It's the holiday season! Time to put up the tree, wrap the presents, and sit down to watch "A Charlie Brown Christmas." But after your thirty minutes of watching Charlie Brown destroy the joy of all who come before him, what are you left with? Santa Baby? Call Me Claus? Christmas Do-Over? Err... Santa Baby 2?

We know it can be rough finding a good Christmas movie. There's out there that can crush the holiday spirit out of you like a sprig of mistletoe wrapped around a sledgehammer. So the Kids on the Street Film put together a curated list.

Now, this is a list of "Great" movies, not "Best" movies. For one thing, we want to leave some room for us to do another six movies next year, and if we declared these the absolute best, there wouldn't be much point in returning to the same subject later, would there? That said, we welcome your suggestions for next year's list in our comments!

There are so many different movies that could be considered Christmas classics, but anybody can snap up It's a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th Street. Choosing a version of A Christmas Carol? That's wading into the deep end of the pool. We're talking about a story where the main character has been portrayed by Albert Finney, Patrick Stewart, Jim Carrey, Tim Curry, and Sir Seymour Hicks (twice) -- and that's not even a quarter of the list.

Yes, Mr. Dickens' novel has been very, very good to the holiday season, and in particular to theater companies and film producers. It might have something to do with that whole "in the public domain" thing.

In 1951's A Christmas Carol, however, you'll see a lot more of the story than you're used to seeing adapted. The Cratchits may seem like a smaller part of the movie than usual, but it means there's more time to devote to scenes that have rarely made it into a film adaptation since. Don't be fooled by the budget price tag -- the blu-ray of this 1951 Christmas movie looks phenomenal.

Christmas movies have spawned some of the worst subgenres. There's the "Somebody has to replace Santa Claus" movie, the "Only one person can save Christmas now" movie, and the increasingly-popular "Santa Claus has a mercenary, business-like child" movie.

Scrooged is from the pretty-lousy subgenre of Dickens rewrites, and -- botched blu-ray cover art aside -- it remains a true modern classic.

Wait. 1988? This movie is over 20 years old? Maybe we're not allowed to call it a "modern" classic, then....

Nah, we'll call it a modern classic, since failure to do so would make some of the Kids feel very, very old.

What really sets this Christmas movie apart is that it clings to the spirit of A Christmas Carol without the slavish devotion to the text that kills so many other rewrites. It's all about digging deep to find what's important about the original story -- and being damned funny in the process.

Also, it opens with Lee Majors rescuing Santa from terrorists. How can you beat that?

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas is one of the best movies out there about finding the Christmas spirit. It's funny, heartwarming, and filled with toe-tapping tunes about the holidays.

It's also not a movie about Christmas.

Yeah, I said it. One of the best Christmas movies from the 1990's is actually not a Christmas movie. Maybe a lot of it is focused on Christmas, and there's a specific jolly fat man in a red suit who plays an important role, but this is a Halloween movie through and through, bouncing giddily from demented to twisted.

More than that, we see the folly of Christmas turned into Halloween -- not through some horrible plot to destroy the holiday, but by the hands of people who just don't know any better. It's not just a movie about the Christmas spirit, it's a movie about the Halloween spirit and how the two differ from each other, making it not just a movie about the importance of keeping Christmas as Christmas, but also of keeping Halloween as Halloween.

Hell to the yeah the Muppets get their own subgenre of Christmas movies. Once we include the made-for-TV Muppet Christmas movies, Henson's fine felt fellows would completely overrun this list. Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas has to qualify as a classic, both The Muppets' Christmas Carol and It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie are great movies from lousy subgenres (Dickens rewrites and It's a Wonderful Life remakes, respectively) -- the Muppets are just that good.

A Muppet Family Christmas is a made-for-tv special that stands out from such an impressive body of work by tying together the entire world of Jim Henson. It's not just the Muppets who are present in this holiday celebration, but the Fraggles and the gang from Sesame Street, too. It manages to be touching, pleasant, and sweet without ever being maudlin or treacly, and while keeping all of the sharp humor and slapstick the Muppets are known for.

And you want to know something criminal? It's not in print! And the out-of-print DVDs will cost you a princely (eep!) $69.99! Not only that, but it's likely not to come back into print any time soon, considering that the Muppets, the Fraggles, and Sesame Street are all completely separate entities owned by completely separate companies. So rare DVD scalpers are your only (legal) option until somebody works out a deal and gets this baby back on shelves.

Bill Murray makes a second appearance in the Christmas A-Go-Go list, this time as Dr. Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters II. A movie that climaxes at New Years, which means that at least part of it takes place during Christmas. A fact illustrated by a split-second shot of the Ghostbusters topped with dapper Santa caps.

It's filled with supernatural suspense and slapstick, and shows New York City overrun by the dead-eyed grim specters of lost humanity. And then the ghosts start arriving. Ha! I kid. Kinda.

Sure, the movie isn't as good as the first Ghostbusters. But then, few movies are.

And holy crap is it becoming obvious we're kids of the 80's.

Well, if we're kids of the 80's, we might as well embrace it.

Every now and then, the holiday season just gets to be just a little bit much. It's not that you're sick of the spirit, so much as you're sick of the endless productions of A Christmas Carol, the parade of Santa replacements and cloying candy cane-covered claptrap. You just want to step back for a moment and enjoy something that isn't quite so red-and-green. But you still want that warm glow of the holidays.

That's why we've picked The Princess Bride. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Glen and Elizabeth happen to think of it as possibly the best movie ever, but man -- the only way this movie could have more of the holiday spirit is if it were actually a Christmas movie. It's romantic, infused with family togetherness, and filled with adventure.

And it features the single greatest action comedy sequence of all time.

First of all - YAY! Scrooged is on blu-ray! It's about time, too. It's one of my favorite Christmas movies, as well as one of my favorite Bill Murray movies. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's one of my favorite movies, period. 

And how about that poster art? Sure, it's basically the big, floating head of Bill Murray over the top of a landscape -- AKA the laziest poster design you can possibly do -- but it's still classic. It's because it doesn't sacrifice character for economy. Bill Murray isn't in a glamour headshot -- he's scared to death. And you have the skeletal hand reaching out with the match lighting the cigar, that key point framed by the pale, featureless moon. It's dark, slick, ghostly, very 80's-modern, and funny. In short, it's a perfect summation of the movie.

When they shifted it to the DVD cover art, they didn't do a whole lot of futzing about with the design, either. They moved the title to the top of the image so they could do away with the black border, and they replaced the original tagline with a blurb from People magazine. It also had that faded, washed-out look that suggests somebody really didn't care how the poster art translated to the DVD case. But it was still the same basic, clean design that anybody who remembers the poster could recognize.

So either the designers of the DVD art didn't want to do very much work, or they realized a good thing when they saw it. And the two options are not mutually exclusive. But the blu-ray artwork....

Okay, let's get the obvious out of the way, first. Yes, they stuck a blue snowflake border around the image. Then, just in case they hadn't driven home the fact that this is a Christmas movie, they took the skeletal arm's dapper suit sleeve with its prominent cufflink and replaced it with a Santa suit sleeve. 

It doesn't match the feel of the movie, it doesn't add anything to the image, and then there's the fact that he sleeve itself is a lousy, slapdash Photoshop job that doesn't seem to be responding to gravity in a manner to which cloth is accustomed.

And how about that gorgeous black background from the original poster, broken only by the city landscape with its murky, orange, city lights glow and the near-solid blue-white disc of the moon that highlights the match and the cigar? Well, we thought we'd just make the glow around the city bigger, and brighter, and bluer. And what the moon always needed was a big, blue halo, not to mention plenty of detail on the moon's surface so the match flame can almost disappear in what is quickly becoming a very cluttered image.

Oh, and let's talk about that city skyline, too. Notice anything missing? Anything big? As a matter of fact, two anythings?

Yes, the Scrooged cover art is one of the latest to have the World Trade Center excised from the New York City skyline. Now, I understand that there are people who still get choked up every time they see a picture of New York with the twin towers still intact. It's a powerful image for Americans after 9/11. And whenever you publish something with the twin towers front and center - like, say, most images of the New York skyline published before 2001, somebody somewhere is sure to complain that you're being insensitive.

But Scrooged was released in 1988. It's very clearly set in 1988. And in 1988 the towers still stood. Are we really not permitted to depict the city as it once was?

Oh, well. It's not the first time people have felt the need to "improve" on a classic design, and I'm sure it won't be the last.

Wait.

Oh, you rank bastards.

Bill Murray's necktie wasn't festive enough for you?

-C Glen Williams

Earlier today, I got an e-mail that dredged up memories -- not an e-mail from a friend, mind you, nor even from an individual intent on making a connection. This e-mail came from an online store that wanted to sell me something. Specifically, they wanted to sell me a blu-ray of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Or, rather, they wanted to sell me Giorgio Moroder's Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

Moroder's version of Metropolis was a half-remembered thing to me -- something that at times I was certain I had dreamed. Scenes tinted wild colors, synth pop and occasional vocals underlying key scenes, all of it as much a product of 1980's America as it was a product of Germany of the late 1920's.

My mother worked at a college, and when I was a young teen with nothing to do in the summer, she would take me to campus and leave me to alternate between the gym and the library. It was in that library that I dredged up a VHS copy of Moroder's Metropolis and tried to make some sense of what I was seeing.

It turns out I'm not the only one. Moroder's edit is highly controversial. There are people who love it and there are people who pray for every copy of it to be destroyed in a fire. Preferably a public bonfire so that they may dance about it and make merry. But whatever side you might be on, it's hard to deny that Moroder thought of his Metropolis as a labor of love. And love, however dirty, debauched, and disgusting it may seem to those watching from the outside, is nevertheless love.

To Moroder, his Metropolis was both a restoration and a rescue. He was editing in some of what had been lost in Metropolis' original journey through American theaters, and along the way he was adding more visual and auditory interest for an audience that had grown up never knowing silent films as anything more than weekend Public Television filler. And what better way to add interest than to add new music? It was a natural conclusion for the man who wrote such film hits as "Putting out the Fire" (Cat People), "Radar Radio" (Top Gun), "Take My Breath Away" (Any movie that wanted to push an 80's vibe but was made post-1995), and "Flashdance... What A Feeling" (Oh, come on, you can guess what movie that's from), to name just a few.

What Moroder created ultimately was not Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It was his own vision, using Lang's work as raw materials. And Moroder was able to do it because of the public domain. At the time Moroder set to work on Metropolis, it was in the public domain inside the United States. That meant that he could mold, shape, and rebuild (or fold, spindle, and mutilate) the film as they saw fit without owing an apology to anyone. 

His version did not replace the original. It did not supplant the original. It existed alongside it as another artist's take on and expansion of the original. Just as Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland didn't replace Lewis Carroll's, Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings didn't replace Tolkien's, and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet didn't replace Shakespeare's -- nor did it replace Branagh's, Olivier's, or any of the multitudes of cinematic treatments that preceded it or would follow it.

This is the promise of the public domain. The closed-off culture we consume in our youth eventually becomes the shared culture that we can all draw from, build on, and recreate. And as Moroder found out, not everybody may love you for it -- but nobody can keep you from it. Your culture is your right.

Which makes Moroder's Metropolis even more a product of the 80's. The Fritz Lang film had its copyright restored in 1998 due to a new international copyright treaty. What Moroder accomplished and released in 1984 can no longer be done legally by any modern artist. This 1927 film is once again off-limits except to the current copyright-holders.

Some would say, "For better or for worse," there will not be a new Moroder Metropolis for years to come. I, for one, think we are all poorer for not even being given the opportunity.