He's Mr. Heat Miser

With only three days until Christmas the temperature in New York around 60 degrees farenheit this afternoon, one thing is very clear: the Heat Miser is back. But did he ever really leave?



Gen-X'ers know Heat Miser from the above appearance in the 1974 Rankin-Bass holiday film The Year Without a Santa Claus, wherein he spars over control of global weather patterns with his brother Snow Miser, who is his polar opposite — literally.

Watching HM's Busbee Berkeley-style number and catty comments for the first time in many years, I'd forgotten (or never realized) how, shall we say, flamboyant Mr. Hundred-and-One is, with a snarky attitude that was pure Paul Lynde.

Snow Miser, conversely, seems to take his cues from  Vaudeville, in the tradition of Jimmy Durante with a smidge of Fred Astaire thrown in.



Despite the Miser Brothers' status as generational touchstones, The Year Without a Santa Claus remains a disturbingly under-the-radar Christmas special, unlike A Charlie Brown Christmas or The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, which have a prime-time, major network showing every season.  But that makes stumbling across it during a run through the cable channels so sweetly satisfying.

It's also worth noting that Heatmiser was the name of the great singer-songwriter Elliott Smith's first band. Despite having all of Smith's albums, I have none of Heatmiser's, but I think that may have to change. Here's a fine tune I found on YouTube called "Plainclothes Man" from their final record. 1996's Mic City Sons.

Get Heatmiser's Mic City Sons on iTunes here.