The Best Holiday Superhero Story on Disney+ is Actually Ernest Saves Christmas (1988)

Hello, Jeremy here. Remember in October when my editor, John, volunteered to take over the newsletter for a week? Well darn it, he did it again. What a guy. I actually agree with pretty much everything he says here, so I hope you like it, but I hope you don’t like it too much, because last time his piece got more clicks than anything I wrote that month, and I’ve been angry about it ever since. Enjoy!

The following four statements are absolutely true:

1: I was born in March 1988.

2: In November 1988, Ernest P. Worrell saved Christmas. 

3: Without Ernest P. Worrell, I would’ve lived in a world without Santa Claus. 

4: Ernest P. Worrell is a goddamn superhero. 

As far as Santa lore goes, the premise of Ernest Saves Christmas is pretty bonkers. The current Santa has served since 1889. He’s a little over 150 years old and, with each passing Christmas, his Santa powers begin to wane, and if he doesn’t pick a new Santa by Christmas Eve, he’ll become powerless. This is a much better approach to Santa succession than Tim Allen committing manslaughter on Christmas Eve. (Also, free pitch to SNL: “Santa Succession.”)

He’s got his heart set on a Mr. Rogers type figure named Joe. So he heads to Orlando and takes a cab – A TAXI CAB! – to meet Joe and offer him the yuletide gig. Guess who’s driving the cab? Our main dude Ernest. 

Then the story splits in two. Santa tries to approach Joe, but Joe’s agent tries to sabotage him every step of the way. See, the agent thinks that Joe’s kid-friendly persona sucks and that it’s time to do a big-budget action film called Christmas Slay about a creature that kills kids on Christmas Eve. So Santa spends most of the movie trying to find and convince a daytime talk show host not to make a genre thriller about Christmas and to just become Santa instead.

Ernest spends the whole movie trying to get Santa back his magic toy sack that Santa accidentally left behind in his cab. (This movie came out six whole years before Dumb and Dumber, in which another elastic-faced comedian spends the whole movie trying to return a bag left in his cab.) 

The stories converge at the last possible minute when Ernest secures the bag, finds the sleigh, and flies it to meet both Santas at the Orlando Children’s Museum. 

Along the way, Ernest randomly does what he always does. He finds excuses to go undercover (at one point he pretends to be a snake rancher?) and prove to be weirdly impervious to physical harm. 

That’s because Ernest was a superhero with his own cinematic universe.

Over the course of the 10* Ernest films, our beloved hero takes a nail gun to the head, gets electrocuted and magnetized, and generally seems to be made out of rubber. He’s constantly working a series of odd jobs, and he’s a much better master of disguise than Dana Carvey.

And Jim Varney absolutely puts in work in these movies. Years before Eddie Murphy decided to play all of the Klumps, Varney somehow played every single member of Ernest’s family, as well as a variety of other characters. 

But now we should talk about how insane and unlikely it is that this character headlined a franchise-spanning 10 films. 

Jim Varney grew up in Kentucky. As an actor, he studied Shakespeare. As a stand up comic, he toured the South trying out a handful of characters that he had created. In the early 80s, an ad agency worked with him to turn one of his characters, Ernest P. Worrell, into a constant pitchman.

Growing up, my dad always told me that Ernest started out in commercials for Purity Dairy. That sorta tracked because for some reason the plot of Ernest Scared Stupid involves a lot of milk. But it turns out that was only partially true. 

Ernest pitched everything. This was apparently an era when characters from commercials could just jump from product to product. He pitched milk in Tennessee. He pitched natural gas(?) in Louisiana. He pitched burgers in New Mexico. He pitched cars all across the country. Somehow the entire nation was being solicited by Ernest.

And somehow they turned him into a movie star. I guess the closest comparison these days** is Ted Lasso, which sorta started out as a commercial. But can you imagine if Flo from Progressive suddenly had an entire movie based around her? Or, god forbid, a Dr. Pepper Fansville movie?** (Milana Vayntraub is great. She should be in more movies! She should not star in a movie about working at AT&T.)

The 80s were a period of excess, which allowed Varney to thrive. He tried to leverage his Ernest success for other opportunities and was modestly successful before he tragically died in 2000 at age 50.

Nowadays, he’s probably best known as the voice of Slinky Dog in the first two Toy Story movies. But for a generation of kids who grew up watching his movies repeatedly on the Disney Channel, he’s immortalized as Ernest P. Worrell, the man who saved Christmas.

*TEN! That’s more than the Fast & Furious franchise! That’s more movies than the Snyderverse!

**Actually the Muppets started out as characters in commercials pitching all sorts of stuff like coffee and Chinese food. And Ernest is basically a human muppet. 

***Okay, but if they do make a Fansville movie, they should really lean into it being a Twin Peaks/WandaVision vibe. Jeremy, should we write this movie?****

****Jeremy here. We definitely should not write a Fansville movie, John. But I will absolutely write Christmas Slay with or without you.

Ernest Saves Christmas is now streaming on Disney+ and IMDb TV, and it’s available to rent elsewhere.