Listen In and Make Your Christmas List

Santa Brings Radio Cheer in Gifts From The Air (1937)

Imagine Santa bringing toys based on your favorite radio stars! I'm talking an alternate universe, of course, but one I presume existed in the 30's when air personalities were as beloved as those in movies, if not more so. Christmas cartoons from the period invariably had toys spun off broadcast personnel, but fewer in the shape of movie stars. Santa visits an urchin boy in Gifts From The Air and leaves Eddie Cantor, Kate Smith, Ed Wynn, and others for gifts. They dance, sing, and do signature thing for Christmas morning. Could a Greta Garbo doll or Clark Gable marionette supply such merriment? Toy collector/historians would know if radio folk inspired toy manufacturers during peak years of the medium; was there a Joe Penner action figure to ask over and over if you wanna buy a duck? Cartoon toys often took the form of W.C. Fields or Laurel and Hardy, and these were movie stars, but wait, didn't Fields become as well known for airwave contretemps with Bergen and McCarthy? I'd guess a stuffed and performing Eddie Cantor would please more than an immobile Clark Gable frankly not giving a damn, though tastes obviously differ. Gifts From The Air was a Columbia Rhapsody produced by Charles Mintz in Technicolor (it's on You Tube). Of Depression-era yarns, few were so cherished as the orphan child who awakens Christmas to a shanty-full of presents and leviathan-sized roast turkey. Each year of the 30's got variation on the theme by one or more cartoon-makers. Maybe it reassured patronage that somehow their own Yuletide dreams might come true.