Biographic - Sunday December 23, 2007 Comic Strip Licensing and Permissions

Transcript

With his role in "Fred Claus" Paul Giamatti, a 2006 Academy award nominee, is the latest actor to portray Santa Claus in a movie. The "Jolly Old Elf" was first depicted on the big screen in the late 1980s in a succession of short films. Six years before creating his seminal 1916 opus "The Birth Of A Nation" legendary director D.W. Griffith unveiled "A Trap For Santa Claus" Welshman Edmund Gwen won an Academy award for his portrayal of "Kris Kringle" in 1947's Miracle on 34th Street" the movie- which also starred the young Natalie Wood was re-made in 1994 with Sir Richard Attenborough as the department store Santa who must prove he is the genuine article. The producers of the lavish "Superman" movies gave father Christmas the hi-tech treatment in 1985's "Santa Claus: The Movie" casting Dudley Moore as an Elf, and over the years everyone from Dan Akroyd to Ed Asner- and even teen actor Johnathan Taylor Thomas of TV's "Home Improvement"star Tim Allen took the lead in a triology of successful "Santa Claus" movies, while Oscar-winner Billy Bob Thornton played an unscrupulous "Bad Santa" "Saint Nick" has been featured in practically every movie genre, from animation to slasher flick! Perhaps the strangest take on the tale is the 1964 low-budget clunker Santa Claus Conquers The Martians" A tale of aliens who abduct Santa and transport him back to their planet, the movie- which also features an 8-year-old Pia Zadora as a martian tyke- is a mainstay of many lists of the worst movies ever produced.

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