John Travolta & Olivia Newton-John's Christmas Album is Adorably Cheesy

Back in the old days at the A.V Club we did a very popular feature at the end of each year created by my old editor Stephen Thompson called Least Essential Albums about the most screamingly, perversely unnecessary records released over a twelve month period. 

The idea was to highlight not necessarily the worst albums but the albums that owed their deeply unnecessary existence to their connection to tacky television shows or even tackier “celebrities” or genuine celebrities making an album solely because they thought it might be fun to do so and proving painfully and conclusively otherwise with the end result. 

That’s John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John’s This Christmas, a collection of nap-inducing Christmas standards and one unfortunate new concoction released in 2011, a mere thirty-three years after they won the public’s hearts as star-crossed soulmates Sandy and Danny Zuko. 

A John Travolta/Olivia Newton-John album in 1979 would be a sure-fire best-seller and Yuletide perennial. By the early teens, however, the album attracted attention mainly in the form of morbid fascination with its cover, which shows a much older, much more airbrushed Newton-John and Travolta holding a mug of cocoa in celebration with a glazed expression that implicitly says, “Join our Christmas death cult! There’s a “secret” in the cocoa that leads directly to the afterlife!” 

Alternately, it looks like they brought in Donald Trump and he drew in all of Travolta’s jet-black hair with one of his magical sharpies. The cover photo is supposed to be kitschy and welcoming, two old friends beckoning us into a cozy winter wonderland of Yuletide nostalgia. Instead it seems like they’re trying to induct us into a Heaven’s Gate-like apocalyptic set. 

Then there was the first video, for the irritatingly upbeat original “I Think You Might Like It” from longtime Newton-John songwriter John Farrar that found the 64 year old actress-singer and 58 year old Scientologist acting like a couple of kids on a massive sugar high, overjoyed at being allowed to stay up until ten o clock for the first time in their lives. 

This Christmas seemingly owes its curious, violently unmerited existence to the weirdly widespread fantasy that unlike every other Hollywood movie Grease was actually real and Travolta and Newton-John are secretly, or not so secretly, also Danny Zuko and Sandy and have been madly in love with each other all these years and decided, decades into a love affair for the ages, to share that love with the public via a Christmas album. 

Oh sure, Travolta and Newton-John couldn’t legally specify that they did the album in character as Danny Zuko and Sandy, and also that they’’re Danny Zuko and Sandy in real life, but that’s clearly the implication. 

This Christmas begins on an audacious and auspicious note with a frisky little Yuletide ditty that enjoyed a reputation as a little raunchy and a little risqué before being deemed officially #problematic over the past few years: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

Travolta and Newton-John decide to subvert/upend the much-discussed saucy Christmas classic’s problematic gender elements by having Travolta clumsily talk-sing-mumble his way through the part of the coquettish young lass being pursued by a rakish, opportunistic aggressor and Newton-John inhabiting the role of the possible date rapist.  

Travolta and Olivia address each other by name and Travolta defers that his father will be pacing the floor, which makes you wonder how old this elderly relation must be and why a man approaching 60 is worrying about his parents, brother and sister all thinking he might be out somewhere kissing a girl. 

Not gonna lie. It is corny as shit and pretty fucking adorable, and ends with John staying, no doubt so they can spend all night fucking on a rug by the fire in accordance with the wishes of the universe. 

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” kicks things off on an appropriately cutesy note that finds Travolta acting his way through the song and its emotions rather than singing, something he no longer appears to be very good at. According to Wikipedia, all of these songs were recorded in one take. That helps explain Travolta’s sometimes tentative croak. 

Travolta certainly acquitted himself well on the Grease soundtrack but judging from his performance here it seems like he put his already less-than-Pavorotti-level pipes in cold storage for several decades between albums with Newton-John and could benefit from some post-production finesse. And endless takes. And extensive use of auto-tune. And having his vocals swapped out completely with someone who can actually sing, then deceiving the public into thinking it’s Travolta on the album in some manner of elaborate, Mili Vanili-style hoax.  

For a legendary onscreen musical couple, Travolta and Newton-John sound surprisingly bad together so the album’s most memorable tracks end up relying on guests and conceptual audacity.

“Winter Wonderland” feels like it’s being song by three high-spirited children playing at being grown-ups and frolicking in a Yuletide paradise. So of course the 58 year old actor and 64 year old multi-hyphenate bring in their elder in the form of eighty-six year old Tony Bennett, whose presence is always welcome even when he’s singing about “the other kiddies” knocking down “Mr. Snowman.” 

Thanks to backing from the Count Basie Orchestra, “Winter Wonderland” swings and Bennett, Travolta and Newton-John seem, if anything, excessively excited to be in each other’s company, ending the song by shouting out each other’s names in a manner half-orgasmic, half Mickey Mouse-like in its guileless enthusiasm. 

Did these three fuck while, during or after recording their frisky musical threesome? Judging from the scorching sexuality they bring to their performances, I’m going to say yes.

Bennett is just a sexual beast. They had to delete the first version of the Tony Bennett VH-1 Storytellers because it was just him bragging about how he fucked everybody he’s ever done a duet with before showing a more than generous selection of images AND video from his many sexual conquests. So I would not be surprised if he added the names of Travolta and Newton-John to his list of lovers while making this musical magic happen. 

Travolta is so synonymous with the widely discredited kiddie slave labor space alien fame cult Scientology that it sounds jarring hearing him sing reverently about Jesus on “Silent Night” instead of waxing exuberantly about Xenu, body thetans and the evils of psychology. I imagine that every time Travolta uttered the word of the false idol Jesus baby L. Ron Hubbard shed a single perfect tear in protest. 

This Christmas is boring and forgettable when it’s not exuberantly, ingratiatingly tacky, an instant kitsch curiosity from two beloved entertainers many decades removed from their creative prime. 

What I would love to hear would be a Nicolas Cage Christmas album, the heavier and more tortured the better. OR if we’re day-dreaming here how about a Christmas duet album where John Travolta faces off against Nicolas Cage in an all-out war for Yuletide musical supremacy? 

If we can’t get this legendary duo back together onscreen maybe we can get them to recreate the video of Bing Crosby and David Bowie performing “Little Drummer Boy.” I know I would pay good money to see and hear that and I suspect all of their other super-fans would do the same. 

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