Since David Zaslav took over Warner Bros. Discovery, he’s earned a lot of scorn. Among his many controversial moves is his habit of cancelling already completed movies for a tax write-off. We know about Batgirl, about the Scoob! sequel, and about Coyote vs. Acme, the latter which appears to be getting a happy ending. What we haven’t heard about much is Wyatt Cenac’s holiday movie about Family Matters breakout character Steve Urkel. It was announced back in 2021, and since then there’ve been crickets. How come? Because it, too, fell victim to Zaslav’s cartoon villainy.
In a new edition of his newsletter (which he admits he never updates), Cenac opens up about the film, which he admitted he did mostly because he “foolishly bought a house moments before the world would shut down” (i.e., right before the pandemic). “And a mortgage and a pandemic together can really get you doing stuff you didn’t expect to be doing, so next thing I knew, there I was writing an Urkel musical.”
But Cenac got into it, partly because, he says, “as a kid who was reluctantly wearing glasses because his eyes went on strike, Urkel hit a little too close to home for me.” Throw in that Family Matters saw a 400% spike in viewership during lockdown, and it made sense to give Jaleel White’s character the kind of revival afforded characters like Pee-wee Herman and the Full House gang.
By 2021 they had a movie. It was called Did I Do That to the Holidays. It was an animated musical, and Cenac and team sought to “make a holiday classic centering people of color that audiences would want to revisit every year like A Charlie Brown Christmas, Scrooged or Elf.” It was set to debut on HBO Max and Cartoon Network for the 2022 holidays. Guess what happened?
Then Discovery took over Warner Bros and HBO. The first order of business was to have Chip, Joanna and the Property Brothers do a gut renovation of the studio’s projects that were in development. And even though the movie was pretty much done… it along with Batgirl and a bunch of other projects got thrown out to make space for a dining room steam shower or a shiplap toilet. And it’s apparently a tax write-off.
There’s a silver lining here: The movie is available, but not on Max or the Cartoon Network. Instead it’s only available to purchase on places like Amazon Prime or Apple TV or Google Play. It’s also no longer called Did I Do That to the Holidays, which is a fine title. Instead it’s called Urkel Saves Santa: The Movie, “even though that never happens,” says Cenac. “Don’t worry kids, Santa is fine.” Also there’s been very little promotion. Cenac notes, “At this point, the promotion might just be this newsletter.”
So guess what? You can watch Urkel Saves Santa right now. You just have to pay five bucks to do so. But at least you can see it, which you can’t say about some other Zaslav titles.
