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You may have forgotten the 1991 Christmas movie All I Want for Christmas. That’s fair, as it is a forgettable rom-com set at the holiday season. Notably, though, Santa Claus is played by none other than Leslie Nielsen. By this point, he was well into his comedy days, though hadn’t gone full-mugging yet. That would arrive a couple years later with the third Naked Gun movie. This got me thinking about how they should have absolutely made a goofy, slapstick Santa movie starring Nielsen.
Seriously, Nielsen got to spoof cop movies, horror movies (including Dracula movies), spy movies, and so on. Why not a Christmas riff where he plays an accident-prone, absurdist Santa? I would even have accepted him as the choice for The Santa Clause, though that wouldn’t have really worked all things considered. Part of the point is that Tim Allen’s character is aging and becoming Santa-esque in appearance. Also, he has a young son. Neither of those makes as much sense with Nielsen in the role in 1994.
Nielsen did get to play an amnesiac Santa in the made-for-TV Santa Who?, which is a sequel to All I Want for Christmas. They did, wisely, focus more on Nielsen, but it still isn’t a Nielsen-as-Santa movie the likes of which we would have expected. That’s too bad.
