Hooves of Fire

This was the funniest programme on the television at Christmas in Britain. It follows the adventures of a young reindeer called Robbie (the son of Rudolph)who has been sent by his father to Lapland to train and navigate Santa's sleigh on Christmas Eve. However, there are a couple of problems in Robbie's way. He is lazy and will do anything to get out of work , a female reindeer called Vixen has caught his eye and made him go all gooey and the leader of the sleigh team, Blitzen, is constantly conspiring to keep Robbie off the sleigh team because he hates Rudolph (Robbie's father) and wants to humiliate him. However, Robbie's friend, Donner, learns of this plan and informs Robbie and tells him to train like mad for the Reindeer Games. You can be rest assured that all turns out well in the end. British viewers will enjoy the depiction of the British sport commentators, Des Lynam and Alan Hansen as a yeti and a snowman respectively, and look out for a joke about the singer, Seal. All in all, it was one of the funniest short animations I have ever seen. I was in stitches on Christmas Day and it is well worth watching, whether you're an adult or a child, or just a big kid!!!

Hooves Of Fire was a Christmas televisual event, much like the Wallace And Gromit animations before it. There's an unwritten rule that a big original Christmas animation needs to be created every year for BBC and Channel 4.

Robbie The Reindeer (voiced by a charismatic Ardal O'Hanlon) is a clumsy, naive reindeer living in the shadow of his father, presumably Rudolph. After being expelled from "The Sleigh Team" for being unfit, he retrains to win back his place on Santa's team.

The animation is Grade-A, stop-motion animation evoking Aardman Animation of the past. It was done by BBC Animation Studios\BBC Bristol and has a very similar style. The voice talent reads like a Whose Who of the time with some future A\B-list talent in the form of Robbie Williams, Steve Coogan and Rhys Ifans. This film tied in with Comic Relief and Sports Relief so there are a lot of references from the obvious "red nose" to Alistair McGowan playing sports commentator Des Yeti (obviously based on Des Lynam).

There's some big laugh out loud moments from Ricky Tomlinson playing a boy-racer Santa Claus who wears gold jewellery and tracksuits, musician Seal as a fish-eating Seal and the Fonzie character, Old Jingle an old, crazy reindeer played by Harry Enfield who sounds a lot like Adrian Edmonson.

Personally for me even at 30 minutes I don't get the same amount of joy watching it as I do The Snowman, Father Christmas, Charlie Brown's Christmas or even The Treacle People Christmas special.

Not shown on UK TV since 2003 according to the Genome project for unknown reasons. This has also stopped it reaching a younger audience, but it is fondly remembered by Millenials and older. A DVD was released as was two sequels of more of the same.

No one ever says "hurrah" do they? You never see, "And Gene Shallit says, 'Hurrah!'" in a newspaper. Which is a shame, because it's so much fun to say. Go on try it. No one's looking. Okay, on three, ready? One...two...three. HURRAH! There, that wasn't bad, was it?

Anyway, onto the actual film, it's wonderful. The story concerns Robbie (voiced by Irish comedian extraordinare Ardal O'Hanlon), the son of another famous reindeer (whose name is never uttered) who wants to be on Santa's sleigh team. Trouble is, he's lazy. In the end he gets up off his butt, defeats the evil Blitzen ("Around the World in 80 Days" star Steve Coogan) and finds love. The writing, performances, animation and everything are superb. You will find yourself laughing out loud at these reindeer and the silly things they do. But make sure you see the UK edition, because on CBS here in the States they've rerecorded the dialogue with Ben Stiller, Britney Spears, Hugh Grant and Brad Garrett and removed charming Britishisms like, "You're chucked" rather than "I'm breaking up with you."

There is an important point here. Americans are obtuse about other cultures. We are so convinced that ours is the best nation out there despite never EVER having set foot off her shores. Anything foreign, we remake and redo and Americanize. This is the logic behind American versions of British comedies, Kevin Costner as Robin Hood and the decision that American primetime TV audiences wouldn't like an Irish reindeer so let's make him Derrick Zoolander instead.

See the British version, I beg you. And its sequel, "Legend of the Lost Tribe."

I'm a huge fan of Robbie the Reindeer- and this is definitly the preferred version. CBS's American-ised re-dub of the voices is bland where the original sparkles with dry wit and humor. Robbie the Reindeer is the best Christmas special since the original Grinch, and everyone should get to see it at least once in their life.

I saw a review of this DVD and I automatically became interested. I mean, how often does a show come out where Vixen asks Blitzen to " stroke her fire " .... this is definitley an awesome DVD to have in my ever growing ( and may I say freaking awesome ) DVD collection. I highly reccomend picking this bad boy up as you will really like it.