'Robot Chicken' Christmas Special: Love, Zombies, and Deep, Deep Cuts

Just as the Christmas season doesn’t begin for some viewers until they’ve seen A Charlie Brown Christmas, there are those fans who can’t get into the holiday spirit until they’ve seen the annual Robot Chicken Christmas special.

The wait is almost over: The Robot Chicken Christmas Special: X-Mas United premieres Dec. 13 at midnight on Adult Swim. It has a linear story that follows the Robot Chicken Nerd as he finds out that his real father is actually Santa Claus. His quest to talk to his dad, naturally, leads to a lot of death, mayhem, and a Harry Chapin-esque ending that may bring a tear to your eye.

“The best thing about Christmas when I was a kid was all of the TV specials that weren’t on the rest of the year,” says head writer Tom Root. “Anything we can do to reference those and that feeling of those Xmas specials was important to us in this one for sure.” Not that there’s total agreement on what those feelings are. Executive producer John Harvatine expels a sharp laugh as Root is talking and explains, “To me, I always thought that Charlie Brown was kind of sad, kind of a morbid downer.”

Fortunately, the Robot Chicken style of throwing absolutely everything into the mix and seeing what happens means that Harvatine gets to include Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer references — including Hermey and the Bumble, which were his personal favorites growing up, as well as some morbid downer moments (one of which also includes the Bumble).

“The Robot Chicken mission statement is taking the piss out of all of the things we loved as children,” Root says. “But that doesn’t mean we didn’t really love them, and it doesn’t mean we still don’t love them. It probably shows more than it does even in a normal Robot Chicken just how much we still love these things we’re making fun of.”

The love doesn’t stop in the writers’ room. Root once again references Rudolph: “There’s a ton of stop-motion animators who work in stop-motion because of those Rankin/Bass specials,” he says. “There’s definitely a different vibe among our artists when they get to work on something that means something to them like that.”

Of course, all that love doesn’t mean that there won’t be scathing jokes leveled at famous celebrities, or jokes about eating babies, or jokes about horrendous zombie deaths bathed in claymation gore. Nor have they lost their penchant for dropping in jokes so obscure they’ll make your head spin. “There’s a reference to the Richard Pryor movie The Toy in Santa Claus’s office. Jackie Gleason’s character has this oil painting of his wife on the wall of his office, and Santa Claus has an identical one of Mrs. Claus in his office.”

The revelation from Root gets a guffaw from Harvatine, who apparently didn’t catch the more than 30-year-old reference the first time around.

“I’m going to guess most of our audience isn’t going to pick up on that,” Root says laughing.

The Robot Chicken Christmas Special: X-Mas United premieres Dec. 13 at midnight on Adult Swim.