Top Cartoons: A Wish For Wings That Work

It’s no holiday standard, but it means something to me.

Now that December is here, I’d like to talk about a TV Christmas special that I remember from my childhood. Adapted from the comic strip Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed, A Wish for Wings That Work tells the wistful tale of Opus the penguin, who pines for a pair of soaring feathered wings to replace the flightless fins he’s been cursed with. As a big budget production with sly adult humor, and featuring the voices of Michael Bell, Frank Welker, Joe Alaskey, Raven Symone, Tress McNielle, Robin Williams, and Dustin freakin’ Hoffman, A Wish for Wings That Work should have been a sensation. Sadly, it turned out to be just another cartoon special that never really got off the ground.

The tale begins in flashback via a letter to Santa Claus that Opus writes. He describes his desperate desire to fly as other birds do, the insecurity he feels because of it, and the building resentment he’s gathered for his mephitic but well-meaning friend, Bill the Cat.

Opus attends a support group for “earthbound birds,” but finds the thinly-veiled discussion on sexual inadequacy to be of little help. Later, he and Bill rig up a balloon harness to lift Opus into the sky, but Bill ties his tongue into the strings and dismantles the procedure. This sequence is very funny and well-animated, almost like something out of a Roger Rabbit cartoon, but it’s also a little brief. I kinda wish it had developed and expanded into a widespread catastrophe. I would have liked to see Opus and Bill drag an ever-growing train of detritus as Opus careens through streets, farms, and buildings. Still, what’s there is pretty good.

Fed up at his failures, Opus takes his frustration out on Bill and chews him out. As Bill sulks away, Opus realizes that there’s still one person who can help him: Santa.

Here we return to the present, when Opus closes his letter and, realizing that it’s too late for mailing, faxes it to the North Pole. As he dreams of waking up to new wings on Christmas morning, and Bill collects snow watching his friend’s house from a distance, we pan up, and up and up, until we’re in the troposphere. That’s where Santa emerges, sailing from cloud to cloud and ho-ho-ho-ing his enlarged heart out. It looks like dreams are about come true after all, but a loose sleigh hitch leads to disaster, and the funniest “Oh, NOOOOO!” I’ve ever heard in my life.

I won’t spoil what happens from here, but it’s not the fairy-tale ending you typically get in holiday programming. The story closes instead with a “We’ll do the best with what we’ve got” message that works well enough.

While I enjoyed its neurotic tone and gross-out humor, A Wish for Wings That Work was not a ratings sensation, and most of those who did see it didn’t much care for it. As far as I can remember, CBS only aired it once, and that confused me. Bloom County was popular, right? People knew what they were getting into when they watched this show, right? Hell, we were living in the age of The Simpsons, Liquid Television, and The Ren & Stimpy Show. Cartoons were growing up, and I was excited about it. Where was everyone else?

My guess at the downfall of Wings was its packaging as a sanitized, child-friendly Christmas special. When Mother and Father plop their kids down for some network-sanctioned holiday television, they’re looking for fat tabbies who hate Mondays, not emaciated ones who hork hairballs. They want beagles who pretend to be flying aces, not cockroaches who pretend to be different genders. So, I guess I can understand that. Had Opus made his television debut on Fox, he might have gotten away with his twisted take on Christmas. Hell, he might have given birth to a whole series, as The Simpsons did. On CBS, however, where Garfield and Snoopy make the rules, Opus was a dead duck.

Even Breathed considered the special a failure. He felt that the director was in over his head, and tried too hard to made the show edgy. Breathed didn’t like his own writing, would have preferred a different actor to play Opus, and generally despised the whole production. He says that an eventual Opus film will surely be better than this, but I was actually quite happy with what we already got. I love the ways that Opus and Bill walk, the bluesy musical score, the emotional and comical performances, and the exaggerated, striking backgrounds (even the ones with the disturbing visual gags).

I consider A Wish for Wings That Work to be a real tragedy. It stood at the vanguard of nuanced, adult-oriented cartoons, at a time when mainstream audiences appeared to be ready for them. Somehow, its particular formula just didn’t add up to commercial success. I admit that it’s a little dark, a little uncomfortable, a little out there, but that’s what I love about it. I say that as someone who’s not even a big Bloom County fan. I’m more of a Calvin & Hobbes guy, but you know what I’m getting at.