Trivia / A Special Sesame Street Christmas

• Billing Displacement: The 2012 DVD puts Michael Jackson on the cover and gives him top billing among the guest stars, even though he only appears in one scene.
• Dueling Works: With Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, but also in an odd way with The Star Wars Holiday Special, which aired three weeks to the day earlier on the same network, and similarly was a strange attempt to build a hokey TV variety special around a revered family-friendly franchise. (Perhaps due to the fact that Christmas Eve on Sesame Street aired prior to it and has been rerun routinely over the years, this special hasn't built up the infamy that The Star Wars Holiday Special has.)
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Its only commercial release was a 2012 DVD, which didn't come from the same label as other Sesame Street DVDs released at that time (but by Legendary Entertainment Associates), and has since gone out of print.
• Money, Dear Boy: Veteran TV Variety Show producer Bob Banner paid the Children's Television Workshop a license fee to borrow the Sesame Street set and characters, which is presumably the main reason CTW went along with it, even as they were producing their own Christmas special. There are some telltale signs that the Sesame contingent weren't really considering this show a high priority, like many of the usual Sesame crew such as Jon Stone not being involved, the use of Big Bird and Oscar puppets that seem like they had some wear-and-tear, Barkley using a different costume provided by Bob Banner Associates instead of the Muppet Workshop, and Caroll Spinney's Oscar voice sounding a bit off throughout the show, implying even he wasn't taking it very seriously.