Revisiting "Lamb Chop's Special Chanukah" Thirty Years Later

The earliest memory I can put a date on is watching "Lamb Chop's Special Chanukah" on December 17, 1995, when I was two and a half. (As I've said before, though, I think I can remember earlier in 1995 because I remember "Roll to Me" and "How Bizarre" playing on the radio constantly.) Because I'm obsessed with nostalgia and the strange passage of time, I've been waiting for December 17, 2025 to watch it again in a different basement on the other side of the country and see how much of it I recognized besides the fragments that stuck with me for thirty years. Answer: not much. I didn't even remember that it had songs. Still a blast from the past, though. I'm on the fence about whether it's good or charmingly bad. The plot makes little sense and the effects are not so special, but the songs are catchy and most of the humor is good or at least okay. It teaches kids about Chanukah and Jewish culture, so that's cool. (I'm not against those things just because I'm against Israel's war crimes and ethnic cleansing.) Feisty, witty little Lamb Chop is a very underrated character. Charlie Horse is a good foil - less sass, more mischief. Hush Puppy is maybe a little bit racist. That's how things go sometimes.

Between my age and the new millennium, the 90s are a different world, semi-ancient history compartmentalized from the rest of my life. The gap between 1995 and 2000 was eons longer than the gap between 2020 and 2025. It just was. I was too young to really appreciate the 90s while they were here, and lately I've mostly been getting into them through The X-Files and DOS games, but this was a more personal connection. ​The nostalgia factor is amplified by all of the lead actors (Shari Lewis, of course, with guest stars Pat Morita, Lloyd Bochner, and Alan Thicke) having been dead for years, even though three of the four were young enough to plausibly still be alive. That's how things go sometimes. I thought about doing a YouTube reaction video of the sort that I waste too much time watching, but it wasn't worth the effort for the likely size of my audience, just like it isn't worth the effort to organize my current rambling into a logical progression of thought. Here's a video to keep you occupied for almost an hour. Or not, your choice.