The magic really has disappeared in The Santa Clauses

"The Santa Clause" movies were a Christmas staple growing up, so when a new addition to the movie trilogy was announced as a six-episode series on Disney+, I was curious. After breakfast on Christmas morning, my partner and I decided to start on the first movie and watch all the way through to "The Santa Clauses."

We watched the first movie and simultaneously let it sink in how morbid its premise is (along with how we somehow never noticed that detail as children). I mixed cookie dough as we watched elves tie up a police officer and shove a donut in his mouth after Santa got arrested.

The second movie was less memorable from our childhood days. Scott Calvin, now Santa Claus, has to get married in order to keep his Christmas magic. Meanwhile, his son, Charlie, has made it onto the Naughty list, and Scott is initially sure there must be some mistake. I rolled cookie dough into balls and joked with my partner about Carol Newman's not-so-thought-out decision to ditch her entire life to marry a man she just met and move to the North Pole.

In the third movie, the rushed marriage between Scott and Carol works as a key plot point alongside antagonist Jack Frost. When Frost uses their family dynamics to trick Scott into losing his role as Santa, the North Pole becomes a capitalist nightmare. The "SOS" (Secret of Santa) is out, and Christmas Eve is no longer a time for an intense night of present delivery. Instead, the Pole is a highly-policed theme park, and Scott has to get his mythical title back in order to save Christmas.

All of this makes the reality of the new "The Santa Clauses" series a bit harder to swallow.

While Tim Allen is not known for playing the most self-aware characters, it appears all self-awareness fell off the roof, so to speak, in the new series. Episode one starts with Santa's Christmas Eve deliveries in progress when Santa decides to make an impromptu stop at a house that is not on his list. Somehow, it appears Scott Calvin forgot he has been the active Santa Claus for 28 years, so he stops at a house from the very first movie (a 1994 release, in case you also forgot) to find that the little girl, Sara, who once slept on the living room couch waiting for Santa has, shockingly, grown up to be an adult who was not expecting to see him appear in front of her.

The obvious "struggling Millenial" trope aside, this interaction sets up the series for a slough of out-of-touch interactions and thinly-veiled conservative commentary. There is, at least, something vaguely humorous about hearing Santa Claus reference the made-up war on Christmas with a claim that saying "Merry Christmas to all" is "problematic now" (while he is, in reality, the leading character in a new Christmas-themed streaming series stemming from a movie franchise that still gets several cable TV slots every holiday season). Even the description of the show in the Disney+ platform includes "as Christmas declines in popularity, so does his Santa magic."

Like other reboots, the nostalgia factor is present with "The Santa Clause" movie trilogy, and Disney+ had an opportunity to appeal to the new generation of children and the generations that have grown up watching these now-classic Christmas films. However, just like other reboots that missed the mark, "The Santa Clauses" fails to capture that magic. Instead, it starts the season off with ridiculous tropes, a grumpy Scott Calvin/Santa Claus who is ready to write off all the kids as "naughty" without the "we like to give kids a break around this time of year" approach from the second movie, and weirdly-placed jokes about political correctness that don't fit into the world that was built through the movies that led to this show in the first place.