siegfried and Roy: Masters of the Impossible wasn't even a series, but a five-part miniseries pilot. In a Dungeons & Dragons - style world, where magic is outlawed, a couple of vagabond entertainers who do a sleight-of-hand act are accused of being magicians.

Okay, it was crazy to make a kid's cartoon about two flamboyant male performers who (rightly or not) are generally percieved as a gay couple. It's crazier to put them on in prime time, and only as background characters in a series about cartoon lions. And it's crazy for NBC to continue with this show, as it seems that the real Siegfried and Roy are through.

Under the circumstances, NBC can't run this show as is. The gift Conditional Santa will give them makes it possible, but just barely - Dreamworks has to move the show out of Vegas and make the story about the family of lions living somewhere else, in some other circumstances. If they don't....Dreamworks gets a three-episode run and the worst press it's ever received.

The Big Surprise Gift

At last, my last stop. After this one, I can head for the covers. My last present goes to...YOU.

Yes, you, the animation fan. Your actions will determine if there will be good cartoons in the future, or if they - and the rest of the entertainment business - goes down the toilet. Your actions are the ones you take in the voting booth.

I know someone who says "I never vote; it just encourages them." Encourages who? The people out of power who might have better ideas than the ones in power? Gee, what a horrible thing.

Right now, the government is allowing entertainment companies to merge into megacorporations. Disney, for instance, owns theme parks, animation, two movie studios, stores, TV networks and cable channels. News Corporation owns cable and broadcast networks, newspapers, magazines, movie studios and more. In 1975 there were fifty companies who owned American media. Today, there are six.

Don't care about the slanted news and the one-sided "unfair and unbalanced" opinions about national and world affairs? Okay, how about a more important reason to break up these monopolies? How about, they make lousy entertainment?

When there were fifty companies, there was competition. A lot of people were competing to entertain you. That meant they had to try different things. Some were conventional, some were oddball, but they had to work to please you. With six corporations, there's no competition. There's no effort to try to entertain you.

What we get is high-pressure salesmanship. Disney promoted Treasure Planet, Universal is pushing The Cat in the Hat, and promoting it in everything from fast-food meals to ads for associated products. If they took their work in promoting the films and put it into the films themselves, they might make more money and save us all a lot of earaches. But that's not the way the Big Six work.

Who's to blame for this? Surprise - it's both political parties, and every President since Ronald Reagan. They have let the media companies - and all companies, for that matter - grow into awkward, stumbling giants. Actually, the responsibility is yours, for not voting, or not investigating who you voted for. Well, you were fooled once, but what are you going to do now that you know the truth?

So this is your Conditional Present. You will have better entertainment, more thrills and fun in everything you watch - especially cartoons - if you elect people into every public office, from President to the House and Senate, who vow to enforce anti-monopoly laws and break up these megacorporations. Part of your condition is that you must research and find out who believes in breaking up the megacorps. I won't tell you how to vote. (However, I can suggest that the Republican party isn't going to do too much to hurt their rich contributors.)

But this research, and the effort you take to vote, will be worth it for you. If you don't, you will be faced with cartoons and entertainment that get steadily worse. Yes, worse than what you have now.

That's it. My sleigh is empty. Now I can head back to The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives, swallow some Nyquil, and sleep through the New Year.