Encore Holiday Special: A Little Holiday Magic with Cyrus the Bodega Cat
"You were better for me than I was for myself."
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One standby of the holiday season is that you can count on movies like It’s A Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Story, Elf, Scrooged, Home Alone, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Love Actually, among others, in heavy rotation throughout the month of December.
As a nod to this tradition and the fact that I have a few thousand new LAST CALL subscribers since last December’s programing (plus I’ve been in my writing bunker trying to finish my next book), in the coming weeks I’ll be sharing some Encore Holiday Specials that have an evergreen quality and can be enjoyed for the first time or again and again. Don’t worry, there will still be holiday-fresh dispatches in the mix, including a special Christmas Eve edition of Dive Bar Jukebox and the return of the reader-favorite year-end retrospective, New Year’s Rockin’ Eve Special.
Today’s Encore Holiday Special (first published November 21, 2022) features one of my all-time favorite holiday commercials starring Cyrus, a sensitive bodega cat who brings a little holiday magic to his lonely caretaker on Christmas Eve.
When I first wrote the story I tried to track down the director of the commercial to interview without any luck, but after this ran, I received a comment and email from Elizabeth Whitlock, a North Carolina cat breeder specializing in Egyptian Mau and Savannah cats. As with child actors, Cyrus is played by two different cats of hers, Tut Tut and Osiris, who are now among the working cats at Studio Animals in California. They continue to book work, and were standouts in the popular “Walter the Cat” Chevy Silverado commercial. “For that production, Chevy wanted average looking cats so through the magic of CG their spots are Muted to look like average gray tabbies which do the still shots,” Whitlock told me. “The cats are a pair of very few working cats that can retrieve, dig in snow, and other trained action behaviors in the commercials.”
What are your favorite holiday movies or specials?