Davey and Goliath's Snowboard Christmas (2004)

Art Clokey's son Joe carries on the Davey and Goliath tradition with Snowboard Christmas, an updated ecumenical offering of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. In it, Davey meets a few of his neighbors -- a Jewish family and a Muslim family -- while collecting for the Children's Christmas Fund. He's startled to learn that not everyone celebrates Christmas -- and that he may not be the best snowboarder in town -- so he learns humility (through the organic development of the story more than a didactic moral-of-the-story summation). The Clokey state-of-the-art stopmotion techniques that originated in Gumby and Pokey as well as Davey and Goliath are also updated with more secure armatures and frame-by-frame video-review technology (as we learn in three short-short featurettes that make up the special features). 3 stars.