Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

You know what they say, right? 'Tis the season to be jolly, falalalala lalalala... Well, to cut a long story short, about 3 weeks ago, I had this brilliant stroke of genius! I was inspired to, er, come up with a collection of twisted songs... Y'know, songs that are usually viewed as perfectly normal and wholesome for the family and all that stuff... Well, one day I chanced upon a song, and upon further dissection (and a little imagination), I realised there was a hidden meaning to this song! So then I came up with this idea of this new project: getting all these songs and analysing them on my blog for everyone's viewing and reading (and hopefully laughing) pleasure... So here it is, my new project - Esther's Selection of Sick, Sarcastic Songs! The songs in this selection are songs which you should never let little kids with their young, easily impressionable minds listen to... And since it's that time of the year where every restaurant, shopping mall, and hawker stall beside the drain starts blaring out Christmas songs, let's start off this selection with Esther's Collection of Constipated, Convoluted Carols, starting off with the dissection of the popular children's song Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which coincidentally, was the song I actually mentioned earlier, the one where I suddenly realised contained a hidden meaning. Enjoy.

Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer

You know Dasher and Dancer
And Prancer and Vixen,
Comet and Cupid
And Donner and Blitzen.
But do you recall
The most famous reindeer of all?

Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
Had a very shiny nose
And if you ever saw it
You would even say it glows

All of the other reindeer
Used to laugh and call him names
They never let poor Rudolph
Play in any reindeer games

Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say
"Rudolph with your nose so bright
Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?"

Then all the reindeer loved him
And they shouted out with glee
"Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
You'll go down in history!"

Now, the thing is, you're probably wondering what's so wrong (or constipated) about this song... This is where you need my help. Here, have a closer look:

First stanza

You know Dasher and Dancer

And Prancer and Vixen,

Comet and Cupid

And Donner and Blitzen.

But do you recall

The most famous reindeer of all?

As you can see (or maybe you can't), this entire song starts off wrong right from the very start! So what if I know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen and Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen? Our minds are precious things, with limited storage space! We shouldn't be wasting our memory banks on worthless details like the names of 8 reindeers! And even if you really wanted to remember their names, who would even in the first place wanna be friends with reindeer with really bad moral values? The name Vixen alone means "temperamental and sexy woman"! And Dasher means "one who makes an ostentatious parade"! You want your children to hang around with reindeer like these? Do you even want your children to make friends with reindeer? People befriend people - normal people do not befriend reindeer! And the last 2 lines of the stanza is actually promoting a very negative value - competitiveness and popularity. So what if I don't recall the most famous reindeer of them all? Are the IUBR (International United Board of Reindeer, Inc.) gonna come and stage a riot or something if I can't remember their names? Stop it with all this competitiveness already, people!

Second stanza
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
Had a very shiny nose
And if you ever saw it
You would even say it glows

I find this stanza very disturbing. I cannot emphasize the total gruesomeness of this stanza much more than this: Not every one is lucky enough to be born with a non-shiny nose. We are all different. Some people are more fortunate than others, and are born with lovely, smooth noses that don't shine in the moonlight. Other people, are well... Less lucky. This is the case with Rudolph. My question is this - so what if he has a birth defect? He still deserves every inch of respect and love from the reindeer community, okay? This is a very sensitive issue and I really don't know how best to breach this topic to you all out there reading this here article. So Rudolph the poor miserable reindeer had a humongous, glow-in-the-dark lightbulb at the very tip of his breathing device. So what? It can still perform its original function, right? A nose is meant for breathing with, not meant for you to go all around the world on Santa's sleigh to show it off, okay? And man, the last 2 lines of the 2nd stanza... Arguably the worst lines to be found in this song. So now we wanna teach our future generations to poke fun at reindeer with red, shining noses? Fine, go ahead, but let this be known: by teaching them to ridicule people's noses, you are gonna teach them to be prejudiced and biased against people with less-than-perfect noses. Shame!

Third stanza
All of the other reindeer
Used to laugh and call him names
They never let poor Rudolph
Play in any reindeer games

I really don't need to say much about this stanza. It's self-explanatory in its entirety. Look, let's just use our imaginations a little and try to put ourselves in Rudolph's miserable shoes: There you are, you have a gargantuan traffic light for a nose, and all you wanna do is crawl up into a little hole and die from the embarrassment of it all (twinkly noselights are not cool), all you wanna do is run away and hide, and all you were really hoping for was for everyone else to just pretend there was no hideous monstrosity on your sniffing device, and maybe in your wildest dreams, everyone would still wanna be your friend... Does this happen? Sadly, no. What does happen is the complete opposite of everything you were wishing and hoping for. In fact, what does happen is something out of your very worst nightmare. Every other reindeer friend you had, and even your own reindeer family, they all come out of their little perfect reindeer homes and they all start pointing their antlers at you and start laughing. Yes. Laughing. At you. And they all avoid you on the streets when you go shopping for new antler stockings. And all the mother reindeer, when they see you walking towards them, they all kinda shrink and shudder away from your gaze, and pull their darling baby reindeer with their perfect little noses closer towards themselves, away from you... As if the little Christmas ornament was contagious or something! And when you try to be nice and friendly, and you give that cute little baby reindeer in the reindeer trolley a sweet smile, what does he do but burst out in hysterical wailings of "Monster! Get him away from me!" And you knw what's the very worst part of this whole catastrophe? In Reindeer High School, your own reindeermates don't even want to talk to you... They don't even let you join in their little gossips and stupid playground games. And all these, just because your nose is sort of more shiny than other reindeer's. Oh, the shame and humiliation of it all. Poor Rudolph.

Fourth stanza
Then one foggy Christmas Eve
Santa came to say
"Rudolph with your nose so bright
Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?"

Okay. The story so far: Imagine you're Rudolph the deeply misunderstood reindeer. You're on the brink of madness. You just wanna crawl under your bedsheets and sleep for one week straight. Then on Christmas Eve, Santa comes knocking on your door. Okay. He doesn't quite do that. What he actually does is throw little pebbles on your little reindeer bedroom window and yell out "Hey, Lightbulb-Face! Come out! I've got something to say to you!" Of all the people in Reindeer Town, you'd think Santa would understand right? Wrong. Santa, in actual reality, isn't all that nice as everyone says he is. He's just got a really good publicist, who pays off the right media people with enough money to spread the image of a jolly smiling white-bearded Santa. In actual fact, Santa's got two earrings in his left earlobe and his breath reeks of the beer he drank from the last party he attended. So then, what does Santa want with Rudolph the acne-prone reindeer? It all goes back to his really good publicist, see... Rudolph's already renowned the whole world over for his little torchlight-for-a-nose problem, see, and what better way to boost up the image of kind and charitable Santa than taking Rudolph under your wings and kinda like, pretending to befriend him, see? So Santa does just that, and he says to Rudolph: "Yo, Rudy! Think you can handle my turbo power SuperSleigh?" It's the image power-up scheme see, and also, Santa's a little bit on the drunken side, and so are all his turbo power sleigh-driving reindeer, and there's been a leak from the Reindeer Cops that there's gonna be a bust-up tonight, see, and they're gonna have reindeer roadblocks on every turning and they're whipping out the Reindeer Breathalysers tonight... This is where Rudolph comes in. Sober, I-don't-drink-alcohol Rudolph. Poor Rudolph. Getting tricked, being used, and he doesn't even have a clue.

Fifth stanza
Then all the reindeer loved him
And they shouted out with glee
"Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
You'll go down in history!"

This is the most widely misunderstood stanza in the entire song. Everybody thinks that you know what? After Rudolph leads Santa's sleigh right, suddenly he's popular, and all the reindeer wanna be his friends now, and they've finally accepted Rudolph and his blinking-headlight nose, and now things are just spiffy, and sparkly clean, and oh-so-lovely, and everybody lives happily ever after in Reindeer Town. That's the original story. Or so the entire world thinks. You wanna know what really happens? I got this from a reindeer frined who was actually at the scene of the crime that night. Here's what really happened: So Rudolph, being the sad little reindeer that he is, you know, just looking for a little love and acceptance amongst his fellow reindeer, of course he says "Yes, I'll guide your sleigh, Santa!" and he left that night in a blaze of upturned snow from the over-pumped turbo power SuperSleigh exhaust pipe. What Rudolph forgot, and apparently what every other silly reindeer in little Reindeer Town forgot, was that Rudolph - poor little pathetic reindeer - was underaged! I mean, hello! He didn't even have a Reindeer Class Driving License! What else do you think could have happened? He took a U-turn a little too fast, a little too dangerously, and the entire SuperSleigh kinda came to a crashing somersault, right there just above the blinking lights of the Eiffel Tower. I mean, honestly, how he even got that far from the South Pole to Paris without being caught by the Reindeer Cops, I dunno. So of course, they arrested him, and locked him up in the Bastille (yes, apparently it's still up and operating, but they only admit 'special' cases)... The last I heard of Rudolph, he was sharing a cell with the likes of Robin Hood (crimes of stealing, rioting, shooting illegal game in Sherwood Forest), Woody Woodpecker (illegal logging of precious Amazonian trees), and Cinderella (fraud and false identity, apparently... She couldn't quite leave behind her old life and the Prince used to find her in the middle of the night in the Palace kitchens, rubbing charcoal on her face, the floor, the walls... The final straw was when she rubbed soot into his brand new Cadillac).

So you see, my friends? When they said Rudolph would go down in history, they really did mean just that. He's history now.

Now you see why we should ban this song from the airwaves? And keep them out of little children's innocent little ears? Now you know.

Poor Rudolph.

A totally original EVSH fictional work of art.