The Lion Guard: Timon and Pumbaa’s Christmas

[Panpardus]

Well apparently it's coming on in two weeks from now, so we'll find out then.

As an aside, the following episode ("The Golden Zebra") doesn't premiere until February...

[SimbasGuard]

Well if this synopsis (off The Lion Guard Wiki Facebook page):

"The Lion Guard enlist the help of animals throughout the Pride Lands to surprise Timon and Pumbaa with a Christmas celebration."
Is legitimate, it makes me think that the pictures we saw of The Snow Leopard and The Red Panda might just be one of Bunga's fanciful imagination ideas. Like in Running With The King.

No new episode until February Well O.K. 2018 might not start off that great for us Lion Guard fans.

[Elton John]

since this is seemingly about Christmas and not some made up holiday that’s like christmas....


Fuli just might find out the true meaning of Christmas! It’s about presents, drowning yourself in hard eggnog, and watching Die Hard a few times over.

[JackStover]

I don't like this. If they had just made it a new holiday, like Kupatana, it would have been easier to accept.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hTkEL_vaes

[Panpardus]

Yeah... I'm just going to assume that they're not making this canon to the rest of the story. If you notice, the clip takes place out of season; the land looks like it's the wet season again even though it's actually at least a couple weeks into the dry season right now in-universe, so that gives the fan me some hope that this is just a one-off Christmas spin-off.

Regardless, I'm not really liking the idea of the episode. I know(/assume) a lot of kids like to imagine what the holidays might be like for their favorite characters from various TV shows and movies, but even as a kid, The Lion King characters doing anything Christmas related never crossed my mind as something I wanted to see. Even watching the little clip now is just a bit jarring (more so than Bunga dabbing, which he does in this) because they're not even necessarily trying to play this off in a way that would make sense for the setting. A Santa Claus reference? Sleigh bells in the background? Ivy and mistletoe references even though neither of those plants are found in sub-Saharan Africa? The star reference alluding to the holiday's religious mythos? Acknowledging snow as "traditional" Christmas imagery even though it not only doesn't snow in most of Africa but also doesn't snow in the Middle East where the real world mythos is set? Not really here for that.

That said, the song itself isn't bad - though I don't really like it anyway - but it does sound a lot like Stevie Wonder's "What Christmas Means to Me" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtgGBgpNcIo), and you can clearly hear the kid actors are starting to grow out of their old voices a bit. I wonder if they'll get to the point where they have to visually age some of them up to compensate, or at least Kion.

[Elton John]

I really hope this episode is just a bizarre fever dream by Timon.

Because it seems so out of place for the tlk universe. Moreso than anything else this show has produced.

[zerodix]

I saw the video. what a horror, what have they become XD No seriously. This made me phisically ill.

[Elton John]

I wonder just how awful this episode will be.

Will it be awful in a way that I can at least get a few cheap laughs out of it.

Or awful like a trainwreck?

[Panpardus]

Clip in which the origin of Christmas is touched upon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gFRYbwFc_g
Commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcZ0BloF1nA

Looks like it'll have a bunch of riffs on traditional Western Christmas songs; never thought I'd see the day "The Twelve Days of Christmas" would get the Lion Guard treatment. We also get this lovely anachronism stew: "We heard about [Christmas] from an ox who heard about it from a yellow wagtail [a bird that doesn't live in Africa] who heard about it from a flying reindeer."

It's leaning train wreck for me right now; Kiara's face will probably be me for most of this:

[Elton John]

at the very least it seems to have almost nothing to do with the rest of the show or the scar plotline.

so we can treat it like the star wars holiday special. Non-canon to anything else in the franchise.