Let Big Mouth's monsters wish you happy holidays with this exclusive short
Check out the puppet versions of Maury, Connie, and Rick as they try—and fail—to offer a season's greetings that isn't dirty
The season’s holidays are upon us! Thanksgiving arrives this week, but Christmas is already starting to throw its weight around in the nation’s retail outlets and corporate advertisements. So why shouldn’t Big Mouth get in on the game, as well? The Netflix series has already delivered “A Very Big Mouth Christmas,” the eighth episode of newly released season five, but now they’ve put together a seasonal blessing just for you, exclusively below on The A.V. Club.
Yes, it’s our old friends, now in cuddly puppet form! Maury, Connie, Rick… even our old nemesis, David Thewlis’ Shame Wizard, is back to join in the festivities. As a holiday greeting, it certainly succeeds, with the hormone monsters’ quest to find a public-domain holiday song that doesn’t immediately descend into depravity eventually hitting paydirt. (Who would have thought “O Come All Ye Faithful” was quite so ready to be transformed into something disgusting? Besides anyone who has ever been a kid in middle school, of course.)
But as a reminder of the most ambitious episode the show has ever attempted, it works even better. If you have yet to see this season’s holiday special episode, it not only contains numerous interstitials of these puppets freaking out, getting drunk, and even vomiting up adorable yarn-barf, but it also cycles through a half dozen or more animation styles, all in service of telling a bunch of deeply NSFW yuletide tales. (Our favorite moment might be when John Mulaney’s Andrew Glouberman briefly breaks the fourth wall, only for his father to berate him: “Don’t talk directly to the audience! Who do you think you are, the Fleabag?!”)
You can watch the Big Mouth holiday special anytime on Netflix, but this is a meaningful little moment for all of us, here, right now, on this website, isn’t it? Our very own Christmas blessing from the hormone monsters—and it’s just for us. Anyone who decided not to click on this particular page is missing out. But don’t lord it over them—this is a season for giving, not pointing out the failings of others.