Official North Pole Seal. Prep & Landing and Prep & Landing: Naughty vs. Nice.

 

                                     Official North Pole Seal. 

                                           Prep & Landing  

                            Prep & Landing: Naughty vs. Nice. 

These are my absolute favorite specials from Disney. The stories are perfect and the animation is on another level, I love them. Plus you have the great Dave Foley and Sarah Chalke who have done an amazing job I mean they are so perfect. So please if you haven't seen these OI really hope you get to cause they are Christmas masterpieces. The inside jokes and hidden things make it even more memorable. 

                                          Prep & Landing

Wayne, a Christmas elf, is part of an elite organization known as "Prep & Landing", whose job is to ready millions of homes around the world for Santa Claus's visit. After working with "Prep & Landing" for 227 years, Wayne looks forward to getting promoted to director of the naughty list. Instead, his former partner and trainee, Peterson, gets the promotion. Wayne is introduced to Lanny, a freshly graduated rookie, whom Wayne has to also train.

Wayne is still bitter about the promotion, and decides to slack off during a mission. He permits Lanny to do all of the work, which is disastrous. Meanwhile, Santa is informed mid-flight of a massive snow storm and that Wayne and Lanny have not fully prepared the house yet. He is told to cancel the landing, which has never happened before; they promise to make it up for Timmy, a boy living at the house. Wayne and Lanny discover that the re-routing was a final decision, but after hearing Timmy thank them in his sleep, Wayne decides to fix it. He calls up Santa, telling him that he must land at Timmy's house. Wayne and Lanny then work together to land Santa safely on Timmy's roof. On Christmas morning, Santa shows Wayne that Timmy had a merry Christmas. Santa offers a promotion to Wayne as the director of the nice list, but he turns it down so he can work with Lanny. 

Prep & Landing includes a number of references and in-jokes left by the animators. Many pay homage to other Christmas specials and traditions. For example, Magee's office has the Christmas tree from A Charlie Brown Christmas. Magee's coffee mug from Dr. H Dentistry is a nod to Hermey the Elf from the claymation Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer. When Wayne prepares to enter Santa's office, Miss Holly is typing the lyrics to "Jingle Bells". The clear to launch acknowledgement given by the flight controllers during the pre-launch check is "Dash away", and Magee's final clearance is "Dash away all" from the poem A Visit from St. Nicholas ("Dash away, dash away, dash away all"). Timmy Terwelp himself is named in honor of Tiny Tim, a character from Charles Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol.

Others are related to Disney itself. Mickey's Christmas Carol is shown on the television of Lanny and Wayne's assigned house. Although Timmy's residence appears to be in the Ohio Valley region of the United States, the latitude and longitude given for his house (N 34' 9' 20" / W 118' 19' 23") are of The Walt Disney Company's world headquarters in Burbank, California. A license plate with the characters "12501 WED" is a reference to the birth date of Walt Disney. The German Shepherd shown in the prologue getting dusted to sleep was a recolored version of the titular character of the 2008 film Bolt, which was completing production as Prep & Landing was being made. Timmy's night-light features Goofy in a pose from the poster for the theatrical short How to Hook Up Your Home Theater.

Lastly, some of the references were inspired by the show's co-director, Kevin Deters. During a scene in which Wayne is "being naughty" and making himself a drink, the milk carton Wayne is using has the logo of Deter's Dairy, a real-life dairy located in Quincy, Illinois, Kevin Deters' hometown. A toy giraffe in Timmy's bedroom is based on a similar toy belonging to one of Deters' children. When Santa shows Wayne what happened at Timmy's house Christmas morning, the home shown is based on Deters' boyhood home.

                         Prep & Landing: Naughty vs. Nice. 

The beginning of the special introduces the Coal Elf Brigade, a special unit of Christmas elves resembling coal miners that is responsible for delivering lumps of coal to naughty children. While seeming cruel to some, the brigade adds small, encouraging notes to the lumps such as "Try Harder next year," in an attempt to steer the children back to the nice list.

With the Big 2-5 fast approaching, Wayne and Lanny must race to recover classified North Pole technology that has fallen into the hands of a hacker identified only as "jinglesmell1337." Desperate to prevent Christmas from descending into chaos, Wayne seeks out (at the insistence of Magee) the foremost Naughty Kid expert to aid in the mission, a bombastic member of the Coal Elf Brigade who also happens to be his estranged younger (but larger) brother, Noel. Reluctant to take the extroverted Noel along with him, Wayne relents, and Noel joins the Prep & Landing team on the mission. During the trip, Noel and Wayne reminisce about their childhood, when they worked together far better than they do now. As the trio arrives at the hacker's house, Wayne sets off a booby trap, imperiling the entire team; Noel manages to defend himself, Wayne takes a particular beating from the trap's various mechanisms, and Lanny makes it into the hacker's room, only to accidentally "sparkle" himself and end up taken captive.

The hacker then reveals herself to be Grace Goodwin, whose sole mission is to get herself off the naughty list, believing that she had been set up by her toddler brother, Gabriel, who had destroyed her favorite toy and ruined her chances to ask Santa for a new one by his crying. After a somewhat intoxicated Lanny suggests using the "magic word" to get the password for the device that will get her off the list, she does just that: using the word "please" as the password, since genuinely naughty kids never say "please." At first, she appears successful in changing her status from naughty to nice, but the device malfunctions, threatening to place the entire planet on the naughty list unless she and the team can pull off a risky operation to fix the problem.

Meanwhile, Wayne is particularly bitter at being "shown up" by his younger brother, prompting a fight in the street in front of Grace's house in which Wayne goes as far to say that he wish that he never had a brother. Shocked and Hurt by his statement, Noel (who always idolized Wayne growing up) asks Wayne to say he didn't mean it and says that he looked up to him and that he was his hero before he throws what he had intended to give Wayne as a Christmas present at him. The gift—a toy sled that Wayne had wanted as a kid but was never able to get—prompts Wayne to reconcile with Noel and carry out the mission. Grace, watching the whole argument as it unfolds, learns a powerful lesson and a newfound appreciation for her younger brother.

Wayne then receives a call from Magee who tells him that the device is causing bigger problems making every single child is being transferred to the naughty list. Wayne tells them that the antenna on Conduct Calculator is broken and so Mr. Thistleton tells him to fix it and attach it to a powerful antenna to reverse the damage. Grace realizes that this is all her fault and Noel ask how they're going to find an antenna until Lanny who had come outside too finds a nearby building with a strong antenna. Grace helps fix the Conduct Calculator as they make their way to the building. Once fixed, she tosses the calculator to Wayne and apologizes for being naughty. As Noel and Wayne climb up the building, all the presents are getting sucked up into the tube as tree farm progresses on transferring every child onto the naughty list. Once Wayne and Noel reach the top, they realized that they can't go near the antenna due to electric hazard. Wayne decides to tie the super sled to the device but Noel couldn't get a good shot due to the flags getting blown in the wind. So Wayne decided to jump off the building with Noel before activating the parachute on his hat to fly up higher so Noel can get a clear at the antenna. He fires the grapple and lets go of it as it pull towards and sticks to the antenna with calculator causing the satellite to go back to normal as all kids get transferred back to the nice list again and all presents get dropped back into Santa's sack saving Christmas once and for all.

The next morning, the scene at the Goodwin house shows Gabriel giving Grace her new Christmas present, a replacement toy for the one he had destroyed a year prior. Meanwhile, back at the North Pole, Wayne and Noel both win the title of "Elves of the Year" for their efforts and cooperation (although the headline of the local paper misprints Wayne's name as "Dwayne").