A Very Black Hole Christmas

A current trend among cinema fans is to debate whether some films such as Die Hard or Gremlins are or are not Christmas movies. Many proclaim that merely occurring during the holiday qualifies a movie as being a holiday classic. On these merits, I state my case that Disney’s The Black Hole is a Christmas movie. I am going to go where no man has dared to go, but you will see that the end justifies the means. In 1978, Walt Disney Studios released their first PG rated film as an answer to the success of Star Wars, The Black Hole. The film tells the story of a failed mission of the spaceship Palamino to discover “habitual life in outer space” and the subsequent fight for the crew’s survival against a madman and his robots, a ghost ship The Cygnus, and the titular Black Hole.

While the merits of the film have been debated over the years, very little attention has been paid to the admittedly tenuous relationship between The Black Hole and Christmas. Although not stated in the film, the fantastic novelization by Alan Dean Foster places the discovery of the seemingly derelict Cygnus as December 24th.  Additionally, the comic strip adaptation by the legendary Jack Kirby places the Cygnus discovery near Christmas as evidenced in this panel:

A final and weakest connection is when the interior illumination of the seemingly abandoned Cygnus is triggered. The young hotshot member of the Palamino, Charlie Pizer, states that the ship lights up like a tree on Christmas morning. Right now you may be quoting Captain Dan Holland, saying “I think the guy is nuts,”  but I think it’s definitely worth investigating.
Although not part of most families’ Christmas playlist, The Black Hole deserves its place in the pantheon of holiday classics.