Tralfaz Wednesday Theatre: Santa and the Fairy Snow Queen

Some Christmas specials are television evergreens—A Charlie Brown Christmas, Alastair Sim’s version of A Christmas Carol, that one about the kid getting his eye shot out. Doubtless you can name others you annually look forward to once a year.

Then there are others that don’t quite make it.

One was produced a man known for screechy and preachy 1950s films about a world filled with child molesters, addicted teenagers, mangled bodies caused by car crashes, and general mayhem and violence.

Sid Davis was John Wayne’s stand-in. He hit up the Duke for $1,000 to film the beware-of-perverted-strangers opus The Dangerous Stranger, designed to be shown in schools and by civic groups. It was available for purchase in January 1950. The money rolled in and Davis made a nice career feeding on the paranoid side of the decade.

But before he got in the strident mental hygiene film business, he produced a Christmas film. It looks like Wayne financed this one, too. In true Sid Davis fashion, it is bizarre.

Santa and the Fairy Snow Queen was written and choreographed by Robert Niel Porter, a Springfield, Missouri native who was a 1942 graduate of Santa Cruz High School, where he starred in the play “The Ghost Flies South.” After serving in the navy in the South Pacific in World War Two, he established a children’s theatre, producing his own plays, and had written and directed 40 children’s shows on television in Los Angeles¹. Porter and a former chorus boy and singer named Jack Perry collaborated on musicals and other shows for a number of years. He also appeared in several feature films, and perhaps it is there he met up with Davis. Porter appeared in Queen as a toy soldier, billed as “Bob Porter.” He died Aug. 28, 2005².

Porter copyrighted Santa and the Fairy Snow Queen as a one-act play on January 7, 1949, which had been performed at the Assistance League Playhouse in Los Angeles the previous December 21st. The film version was made that year as there was a showing at the Budlong Avenue P-TA on December 15, 1949³, though it wasn’t copyrighted until 1951. That year, Queen was picked up a number of television stations for Christmas-time broadcast, including WENR-TV in Chicago, WATV in Newark, WTAR in Norfolk, Va. and WBRC-TV in Birmingham.

The film was distributed by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films which eventually made it part of a four-programme package for television distribution; in 1956, it was through Trans-Lux Television⁴, the same people who brought you the made-for-TV Felix the Cat cartoons. Queen was a minor success. At least 35 stations bought the package⁵; WVET in Rochester purchased the colour negative for a three-year period⁶.

The question is “why”? Maybe the answer was “desperation.” Even Felix’s magic bag of tricks wouldn’t be able to turn this from being a steaming pile of “what the....” The show opens with a “brownie” named Snoopy who twirls and swirls for no particular reason, talks down to the viewers and continually whinnies like a horse (it’s supposed to be laughter).

The embarrassing performance comes from stage and TV actress Rocky Stanton, who grew up in Phoenix as Rochelle Costanten. In early 1950, she went from a brownie to a pixie as she was hired as “Miss Pixie” for KECA-TV’s “Sleepy Joe” show⁷ and played Gleeper on the “Mr. Do Good” (formerly “Santa’s Workshop”) children’s show, originally on KTSL⁸. She later, as Rocky Rau, became resident director of the Ana-Modjeska Players in Anaheim and passed away on April 10, 2003 at age 78.

Santa is played by Edmund Penny, a USC grad and World War Two vet who appeared on Dr. Christian on radio, and wrote and produced plays. The other title role, with some kind of off-and-on accent, is enacted by Margot Von Leu, about whom I can find nothing and my guess is her last name is a contraction. And Audrey Washburn (baby doll) was a dancer and the older sister of actress Beverly Washburn, who appeared with Jack Benny on radio and TV and is still with us today.

Anyway, enough of the background. See how much of this you can take. I can’t get past the first few minutes. I recommend you watch Davis’ Keep off the Grass or The Bottle and the Throttle for its pro-police messages. The Duke would be proud.

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1 Santa Cruz Sentinel, Oct. 27, 1973, pg. 25^↩
2 Los Angeles Times, Aug. 31, 2005, pg. B11^↩
3 The Southwest Wave, Los Angeles, Dec. 15, 1949, pg. 33^↩
4 The Billboard, Nov. 10, 1956, pg. 9^↩
5 Broadcasting, Dec. 25, 1956, ph. 48^↩
6 Variety, Dec. 5, 1956, pg. 54^↩
7 Los Angeles Evening Citizen, Jan. 23, 1950, pg. 18^↩
8 Los Angeles Mirror, July 28, 1949, pg. 35^↩