Christmas International 2001 2ft Animated Dickens Family Band - “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”

Welcome back to daily double uploads! I hope everyone had a fantastic Thanksgiving! But turkey day is old news, it’s officially Christmas time now!

Starting things off this year with a very odd one. I won these guys at an auction for a buck on November 5th, solely for the purpose of learning what they did. Plus, they came with a duplicate Gemmy hip swinging claus couple which I restored and re-homed:
   • Gemmy 1998 Dancing Claus Couple - “Jingle ...  

Very rarely can you snag anything at all at that auction house for $1, but these were disgustingly dirty at first which I’m sure made a difference. It was such a pain to clean everything, literally- I burned myself and cut myself working on this stupid thing and still bear the scars to prove it 🤣. But, after running all the clothes through the washer and permanently staining my pillowcases pink, they look pretty good. I’ll admit their clothes are impressively high quality, and they look great besides those ugly hats lol. The resin sculpts are pretty detailed too, though the paint job is a little questionable. The mom’s face sculpt is also identical to the kid’s, which is super weird. Otherwise, the build quality couldn’t be much worse… especially considering this thing cost SIXTY BUCKS new. I think there’s supposed to be a sign hanging from the lamppost (which is made entirely of fragile resin btw), and I’m surprised nothing else is broken. The plastic is so thin that just lightly pressing down in the middle of the base makes the figures bounce up and down. Interestingly, the cello is literally just one of those standalone musical battery operated toy ones but with nothing inside. At the end of the video I attempt to show you the battery compartment and speaker holes it has 😂.

Of course, these also didn’t work, which was due to a heavily corroded battery compartment and a bad switch. The motor was locked up too, and I was surprised to learn it switches direction instead of just running continuously. This is not what I expected these to do at all, but I’m also not very surprised. The audio obviously doesn’t make any sense, and I’m not sure why they even bothered giving the father a mechanism if they were gonna leave the other two motionless. However, I’ve seen a surprising amount of slightly different variants of this item out there, including many “caroling” versions where this audio would be perfectly acceptable. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to assume that’s how this particular item ended up with this audio. I haven’t had any luck tracking down another one exactly like this online though, and I still really don’t know much about it at all. It’s just one of those mysteries that will probably never be fully solved. At least there’s finally a video of one in action now!

Thanks for checking out the video! Hope you enjoyed! Let me know what you think in the comments, and I hope to see you again soon!